RUSH: So, I have one of these things that’s… I still have friends who send me these crazy e-mail, Internet things. Do you still have friends who never send you an actual e-mail, they just forward you the latest gag that they’ve seen? Well, I created a filter that blocks it. It’s not part of a spam, although I could have made it part of spam. I actually worked really hard to create a filter that just trashes all those things.
Because I mean, I don’t even… If it’s on the Internet, the odds are 95% that it is wrong, and old — and in addition to that, everybody’s going to have seen it. So what’s the point? I know they’re funny, sometimes, but everybody has seen them. But the last thing I want is a reputation as a guy who gets caught up, gets fooled, gets hooked by these mindless (which is what they are) little jokes that get passed around. But one of them, maybe there’s a reason.
Things happen in strange ways; one of them beat my filter today, and maybe it’s because of who sent it to me, a friend of mine. What it is, is an explanation of the Greek bailout. So I don’t know how old it is. I don’t know if it was originally written about some other bailout. You just can’t tell with these things. You may not remember this, but when this program first started, the only way that people could actually communicate was e-mail via CompuServe, and maybe AOL came along shortly thereafter.
But CompuServe had chat rooms and a number of different ways for people to communicate. And back then, the thing that got spread around to the point of driving me insane, is people were just discovering CompuServe. They were just discovering e-mail. They were just getting computers and they were sending things out left and right because it was so cool and neat. And I actually had to guard against losing my temper. What it was, was ten things supposedly said by Abraham Lincoln. I had to get 1,500 of those a day.
Every person that sent it said, “Rush! Rush! Rush, look at this! This will make your point for you. Look at Lincoln…” The problem is, Lincoln never said them. They were from a pamphlet that was created by a preacher back in Lincoln’s day and for who knows whatever odd reason. They ended up being attributed to Lincoln. I spent a lot of time wasting time replying to people. “Please, Lincoln didn’t say these things. Will you spread the word? Help me. Lincoln didn’t say these things.” I kept getting them and I kept getting them.
So that set the stage for me distrusting all of this mass-distributed garbage. But this one got through today: The explanation of the Greek bailout, how it works. “It’s a slow day in a little Greek Village. The rain’s beating down; streets deserted. Times are tough, everybody’s in debt and everybody lives on credit. On this particular day a rich German tourist driving through the village, stops at the local hotel and lays a €100 note on the desk, telling the hotel owner he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night.
“The owner gives him some keys and, as soon as the visitor has walked upstairs, the hotelier grabs the €100 note and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the €100 note and runs down the street to repay his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the €100 note and heads off to pay his bill at the supplier of feed and fuel. The guy at the Farmers’ Co-op takes the €100 note and runs to pay his drinks bill at the taverna.
“The [tavern owner] slips the money along to the local prostitute drinking at the bar, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer him ‘services’ on credit. The prostitute then rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill to the hotel owner with the €100 note. The hotel proprietor then places the €100 note back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything. At that moment, the traveler comes down the stairs, picks up the €100 note, states the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money and leaves town. No one produced anything.
“No one earned anything. However, the whole village is now out of debt and looking to the future with a lot more optimism. And that…is how the bailout package works.” (chuckles) So whether this… It’s clever. Some of these things that go around are clever. But it does come on a day where Greek bailout’s been announced and the market’s going gangbusters here, at least it was before the program started. Yep, it’s 2:03 and it’s regaining a lot of ground it lost yesterday and the day before. And it’s all because Angela Merkel has caved and agreed to bail Greece out again. This is a pretty good illustration of how it all works.
Nobody produces anything.
Nobody earns anything.
Yet another bailout.
It’s just a way to cancel out debt that really hasn’t been cancelled, and nobody’s better or worse off afterwards. Except, see, that’s the rub, because the Germans are going to be worse off. They’re throwing good money after bad. Do you know what the Greek debt ratio is to GDP? The Greek debt ratio to GDP is 180%, meaning that whatever the Greek gross domestic product is, their debt is 180% of it. It is such now that it has been admitted that Greece will never pay that back. They will never be able to pay that back.
So a bailout structure scheme, what have you, was concocted to effectively, on paper… No, no, specifically not on paper! It’s psychologically, take everybody back to zero. It’s one of the biggest fool’s errands that you can ever see, and I have no doubt that Obama put pressure on Merkel for this. I have no doubt whatsoever. Obama can’t sit there and let one of the most flagrantly out of control examples of socialism go down the tubes.
Speaking of which, have you heard about the pope? Pope Francis is in Bolivia, and he’s come out with another one of his anti-capitalism remarks. He said…? Did you hear this, Dawn? (interruption) Okay, then you better be ready. The Pope, il papa, the vicar of Christ, said that “unfettered capitalism is the devil’s dung.” Now, in the first place, would somebody find for me anywhere on this planet where there is, at this very moment, “unfettered capitalism” taking place? You can’t, because there isn’t.
I would go so far as to say that the United States doesn’t even have half-baked capitalism going on right now. But unfettered. What is unfettered? Have you ever heard of unfettered socialism? Have you ever heard of unfettered communism? Have you ever heard of unfettered Marxism? What is this “unfettered capitalism”? It’s just more bastardization of language to denigrate the greatest economic system yet devised that creates prosperity for the most and opportunity for everybody. And because it does that, it must be reviled.
It must be impugned.
It must be destroyed.
So you put the word “unfettered” in front of it, and what that means is unregulated. “Because, you know, capitalism is so unfair. Capitalism is so unfair that it has to be regulated in order to make sure the rich just don’t steal and take everything!” Well, there isn’t any unfettered capitalism, and there hasn’t been any unfettered capitalism in I don’t know for how long if ever. But we do not have it. Capitalism is not why the United States is in a quagmire. Capitalism is not why the United States is in a malaise.
Barack Obama and the policies of his and the Democrat Party are why this country is stagnating right now. Back to a previous caller, Gary in the previous hour, urging me to run for president. He reminded me of something I said earlier this week. “There is no way Barack Obama…” I gave you this as an example of why I don’t think we have reached the tipping point. I don’t care what it looks like in the media every day. I don’t care what it looks like pop culture, whatever. I do not believe we have lost this country to the brain-dead, low-information voter who can’t distinguish good from bad, evil, what have you.
I don’t believe we’re there yet. The reason is I’m not yet convinced that Barack Obama would have been elected in 2008 had he run on an agenda that he has implemented. If Barack Obama had told people how much their health care was going to increase, if Barack Obama had told people what was going to happen to the US economy — and five years in he would be telling us that this lack of economic activity and 95 million Americans not working is the new normal, and that the average workweek would now be 29, 29.5 hours, because Obamacare would penalize full-time work — do you think he would have been elected?
I don’t think so.
And the reason is, because I think a lot of people voted for Obama for reasons totally unrelated to anything other than this country’s race problem and a desire people have to let the statement, “We elected a black president,” say so much about our ability to shed our so-called racist past. I think… I don’t know what percentage it is, but it’s clearly enough for margin of victory. In other words, a lot of people voted for Obama and they didn’t care what he was going to do. They didn’t bother to even find out. And even if they had been told, they wouldn’t have cared.
They were going to vote for the first African-American because they hoped, they prayed desperately that it would mean the end of all this racial strife. If you would have told people that the election of Barack Obama would lead to even worse racial strife — more anger, more dissatisfaction — do you think he would have been elected? I don’t. That’s why I don’t believe that we’ve reached the tipping point here. So my point is that this country is… Obama’s not a capitalist. This country’s economy has not slowed down because of capitalism.
The closest we’ve had to the capitalism the Pope and these clowns are talking about is the Reagan years, and look add what happened. Look at the economic boom that lasted practically 20 years. We had legitimate full-time employment. We had rising incomes. We had a deficit that was coming down and a balanced budget that was on the verge of happening in 1995 — or actually, 1994 I think it was. Whatever. We were making great progress on a whole lot of things. The top marginal tax rate down from 70% to 28%.
It was so successful that the Democrats and the media had to immediately begin revising history and trashing it as trickle-down that didn’t work. But who do you think is in bed with the rich today? The Democrat Party. You know, there’s a big media conference going on right now in Sun Valley. It’s an annual thing by Allen & Company, an investment banking concern in New York. Herby Allen and his sons now. They are a company. They’re middle men for major, big deals between large media companies and they take their commission for brokering them.
They have this little convention every summer out in Sun Valley, and every Democrat and everybody there… You’ve got the CEOs of all the tech companies. You’ve got the CEOs and ranking execs of all the broadcast and cable outfits. They’re all liberal Democrats. All this wealth today that has a crony relationship with the US government. It’s all Obama money. It’s not conservative capitalism that has a foothold on the things happening in this country today. No way, no how. By definition or any other measure.
So the Pope is running around attacking “unfettered capitalism,” and you know what else? One of the presidents of Bolivia gave the Pope a gift. It was a crucifix atop the communist hammer and sickle, all one piece. The Pope clearly didn’t know that the gift was going to be given. You can tell in the pictures and the Pope had no idea and he’s not really crazy about it, linking — I mean that blatantly linking — the crucifixion of Christ to Soviet communism.
Related Links