RUSH: Ken in Decatur, Alabama, I’m glad you called, sir. You’re up next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.
CALLER: Dittos, Rush, from Alabama, the reddest state in America.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Rush, I just wanted to comment about your talking earlier about the automobile industry in Alabama.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: I am in industrial sales, and I call on all of those Alabama automobile manufacturers, including the three General Motors plants here that are scheduled for closing next year. And based on that, I needed a new vehicle. I drive a ’99 Chevrolet pickup truck with 250,000 miles on it, and today I’ll be trading it for a new one.
RUSH: Why?
CALLER: Well, like the value, like the quality, compared to all the other vehicles, made a buyer’s decision that that’s what I want to drive. Like you said, the government and everybody is trying to force us into smaller vehicles. I live in it. I drive 25, 30,000 miles a year. And safety, comfort, convenience, all those things added up for the money, I can’t beat what I’ve had in the past and I’m gonna stay with it.
RUSH: I’m going to tell you I’ve had enough of this.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: I’m very proud of you for doing this. Way to go, you’re buying what you want, and that’s cool. But you, you just illustrated the greatest single downfall of the domestic automobile industry, and nobody is talking about it.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: You know what it is?
CALLER: I didn’t catch it.
RUSH: Back in the days when I bought my first car and then my second car and my third car, and they were all General — they were Pontiacs, and a Buick. They all broke down in three years, had to get a new one. Then all of a sudden they got quality minded, started making cars that get 250,000 miles, you didn’t need to trade it in after three years, and so they didn’t have to be as innovative because people were keeping cars longer. If they would have kept making cars that fell apart after three years, none of this would have happened.
CALLER: True.
RUSH: Well, thanks, Ken, I appreciate the phone call.
Here’s Yvonne in Wayne, Michigan. Nice to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello. Yeah, hometown of Wayne assembly for Ford Motor Company.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: And I’m for the bridge bone, and I call it that on purpose. I feel that the Democrats do believe in trickle down because we’re all suffering from the trickle down from Barney Frank and Chris Dodd who has the nerve to sit on the board to discuss whether or not the auto industry gets their bailout, when they CYA’d on AIG. Do you agree, or not?
RUSH: Yeah, CYA on AIG.
CALLER: Yes, because the Democrats are all involved with the triggering mechanism of this whole economic downfall.
RUSH: I know. I know. Well, at least the home mortgage, this whole subprime thing is at the root of so much of this and they oversaw it, they brought it to us.
CALLER: And let me tell you everybody, I voted for change, I voted for Dick DeVos back in ’06 for governor, or ’04, and then Governor Granholm promised we would be blown away in five years, and yes, we are, and guess what? You guys voted for Democrats and you’re going to end up in the same shoes that Michigan is in right now. So there you go.
RUSH: Wait a minute, but wait a minute, what kind of shoes is Michigan in here?
CALLER: Michigan’s been downsizing and restructuring, and I gotta give it to Ford Motor Company who says they may not need the money. Because my sister and my mother both work there, and they have been adding jobs onto their single job for years.
RUSH: No, no. No.
CALLER: And laying people off and getting rid of people and offering buyouts, and they’ve been afraid for their jobs for at least five years. So Ford Motor Company has been already retooling and predicting this. That’s why I think out of the three, they’re the best off. And it makes me very angry with this whole horse-and-pony show that Congress is doing when 61% of the people are against the auto industry bailout and yet 71% were against the AIG bailout, and yet we did that, so since we did that, guess what? You should do everybody because we were all affected by that.
RUSH: When did you start thinking they’d listen to you in the first place? This is all about the continued acquisition of power within the private sector by members of government.
CALLER: Yeah, exactly. And I can’t believe they can sit up there, and I think their faces are red because they must be shame faced, they’ve gotta be.
RUSH: No.
CALLER: And fine, you know what —
RUSH: They are salivating.
CALLER: — make us be accountable —
RUSH: They are salivating. You’re angry —
CALLER: They wanted this. They have been hoping for this —
RUSH: Wait a second.
CALLER: — because they wanted a Democratic president.
RUSH: Yvonne, your incredulity ought to be aimed at your fellow citizens. It’s your fellow citizens that are sitting out there on their hands. It’s your fellow citizens out thinking this is all wonderful stuff, other than —
CALLER: They’re afraid to speak out in my town because this is a UAW town. And my mom, when I got her a McCain sign, was afraid to put it up because the UAW, come on, you gotta give them the bailout, they totally got the union to vote for you, for the Democrats.
RUSH: I understand. I’m not talking about just specifically Michigan and the auto industry. I’m talking about the fact that you’ve got people who ought not by rights have ever been lent money for a home being allowed to stay in their homes so they’re all for the government taking care of them. Wait a minute. You have people at Wall Street banks and so forth who should have gone out of business with the way they ran the business, they’ve been bailed out. They’re sitting idly by happy the government’s taking over. There are way too many Americans happy that the government is getting a nose into as many —
CALLER: Hypothetically think about if the AIG loan had not failed out, because, oh, New York will fail. Well, they’re going to let Michigan fail? Well, what kind of a trickle down is it going to have, through the economy, I’m talking rails, trucking, stamping plants, everything, like you said earlier, cows, leather, everything, down to everything. This will so impact the economy. That for them to make our CEOs go through this, when I think that all they woulda had to do is carpool on those jets, they didn’t have to do the hybrid thing down there. You know, it makes me so angry. And yet AIG after they got their bailout did a $400,000 spa day. It just makes me angry. If you compare the two, the three CEOs only spent $60 grand compared to $400 grand.
RUSH: Wait a second. See, you’ve just nailed something else here. The AIG people —
CALLER: I’m so surprised at Americans that they are not more angry than they are. They’re all just going to sit back while Barack Obama and the Democrats lay this at the doorstep of the Republicans, when this is not their fault. And I’m an independent and I happened to lean Republican this time because of fiscal responsibility, but, you know what, you got what you voted for, and welcome to Michigan’s reality.
RUSH: The reason this has happened is because the country, in too many places, has indeed moved left. And one of the reasons it moved left is because the Republican Party lost its guts and didn’t put anybody on the field that could explain alternative ideas so that people had an alternative option to vote for. We instead got into a competition for who can give out the most government the nicest. There’s people who are willing to sacrifice a whole lot of freedom and liberty and all that for either security, economic or otherwise you want to describe it. But this business of the AIG bailout and these CEOs from the auto companies and their private jets, I have to say something about this because this is systematic of what’s wrong with all this.
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RUSH: See, this is my point, this is my point. Senator Shelby, by the way, is on TV, CNBC being very, very hard. He doesn’t want GM to get the bailout or Ford or Chrysler. He says, ‘I don’t want them to get the bailout.’ Well, throw aside for the moment that the auto industry in his state is thriving, Alabama, other than the three GM plants, which are going to close even if they get the bailout. Senator Shelby said, ‘I looked at their plan, and I don’t see anything in there about making a profit. I just see a bunch of facts.’ This is my point. Find for me one member of Congress who could read a business plan and say, ‘Okay, that’s where you’re going to make profit.’ What do they know about it? The biggest deficit spenders in the history of this country are elected officials! The most irresponsible people with money in our country are elected officials! And they dare sit there and demand thrift? Can you imagine if we got to have hearings with these guys? ‘Okay, you say the taxpayers are gonna profit from the bailout of AIG. I want to see it on paper. I want to see how this is going to happen,’ Mr. Citizen could say to Mr. Congressman. Folks, this ought to have you fuming, what is happening out there.
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RUSH: Yorba Linda, California. Elliott, I have one minute, but I wanted to squeeze you in here.
CALLER: Rush, here it comes, quickly. I’m glad you mentioned it before. The thing that’s making my head explode is all this junk about corporate greed. Now, you mentioned it before, and here, the worst people that spend money to give money to are the unions and our government, and what I want to see is Chris Dodd and Barney Frank sitting where the GM and Ford execs are and you sitting up there on the bench asking them questions about why they bankrupted the company, not the other way around.
RUSH: And the mortgage industry and how did they profit personally from it.
CALLER: There you go.
RUSH: This corporate greed business, it’s typical central planning lingo, folks, designed to get people hating these guys who run corporations, any corporations, large or small. And again, the most irresponsible, the most untalented, the most wasteful people with a pile of money in this country are elected officials in any branch of government, in any federal government or state government.
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RUSH: One final thought to chew on. During all of this auto bailout talk, understand one thing: The UAW has offered not one serious concession. If they’ve only got two weeks to live, that’s awfully strange.