RUSH: Auto bailout. The reason people oppose the auto industry bailout is not just because they don’t think it will work, but a lot of people just don’t want to subsidize workers who have bigger salaries and better benefits than many of them do. It’s just an issue of fairness. It’s not anti-union. It’s, ‘Why should we be doing this?’ Now, for Obama and the Democrats, this isn’t about the working man, it’s about clinging to the old Democrat coalitions. It’s about power. Of course they want the taxpayers to finance their constituents. Same with the inner cities. They consider those folks their constituents as well.
They don’t do anything for the general good. They are endlessly plotting on how to get and keep power. The Democrats have yet to improve the lives of the people that vote for them. They have yet to do so, and yet they continue to get the votes because they continue to succeed in blaming Republicans and everybody else for standing in the way of this so-called brilliant progress the Democrats have designed. Somehow it just never manifests itself. It’s the same thing with the environmentalists. Global warming, if fully enacted with the Gore model — what happened today, Henry Waxman just secured control of the Energy and Commerce Committee from John Dingell, and Waxman is as nuts on global warming as Algore is.
So Waxman now is in charge of the House committee that’s going to be pushing all this legislation to advance global warming technology, which basically is anti-capitalist technology, on the American corporate sector. So that’s going to industry our industries. They have managed to somehow walk the high wire on the issue between the unions and the environmentalists. Because, as they destroy these industries, the unions are going to get hurt. People are going to continue to lose jobs. You’re seeing it. You’re seeing right now. What’s happening in the US economy is a prelude to what is on tap, should Obama be able to proceed unchecked with allies in Congress advancing his agenda. They’re going to deliver on this job-killing cap-and-trade rule.
Remember during the campaign Obama said his cap-and-trade plan would put the coal business out of business, not by saying, ‘You can’t do it anymore.’ What he was going to do was just make it so cost prohibitive that nobody would open a new coal-fired plant; it wouldn’t make any sense financially because Obama’s cap-in-trade program is going to make it impossible to earn a profit doing so. So, yeah, we’re going to put the coal industry out of business. He thinks it’s a good thing because of these magical alternatives that do not exist that somehow are going to magically materialize under his stewardship; and then when this happens, they’re going to tell their union constituents that they will spend hundreds of billions of dollars on new ‘green jobs’ and it will get the minimum wage up to nine-and-a-half an hour, and they’ll have some moderate (not much, but some moderate) success at that.
There are still going to be some people losing jobs. As the minimum wage goes up more jobs will be lost. It will be extremely damaging to our economy and nation, but the Democrats are betting that all this will secure their power for decades to come. You know, if you go back and you actually can find some objective history of the Great Depression and FDR, there are many indications that FDR made things worse. The New Deal did not fix the Great Depression. It made it worse. The New Deal prolonged it. But in the process, FDR secured massive power for himself, as well as his party. Obama has indicated that his model is FDR. So, we have Rahm Emanuel. Here, grab sound bite 19 again. This was Tuesday night in Washington. I just want you to listen to this.
If you connect the dots — and, by the way, it’s not true to say nobody knows what Obama’s going to do. We do know what he’s going to do. His voters didn’t know what he was going to do. His voters were clueless. Did you happen to see the poll that Zogby did (it was commissioned by John Ziglar) after the election, on the knowledge Obama voters had. Give me the details of this. This is amazing. When I sit around and you hear people say, ‘Well, you don’t know what Obama is going to do. He has no plan.’ We do exactly what he’s going to do, if we trust what he said and the indication… We trust what Rahm Emanuel says. We know what he’s going to do. He’s a radical leftist. Here, listen to Rahm Emanuel Tuesday night in Washington. This crisis is an opportunity. Now, the opportunity, he cast the opportunity as an opportunity for you: national health care, get tax cuts for the middle class, tax increases on the rich, all these things. The opportunity is for them to finally coalesce their power in a way they can’t be beaten for years, because everybody is going to be dependent on the Democrat Party for what little they have on a daily basis in terms of economics. Here’s Rahm Emanuel again Tuesday night.
EMANUEL: You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before. This is an opportunity. What used to be long-term problems — be they in the health care area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area — things that we had postponed for too long that were long-term are now immediate and must be dealt with. And this crisis provides the opportunity for us, as I would say, the opportunity to do things that you could not do before.
RUSH: Crisis is an opportunity. They’re looking at an opportunity. Your misery is an opportunity. Your unsettledness — this volatility, this lack of stability — is an opportunity for them, not for you. And the opportunity for them is to get all these big programs and make everybody dependent on them. That coalesces their power. That’s what FDR did with the New Deal in the Great Depression, and it didn’t solve the Great Depression. It was World War II that finally took us out of the Great Depression. It was not FDR’s New Deal policy. Obama’s people don’t know this.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We’re going to start in Midland, Michigan. Mark, it’s great to have you on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hello.
CALLER: Greetings from Michigan, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Yeah, the crown jewel of Democratic rule, land of soaring unemployment and the future penal colony of America. (laughing.)
RUSH: The future penal colony of America. We’re just joking. We’re just joking about sending the pirates there if we nab ’em on the high seas. We’re not going to be able to send them to Club Gitmo because it’s going to be shut down.
CALLER: Well, they can come to Michigan, you know, we could probably dig a moat at the lower part of our state and just use it like an Australia.
RUSH: Now, now, now, we’re going to get Michigan fixed. Just hang on for Obama to bail out the unions and Jennifer Granholm, you’re going to be fine up there. Ahem.
CALLER: Oh, yes, I forgot. It’s been so long. Rush, I work for the United Auto Workers, and I work at an auto parts supplier for General Motors. In fact, General Motors is our biggest customer. So, you know, I guess what I’m supposed to do is give you the union line on why we should protect our jobs and why everybody should be given top dollar and why union management is all at blame and all at fault for all this mix that we’re in, but I guess I can’t do that because I’m a conservative first, Rush, and we both know that the free market’s what’s going to solve this problem and not a bailout.
RUSH: Exactly.
CALLER: Wouldn’t you agree?
RUSH: It’s sad to say. You know, this autoworker business is kind of a tough one for me because, you know, I’m all for everybody earning what they can. I’m not going to sit here and tell people they don’t deserve what they have bargained for and so forth. I’m not one of these anti-union people that says you guys are destroying the country, but there is a large contingent of people that are starting to think that way now, which is not good PR for unions. You don’t want people thinking of you that way any more than they already do. And, you know, labor has to be priced like any other commodity when you’re running a business. It has to be priced competitively. And if it isn’t then, of course, the place you work for can’t compete against its competitors, and you’re killing yourself.