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Oct. 14, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:20
October 14, 2015, Wednesday, Hour #2
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Greetings, my friends, welcome back.
Wonderful to have you here, Rush Limbaugh behind the Golden EIB microphone.
We are into our 28th year here.
Twenty-seven years in the can and well into our 28th.
It remains the high point of my day.
Be here with you.
Hosting these three hours of Busy Broadcast Excellence.
Telephone number is 800-282-2882, the email address, Lrushbow at EIBNet.com.
Mr. Snerdley has been brow beating me over something Martin O'Malley said last night about Glass Steagle, the bank deregulation law.
And it was O'Malley brought it up and said that we need to re-I I don't even remember what O'Malley said.
I watched the whole debate and I don't even remember him talking about it.
I must have been well, I don't know what I was doing, but I missed it.
And frankly, I don't care what O'Malley said about it.
It's not going to matter a hill of beans, but here for anybody who wants to know what it is.
And I knew it.
I just I had to refresh my memory on some of this stuff.
Glass Steagall was originally passed after the depression.
It goes back all the way to 1932.
And it was, as you said, it was intended to prevent banks from wheeling and dealing.
It limited banks on the kind of banking they could do.
And Bill Clinton repealed it in 1998, which meant banks could do anything.
They could be investment banks, they could be your standard ordinary every day neighborhood bank.
They could combine all these different activities under one roof, if you will.
Now, in a nutshell.
And what was O'Malley saying that we need to go back to it?
Well, he must have been doing that as a way of hitting Hillary because her husband is the one that.
You know, I the people have said that that Clinton uh repealing Glass-Steagall in 1998 led to the subprime crisis.
But there's a that's just that's that's trying to excuse Clinton for his real role in the subprime crisis.
Glass-Steagall has very little to do with it.
I mean, repealing Glass-Steagall enabled them to do what they really then set out to do.
That's when Clinton sent Janet Reno to all the banks and threatened to prosecute and investigate them if they didn't lend money to people that could never pay it back.
And that's what got the whole the Jimmy Carter actually started the home the the uh subprime mortgage thing, and Clinton picked it up, gave it energy, didn't go very far under Clinton or under Carter.
But it was it was it was nothing more than Black Lives Matter.
It was affirmative action.
It was a it was a uh a so-called, it was a PR effort to make it look like the Democrat Party cared about the American dream when the Republican Party didn't.
American dream defined as home ownership.
Well, who wasn't able uh able to afford homes?
Well, middle class African Americans, poor Americans, poor blacks, and that was the focus.
It was to extend the benefits of home ownership to people who couldn't afford it, because it wasn't fair, some couldn't afford it.
And so the banks were forced to make these loans.
I'm not defending banks here, but I'm telling you they are not the original guilty party in this.
Once they were told that they had to engage in practices guaranteed to lose them money, they did what any responsible institution would.
They tried to turn it around and figure out how to make money out of it.
So they collected all of this paper, i.e.
fraudulent income streams and all these mortgages that they had made, all this money they had lent to people that would never ever otherwise be qualified, would never ever be able to pay it back.
But nobody knew that.
They package all these mortgages together, and the packaging of the mortgages had uh had a had a had a mortgage-backed securities.
And what it represented was an income stream.
Look at all of these loans that people are making monthly payments on.
And you can buy a package of these.
I'm selling these because I want to move into other areas.
So somebody bought them, and then they found out that it's worthless.
They repackaged it as something else, sold it to somebody else, found out it was worthless until finally it all crashed on itself.
The subprime mortgage credit.
During all that period, regulators knew what was going on, tried to bring it to a halt during the Bush administration.
And that's when people like Barney Frank threatened the investigators during congressional hearings to leave it alone.
And Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got involved, people started getting rich in the process of moving these worthless pieces of paper, these worthless loans that nobody was ever going to pay back.
And eventually the banks had to foreclose on these properties.
You know the drill.
Now, the role that Glass-Stiegel had in this, I don't even know why O'Malley brought it up, what he thought he could benefit by doing.
But in a nutshell, Glass-Steagall was to differentiate between commercial banks and investment banks.
Under Glass-Steagall, commercial banks like Citibank were not allowed to get into the securities investing business.
But once Glass-Steagall was repealed, Citibank, for instance, big time went into the investment banking business in addition to this commercial banking.
Remember, they went, I mean, bad trouble, and they had to get Bob Rubin in there to try to save them and uh bail them out.
And Citibank got very involved with Solomon Smith Barney, which left them very exposed when the mortgage meltdown hit.
Under Glass-Steagall, banks had to be either commercial or investment.
They could not be both.
And after it was ignored and eventually repealed by Clinton, banks did both.
So really, risky securities investments ended up being underwritten by commercial banks like Citibank.
And it turned out investment banking on paper looks much more profitable than just being a commercial bank, with Ma and Pa citizen coming in with their weekly deposits and wanting their passbook interest.
You know, what fun is that when you can be over there playing with the big boys at Goldman Sachs.
So basically, Goldman Sachs was able to become a commercial bank, and Citibank and Wells Fargo were able to become Goldman Sachs if they wanted to.
And there are a lot of people who think that repeal of Glass-Steagall allowing these banks to start trafficking in any kind of activity they want to is what led to the big corruption and the subprime mortgage.
Here's the bottom line, though.
You know, I don't care what anybody said on that stage last night about banking.
The simple fact of the matter is that the big banks, be they commercial or investment, the Wall Street financial apparatus, is 80% tied to the Democrat Party today.
And that's why I'm sitting up there laughing at it because Bernie Sanders going on and on and all these other people going on and on about closing the banks or regulating the banks and making the banks play pay play fair and so forth.
The banks are donating to Obama left and right.
They donated to Hillary.
continue to donate to Hillary and they will continue to.
They're run now by, for the most part, your average, ordinary, run-of-the-mill, everyday liberal Democrat.
And yet the image persists that Wall Street equals big business equals Republican.
And it just isn't true anymore.
The Democrat Party has become the party of the rich.
The time you add the Hollywood rich, the entertainment rich, the union rich, and believe me, there are tons of them.
And it's overwhelming the transformation that's taken place to the point now that the Republican Party cannot be said to be the party of the rich.
It is the Democrats.
And yet nobody knows it, particularly people that vote Democrat.
So Bernie Sanders can sit up there all night and start talking about the banks or evil here and evil there and get standing ovations.
Now, what O'Malley said about Glass-Steagall, he said there's another piece that Senator Sanders left out tonight.
But he's been excellent about underscoring that, and that is that we need to separate the casino speculative megabank gambling that we have to insure with our money from the commercial banking, namely reinstate Glass-Steagall.
Secretary Clinton mentioned my support eight years ago, and Secretary, I was proud to support you eight years ago, but something's happened in between.
And that is Anderson, a Wall Street crash that wiped out millions of jobs and millions of savings for families.
And we are still just as vulnerable.
Paul Volker says today that we as we were then.
We need to reinstate Glass Steagall, and that's a huge difference on this stage among us as candidates.
So O'Malley wanted to reinstate Glass-Steagall.
And I guarantee you that 99.9% of the studio audience and 99.99% of the television audience was saying, What?
Glass what?
Come on, Martin, take your shirt off.
That's why we want to see you.
They couldn't care less about it.
Before we get back to the phones, I want to go back to our first caller in the last hour to tail into the previous hour.
You remember he was just frustrated as he could be.
Watched this thing last night.
And I could tell by the nature of his comments that he was young, which is good.
He can't believe what he was hearing.
He literally can't believe there are still people in a dominant major political party talking about all of these things like they were talking about last night, which are demonstrated failures.
They do not work.
They do not help people, they do not revive a case, they don't do anything, and yet here they are talking about it and doing even more of it.
And he was beside himself.
He can't find any pushback anywhere today.
He goes, the media can't find it, he doesn't understand it, and I'm telling you why that is.
And this is a this is a very, very important point here, folks.
And I'm I'm sorry to sound like a broken record on it, but the reason our opening caller, and I'm sure he echoed what many of you think.
It wasn't that long ago that you could count on the Republican Party to last night be all over TV nuking that stuff.
Either Republican presidential candidates or party leaders or elected Republicans would be all over T and the media would love to talk to them, and they would be nuking everything the Democrats said.
They would be engaging in pushback.
They would be attempting to put it in context and to disqualify it and to expose it for what it is as just runaway, irresponsible socialism which hasn't worked anywhere.
And then they would contrast that with what they believe, or what we believe.
And the American people watching news media last night, and the same thing would happen today.
There would be some pushback on it.
There would be some people with credibility who would be explaining why what you heard last night was absolutely irresponsible, juvenile, whatever else.
But there hasn't been any of that.
And so you who have that very reaction to what you heard last night, you don't see anybody in politics representing what you believe.
The Republican Party is not out fighting this stuff.
And the reason that they're not, we know this.
The Republican establishment believes that to do so would be to endanger their support from independence.
And I'm not trying to be funny, and I'm not cracking a joke.
They really do believe it's why they don't oppose Obama.
So people say, Well, why don't you at least fight back?
No, because that would anger the independents.
really believe this stuff inside the Beltway, in the Washington establishment, in the Republican section of it, they really believe.
Mitt Romney won the independents in droves and lost the election.
They're election cycles behind reality at the Republican establishment.
These moderates establishment types, it's the most frustrating thing.
So the bottom line is you have to wait until today and turn on the radio to hear any responsible opposition pushback and putting what you heard In proper context.
And you're not hearing it from people you can vote for.
So it's understandable you'd be frustrated it's get out.
I'm with you.
I totally understand.
There's been a big change in the 27 years I've been behind this microphone.
The first 10, 15 years, the Republican Party was pushing back every minute of every day.
And now they've been scared into silence.
So that's why you watched this last night and you my God, I don't hear any reaction.
Really believe this crazy stuff?
My God, I understand the incredulity that you're feeling.
Anyway, uh back to the phones.
This is Mike.
Oh, we had a guy who dropped off.
He was from Denver.
I wish he hadn't dropped off.
He's going to tell me that I was all wrong, that Hillary is not going to be the nominee.
Because Democrat voters, particularly young Democrat voters, they don't want anything to do with Hillary.
They are in love with Bernie Sanders, and they're going to make him the nominee.
And this guy dropped off.
I don't know if he ran out of time or what.
But I would have liked to have talked to him.
In the meantime, here's Mike in uh uh put my glasses on.
Finkesburg, Maryland.
Mike Hyde, great to have you here.
Thank you, Professor.
I appreciate you taking my call.
You bet.
Make it short and sweet and great to the point.
I've been a student since 1989, and I'm gonna put forth my uh my plan.
We've been we've been given a golden opportunity, not for Republicans, but for conservatives.
We heard it all last night.
And and it's short and sweet.
First, the economy.
Simple.
Lower taxes for all businesses, large and small.
They want to talk about gun violence.
We attack gun violence like we attacked drunk driving 30 years ago.
We didn't go after GM and Ford.
We went after the guys that were killing people on the road.
And it worked.
The border.
Seal the border.
Use the laws we already have.
We don't have to add one law.
They're there.
They're on the books.
They just need to be used.
And that's the start that just goes straight down the line.
Yeah, well, who's gonna do that?
Give people the op.
We are the party of producers.
Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, who's gonna do all that?
I'm waiting to hear.
I've been waiting for a long time.
I've been holding my nose and glowing.
Well, I know this is you're you're you're echoing the frustration of the first caller.
The answer to this stuff we heard last night is first grade easy.
It is first grade fundamental Dick and Jane C spot run easy.
This stuff that we heard last night can be obliterated.
It can be nuked.
In one busy broadcast newsday.
Haven't heard anybody on our side say anything about it last night, other than echo how well Hillary did.
Even commentators on the right have fallen into the trap of analyzing what happened last night on the basis of how well did Hillary do.
Not what the hell folly did she say.
But how did she do?
Oh man, she looked formidable last night.
Oh man, the Republicans are gonna have to work on it.
We have had Mike, the point is you're right.
We we've had for seven years, the greatest opportunity of my lifetime to contrast what we believe with what liberalism is.
We don't even have to speak about it in theory.
We don't have to go people, we don't have to go to people and say, look, if you elect Democrats, let me tell you what's gonna happen, A, B, C, D and E. It is happening.
We don't have to wait for it to happen.
We don't have to present theory and then be patient while we're proven right.
We're in the middle of it.
All we have to do to point out to people, you what you heard last night?
It's exactly what has happened the last seven years.
And where are we?
Everything you heard last night that they want to do more of is what we're already doing, and we've already got 94 million Americans not working it.
Who do you think's running health care that nobody has?
Who Do you think is running immigration that you think is all screwed?
Who has been in charge the last seven years?
This is the thing about last night that boggles my mind the most is these people get up there after being in charge for seven years and get to act like a Republican is still in office.
And like we are still in Iraq.
And like we are still losing in Iraq.
It's as though Barack Obama has not been president other than when they need to praise Obama to be loyal Democrats.
But other than that, if you didn't know if you just landed from Mars last night, you would think the Republican Party's been in charge and has been totally inept and irresponsible and is in the process of ruining this country, and we need to act fast.
We need to give everybody health care.
We need to punish the banks, need to get rid of oil.
We need to save the planet, because on the way to becoming uninhabitable.
Who is failing to fix all these problems the past seven years?
I mean, I think it was even O'Malley in his opening statement.
So, well, you know what?
I can't be critical of what's happened in the last seven years, but I must tell you that we haven't gone nearly far enough.
So he even had a tantamount to admit that they haven't advanced the leftist agenda nearly as much as a lot of people want, but certainly you cannot find any Republican fingerprints on any of the messes that are being made or have been made in this country.
That's why, I mean, seven years and these people list these complaints like they're out of power.
Is that right?
I had not heard that.
You're not, you're not kidding me.
Trump praised Hillary's performance too.
No.
No, that didn't happen.
You, you, you making that up.
Okay, I've got to I've got to find it.
See, that's Donald Trump ought to be out there today.
He should have been out on the morning shows.
He should have been tweeting last week.
He was tweeting the life tweeting it.
He should have been on the morning shows mocking what happened last night.
Not the people mocking what they said, mocking their policy, mock he should have been tearing it down statement by statement, issue by issue.
First thing we can't afford any of it.
We're already $18 trillion in debt.
We have spent $18 trillion we don't have trying to do everything these people last night say they want to do.
Spending money obviously is not the way to do this.
You want everybody to have health care?
Ain't the way to do it.
You want everybody to have health insurance?
Whatever they're doing the last seven years, not the way to do it.
You want to end poverty?
Sorry.
The way we've been doing it's 1964 isn't working.
And spending more money isn't going to work.
This stuff needs to be torn down, statement by statement, candidate by candidate from Bernie Sanders and what he was saying about the banks is stupid.
Climate change stuff, somebody's got to push back on this stuff.
But if everybody's going to run around and talk about how well Hillary did, sorry, folks.
I don't know how you marshal any opposition to it.
What what are you going to gain by going out and praising Hillary?
You're going to get a Democrat to leave Hillary and vote for you because you go praise Hillary, any Republican.
I mean, just Trump anybody.
What's the point?
You're going to get over this idea that the Republican Party is hated by over to half the country.
And to get back in their good graces, you've got to be nice to Democrats.
It's another giant trick that Democrats in the media have concocted that every Republican that's elected seem to have fallen for.
I remember, you know, I was alive during the 80s, and I was an adult in the 80s.
And I remember, you know, Alan Cranston and these guys that go out and start like Bernie Sanders last night brought up once again that Republicans want to cut social security and leave senior citizens penniless.
Well, back when Alan Cranston would make a statement like that back in the 1980s, somebody in a Republican Party would be on TV the next day laughing about it, mocking it, ridiculing it, and pointing out how it isn't so, and asking, is that the best you've got?
You have to ask yourself, why do these Democrat complaints work After 30 years, how do they keep getting away with Republicans want to cut Social Security?
For 30 years.
Now, they may not be getting away with that.
The seasoned citizen vote has been tending Republican for quite a while.
And I think the reason why is seasoned citizens have figured out all these years the Democrats have been predicting that the Republicans are going to take their Social Security away, it never happens.
And so the seasoned citizens at some point realize that it's a phony and false fear, and they don't have to worry about it.
But the things that were said on that stage last night, I'm telling you, are first grade easy to blow up.
And they deserve to be blown up.
It's easy.
Everything these people said.
You want me to summarize this again?
Let me summarize it for you real quickly, ladies and gentlemen.
Elect the Democrats, we're going to higher taxes.
When's that solved anything?
We've been raising taxes, lowering taxes, high attack rates.
Still got problems, right?
We're going to make sure the borders stay open.
I even heard one of the candidates last night said this is how you raise wages in America is flood the market with all these illegals.
Really?
The law of supply and demand alone disproves that.
94 million Americans not working.
You know, I went back.
I mentioned to you last week that I had a story about how what we are living through right now is actually worse than the Great Depression and why nobody knows.
I went back to my archives, and I got that story, and I have it here.
Open borders, bigger government, free college for everybody.
How many people already have free college by virtue of having their student loans forgiven?
Or what have you?
Everything these people have tried has not worked, so they want to try even more of it.
Bigger welfare state.
Get rid of the guns, no oil, no banks.
Really?
That's what the Democrats in the 60s were talking about when they were protesting a Democrat convention in Chicago.
This is so old, it's predictable.
You don't even have to wait for these people to say it in a debate.
You know what they're going to say.
Trump, Carson, Fiorina, where are they today?
I'm serious.
Where are they nuking this stuff?
Well, they're running in opposition to it.
That's why I'm asking.
They're running for president.
Your opponents last night put their agenda forward forward.
Are you telling me you're not going to spend any time obliterating it?
Jim Quinn versus the burning platform blog.
We find everything here, folks.
Why this feels like a depression for most people?
It's you read this and you you can figure out why the millennials are weird or strange or feel that way, because they have come of age in a depression that nobody will call that.
Now, none of this in this story is new to those of you who have been regularly listening to this program.
But it is well thought out and presented here.
I found it it's actually the zero hedge blog.
Everyone has seen the pictures of the unemployed waiting in soup lines during the Great Depression.
Wait, should we make that assumption?
Do you think everybody has seen those pictures?
Now you think you have, so you think everybody else has.
I yeah, I've seen them.
You know those old black and whites with men standing in soup lines with hardly any clothes, and it's freezing cold.
All these black and whites, some still shots Some film, you've seen it, right?
Everybody's seen those pictures.
The Great Depression.
When you try to tell a propaganda-believing, willfully ignorant mainstream media watching math challenged consumer that we are in the midst of a greater depression, they act as if you've lost your mind.
They will immediately bluster about the 5.1% unemployment rate.
How can we get depression?
What are you talking about?
You see the unemployment rate's 5.1%.
And then they'll tell you about record corporate profits.
And then they'll tell you about how well the stock market's doing.
The cognitive dissonance of these people is only exceeded by their inability to understand the basic mathematical concepts involved.
The reason you don't see huge lines of people waiting in soup lines in this depression is why.
Let me just ask you.
And let me give you a number.
Do you know what the number of at the peak of the depression?
At the height, you know what the number of unemployed were.
Now, granted, population of the country was less than it is today.
There were 12.8 million Americans unemployed during the Great Depression.
These were the men pictured in those soup lines.
Today, there are 46 million Americans unemployed.
And 94 million not working.
I don't care what.
Now that these 46 million people, these are the counted unemployed.
This is the U3 number.
The counted unemployed represent 14% of the population.
There are 23 million households on food stamps.
There are 123 million households in America, and 23 million of them are on food stamps.
Therefore, 19% of all households in America require food stamp assistance to survive.
In 1933, there were approximately 126 million Americans living in 30 million households.
The government did not keep official unemployment records until 1940.
But the Department of Labor estimated 12.8 million people were unemployed during the worst year of the depression, or 24.9% of the labor force.
We have the lowest labor force participation race in 1977 in the country today.
have 48% of the labor force not working.
62% or 38% 62% is working 38% not working.
Now I'm going to stop with the numbers because numbers get confusing to keep track of when you're hearing them you don't have them in front of them to look at.
But why do you not see any soup lines?
What's the difference in 1933 and today?
Well, obviously, 1933, there were no food stamps.
In 1933, there was no welfare.
In 1933, there were no welfare debit cards.
In 1933, if you were out of work, you didn't eat.
You had to stand in a soup line and depend on charity.
In 2015, you can be among the 94 million not working and have a roof over your head, have a cell phone, a car.
Your home is probably air conditioned.
And you're eating as much as you want.
12 million unemployed people standing in soup lines gave us these horrible pictures of the Great Depression.
Today, the numbers of people out of work dwarf.
even when you factor the population difference.
Far more people not working today than during the Great Depression.
We are $18 trillion in debt today, too.
We are paying people not to work.
Thank you.
We are paying people comfortably not to work.
This is why I keep making the point.
94 million Americans not working, but they're all eating.
It does matter.
Well, you want people to starve?
No, that's not the point.
Don't get sidetracked here.
If you can eat and have a house and a big screen and a cell phone without working.
Who in the world is paying for it?
Back during the Great Depression, if you couldn't pay for it, you didn't have it.
And that's why parents and grandparents of yours who lived during the Great Depression are so scared that another one would happen.
That's why they're so hellbent on everybody going to college and getting an education, because that was the key to not being fired.
That was the key to having a job so that you could eat.
My parents and grandparents could not imagine being paid not to work by the government.
They feared it.
They thought it would be disastrous.
And so here comes the Democrat Party last night promising even more for people that don't work, can't work, are not qualified to work, not very skilled.
They become the champions.
They become the number one constituency group for the Democrats.
They and their rich donors.
And at this point, I must take a brief time out.
Be right back and continue after this.
Donald Trump did uh have something to say about last night.
He was on uh Good Morning America today, and he declared Hillary the winner.
George Stephanopoulos says to Trump, you said it was a good move by Bernie Sanders to tell Secretary Clinton he's tired of hearing about her emails.
He also took on casino capitalists.
Sounds like a preview of a possible attack on you, Mr. Trump.
So who wins between the casino capitalist and Democrat Socialist?
His performance was okay, but he had to be much better than okay.
He had to come out the clear winner, he didn't.
And I actually think she probably came out not the winner.
But yeah, probably if you think about it, George, she came out the winner.
She did what she had to do, and they were extremely gentle.
The other three, it's not gonna happen.
Yeah, but he's saying is yeah, it's not gonna happen.
And he's right about that.
I mean, there was not a debate last night.
And he's promising that when she has to go up against him, it ain't gonna be that way.
But this is not I don't know.
I uh I don't know anymore.
I I just what what is what is this obsession with praising the other team, the other side?
Yeah, I thought he did it.
Bernie Sanders was an absolute embarrassment last night.
Bernie Sanders was scary embarrassing last night.
Rate these people on the basis of their debate performance of what happened.
Anyway, here's here's Lee and Gilroy of California.
Great to have you on the program, Lee.
I'm glad you waited.
Hello.
Hey, Rush, uh, long time listener.
Uh last night uh when I was watching uh the uh the debate last night, um, was watching uh all the clowns debate each other.
Um they got to, especially uh Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, when they got to the part where um they promised all the free handouts, you know.
I I I sat there and I really contemplated that, and I I felt just in my gut, I'm like, wow, you know, Republicans are really in trouble here.
Um, is your question?
How do you compete with that?
Exactly.
How do you compete with all those uh handouts?
See, that's the scary thing.
This is the scary thing.
And from the standpoint of whatever percentage you want to say supports this stuff, that we have to conclude we've lost that percentage of the country.
When you have what was on that stage last night, all these promises for much bigger welfare state.
Free this, free that.
You have to realize that there's a portion of the population that does applaud it.
Think it's great, think it's cool, thinks that is the purpose of government is to take care of people and to help people.
And what's wrong with it, they will say?
What's wrong with free college?
What's wrong with food stamp?
What's wrong with helping people?
What's wrong with bringing illegal since they can make something of themselves?
And that begins an entire education process of trying to explain to people how it's hurting the people you're trying to help.
It's denying them their dignity, it's denying them their opportunity to be totally self-sufficient and to find out how good and capable they are.
And sometimes people look at that whole effort as a lost cause waste of time.
So, yeah, I mean, it's my assessment following the 2004 election.
American people voted for Santa Claus.
Or 2008, I'm sorry, 2000.
I'm just sitting here reading a story about Nielsen and the TV ratings people.
The upshot of it is that it really is not clear this election is drawing more viewer interest at all.
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