RUSH: Here is Phoenix and David. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Pleasure speaking to you again, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I’ve been a longtime listener, turned on to your show by my father, and here I am calling you again with regards to the new financial regulatory bill —
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: — that was signed into law. I don’t even know where to begin with this monstrosity because I’m —
RUSH: Neither does anybody else because we’re not going to know what it contains until there’s the next crisis.
CALLER: Exactly. That was my point. We know a little bit that they’re going to tax the banks and if I understand it correctly they’re going to create a new bureaucracy that’s going to oversee, you know, big banks that are too big to fail. Now, wasn’t it the point of the regulator before to do that, to prevent that from happening?
RUSH: When you strip it all away this is what you need to take away from the financial regulatory reform bill. It’s being sold as a package of consumer reforms that the banks and the credit card companies cannot sock you with hidden fees —
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: — exorbitant interest rates. That’s how they tried to drill up public support for it. They also say it’s not a bailout bill, but it is, it’s expressly a bailout bill. It gives the federal bureaucracy the authority to either bail out a company or a bank or to shut it down. This is the real key. The theory is that we’re in this economic recession because Wall Street was greedy, they made investments and they made loans, i.e., subprime mortgages that were irresponsible and they have put all of us at great peril because of their own irresponsibility and greed. So now this bill is supposed to be able to deal with that. So from now on if the wizards of smart in the administration, in the regime, at the secretary of the Treasury or the Council of Economic Advisors, I mean this is a big. Congress is giving away all kinds of power here at the executive branch and whoever the bureaucrats are in this can look at a company, any company and say, ‘You know what? We think you might fail, and we think you might fail and that would be a bad thing for the country. We’re going to shut you down before you fail.’ They can do it!
CALLER: Yeah. I mean that aside, just the taxes alone on the banks is gonna make it harder for me and my family to put food on the table, and I think the new regulations are going to exacerbate the problem. Not to mention the taxes that I see coming down the pike as well.
RUSH: Oh, exactly. This is about taking over more and more of the private sector, pure and simple. And they got a couple of big banks to go along with them because what’s going to happen is small banks, small entities are going to be snuffed out essentially.
CALLER: Right. And I’m not a big Wall Street investor or anything but I have retirement that’s wrapped up in stocks. So are they saying that I’m greedy because I have money coming through my retirement in years to come?
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: I mean that’s just ridiculous.
RUSH: It’s not so much that you’re greedy. It’s that things are not fair, there’s no justice.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Because while you have investments and you have a nest egg however large or small it is for retirement, there are plenty of Americans who don’t, and that’s just systemically unfair, and so your nest egg must be redistributed to other people. It’s not fair that you should have an advantage that others don’t, particularly if the advantage that you have has come about from your having stolen what you have from these other poor people which is the assumption that guides Obama and all of these people in the ruling class. I mean Obama’s slogan seems to be: ‘If it ain’t broke, reform it until it is broken.’
CALLER: And see, I’m afraid this is going to skyrocket the misery index past Carter levels and how are we going to undo all of it?
RUSH: Well, the tax increases slated for January and the tax increases that are part of the health care reform are going to raise the misery index. Look, 2011, if these tax increases do hit, it’s gonna take even more money out of the private sector. You talk about a double-dip recession. I mean it’s going to be disastrous. The scary thing is, is it’s by design. I keep saying it, but the scary thing is it’s on purpose. This is how you wrest even more control over the private sector. You come up with the regulations designed to — see, here’s the thing. When government makes a mistake, and people will admit that it does, what do we do? Ha! We have a new government program to fix what went wrong. If government screws up, what do we get is more government. If the private sector screws up, what do we get? A trial. We get criminal charges. We get all kinds of impugnation’s, individuals in the private sector’s reputations are targeted, ACORN and SEIU people show up on the executives’ front yards and protest.
So government gets bigger under the guise of fixing what it broke. When something goes wrong in the private sector you sue ’em, you shut ’em down, like Big Oil, or you take ’em to court. So when you hear the ruling class wailing and moaning and decrying the wealth disparity, what they’re really complaining about is the wrong people have wealth. Only they, the ruling class, deserve to be wealthy. Only they. Anybody else who’s wealthy, their wealth is going to be taxed and it’s going to be redistributed. It’s not just bank taxes. The financial reform is gonna introduce at least 243 new regulations. It’s not just taxes. It’s not just the debt. Every bill weaves a spider’s web of red tape that will tie businesses up so tightly they’ll not be able to move. And we’re not going to know the ramifications and the manifestations of this until these bureaucrats start implementing whatever they’re empowered to implement at whatever point during an economic circumstance, crisis or otherwise, after this thing goes into law. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I’ll tell you when America began its slide into disaster. A lot of people think it began with Woodrow Wilson and the codification in our government of liberalism and so forth. A lot of people think it started with FDR. We recovered from all of that. World War II and the postwar boom in the fifties and sixties, we recovered from all that. I actually happen to believe that the slide into disaster began with the ascendancy of the Kennedys and their gang from Harvard, the Ted Sorensens, that whole bunch, Robert McNamara, Theodore — well, Theodore White was one of them, but Arthur Schlessinger Jr., that whole crowd, the best and the brightest. David Halberstam wrote a book about how this bunch gave us the Vietnam War. They knew better than anybody else. Now, David Halberstam was part of the ruling class himself, he thought he was one of the best and brightest, too. But that marked the full ascendancy of the aristocracy. If we had an American aristocracy, it would be the Kennedys and everything that manifested itself from their time at Harvard and it’s just ballooned.
Now we’ve got the Kennedy School of Government. What is the Kennedy School of Government? The Kennedy School of Government is an explicit training ground for people like Tim Geithner or anybody else in this regime, a Barack Obama. America sucks for these reasons, here’s what’s wrong, here’s what you do when you get to Washington, the only fix is America’s inherently unjust and immoral, it was founded on principles that are incorrect, the Bill of Rights doesn’t go far enough because it doesn’t empower government to do anything. So you end up at the State Department, you end up at the Council of Economic Advisors, even the CIA. The CIA recruits from these places. Yale, Harvard, the Ivy League, and I think that’s when the slide into disaster began, and it has grown and grown and it’s now settled in. And these people do think that they’re smarter than everybody else simply because of where they went to school. They have no real-world experience. They don’t know very many people, if any, at all, who actually make the country work.
I had a fascinating note the other day from a friend, it was bouncing off of a news story. It was about some guy somewhere, some obscure guy who wants to remain anonymous who came up with the design for the cap that BP used to cap the well. Now, nobody is saying that his design was used by BP or that BP knew him, but his design was submitted. He submitted it somewhere, and what actually ended up being used by BP looks strangely suspicious to this guy, and he was a backyard garage engineer. And the e-mail I got pointed out this guy’s a fixer. Here’s an average American, doesn’t even want to be known, he’s not seeking fame, which is really odd in this country, who came up with an idea to fix this. There’s a good chance it was implemented. The guy is a plumber, 40-something years old and somehow BP ended up with his design or something close to it. So the point is there are all kinds of people in this country who fix things. I don’t care what it is. If your satellite receiver isn’t working, call somebody to come fix it. Your washer-dryer, your car, we have people who fix things, who take things that are broken and fix them. And they’re individuals, they’re entrepreneurs, some of the have jobs employing these talents where they fix things.
None of the people in Washington can fix anything. Do you think if Tim Geithner’s satellite receiver goes out, do you think Tim Geithner has the slightest idea how to even troubleshoot it? Or his car or his washer or dryer? Yet, these people tell us they can fix an economy that they have ruined. They tell us that they can fix diplomatic problems around the world when in truth all they do is break things because they can’t fix, they can’t repair. Geithner cannot even do his own taxes, and he’s the secretary of the Treasury. That was his excuse for being a tax cheat, (imitating Geithner) ‘Well, I didn’t understand the tax code, I do my own taxes. Farm it out. Accountant made an error out there. What do you think I am? I just got outta Harvard. You think I can do a tax form?’ ‘Yeah.’
It’s a contrast between the people I’ve always said are the ones who make the country work. And they’re anonymous, they’re not seeking fame. Ah, couple of them may put their kids up in a balloon and hope to get a TV show out of it, but most people still are not in it for the glory. And the people who are in it for the glory, always be suspicious. Do not doubt me on this. If you run into anybody — we have a name for ’em in show business, we call ’em fame whores, and they are everywhere. There are people who want fame for the simple sake of it and they are not the people to entrust a confidence. The ruling class can’t do anything. They’re mandarins. The people with six-inch fingernails, they never get dirty, and yet here they are telling us they have all the answers to all these problems. They couldn’t design, they can’t fathom how most of the devices they use even work. And yet they will sue manufacturers for violating some sort of federal law or not following some Equal Employment Opportunity thing. And they really are threatened by fixers. They’re threatened by doers. Doing is beneath them. Theorizing, grand schemes, grand, great ideas. That’s what they’re good for. You and I are not capable of those kinds of things.