RUSH: “Utility giant American Electric Power said Thursday that it will shut down five coal-fired power plants and spend billions of dollars to comply with a series of pending Environmental Protection Agency regulations. The company’s dramatic plan to comply with the regulations could give Republicans and moderate Democrats ammunition in their ongoing fight against EPA’s efforts,” that’s Obama’s efforts, “to impose new regulations aimed at limiting greenhouse gas emissions…” So Obama, to the San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Board, promises to put the coal business out of business by making it impossible to do business.
“Yeah, I’m not going to stop you from starting up a coal fired plant but you’ll go bankrupt doing it.” That’s 2008. Three years later his EPA has instituted regulations that make that real. So here comes the first coal energy company shutting down five coal plants. How many jobs are involved here? The story doesn’t say. Just shutting down, folks. Six hundred? Six hundred people will lose their jobs just because this giant, American Electric Power, is going to have to shut down five coal fired power plants — and even beyond that, spend billions of dollars to comply with the new regs. Now does somebody want to argue with me about this not being intentful, purposeful?
Try this: “Unless shares recover sharply on Friday,” this is Wall Street, “they are on track for their sixth straight weekly loss, the longest down series since the fall of 2002,” and the DJI dropped. I don’t know if it’s still below 12,000; it’s flirting with the 12,000 level. It’s been below it, then hovering just above it, but regardless: It’s plummeting. Now, let me take you back. Do you all remember in 2009? In the first six months, Obama does the stimulus and there’s a great fear — the political analysts on our side have this great fear — that the US economy is resilient; that the American people will not be held down; that despite all of this, the economy will, on its own, rebound and credit will accrue to Obama that he doesn’t deserve.
I remember Republican consultants and pundits and analysts all over television worried sick about that, and we all knew Obama’s policies were destructive, but the economy, “Look, Rush, you know it’s going to happen: There’s going to be a recovery and it will be timed in such a way that it will help Obama electorally. It’ll either happen late 2009 or 2010 for the midterms — or at the latest, in late 2010, we’re going to start seeing an uptick right in the ’12 election and Obama’s gonna benefit.” I remember people worried about this. The reason they said this is because historically that’s been true. Historically, the United States economy has been resilient. It does not stay in recession this long if left alone. The US economy, if left alone, recovers from these recessions. The ’90 ’91 recession, remember?
There were two recessions in the early ’80s, and we came out of both of them in a period of time that’s predictable and that’s why people were predicting that the recession that we’re in now would end — it would bottom out — and the trends toward recovery would begin. It hasn’t happened, has it? So even what everybody acknowledges as the natural resiliency — the buoyancy, if you will; the dynamicism and the power of the American economy — hasn’t shown itself. Where is it? What’s reality? The reality is that we are headed down. We’re talking about now double dip recession. Some people are starting to talk about a genuine depression. If the US economy would have just been left alone, it would have rebounded from this months ago and we would be on the positive track, and people would be worried to death that Obama’s leftist policies would be getting the credit for it.
This is a willful and purposeful suppression of the US economy, and all the evidence confirms it. I don’t even think that it’s arguable. And you know the word “failure,” people are starting to bandy that word about more and more now. Even Mitt Romney in his announcement said, “The President has failed the American people.” I said that I hoped he would fail and he has, if failure is defined by policies improving the US economy. If the measure of truth is policies designed to suppress our recovery, to weaken this country, to hand it off to somebody else in a very weakened state, then he succeeded. So it depends on how you define “success” as to whether or not Obama has failed. I said, “I hope he fails,” because I knew that this, what we have now is exactly what he intended. As a liberal.
Not even him personally. It was not based on Obama personally. There were some things maybe. You can’t avoid what he learned from Reverend Wright, Frank Marshall Davis and Bill Ayers. But still, he was an uber leftist, a liberal. It means something. It means something very specific — and I don’t want liberalism, because it never does work. Liberalism fails every time it’s tried. It’s historically proven, and that’s why I wanted the country to be better than Obama. I wanted the country to be more dynamic than Obamaism is. I wanted the country to survive, and that’s what I meant by hoping Obama fails. Because the socialist agenda is not this country. A socialist agenda fails everywhere it tries. I said that I hoped he would fail because if he succeeded, the nation would be in deep trouble, and we are — and everybody knew back then what I meant, even those who acted outraged, shocked and stunned.
“Limbaugh’s really done it now! We know he’s capable of some of these over the line statements, but this! This! This is just unacceptable.”
Remember all that? We had Republicans and even pundits in a mad dash for a microphone. “I want the president to succeed. We all want our president to succeed.” No! No, my friends, we didn’t. We don’t want socialism to succeed, but it is. You just stop and think. You know and you know that I know that the resiliency, the dynamicism of this country is such that left alone we’re already coming out of this, and we would be on an uptick, but we aren’t because there’s a giant boot on the throat of the country — and it’s only going to get worse. The Bush tax cuts will eventually expire. New tax increases associated with Obamacare will kick in. Obamacare in general. There’s nothing on the horizon. If Obama remains President, nothing on the horizon that indicates an improvement where we are. Nothing, folks. Not a thing.
So how is your Friday?
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RUSH: Ron, Birmingham, Alabama, the free side. Great to have you on the program.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush, and God bless you.
RUSH: You bet, sir.
CALLER: What I’m calling about today — and I don’t hear anybody talking about, Congress or the President — is with all the upheaval in the Middle East and Islamists taking over the area over there, what do you think is going to happen? Will they tell us $500 a barrel for oil or no oil?
RUSH: Yeah. You know, I’m glad you brought that up, because OPEC has basically said, “We’re doing nothing right now to change our production quotas.” So we’re guaranteed $100 a barrel for the foreseeable future, and you’re right: If the OPEC guys wanted to say, “It’s 300 bucks a barrel,” they could. The problem with doing that, Ron, is the minute OPEC comes along or any other cartel comes along and says, “Oil is $300 bucks a barrel,” somebody is going to come along and say, “Oh, no, here it is for $200.” OPEC is not the entire oil market. They do not their cartel does not — run all of the oil market. So there would be people coming in trying to take advantage of that, but they do control a lot of the supply.
But the question is relevant in the sense that it could be used as a weapon, as an economic weapon — and if you couple that with the ammunition that this regime is already using on the US economy? These are serious times. Really. People instinctively know it, but still in most people there’s a grain of, “It can’t happen here. This is the United States of America. Really, it’s going to get better. It’s going to bottom out. We’re going to start rebounding. It’s going to happen.” There are a lot of policies in place, folks, the purpose of which is to see to it that our economy doesn’t rebound. This is the sad, scary reality. There are policies to do that, and more to come. Once Obamacare implements with all the massive new tax increases there. When the Bush tax cuts expire in 2013.
We’re looking at, just with that, a top marginal tax rate of 62%. You can kiss job creation goodbye.
It really is frightening and serious stuff.
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