X

Liberals and the Dependent Class

by Rush Limbaugh - Oct 23,2008

RUSH: Mere moments ago — it was about 25 minutes ago — we had a call from a woman in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She’s serving her residency there. She’d moved there from Pennsylvania. She’s Jewish, and she was telling us all these stories about how the Jewish people she knows are all voting Obama because they didn’t want to be called racists. They didn’t want to be thought of as racists. So we had a little conversation, and I expanded on her theme, and I tried to tell her that one of the ways that this country is kept in constant turmoil is by people on the left who are promoting racial disharmony at every turn; trying to portray this country as inherently, unabashedly and unalterably racist; that there’s nothing we can do. It’s part of our heritage and there’s nothing we can ever do to end this racism.

And, ‘Oh, woe is us,’ and it’s just so horrible. I advanced the notion that a lot of people of black community, despite a rising middle class, are still constantly enraged. They’re being taught to be enraged. They’re being taught that they have no chance here. They’re being taught this country is discriminatory and is going to keep ’em down, and they end up believing all of this, they’re constantly angry and being put out, because they do see all this prosperity all around them. I have a story in the Stack today. Let me find this. I have one pulled out here. Let me find the other one. It’s all about cities and where the greatest wage gap or income gap disparities are, and of course they’re New York and Los Angeles and Chicago. It’s all about how these people that live, say, in Harlem and in the outer boroughs are angry.

Here we go. Two stories here on this topic. The first one is from the UK Guardian: ‘Wealth Gap Creating Social Time Bomb — Growing inequality in US cities could lead to widespread social unrest [read: riots] and increased mortality [read: death] says a new United Nations report on the urban environment. In a survey of 120 major cities, New York was found to be the ninth most unequal in the world and Atlanta, New Orleans, Washington, and Miami had similar inequality levels to those of Nairobi, Kenya Abidjan and Ivory Coast. Many were above an internationally recognised acceptable ‘alert’ line used to warn governments. … According to the annual State of the World’s cities report from UN-Habitat, race is one of the most important factors determining levels of inequality in the US and Canada.’

So in this case what you have is the United Nations putting out a report that now gets reported on in the United States and widely disseminated, that all this wealth gap is purely based on race. It plays right into the Obama campaign and the leftist belief that this United States and Western civilization in general are the director result of white man’s greed. And it is only white man’s greed that keeps otherwise well-qualified people of race and color subjugated to inferiority. Of course a guy like Jeremiah Wright will see the story and start preaching about it, and others. Jesse Jackson will see it. The Reverend Sharpton will see it and use it. Bill Ayers will put it in his curricula. And then there’s this story. Now, see what you think of this. This is from Durham, North Carolina.

‘Lacrosse Party Dancer Still Claims Assault — The escort service dancer who claimed she was raped by members of the Duke University lacrosse team is scheduled to talk with reporters today as she promotes a book about her life. Crystal Gail Mangum’s accusations were labeled falsehoods by the state attorney general, who dismissed charges against three lacrosse players. Attorney General Roy Cooper said investigators found no evidence of an assault. But in excerpts of the book released today, Mangum continues to claim that she was assaulted in March 2006 at a lacrosse team party, where she had been hired to dance. ‘Even as I try to move on with my life…” Yeah, you know, Crystal, putting out a book on this subject will really help you move on with your life a lot.

”Even as I try to move on with my life, I still find it necessary to take one more stand and fight,’ she says in the book. ‘I want to assert, without equivocation, that I was assaulted. Make of that what you will. You will decide what that means to you because the state of North Carolina saw fit not to look at all that happened the night…” In her book, she says ‘the state of North Carolina saw fit not to look at all that happened.’ There was nothing short of a nationwide media orgy for months on this story! The only one who didn’t look at what happened was Nifong. ‘Mangum says in the book that her story ‘has never changed’ and that some of those who participated in discrediting her were motivated by race.’ Now, what’s the purpose? Do you think this is her idea? Do you think this is Crystal Mangum’s idea to do this? You want to talk about increasing the racial divide? Who is paying for and promoting this effort?

Bring this up again in an election? Bring this up now, after months and months and months of a media orgy where this woman was totally discredited by an investigation that was relentless and unstoppable? The Duke Lacrosse case showed precisely what is wrong in this country regarding race, and now somebody sees fit to bring it back up 13 days before an election? She still claims she was raped and assaulted? The Duke Lacrosse case showed who the real racists in this country are. They are the faculty at Duke, the Nifongs of the world and the Drive-By Media, who saw, ‘Well, here’s a story that fits what we believe! Here’s a story that fits our narrative. You know, by golly, by gosh, yeah!’ So they keep it alive. This is exactly what I meant when I said that there are efforts being made to keep the racial divide big and to keep it on edge with a lot of tension.

The purpose of this, by the way, is to get as many people like this woman from Kalamazoo, Michigan, who called and said, ‘I don’t want to be called a racist,’ and they’ll do whatever they have to do to prove (in their own minds and to everybody else) that they aren’t racist. Folks, have you heard the old saying that some brilliant philosopher way back when said at one point in time: ‘Democracies always fail because once people learn that they can vote themselves money, then that’s it.’ Once they figure that out, it’s over. Well, here’s an actual quote, and it is from a science fiction writer named Robert Heinlein, and it is from a book called, To Sail Beyond the Sunset: ‘The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories.

‘A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. … [O]nce a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so…’ They’ll vote themselves bread and circuses every time ‘until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader [such as] the barbarians enter Rome.’ Now, you juxtapose this with Barney Frank the other day: needs to be a focus on immediate increase in spending; deficit fear has to take a second seat. Later on there should be tax increases.

So here we have a situation where many of you probably would believe we’re nearing the point that with so many people now on some sort of federal sustenance, that that’s all that matters to them. Issues, anything else, national security, they couldn’t care less — as in Social Security and the seasoned citizen population (although that’s changing a bit). But the theory is that once enough people figure out that they can vote themselves a house by voting Democrat who’ll relax mortgage rules. They can vote themselves help with their home heating. They can vote themselves health care. The producers will not be able to stop it. Like Hawaii with health care for children, remember that story? It lasted seven months. Free universal health care for children.

It was only going to cover 2,000 kids in Hawaii. It went bust after seven months. They had to cancel the program. Now, we are at this situation, and what I find very simple… Others apparently don’t, but I do. I find this very simple. There’s no question we have a dependent class in this country, and it’s growing. We have people — and, of course, who are their biggest champions? Well, the Democrat Party’s considered to be the party of caring. The Democrat Party is the party that cares about the little guy. The Republican Party is the rich party. The Republican Party doesn’t care. The Republican Party, in fact, got rich by stealing from these poor people, and that’s why they’ve got nothing. Now they’re stealing their opportunities, and so forth and so on.

What is simple to me is that this entire class of people whose lives have been stunted, whose ambitions have been destroyed, whose own realization of their own dreams has been destroyed (their dreams have been destroyed, much less their realization!) have been created by the Democrat Party. This degree of dependence, this degree of unproductivity, this degree to which people’s lives, in their own minds, are miserable and they’ve got no way out, has been created by the very party that has sought all these years to be their benefactors. So now we face the situation where, in a lot of people’s minds really serious issues — national security and so forth, the kind of country we’re going to be — don’t matter at all. All that matters is, ‘We’ve got an economy in bad shape and we need change!’

‘We need people who are going to continue to give me what I have here.’ The Democrats have created this, and the dirty little secret is, they’ve done it on purpose. They have sought to take people who otherwise would have been productive and could have realized their dreams (or at least gotten close, could have used whatever ambition they had) and they destroyed all that for the express purpose of making them wards of the state, owing their existence to the Democrat Party. And then the same party that did this comes out and claims to be their champion, claims to be the only ones who care about them and is going to fix their circumstance. It really just distresses me to see how this has happened, because this country produces and has produced millions of great people, millions of hardworking Americans.

I mean, you never meet them. They’re the people that make the country work, and there are millions of them that could be part of that group who have just been dispirited and dissuaded from even trying. I’m not talking about race, now. I’m talking about everybody that thinks they’re in poverty or lower middle class because Republicans have been in power for too long and the Democrats are going to fix all of this. It’s the Democrats that have brought this about, on purpose, for the sake of their own ascension to power. The idea that these are the people who are the most tolerant and compassionate among us, really offends me. It does more than that. It enrages me. Because these are people who, as I say, have had their futures taken away from them.

You know, it’s not hard to do that. We’re all born pessimists. We’re all born needing leadership. John Wooten has a famous phrase: ‘Learn to discipline yourself so somebody else doesn’t have to.’ Most people don’t have self-discipline. It takes effort to be optimistic. This is why parents and the right kind of teachers and friends and so forth that are optimistic are so important. Anybody can hang around and tell you that you can’t do something. Anybody can tell you that you have an excuse for not becoming what you could be. It’s always somebody else’s fault. That’s easy to accept! It’s very hard to look at yourself and say, ‘Gee, I’m screwing this up. I could do better.’ But that’s why you need people around you who will do that: inspire you and motivate you.

The Democrat Party, I want to ask you a question: ‘When’s the last time they inspired anybody in a positive way?’ In the last six, seven years, everything out of their mouths has been the epitome of doom and gloom and the apocalypse. They have sought defeat of their own country and the military in Iraq. They have sought to create in the minds of as many Americans as possible we’re already in a recession and depression and it’s going to get worse. They’re telling people that the greatest days of America are over and it’s going to be different from now on. They have done everything they can to frighten, panic, and scare people. Keep them in a constant mode of crisis, with no happiness in their lives and no contentment.

It’s gotten to the point now where those who are unaffected by the onslaught of Democrats in the media who are content — who are working, who are seeking to improve their own lives and the lives of their family — are resented now. They’re said to be out of touch. They’re said to be people that are insensitive. So Obama comes along and says, ‘We gotta spread the wealth around,’ meaning: We’re going to take from these people who are unfairly producing more for themselves than they need, and then we’re going to hand it out. We’re going to hand it out to the group of people who the Democrat Party has specifically taught how not to be productive. Yet, they get the credit for having all this compassion and love for people whose lives they’ve damaged, in some cases greatly.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Paul in Long Island, you’re next on the EIB Network, sir. Great to have you here.

CALLER: Hello?

RUSH: Yes, sir.

CALLER: Good afternoon. First time caller and I got through on the first time that I dialed. I have my own business on Long Island. My weekend, sometimes I work 35, 40 hours just between Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. The work ethic, which you brought up, which is a completely different point, it’s gone. I pay kids $15 an hour and you can’t find people to work. They just don’t want to roll out of bed and come to work on the weekend.

RUSH: I know that exists in a lot of places, but it’s not everywhere. I feel bad for you, but the work ethic is not totally gone. If it were we’d be in a lot worse shape than we are in. But I know we’ve got a lot of young people — this is my point — we’ve actually got a lot of young people who think they ought to have their parents’ home when they’re 22 or 23 years old.

CALLER: Absolutely correct.

RUSH: Now, look at those expectations. They must think this is one hell of a country if they have those expectations. The only problem is they don’t think they should have to work very hard for it.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: But in the midst of all these kind of expectations we still are surrounded by people who don’t have these expectations at all, they think they’ve got no chance to have a house, period.

CALLER: Correct. The only bigger point I want to make which no one’s bringing up, I know it’s a dirty little subject and people don’t want to talk about it and make believe it doesn’t exist, is that should he raise taxes on small businesses like myself, revenues will go down because if I don’t want to pay more taxes, there’s money that goes under the table, a cash market, call it what you want, but not only does he miss out on the federal tax, the state misses out on the state tax, Social Security misses out on the Social Security tax, ’cause there’s ways to get around it when you have your own business, so raising my taxes and I’ll still show the same amount of money or less because there’s ways to do it.

RUSH: Okay. What you’re saying is you’ll go cash economy, in part.

CALLER: Yeah!

RUSH: Yeah!

CALLER: If they raise my taxes, I’ll pay the kids under the table, however you want to call it.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: And nobody wants to talk about it, make believe it doesn’t exist, but not only are you missing out on the feds, you’re missing out on the state–

RUSH: We’re missing the point, we’re missing the point. We’re taking Obama seriously. When I say we’re taking him seriously, what I mean is we’re looking at his plan to benefit small business and analyzing it. He has no intention of benefiting small business. Don’t you understand? Of course, not only may he drive you to a cash economy. That’s your business. You’ll probably find a lot of employees who will show up on the weekend for 15 bucks an hour, cash, but you’re running great risks doing this. But this is one way people escape the taxes. Another thing you might do is fire some people, but the point is, I’m going to get blue in the face here telling you this. People like you, Paul, Obama, you’re his best friend. He wants to help you. He wants to give you tax breaks and tax credits so you will hire more people. One of the ways he’s gonna do it is to give you a $3,000 tax credit. And you’re going to take that $3,000 tax credit for every full-time worker you hire and you’re supposed to start hiring people like crazy.

Now, the problem with this is that it may cost you, for full-time people, if you pay ’em say $35 grand a year, may cost you $45 to employ ’em. So 45 minus this $3,000 tax credit, 42 grand to hire somebody to pay ’em 35, what’s the deal? So you say, ‘This is a bad deal for me. I’m not going to hire people this way.’ Besides, that’s not why people hire employees. They don’t hire ’em for tax breaks. They hire ’em because they need their productivity, for crying out loud. So Obama wants the federal government to come in and manage the way businesses hire people, and one of two things is going to happen. You’re either not going to hire under his premise, in which case he’s going to be able to point fingers at you and say it’s still corporate greed that’s preventing people from getting them jobs. He’ll talk to these dunces that have voted for him and he’ll say, ‘I’ve offered ’em tax breaks, I did everything I could, but they won’t hire you, ’cause they’re tightwads and want to keep the money for themselves.’ Or the other thing that happens is if you do end up hiring and take his tax break, he’s going to run around and say he saved small business.

Folks, everything about the Obama plan is designed to make sure only one person and entity get credit for an economic recovery when it happens, and that’s Barack Obama and the Democrat Party and government. That’s what this is all about. And by the time you throw in the Employee Free Choice Act with his attempt to unionize every small business. Talk about a cash economy, it’s going to be worse than that.