Our Institutions Are at Stake

RUSH: Ray in Carmel, California. I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hey, thanks a bunch. Big fan for a long time.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Opinion. Whatever happened to the US’s drive to fight? I mean, the sleeping giant? Everybody seems to have lost their will to stand up for themselves or protect what was kind of bestowed on them, you know, being a US citizen.
RUSH: That is an interesting question. I’d be hard-pressed here on a moment’s notice to trace it back to the beginning. I would have to say the modern incarnation of this passivity has to be the Vietnam War. I think that is the best I could do here off the top of my fertile mind.
CALLER: We got it back a little bit when Reagan was president, because I mean you didn’t mess with Reagan. He kept the peace in the world. But I mean, after that, it was like, ah, okay.
RUSH: Well, Reagan was great and he made people proud to be Americans again, proud to feel good about themselves. But look even when the terrorists took out 200 and some odd Marines at the barracks in Lebanon, we cut-and-run. We got out of there. There wasn’t the stomach to deal with that then. There hasn’t been the stomach to deal with any terrorist attack prior to 9/11. During the nineties we treated terrorism as a legal issue, as a criminal issue, not truthfully as what it was. I think it’s because only one president has dared to tell the American people the truth about what we face, and he’s up against decades of passivity and people thinking the opposite. I just think it’s going to take a long team here to wake people up. I do think the American people ultimately respond to the tipping point whenever it’s reached.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: What worries me is what that tipping point’s going to be. I do think that — look it, there’s so many factors in this, Ray. I’m 55, and for the last 30 years of my life it seems to me that the minority in this country, any minority, I don’t care what the minority is, a political minority, a cultural minority, religious minority, whatever, has begun to try to intimidate the majority using guilt that the majority has no right to be the majority because they attain majority status through slavery, murder, racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia. And most people don’t like being called those names, and most people don’t like confrontation. So they’ll agree and shut up or not argue and not be confrontational, just in order to not be uncomfortable. I think people have idly sat by thinking these isolated incidents are no big deal, failing to see the cumulative effect, and we are now starting to see the cumulative effect.

This is not the first year, and not the first time. It’s just now that one of the things that is happening is that we have a people perceived as a minority in this country who are of the same religion as those who are attacking us and trying to kill us who are now trying to change the basic cultural designs and traditions of the country along with a lot of other wackos, the atheists and the ACLU and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Basically liberals are mobilizing in new and different ways and capitalizing on so much guilt that exists out there, and then you add to all that, you add to that recipe, something I say a lot — see, I have no patience for this talk about how rotten the economy is in this country. I have no patience. I’ve seen genuine suffering around the world. We don’t even know what it is.
I’m telling you that the notion here that we are so affluent and there’s so much prosperity, you talk about high expectations, you see the bonus figures from Goldman Sachs that were announced today? You haven’t seen this? Let me find the story and give you the numbers. I’m not going to cite this with any analytical commentary at the moment. I’ll save that for later. But just within the context of the affluence and the prosperity of the country and the perception by others that it’s possible, “Goldman Sachs set to throw gigantic bags of money at its bankers, traders, and stockbrokers this year. They are going to give out company-wide more than 16 and a half billion dollars in bonuses. Top executives will make $100 million bonuses this year. They’ve had just a tremendous, tremendous year. Twenty-five top-level managers will receive $25 million bonuses. A number of others will receive $50 million bonuses. The average pay at Goldman Sachs, $622,000 this year, including all the low-end workers. Now, I realize this is one investment banker house, one bank and so forth. Wall Street’s had a pretty good year, which is indicative of the country having a good year.
People look at this number, “That’s not fair, the rich are getting richer!” Well, they chose to go into this business. I mean, you didn’t, they did. You can sit around and say, “My gosh, that’s 16 and a half billion. That would wipe out TB in Africa.” Yeah, it would. But we probably spent more than that in Africa in the history of this country’s lifetime trying to solve every disease they’ve got. Until they get rid of their governments over there that oppress and so forth, we can give all the money in the world and it isn’t going to matter. The point is when you have a country with this much affluence and this much opportunity, people don’t want to upset that apple cart, they don’t want to be reminded that there are threats and challenges out there when they don’t believe there are. So the tipping point is always going to be reachable, but I shudder to think what it’s going to be. There’s so much passivity out there now against the tyranny of the minority, that I call it, that we have a chance of losing some institutions here before the tipping point is reached. I genuinely have this fear. Where it all started, at this point it’s really not germane, other than an interesting intellectual exercise.