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Dec. 31, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:52
December 31, 2013, Tuesday, Hour #2
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Yes, America's Anchorman is away, and this is your undocumented anchorman sitting in on the very last Rush Limbaugh show of 2013.
A brand new year of excellence in broadcasting kicks off live with Rush, the man himself, on Thursday, and tomorrow we'll have a best of rush for New Year's Day.
But as it's the last show of the year, we're not doing Open Line Friday.
It's not that free form, but we are doing Open Year Tuesday.
So we'll look back at the big stories of the last year and look ahead to the coming year.
And so whatever is your, you think was the real big story of last year, or you think is going to be the real big story of the coming year, you can talk about that.
We'll take your calls.
That leaves you to play the field from Putin to Mandela, from Syria to Obamacare.
Whatever you want to talk about from the last year is fine by me.
Whatever you think is going to be the big story in the coming year is fine by me.
1-800-282-2882.
It's worth saying that this has been a pretty good year for conservatism, not because of anything conservatism did, but just because the news taught the big lesson.
I mentioned yesterday Mrs. Thatcher's great line, the facts of life are conservative.
And liberalism depends on suspending the facts of life.
And you can do that.
If you're determined, you can do that.
You can maybe do it for a generation or two generations, as they've done in many parts of the world.
Where, as I was talking about before the break, if you're prepared to loot the future to bribe the present, then you can suspend the facts of life for a generation or two.
But eventually it catches up with you.
It catches up with you.
And I think this was a pretty good year for conservatism.
Not for anything conservatives did, but simply because we sat back and let the geniuses of liberalism do it to the American people.
You think back to where we were a year ago.
I was actually here.
I was guest hosting on the day of the Obama second inaugural, which we wound up accidentally covering live because it overran.
So we had like that poem guy, that poem guy who read that terrible, interminable poem that was longer than Obama's speech.
We wound up taking huge chunks of that live and we wound up having Beyoncé lip-syncing.
Well, Beyoncé wasn't live.
She was lip-syncing to the national anthem, which is in itself was a fairly appropriate start to the Obama second term.
We wound up carrying Obama, Beyoncé's lip-syncing live to the second inaugural.
So we came in at the beginning.
And at that point, the whole story was Republicans are in trouble.
Republicans need to do this and Republicans need to do that.
And Republicans immediately began obsessing about whether they should do this and whether they should do that.
And Mario Rubio got involved with the Marco Rubio got involved with the whole immigration reform thing and went down that path and other people did other things.
But what this year has been about is how big government has damaged its brand.
And it's damaged it on two fronts.
First, they sell themselves to us as technocrats.
That, you know, the Republicans and the conservatives are the ideologues.
They're the ones who are obsessed with ideology and ideological purity.
Whereas Democrats, centrist, moderate Democrats, are the souls of prudence.
They are merely trying to find workable solutions for the problems that confront the nation.
This is the whole Democrat line.
And this is how the media present them.
And this is how the academy presents them.
And this is how the popular culture presents them.
That they're just trying to solve the problems.
And what that generally means is that they solve them emotionally.
So, for example, the justification for passing Obamacare is that it shows you care.
Because America has tens of millions of people without health insurance.
And so if you support Obamacare, it shows you care about those people.
And if you care about these people, then you can feel good about yourself.
And if you feel good about yourself, that's such a nice, fluffy bunny feeling that it doesn't matter that your lousy healthcare reform actually still leaves tens of millions of people without healthcare coverage.
And it leaves millions of other peoples getting booted off their healthcare plan, even though this president told them that they would be able to keep it.
And none of that matters because you have demonstrated your moral virtue by showing how much you care about people by supporting Obamacare.
So you can look yourself in the mirror and you can look your friends in the face at fashionable dinner parties and you can look your nice fellow soccer moms in the face when you go to collect little Jimmy from grade school after the soccer match.
And that's all that matters.
That's all that matters.
It's an exercise in self-preening.
And we have seen all this before.
You know, there's a long history to this.
The great LBJ's great society destroyed the black family, but it made white liberals feel good about themselves, so nobody cares.
There's a whole big track record for this.
Head Start doesn't do anything for school kids, but it makes white liberals feel good about themselves, so who cares?
And that's the whole point of it.
That's the whole point of it.
And they went a stage too far this time because they didn't just do it to selected target groups who lack the ability to make their voices heard.
They did it to everybody.
They overreached with Obamacare.
And they demonstrated, the so-called technocrats demonstrated that in the end they couldn't do it.
They could come up with a hashtag.
They could come up with a political slogan.
If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, period.
But could they actually devise a functioning health care regime?
And I'm not talking here about any comparing it with the greatest healthcare systems ever known.
I'm just talking about comparing it with the cruddy mediocrity of the Canadian health care system or the Scottish National Health Service or whatever you care to name.
It couldn't come up with any – these guys, the smartest guys on the planet, couldn't even come up with something that cruddy.
They couldn't come up with anything that good.
So big government's brand took a hit there.
I think it took a hit in a couple of other ways this year, too.
Important ways.
Obama revealed himself as a liar, as a liar.
Now, he's lied on a lot of things.
There have been lies about Benghazi and all kinds of other stuff.
But most of us don't live in Benghazi, have no plans to buy a timeshare in Benghazi, don't want to go to Benghazi.
It's somewhere on the other side of the world.
Who cares?
But this time he lied about something that affects the real lives of ordinary people.
If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, period.
And when Democrats go on TV and they have their talking points and they say, oh, what he actually meant was that if you have an existing plan, we may be assisting you in transitioning to an even better plan that will cover you for contraceptives and what have you.
We may be assisting you in transitioning you to an even better plan.
So when the president said, if you like your plan, you can keep your plan, what he actually meant was, if you like your plan, it may not be quite as good as the government happens to think it should be.
So we'll be assisting you to transitioning to a better plan by canceling your existing plan.
And when they go on and on like that, they're actually asking you, the citizen, to go along with the lie.
And that's totalitarian, by the way.
That's totalitarian.
Everybody knows the lie is a joke, but officially, we all accept that the lie is the truth.
That's the basis of totalitarian societies.
That's what George Orwell wrote about in 1984.
That's what the Soviet Union was.
That's what Eastern Germany was.
All these, the citizen had to be made complicit in the state's lies.
So don't do it.
Don't be complicit in the state's lies.
He told a lie.
He told the lie of the year, as PolitiFact calls it.
If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, period.
Don't get enrolled in the lie.
If you want to get enrolled in Obamacare, that's up to you.
But don't let him enroll you in his lie.
It's his lie.
Let's keep it his lie.
And that's worrying.
That's worrying, and I think it's damaged him.
Why should anyone believe him now?
Obamacare is damaged.
This is where Sean doesn't get it.
Obamacare isn't even accepted by the guy whose name it bears.
Obamacare is named after a guy called Obama who keeps saying, oh, well, this bit of the law doesn't apply and that bit of the law doesn't apply and this bit of the law we're putting on hold for a year and that bit of the law where so we're now in a land without law, a land without law.
You imagine if you're a liberal, George W. Bush starts doing this to you.
He starts saying the Patriot, let's say the Patriot Act.
The Patriot Act was a big obsession with American liberals.
They all voted for it in the Senate and the House, and then they suddenly decided they didn't like this and they didn't like that.
Okay, fine.
Suppose George W. Bush had said, well, this bit of the Patriot Act applies, but that bit doesn't.
And this bit we're going to double down on, but that bit we're going to suspend for a year.
And this bit which made this illegal, we're now going to say that it actually re-legalizes them.
And this other bit over here, we're going to, which says that certain things have to be in effect by December 31st, we're going to postpone for another 18 months.
In other words, the Patriot Act, like Obamacare, just meant whatever George W. Bush said it meant on the day he happened to say it.
Liberals would be up in arms about that.
Liberals would be crazy about that.
So we now have a situation where principled lefties don't like all the NSA stuff, don't like all the NSA stuff.
How many of you lefties, I'd love to hear from you on this, by the way, 1-800-282-2882, oppose what the NSA is doing, but support Obamacare?
Because Obamacare is what licenses the NSA.
Obamacare, if you accept that the president is in effect the emperor, I mean, one of the fascinating things about Obama is that when he was a member of the legislative branch in Illinois and then in the United States Senate, he legislated nothing.
He has no legislative fingerprints on anything.
He's got no bills, no nothing.
He voted present.
He didn't legislate.
When he was a legislator, he never legislated.
Now he's the president in charge of the executive branch and he legislates every single day of the week.
Oh, no, that bit of the law we're taking out and that bit of the law we're amending and this bit of the law we're increasing and that bit of the law we're downplaying.
He legislates more as the executive than he ever did as a legislator.
And if you say, oh, I oppose what he's doing with the NSA, I oppose what he's doing with drones, but I support what he's doing with Obamacare, you're a chump.
You're a chump because what he's doing with Obamacare licenses what he's doing with drones and the NSA and all the rest of it.
Because if you accept the principle that the chief executive of the nation, the head of the executive branch, has the right just to say the law is what he says it is, the law on Monday is what he says it is on Monday, and the law on Tuesday is what he says it is on Tuesday, why be surprised that he then decides on Wednesday that he has the right to read all your emails and see all your telephone calls and check all your credit card transactions.
In other words, if you go, my comparison between Obama's one-man law rewrite of Obamacare and if George W. Bush had done the same thing with the Patriot Act is a critical one.
Because if you give the president the right to do this stuff on healthcare, you'd have to be the chump of chumps to think it's going to stop with healthcare.
Because if he can do it on healthcare, he can do it on immigration, he can do it on taxes, he can do it on national security, he can do it on droning, he can do it on anything he wants to do.
So if you go along with one-man lawmaking on healthcare, you're going along with it on everything.
Mark Stein, Infra Rush.
We're taking your calls as we look back on 2013 and look ahead to 2014.
More in just a moment.
Hey, Mark Stein for Rush behind the golden EIB microphone.
Let's go to Steve in Rochester, Michigan.
Steve, you're live on the Rush Limbo Show.
Great to be with us.
Oh, don't, don't tell.
You never know whether customs and immigration enforcement will be listening.
The Border Patrol could kick the door down at any moment, Steve.
Don't say that too.
No, I'm a former cryptolingist with the NSA, Mark.
Good for you.
Really?
You still there?
Yeah, yeah, no, I'm just, I'm just, you spent, you spent, you spent 11, just, just, just Just clarify that for me.
You spent 11 years working basically on North Korean issues.
Correct.
Wow.
That's great.
I've interviewed close to 200 defectors.
Right.
I was in during the Huang Jung-yup interviews.
He's the guy who helped build the North Korean Constitution.
He defected via Switzerland some time ago.
Yeah.
And you said a bunch of things today that just made me laugh.
First of all, the use of code words and code phrases like that host over on NBC.
That's a common trait in North Korea.
They've got little political ads.
They talk about don't use the word lighter in reference to a cigarette lighter.
You have to say son budung.
Use the North Korean word or you're jeopardizing this great nation and our traditions.
Yeah, Bob.
Tons of little code phrases like that.
One of the most common features I experienced when interviewing the defectors is many of them would start crying when they realized that they had actually been lied to their entire life.
Remember, this country has been essentially brainwashed since 1947.
That's right.
That's right.
There are many whole generations who know nothing but the Kim family.
Yeah, and it's not even like what we thought of as old school tyranny, which is like some medieval king or whatever.
This is actually a one-man psycho-state.
I like to compare it to a combination of the Egyptian Sparrows at their height and P.T. Barnum with the sideshows.
It's a miraculous job what they've done over there.
It's pure evil, of course, but you have to admire the artistry with which they have committed this pure evil.
And so when you hear people talking about, oh, code words, this and code words, that, where the use of one little word will betray to somebody that you're not quite sound.
You're not quite solid.
You're not quite on board with the ruling ideology.
That starts to, whether if that's somebody saying it on a TV show out in New York, that starts to ring all kinds of other bells with you, Steve.
That's precisely it, Mark.
And the more I see that here in the U.S., oh, you can't say golf or you're secretly a white racist.
Right.
They're building these code words and they're building them into our kids as well.
I mean, my daughter came home.
She's half Korean.
Right.
And one of her teachers brought up white privilege, and she comes home to me and says, well, what about me?
So I went to the teacher.
I said, excuse me, that has no place in my daughter's class.
She's a seventh grader.
And the teacher kind of gave me a funny look.
I said, look, I speak two other languages fluently, plus half a dozen others functionally.
I've been all over the world.
I'm not willing to sit here and have you teach my daughter white privilege.
It's not.
Good for you.
And good for you, Steve.
And by the way, I tell you, we often talk about solutions here on this show.
You know, it's okay, we're great at identifying the problem, but what do we do about it?
And should we give money to this or that campaign and get this or that congressman elected?
What you did is what citizens do.
That if you've got your kid in the government school and they're doing this kind of stuff, you go down and you say to the school teacher, I don't want this.
And if the school teacher doesn't back off, then you go to the school board and you go to the school superintendent and you deal with it at the school level.
And that way, you'll find 20 years down the line, you won't have a problem with it at the congressional level.
And everybody should do, Steve acted as a citizen here.
When they're doing this to your kids, go and see the teacher.
And if you get nowhere with the teacher, see the principal.
And you get nowhere with the principal, see the school board.
Well done, Steve.
That's the way to deal with these things.
That is one of the ways you have to deal with the other way is people have to stop putting their heads in the sand every time somebody says, oh, you can't say Merry Christmas.
Oh, you can't talk about this.
Oh, you can't speak of homosexuals because you're not gay.
We need to tell them, excuse me, wait a minute.
Be quiet.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and you need to say, actually, you know, I wasn't planning on saying Merry Christmas or talking about gays, but now you've told me I can't say Merry Christmas and talk about gays.
I'm going to talk about it 10 times as much as I ever planned to until you learn the lesson that you don't have the right to tell me what I can say.
Steve, thank you.
It has been an inspirational call.
We didn't actually get around to talking about any of the stuff that Steve told Mr. Slurley he wanted to talk about, but that was an inspiring call.
Steve acted as a citizen.
Don't let them do it to your kids.
Who cares about the congressional district or the Senate?
Don't let them do it to your kids.
It starts there.
Yes, Rush Returns live Thursday.
A little later in the show in whatever it is, 10 minutes or so, going to be talking to Mallory Factor.
He's an author, and you've seen him on TV, professor, does a bunch of other things.
He's the author of a book called Shadow Bosses.
And that is a great title because it's about the union movement and the Democratic Party and their relationship.
And we're going to be talking to Mallory Factor in 10 minutes or so.
But it is open year Tuesday on the Rush Limburger Show.
And that means we're looking back and looking forward.
Let's go to Sean in Bell Harbor, New York.
Sean, you're live on America's number one radio show.
Hi, good afternoon, Mark.
Thanks for taking my call.
My pleasure.
What's on your mind, this Hogman A?
I want to give you my impression of 13 and 14, and then one question after that, if you don't mind.
Okay.
Mike, my idea of the high point that we don't know about just yet is that New York Times not even Sunday article on the Ghazi, which I think is the re-education of the public when it comes to Hillary Clinton as she's starting her run.
And I think in 2014, I wouldn't be surprised if Islamic terrorists take over the tools now to really throw things into flux.
Yeah, I mean, this is basically the high stakes going on in Egypt right now, where the present government of Egypt under General Sisi, which is quite a name for a strong man, but that's the name of the strong man who's in control in Cairo, General Sisi, basically takes a tougher line on the Muslim Brotherhood than the United States government does.
And Cairo is now cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood.
And either that will work, or as you say, we might be in a situation where it rebounds on them big time.
And Mohamed Morsi and his ilk return to power far angrier than they were a couple of years ago and Islamize Egypt entirely.
This is the big story, the big foreign policy debug.
Basically, the United States government got into bed with people who hate America and people who we assisted in Libya, people who hate America.
We helped them to overthrow Gaddafi.
And the result now is that Ben, you have ridiculous situations where a couple of days before an American ambassador is killed, diplomats are meeting with these guys who are demanding inward investment from America and they're demanding a McDonald's outlet and a Kentucky fried chicken outlet in Benghazi.
And two days later, they're killing the American ambassador.
That's it.
They want the money.
They want the KFC outlet and they want to kill Americans.
It's a big package to them.
And that story will continue through 2014, Sean.
What was your question, by the way?
You said you also had a question.
I've been doing a lot of reading recently on the idea of citizenship and Ted Cruz and Obama and where they come from.
And if I'm correct, you being a Canadian are citizen of the British Empire.
And if that's the case, my father was born in 1907 in Ireland before it was free.
So he was a citizen of the British Empire.
Does that mean one too?
Yeah, now, the phrase you're searching for, Shaud, is Her Majesty's Dominions.
Basically, if you're born within Her Majesty's Dominions, you're a British subject.
And the relevant bit of legislation here off the top of my head is the 1948 British Nationality Act, which declared that a quarter of the world's population were British subjects.
And in effect, Canadian citizenship or Australian citizenship were subsets of British nationality.
And if you were born in colonial Kenya, like Barack Obama's father, you were just a British subject, pure and simple.
If you were born in Canada, until I think it was 1977, in a Canadian passport, it used to say a Canadian citizen is a British subject.
And then the preferred term now is Commonwealth citizen, because it sounds less imperialist.
But you're basically right that Ted Cruz, Barack Obama, and I are all members of the same club, as was your dad, Sean.
Okay, thank you very much.
I didn't get it.
Do you know, I've had so much email about the Ted Cruz things.
I make no claim to be an expert in the constitutional requirements for president and also the American definition of natural-born citizen, which are controversial subjects.
But it's interesting to me that, as Sean pointed out, if you were born anywhere within, and that's still true, in fact, if you look at Australia, for example, the new prime minister in Australia, marvelous man, strong conservative, strong.
I would love for a guy like Tony Abbott to get elected president here, but he can't.
But Tony Abbott was actually born in England, and he's now Australia's prime minister, and he succeeded Julia Gillard as Australia's prime minister, and she was born in Wales.
So if Sean is right to point out that if you were born within Her Majesty's dominions, you're all members of the same club.
And by the way, as was every American president, they were either a British subject or the child of a British subject until President Van Buren.
I think he was the first president not to be either a British subject or the child of a British subject.
So I don't know whether Sean is trying to get some one bad birth of thing going here with the Ted Cruz phenomenon.
Again, I don't quite know the situation here.
As I understand it, Ted Cruz's father was born in Cuba and he took U.S. citizenship, I think, six or seven years ago, something like that.
But I had some email to the effect that he actually also took Canadian citizenship while he was up in Canada.
So I don't know where this is going, but the fact is that if you're born outside the United States, you have to meet that definition of natural born, which I assume would mean you were born to U.S. parents of one kind or another.
So Ted Cruz, there may be method to him renouncing Her Majesty the Queen and all her ways.
So we'll see how that works out.
But that was short.
Sean is right, by the way, on the bigger picture, which he was talking about, which is this business with what's happening in the Middle East.
The New York Times is trying to impose a narrative on Benghazi that will get Hillary Clinton through primary season.
I don't believe Hillary Clinton, by the way, is going to be the nominee.
You know, at this stage in the 2008 cycle, we were told that Hillary Clinton was inevitable.
And a lot of things that are inevitable never happen.
And if they didn't happen for Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton, when you put her on stage with a more beguiling novelty who also checked all the identity group boxes, and that's Barack Obama, the Democrat Party decided that they would rather go with Barack Obama.
Hillary Clinton is not an effective campaigner.
She's not her husband.
And the New York Times may be investing far too much money in trying to get itself into a situation where it can drag Hillary across the finish line.
They may be they've damaged their own story.
And just to deal with it in purely Middle Eastern terms, by the way, they're asking us to believe something ridiculous.
This guy, Fitzpatrick, who wrote the story, he was on the Sunday talk shows and he said it had nothing to do with al-Qaeda if by al-Qaeda you mean an organization founded by Osama bin Laden.
That's not what Al-Qaeda is.
Yes, you can go through all the bodies of the dead guys in the compound and in Benghazi and go through their wallets, and you will not find the official al-Qaeda membership card showing them officially designated as a grade D officer in the Al-Qaeda cadre of jihadists signed by some guy sitting in a cave in Waziristan.
That's not what Al-Qaeda is.
But 2013 is the year al-Qaeda made a hell of a comeback in the Maghreb and in North Africa and Syria.
And not because they're taking orders from some guy in a cave somewhere in the Hindu Kush, but because the beauty of the organization is it doesn't depend on that.
It's not the Cold War.
It's not some Soviet control officer leaving you instructions in a dead drop underneath a rock in a park in Washington.
It doesn't work like that.
It's a very decentralized, highly effective organization that shares the same goal.
But Al-Qaeda in North Africa, Al-Qaeda in Syria, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Al-Qaeda in Yemen, they're all affiliated and share the goals of the guys sitting in the caves in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal lands.
Mark Stein Infra Rush.
We'll talk to Mallory Factor in just a moment.
Mark Stein Infra Rush, pleased to welcome to the show now Mallory Factor.
Mallory is an author.
He's professor at the Citadel in South Carolina, the military college there.
And just so you can't stereotype him, he's professor at the military college, but he was also on the Tony Awards Committee for years.
I've always wanted to be on the Tony Awards Committee, so I'm envious of him.
Hello, Mark.
How are you?
I'm doing great, Mallory.
I'm thrilled to be with you.
Well, you've written a book called Shadow Boss.
You've got your new book coming out, I think, in a couple of months' time, Big Tent.
But Shadow Bosses, which is basically your book about government unions.
And that title is great because it gets to the idea of who really controls government.
Why does government expenditure rise remorselessly no matter who's in power?
And it's really interesting.
It's funny, right after the last election, Trumpka, head of the AFFL CIO, one of the big union shadow bosses, he came out and he said, without the unions, Obama would never have carried Nevada, Wisconsin, Ohio.
He listed a whole bunch of cities.
And some people thought he was bragging.
Heck no, he wasn't bragging.
He was right.
The unions registered more than 450,000 union household voters just in the last several months.
They got most of them to the polls.
They knocked on 11 million doors nationwide.
They put over a half billion dollars into Obama's campaign.
And they put 400,000 people volunteers on the streets, volunteers who got paid.
Right.
Now, Rush uses a phrase, low-information voters.
But the way you present it is to look at it from the union's point of view or the Democrats' point of view, is that these are in fact low-information donors.
Who cares what they know about as long as they sign up to a union and effectively fund the Democratic Party and big government?
And that's the point.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
First of all, I'm going to use that.
Low information donors, but they don't sign up in over 20 states to keep your job.
You have to pay a union.
If you don't pay the union, you can't keep your job.
Right.
Isn't that amazing?
Yeah, yeah.
You have no choice.
You have no choice as to the political contributions you make.
That's amazing.
Well, they separate out quote-unquote political contributions, but that's a lot of nonsense.
You're having really no choice.
There's a major Supreme Court case which is going to be heard on January 21st.
It's called Harris v. Quinn.
And what it's going to be about is a group of independent-minded home care providers that were redefined by Illinois' elected officials as public employees for the sole purposes of unionization.
And what they're going to do is they're challenging Illinois to define them as union members and them being forced to pay dues.
And the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation took on the case free.
They're going to hear it before the United States Supreme Court.
And basically what it is is do workers have the right to make a decision about who's going to represent them, if they even want to be represented, or do they have to pay tribute to a union boss even without them voting on it?
What you also bring up is the way illegal workers can in effect fund this machine too, which means that they have more say in the political process effectively than U.S. citizens going to the voting booth.
Absolutely.
See, here's the big, deep, dark secret.
It's not that much of a secret, really.
Every million members that the shadow bosses can force to pay dues is about a billion dollars a year in revenues for the union heads.
That's a billion dollars a year in revenues.
And they themselves say they only spend between 20 and 30 percent for membership representation.
Where do you think the rest of it goes to?
Right.
Right.
It's going basically, well, it's going on narrowly defined political activities, but also more broadly defined political interests.
Well, it goes to them, and it goes to the political process.
Union bosses like to say they elect their own bosses.
We go into this in great detail in our book, Shadow Bosses.
I mean, they're electing their own bosses.
And it is even worse in the government employee sector.
That is the worst.
In the private sector, there's only about 6% unionization.
But in the government employee area, government employees, 40, over 41% are unionized.
And the reason is real simple.
If you push a private company too far, like Hostis, they go out of business.
But it's hard to put the government out of business.
And there's nobody representing our listeners, your listeners, Russia's listeners, the taxpayers, because these elected officials get huge amounts of money and support from these union bosses.
And this is a recent development, relatively.
It basically goes back to JFK at the federal level.
Wow, you're good.
You're right.
On the federal level, it started with an executive order.
Right.
1988, if I'm not mistaken.
And basically, Before that, it was accepted that while you might need a union if you were working for some rapacious capitalist who owned the local mill, the one guy who doesn't need a union is the government worker.
There's no competition there.
You can't say, I'm going to go and get another better job at the government across the street.
We understood that somehow government's relationship to labor management relations was different from the private sector.
And that's all gone now.
Now it's the biggest source of union power.
Yes, these unions control far more of our political process than we like to even give them credit for or even realize.
Do you realize that in every single congressional district, be it a right-to-work state or not, there's a union representative for the education, our teachers, and that the teachers' unions, the two teachers' unions alone, take in over $2 billion a year.
That's worth talking about all by itself, Mallory.
This is a fascinating conversation.
We could continue it for a long time.
We got to go to take an EIB profit center break.
We'll be back after this.
Mark Stein in for Rush behind the golden EIB microphone.
That was Mallory Factor we were talking to.
He's the author of Shadow Bosses, which is a book that basically explains the self-dealing relationship between government and government unions.
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