JASON: You know, as I mentioned before on this economic thing — I do want to touch on this, because the infrastructure plan is sort of a revisit of the Obama American jobs and Recovery Act, the $800 billion stimulus. Except this is a $2.3 trillion, $2.5 trillion, $3 trillion stimulus, right?
I want to make certain that people understand this doesn’t work. When you take money out of productive, private hands and put it into Solyndra, put it into Amonix solar, Solar Trust of America, BrightSource, LSP Energy, A123, SunPower, Beacon Power, Energy Conversion Devices. Why do I mention those companies? They all failed during the Obama Green New Deal stimulus.
Most importantly, though, why this doesn’t work is when the government says, “We have to prime the pump of consumerism to get the economy going,” and you’ll see this on CNBC ad infinitum: “Consumers are two-thirds of the economy,” which is total hogwash. When they say that consumers are two-thirds of the economy, they don’t count the business-to-business transactions in between.
So when Business A buys from Business B and then Business B pays their employees and the employee go out and buy something, why, that’s consumer activity in the economy. Hogwash. It’s business to business. So what happens is the government takes money out of the hands of savers — tax the wealthy, tax dividends, tax interest — and it puts it into the hands of consumers.
“Redistribute wealth to people who will spend it. That’s gonna prime the pump.” Nothing could be further from the truth, because there’s no such thing as saved money. All savings are spent. When you save your money and it goes to the bank, the bank lends it out on spending. But it’s productive spending, and when everybody’s consuming and there’s a lack of spending, you not only get high interest rates, but you get bottlenecks because capital depreciates, and you have to have savings to replenish the machine and buy the truck driver the truck.
The truck driver is gonna be a hell of a lot more productive with the truck than without it. And if there’s no capital there for someone to buy the truck, nothing gets delivered. This is the failure of the new economics, as Henry Hazlitt put it, and it’s something that — because we don’t teach economics in school — not one American in 50 understands, and they’re all Democratic officeholders.
Nothing is more insidious to all of this than scaring people over climate change because that gives government the control they want to lock down the economy. They call it the “reset.” To tell companies they have to price in a carbon footprint, which lowers the return to investors. And, most importantly, allows them to spend money on a Green New Deal on all these failed companies; hence, buy votes.
There was an article. I think it was in the New York Post. No, CNN. Wow. I couldn’t confuse the New York Post and CNN. One tells the truth; one lies. Let’s talk about the liar. CNN identified a “climate safe haven” for people that are “fleeing the climate crisis.” You know what it is? Duluth, Minnesota. Well, we’re broadcasting from Minnesota. I campaigned in Duluth.
Duluth has gotta be one of the few cities in this country of ours that has a lower population today than it did in 1960. Why? Because of the wacko policies of their current mayor, who’s a real piece of work, and the fact that the left has shut down mining, the end of the taconite era. They can’t get at these new minerals that are there thanks to Democrats.
They shut down logging. And Duluth has the problems of a big city but is not one. I’m telling you what: Good thing they got great weather. Rush had a great point on this, the apocalyptic version of climate change sort of being the precursor of government control. Run audio 12.
RUSH: What Happened to the Climate Refugees?” Now, this story is from last week. I kept it. It’s too good to pass up. “In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010. ” That’s kind of like the Ted Danson prediction in 1988 that if we didn’t clean up the oceans in ten years, that there’d be death and pestilence everywhere on the seas.
“These people, it was said, would flee a range of disasters including sea level rise, increases in the numbers and severity of hurricanes, and disruption to food production. The UNEP even provided a handy map,” think the purple and the yellow is where there were gonna be massive refugees because of climate change. You can see even in the US there’s some purple and yellow. I’m sure purple has gotta be one of these because of the sea level rise. You see, Florida would have climate refugees.
So the title of the story here is: What Happened to the Climate Refugees?” There are 50 million people missing. “Meanwhile, far from being places where people are fleeing, no fewer than the top six of the very fastest growing cities in China, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Foshan, Zhuhai, Puning and Jinjiang, are absolutely smack bang within the shaded areas identified as being likely sources of climate refugees,” but their populations are skyrocketing.
So it’s another example: A huge story of the environmentalist wackos being entirely wrong. Imagine they predict 50 million climate refugees, and there are none, and there are no sea level increases. Then Jon Ham at the John Locke Foundation: “The ‘Ozone Hole’ Hoax was ‘Global Warming’ Warm-up act.” You may not be old enough to remember this but many of you are. Back in the seventies, eighties, we had to get rid of Freon. We had to stop using aerosol spray cans ’cause that he was creating the hole in the ozone.
Folks, the panic over the ozone hole was as big a panic as any of you who remember any panic associated with global warming. I mean, it was big. They had maps, they had charts, they showed the us how big the hole was and it was gonna lead to skin cancers and it was going to lead to global warming. It was going to be an absolute disaster, and the hole was getting bigger! They finally “found out” it was aerosol causing it, so people started making jokes about spraying Right Guard was causing an ozone hole. Of course back then I, your host, was as big a skeptic then as now. I laughed at it.
“What are you talking about? Are you really trying to tell us — you really want us to believe — that aerosol spray cans are causing a hole in atmospheric ozone?” And they were dead serious! “The Montreal Protocol to ban Freons was the warm-up exercise for the IPCC. They recently measured and the ozone hole’s the same size, and it fluctuates. It changes in size year to year. “If the measurements are correct we can basically no longer say we understand how ozone holes come into being.”
It was the same hoax. It was the same tactic. It was the same technique. In fact, the New York Times, in January of 2010, had a story on how the ozone hole is mending. “That the hole in Earth’s ozone layer is slowly mending is considered a big victory for environmental policy makers. But in a new report, scientists say there is a downside: its repair may contribute to global warming.” So a year ago, the hole was reducing, but that was causing global warming. Before the ozone hole it was acid rain, and then it was nuclear winter, and it went from global warming to…compact fluorescent lightbulbs! I’m telling you: Every aspect of it is a lie. Every environmental claim — every one that’s apocalyptic — is a lie — full-fledged, 100% through and through.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
JASON: This is actually shocking. You think the corporate leftists’ trend is something that, well, you just ignore it; you know, “it is what it is,” don’t think that. It wasn’t that long ago when 180 corporate CEOs declared they’re gonna reduce businesses in states that restrict abortion. I kid you not. Now they’re boycotting Georgia, right?
Imagine these officers of a company who own a tiny, tiny fraction of public shares. You got literally millions or billions of shares in some cases out there — and the president of the company, the CEO of the company, may hold 0.0018 of a share, and they’re speaking for everybody? They’re speaking for everybody in the company? Well, now the great craze is carbon footprinting.
BlackRock is leading the charge in this ESG-linked credit. You got banks and hedge funds and everybody else basically telling people, “Well, we’ll loan you money, but we’re gonna tie the capital to sustainable investing. And you’ve gotta report your carbon footprint, and you have to reduce your carbon emissions, and you have to reduce your return to investors and violate your fiduciary duty so that you can be politically correct and be climate conscious.”
So now BlackRock will have to get diversity targets and carbon targets to access their credit facility. There are a number of hedge funds and private equity firms that are doing this, a number of banks that are doing this. Understand one thing. If you own a stock — which you all do in your 401(k) or your public pension or whatever — your returns just got lower because of this relentless push towards making catastrophic climate another covid.
Rush talked about this a while ago, but he hit it, as he always did, spot-on. Hit audio cut 13.
RUSH: Naomi Klein. She’s got a book out that admits, it literally admits that the global warming movement is totally devoted to anti-capitalism. It finally admits it.
Of course, the left is hailing the book. She has written a couple of books prior to this that are also extreme left wing. But this one they’re celebrating because apparently, they like the fact that they could be honest that what they’re doing here is trying to destroy an economic system and that capitalism is responsible for all of the war.
Capitalism is responsible for all the inequality, the inequity, the unfairness, the discrimination, the divide between haves and have-nots, the divide between rich and poor. Capitalism’s the reason there are Republicans. That alone is reason enough to do away with capitalism. Capitalism is the reason there’s a Tea Party. That’s reason alone to get rid of it. Capitalism is the reason why there are conservatives.
She pretty much admits it in the book. So she was on the radio, NPR, and the host was a guy named Tom Ashbrook. Now, Naomi Klein is a contributing editor at Harper’s, and the host said to her, “If you listen to right-wing talk radio, conservative talk radio, this is exactly what they always have warned about. They said the environmentalists want to take away your pickup truck, they want to take away your free market…”
I, by the way (since they’re talking about me here) have said that militant environmentalism… I’m not talking about you people driving an electric car ’cause you want to save the planet. I’m talking about the militants. For militant wacko environmentalists, environmentalism is the new home for displaced communists, once the Berlin Wall fell. As evidence, look at where Gorbachev went!
Gorbachev actually formed something called the Green Cross.
What do you think it is? They actually gave him some real estate at the Presidio in San Francisco to house his headquarters or base of operations or whatever. I don’t know if it’s still there. Green Cross. So, anyway, he says to her: You’ve written a book here, and you’re admitting it’s exactly what the right wing has always said about you environmentalists. “So how do the politics of this work out,” Naomi?
KLEIN: Planning is a dirty word (snickers) in post-Reagan America. I spent time with the climate change deniers on the right. They have understood for a very long time that if the climate science is true, and we need to cut our emissions as much as scientists are telling us we need to — and if indeed industrial capitalism is destabilizing the life support systems that we all depend on — then their ideological project of pushing for ever so-called freer markets and vilifying collective action as quasi-socialist — which, you know, the basic talking points of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh —
ASHBROOK: Mmm-humph!
KLEIN: — that they’re in big trouble, and so they face a choice: Either they accept the science and then have to challenge their worldview, or they deny the science and their worldview is intact. And they are choosing to do that, for obvious reasons.
RUSH: I am not denying the science; you are! There isn’t any science that says there’s man-made global warming. Anyway, notice this passage here: “[I]f indeed industrial capitalism is destabilizing the life-support systems we all depend on…” Naomi, it is the capitalist system which has allowed this country to feed and clothe the world, and to rush to any far corner of the globe to assist in disaster relief.
It is capitalism that has created a country capable of this.
We have been around hundreds of years less than other countries or civilizations that were around thousands of years. Now, we aren’t any better DNA-wise; there’s nothing superhuman about us. So what is it that has allowed this? What is it that resulted in the United States creating — not stealing, creating — half of the world’s wealth, 50%? That’s what gnaws at them. They hate that that’s true! They think that’s inherently unfair.
“It’s not right. It isn’t fair that one country should have so much.” So they chalk it up to the inherent unfairness and inequality of capitalism. This is what Obama believes. “We didn’t create that wealth; we stole it. We went around the world and we took it from people. Under the guise of going to war and liberating them, we took what they had. Yeah! That’s how we did it.”
If the United States had never been a capitalist country and if Naomi Klein’s preferred view of the world had happened, we wouldn’t be a superpower. There wouldn’t be any “life-support system that we all depend on.” Under socialism, a bunch of dictators would be in charge of it, and they’d be feeding themselves and their cronies, and everybody else would be fighting for crumbs, which is the way it is in every communist or socialist country.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you are a longtime member of this audience, I wouldn’t blame you if during some portion today’s program you’re saying, “Rush, come on, could you get on to something besides global warming? We’ve heard it for 26 years,” and I hear you. I would love nothing more than to move on from it. But they keep dragging me back in. Because they don’t go away. They keep coming with the lies and the distortions and the misrepresentations and the propaganda.
Folks, I’m gonna go out on a limb. If I hadn’t stayed devoted to the truth of this issue, we might have had a carbon tax years ago. The individual wealth in this country would be even less than what it is if Clinton had succeeded in getting his carbon tax the first thing he wanted in 1993. I’m with you. I’m tired of talking about this, but I’ve got a responsibility here. I get up every day and I look at what I believe in under assault being attacked, including me, and I come here and defend it.
I mean, just today this journal of science, whatever it is, peer reviewed journal that has a lot of claims that the warming that’s happened in the western part of the country for the past hundred years all of a sudden that’s not man-made, it’s because of the wind. There is no man-made global warming. They’re not gonna give it up because it’s not really about global warming. It’s an anti-capitalist movement that uses global warming and how people can save the planet as its theory and mechanism for advancement.
JASON: And now corporate America has bought in, because they’re gonna get subsidies. They’re gonna get tax breaks. They’re gonna get government contracts — and the shareholders and economic growth be damned. Let me just add this before we go to the next break, and we’ll try to squeeze in a call next segment. Years ago (and I’m talking about decades ago), in the midst of time in the twentieth century when journalists were actually real journalists, there was a guy that hated all politicians, which is really healthy if you’re in journalism.
They just hate Republicans now. His name was H. L. Mencken, one of the great writers, great journalists of the twentieth century. This is decades ago. But we saw through, it all and consider this when you think about the non-stop climate change reset. Quote: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
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