RUSH: We’ll start with Joan in Boca Raton. It’s great to have you with us. Hello.
CALLER: Hi. How are you?
RUSH: Fine.
CALLER: I’m not so good. I’ve been sitting here watching C-SPAN. It’s a joke. It’s a total joke. I’m sitting here watching Pelosi shake her finger at them and tell them that this is the Republicans’ fault. How can the Republicans vote yes in a situation like that? I just can’t believe it.
CALLER: I know. I heard you, and I can’t believe you were saying everything I was going to say. (laughs)
RUSH: Look, I’m reluctant to even say what this is really about, and certainly people who get votes aren’t going to say it. That’s the problem. Let me just fire both barrels. The left in this country — the extreme left, the far left and the media — are not going to stop until in their minds people in this country, whoever is alive whenever it happens, pay for slavery. So what you have here is you have people who are afraid to oppose any of this because the primary beneficiaries are minority and poor people. And then you have the Democrats ready to pounce on that. ‘You racist. You racist elitist. You only care about the rich and so forth.’ The Republicans don’t have an answer for that, that I’ve ever heard, that they feel confident using. So this is the power of political correctness. This is the power of holding racist accusations over people’s heads.
CALLER: You know, that’s getting old, too.
RUSH: Well, I think it’s old to most of the people in the country. But keep in mind, that’s not how this is being portrayed in the media. The truth of it, once again, is not being portrayed in the media. The truth of this is being swept under the rug. It’s been replaced by the notion that we’ve got Armageddon here. We got the Great Depression 2 next week, if we don’t do this.
CALLER: No, we got an election coming up, and that’s what this is all about.
RUSH: Well, that —
CALLER: This is all a set-up thing.
RUSH: Exactly. Exactly right.
CALLER: And, you know, I don’t like to be manipulated by this. This is wrong.
RUSH: Here’s the answer to this, and we’re all going to have to be self-starters on this. We had a call last week, Joan, from a woman in New Jersey, desperate to get some McCain yards. She was desperate to get some McCain yard signs, and she called the McCain campaign.
CALLER: Make your own signs, for crying out loud.
RUSH: She wants the official ones. She couldn’t get ’em. Yes, but here’s the point. You can’t detect much of a McCain ground game out there in a lot of parts of the country. My point here is is that, again, I say this: It is a waste of time for all of us to sit around and wait to be inspired and led by somebody in our party, the nominee on down, to excite us, to get us to turn out and vote. We’re going to have to do that on our own. The way to answer this is to take this anger. You’re angry at Pelosi blaming you. You’re fed up with being manipulated. You don’t like it.
CALLER: Barney Frank? I wouldn’t buy a used car from him.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: So turnout is going to be a self-starter thing in this election.
CALLER: Well, I’ve tried. Every time I talk to anybody, I tell them that, you know, this is not the answer. Obama is not a savior.
RUSH: Okay. All right. Let me say it a different way. Get your anger to the polling place on Election Day. That’s essentially what I’m saying. Let your anger at all of this, at whoever, get you to the polling place on Election Day.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: Because we can’t afford Obama. It’s Obama’s buddies, it’s Obama’s groups, it’s Obama’s organizations that has brought us here. It’s Obama’s party that has brought us here, for all the finger wagging at Nancy Pelosi. It’s frustrating, at the same time, to hear people on our side not understand this, not get it. Some people on our side (supposedly) in the media are just so lazy. They do not even have the professionalism to justify what they’re being paid, to go out and properly inform themselves. We have media people on our side who want to be seen so much as down-the-middle and fair and not partisan that they don’t even educate themselves on these things. They can’t get past the traditional cliches that dominate every election. So in this case, if you’re waiting around for leadership, it doesn’t appear from your elected officials you’re going to get a whole lot. Just act on your anger and your frustration, and you do that at the voting booth on Election Day. Thank you, Joan. I appreciate the call. This is Aaron in Idaho Falls. It’s great to have you on the program. Hello.
CALLER: Hi. How are you, Rush?
RUSH: Just fine, thank you.
CALLER: Good. Hey, you know, you said you’re not going to detail this plan, but to me this plan sounds exactly like what was brought up last week. I mean, McCain rushed back to Washington, and the House Republicans, they have this new thing, and economists are saying, you know, ‘Why don’t we insure. Revoke Sarbanes-Oxley.’ I mean, honestly I’ve been watching this, and I’m amazed at all of these talks over the weekend, this is what we have come up with? Nothing different! We haven’t come up with anything different.
RUSH: Nothing substantively that has any conservatism in it, correct.
CALLER: Exactly. I can’t imagine that there’s Democrats out there that feel okay about handing over their wallet book to companies who have mismanaged their money. I don’t feel okay about that.
RUSH: Let me tell you something. The people in Washington are being inundated from people across the country, by people across the country who don’t support this, but the Democrats’ answer to that is, ‘Well, we’ve got an important role here, that’s saving the country, and if the voters don’t understand it, we gotta take the heat for it.’
CALLER: Well, obviously when to listen to the people because I’ve e-mailed. I can’t imagine that there’s not a lot of people out there e-mailing their senators and representatives. I thought that’s what they were there for, was to be the voice of the people.
RUSH: Well, yeah, look, this is a representative republic. You know, we don’t have that. If this were a direct democracy, yeah, they’d have to do exactly what we say, but even then not everybody in their district is going to agree about what should be done. That’s not the case. They listen to us sometimes. They listened to us on the Dubai Ports Deal. Well, they listened to you. I was for the Dubai Ports Deal, and they finally got the message on illegal immigration, but they’re still trying to trickle that back piecemeal. But sometimes they ignore; sometimes they don’t. This is election-year politics. This is about Democrats trying to steal the country, and they’ll deal with the fallout later. But as is the case in a lot of elections, I think everybody gets caught up in what the Drive-Bys report, everybody gets caught up in the polling data. Like today, all of the tracking polls have Obama up six, some up eight. It’s being attributed to the debate. It’s being attributed to the economic crisis. I don’t see any serious polling of just how angry people are all over this country about this. You know my big desire is? I want to see on the morning after November 5th, I want to see the media so shocked that some of them are thinking about jumping out the windows of skyscrapers, not Wall Street people. I want to see the Democrats so shocked that the Democrat National Committee has to be guarded by psychiatrists to make sure the people inside do not go insane and have to be sent to an asylum. I want to see such a landslide.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You know what the Democrats have engaged in here, partisan attacks, they’re out there saying the Republicans caused this. Nancy Pelosi, ‘The Republicans caused this.’ And then they say they need the Republican votes. They go out and make these partisan attacks and then they make these bipartisan demands. And it’s the exact opposite. There is no doubt at whose feet to lay blame here, the Democrats.
Indianapolis, Nate. Glad you called, glad you waited. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Yes, Rush. Real quick, I just wanted to say mega dittos and mega dittos to my father-in-law who got me hooked on you about a year and a half ago.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: Real quick, I just wanted to foreshadow a little bit. I wanted to know what’s going to happen with all the assets the government — when they buy this $350 billion, $450 billion worth of assets, five years from now what’s going to happen when they sell them all off, who’s going to get first dibs on all those investments?
RUSH: Tell me. I don’t want to play a guessing game here. Tell me who’s going to get them.
CALLER: Well, the politically connected, those making campaign contributions to all our fellow or non-fellow Democrat Party.
RUSH: Probably so. The Democrats still running the show, that will probably be the case.
CALLER: I just want to see five years from now, I kind of want to hold you to it, Rush, when these come up for auction, I just want to know what happens with all these.
RUSH: Well, one of the problems of them coming up to auction is they gotta peg a market price to them. Who knows when this is all gonna happen in terms of when the auctions are going to take place but yeah, folks, we have a chance to profit here, you know that? Yeah, we’re going to profit. They’re going to write us all dividend checks. Yeah. We’re going to get dividend checks when all these profits roll in, and then after we get the dividend checks what’s ever left over they’re going to reduce the cost of Social Security, going to get rid of some government fraud and government waste. They’re going to do all these wonderful things with all the profits, these assets. Yeah, right. Exact opposite. I don’t care who they sell these things to. It’s fait accompli, they’re going to be sold to their cronies. What’s gonna happen, folks, what’s gonna happen is that all the money generated by that, if this transpires, is going to be the money that Obama spends before these assets are even sold, in order to build even more social programs and a bigger government. Do you remember the peace dividend? What was the surplus that the Clintons were reporting at the end of their two terms? Of course it vanished, didn’t it, when Bush took over. There was this huge surplus. There was no surplus. They just said that, giving an excuse to start spending even more money.
Understand what’s going on, liberalism is liberalism. The liberals are in the process of stealing the country. If they succeed in this, folks, it’s going to take a generation to roll this back. And it will get rolled back ’cause it’s going to fail. If you think that you’re in a disaster now, you wait ’til the government’s running more and more and more of the private sector, the market or what have you. Why on earth would anybody with a brain want the same people who caused this in charge of it? Where is the evidence that the government running a program works? Everybody that’s a beneficiary of a government program is complaining. The VA, the veterans are complaining. People in poverty are complaining. People that are the beneficiary of anti-discriminatory programs are complaining. People that are supposedly the beneficiaries of low down payment mortgages, they’re complaining. Everybody’s complaining, people that are on Medicare complaining, people on Medicaid complaining, people that have already been forced to depend too much on the government for their health care are complaining. People on Social Security are complaining. Parents who have to use the school lunch program are complaining.
Now, I know the complaint’s are it’s not enough money, but, hey, get a clue! It’s never going to be enough money because the government doesn’t produce anything. All it does is take what other people produce. The only people that are not complaining are people like me. I don’t get a damn thing from the government that I want. Some of it’s forced on me now and then. The unhappy people in our society — not all, there are exceptions of course — the unhappy people in our society, the truly miserable, the truly angry are those who are depending on somebody other than themselves for their wants and needs, and somebody else can’t do it because somebody else is out working for themselves. This is so fundamental it makes me wonder how we lost this argument, or if indeed we have. I’m not sure.
Here’s Renata in Detroit. Hey, Renata, I’m glad you called. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Well, hello, Rush. I cannot believe I got through. My son will be ecstatic when I tell him I spoke with you today.
RUSH: Well, I’m ecstatic that you get to speak to me today.
CALLER: Well, mega dittos from Detroit.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I just wish some of the reporters would check the condition of the houses that are being foreclosed. Rush, they are worthless, absolutely worthless.
RUSH: What do you mean, check the condition? You mean they’re dilapidated, falling apart?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Because nobody’s maintaining them?
CALLER: Nobody.
RUSH: The rats have moved in, the bobcats have taken over like they have in some houses in California?
CALLER: Exactly. And some of the houses that Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac would give loans for $150,000, I can go and buy that house for a thousand dollars now.
RUSH: Wait a second. Wait a second.
CALLER: Yep.
RUSH: A house that was foreclosed on, a Freddie Mac house that was worth $150,000, that’s what it cost to buy?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: You can go buy it now for a thousand dollars, where, in Detroit?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: (laughing) Well, it may be true then.
CALLER: Rush, I personally bought — because I go and check the houses before I buy. So I can see maybe thousand houses in the last year.
RUSH: I can’t believe you can buy a house for a thousand bucks that was $150,000.
CALLER: Thousand bucks. But Rush those are the houses that you have to practically gut it down and start over again. So what you’re looking for is just the land value.
RUSH: Yeah? Well, I have experience with that, but not in these circumstances. Look, I think that’s kind of unusual, if that’s true. Most of these foreclosures cannot be bought for a thousand dollars. So you don’t want to give people the wrong idea. But they are worthless. I mean, who wants to buy a foreclosed house in a neighborhood where everything’s been foreclosed and nobody’s mowing the lawn and keeping the property up, maintaining it and so forth?
CALLER: Exactly. I’m talking about Detroit, the areas that people don’t want to move in, the government is giving the loans to people that like, you know, we talking about they can’t afford the houses, they just walking away, ripping the cabinets, taking even the toilets off the sinks, everything, and then you walk into the house and the roof falling down —
RUSH: Because they know nobody’s going to come after ’em.
CALLER: Exactly. And the banks can’t keep up a maintenance with those houses. Even in the areas that you know, very —
RUSH: See, that’s a good point. That is another little hidden aspect of this. The banks, for all the people out there that have been foreclosed on, you think the banks love it, the people in this country, too many people have bought into the notion that the libs have put out there, class envy arguments, that Wal-Mart likes to kill their customers, so does Big Tobacco. Big Automobile likes to build unsafe cars that kill you. Drug companies, they don’t care if you die. We’ve created this notion that the very engine that produced the greatest country in the history of the earth is out to kill its citizens. So when the bank forecloses on you, ‘Those dirty, rotten capitalists, they never wanted me in the house anyway. They just hate me.’ The last thing a bank wants to do is to have to take on the expense of maintaining a house or a whole bunch of houses and mowing the yards. The banks are not into that. The banks frankly, if you get down to brass tacks, other than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they didn’t want to make these loans in the first place. There’s no responsible banker in the world left to his own devices that would have made these loans. They were forced to make these loans by the people now — (laughing) — who are going to run the system again after claiming to have fixed it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: This is Joe in Teaneck, New Jersey. Joe, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. Mega dittos from Teaneck, New Jersey, and it’s an honor for me to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I just wanted to comment. I heard the clip of Maxine Waters talking about Desktop Underwriting. Just so your listeners under what Desktop Underwriting is all about and why that has created a problem and has brought us to the crisis today, because that was a software that Fannie Mae came out with where you just input (telephone drop) of a borrower and the loan gets approved and it’s been very liberal in getting those loans approved so people can get into houses. And one of the things that’s been very liberal was the debt to income. So you can have a 65% liability against your income, and the system will still approve it.
RUSH: You could have a 65% liability against your income?
CALLER: Yes and that is gross even. That’s not even after tax.
RUSH: Wait a second. When you say the system would approve you, you mean Fannie Mae? Any bank making a mortgage the system back then would have approved it?
CALLER: Yes, and it still approves it above the 55% level.
RUSH: Now, Joe, hang on just a second here, because financial terms sometimes elude people. Explain briefly as you can — brevity is the soul of wit — 65% liability on your income. What does that mean?
CALLER: That means if a person is making $4,000 a month, 65% off of that is $2,600. So they can have $2,600 in objections between their mortgage and their credit cards and their car note.
RUSH: So they make $4,000 a month gross. We’re talking gross?
CALLER: We are talking gross.
RUSH: So if I understand this, so the lending institutions will underwrite an additional $2,600 as though you have that as income on top of the $4,000?
CALLER: No, what they’re saying is that if you’re making $4,000, you can spend $2,600 a month just in liability.
RUSH: Okay. The rule of thumb, if I remember this when I was shopping my first house, was one-fourth. Your mortgage payment could be one-fourth of your monthly net, otherwise you going to be in trouble. Now you’re saying they moved that up to 65%?
CALLER: It’s 65% in the past couple of months they’ve lowered it to about 55%, but Freddie Mac is offering about 59% or 60%.
RUSH: Interesting. Interesting. Well, that explains quite a lot, too, because these lending institutions are being forced to loan. I’ve seen some of the guidelines. Pay no attention to income! Income should not be the determining factor!
CALLER: Yep.
RUSH: Thank you, Joe, very much.