RUSH: Neil, Charlotte, North Carolina. Welcome, sir. Glad you waited. You’re on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, I heard you talking a while ago about never hearing about a pay czar, and I hadn’t either until I was talking to my father-in-law, and he told me about a man named Leon Henderson back in FDR’s time. An executive order by FDR created what was called the Office of Price Administration. Leon Henderson, my father-in-law’s friend, became the head of that division of the OPA and he was dubbed the price czar by the media. And the interesting thing was the OPA was actually used to help control and regulate resources during wartime trying to stave off inflation, but it actually morphed into what government normally does, an overreaching arm. And in 1942, October 2nd, the Office of Economic Stabilization was responsible for, get this, controlling wage levels and regulating food prices and basically generally stabilizing the cost of living. But the problem that stemmed from that was the government outreach, talk about Big Brother, in 1943 alone, 650,000 investigations into private citizens for noncompliance and 618,000 violations in 1943 and ’44. So the government chased these people down.
RUSH: You know, I didn’t know all of that. I’m not surprised, ’cause it didn’t work. And we came out of it, and a lot of those policies were repudiated. And it’s true that we’ve had wage and price controls tried a couple of times. I remember Nixon did it. Nixon did it when inflation was 3%, wage and price controls. And they never work. They never work. Look, this guy does fashion himself as a modern-day FDR, there’s no question about that, and those are interesting facts that you cited. But I’ll tell you something. What Obama is doing with all of these czars, particularly the pay czar, is a little different than wage and price controls. Wage and price controls are slapped all over the country, and they are by definition temporary. They are to control an emergency at the moment, ostensibly. What Obama is doing is buying companies. Obama is nationalizing companies and then telling people in those companies what they can and can’t earn, it’s a pure definition of fascism.
But I agree with you, there are a lot of similarities, which, by the way, offers a lot of reasons for hope because we came out of that, and of course it took a world war to get us out of that kind of stuff, but the country did not fall into dictatorship. The country did not fall into tyrannical control. FDR tried, but it didn’t fall to that. I know we’re still living with it but we haven’t succumbed to it is the point, and we’re not going to succumb to this. I’ve gotten some e-mails, ‘Rush, you’re really depressing me today. I feel like just checking out.’ Let me tell you something, folks. I happen to be depressed. I happen to be in a foul mood today, and I’m not one of these people that come in here and go, ‘Hey, hey, everything’s wonderful, ah, great.’ Normally I’m up and ebullient, but today I’m just in a foul mood. All this stuff is getting to me, but I don’t think they’re going to win. My frustration centers around the lack of organized opposition to it and that’s going to have to happen at some point in time. The future of this country will be determined in November of 2010 and we’ve already learned today, given what they’ve done to Kinston, North Carolina, they are counting on election fraud big time.
They know at the White House that they are in big trouble. They can read the poll numbers. They know what the mood of this country is. That’s why there is a sprint to get all of this stuff done before 2010 but it won’t be enacted until after 2010 and some of it not until after 2012, after Obama runs for reelection. That’s why 2010 is a crucially important time. That’s where ultimately this is going to be stopped. But, no, the tea parties weren’t for naught. The town hall meetings, they were not for naught, they weren’t worthless. Let’s play this sound bite number nine. This is Eric Massa. He’s on a liberal talk show. And, let’s see, there’s a fill-in host, I never heard of the fill-in host, so I’m not going to mention the name. ‘Senator Kent Conrad is still pushing the idea of co-ops. Is that dead in the water? What’s the point of talking about it?’
MASSA: The Senate bill and the House bill are on different planets. And they’re on different planets because as much as I want this administration to succeed they did not present a piece of legislation to the United States Congress. We still don’t have a piece of paper that says what his plan is. We’re kind of like pilots flying blind.
RUSH: Now, this is again Eric Massa who’s a Democrat from New York, a member of the House of Representatives. So it indicates there’s some frustration out there and I’ll tell you what the frustration is. These guys are going to go stand for reelection next November, a year from now, and they’re the ones having to put their names and their reputations on these myriad plans. Meanwhile, the great emancipator — sorry — The Messiah, Barack Obama, sits up there and gets to play Mr. Perfect all day long and bring in Earth, Wind & Fire, grab Air Force One and take the family up for dinner and for dates and so forth, and be treated like there’s never been a human being like him and he gets to escape all the heat for it. So there’s no question some Democrats are a little, ‘Eh, where’s his plan? We got five plans, these two plans are on different planets.’
Meanwhile, we’re all on the Hale-Bopp comet while the health care plans are on two different planets and he’s saying, ‘I don’t know where we’re going to come to any agreement here and we’re not going to come to an agreement on these two different plans unless Obama tells us what he wants.’ And he’s not going to do that. Not now with his poll numbers shrinking, it’s just not going to happen. So these guys are starting to say, wait a minute, we don’t want to sink or swim on this when he’s going to get the credit for it and we’re going to get the blame. So, look, these guys are playing defense, they’re playing defense. None of this was supposed to happen. Obama was supposed to get health care in August, before August. There was supposed to be universal acclamation, ‘Whatever you want, Barack, it’s yours,’ from everybody in the country. There was not supposed to be this opposition. And now look what they’re doing, going after me, going after Fox News, talk radio. Their colors are showing and they are not pretty.