RUSH: We are on the verge, ladies and gentlemen, of becoming a socialist country. The federal government now owns 80% of AIG, my insurer. That means that you are going to be propping up the outfit that insures me. I’m going to be, too, but so are you. If you want to fix AIG, put the guy who built it back in there, Maurice Hank Greenberg, not to be confused with Hank Ace Greenberg who ran Bear Stearns. Where’s that now, by the way?
We have a socialist retirement system. We have a socialist health care system for the elderly. We have automobile and aviation companies on the verge of bankruptcy or government ownership due to legislation and regulation in oil prices that could be half of what they are if Congress got out of the way. Look at me. The problem with General Motors and Ford and Chrysler and domestic auto manufacturers is not that they don’t know how to run their business. They are all kicking butt internationally. Ford, General Motors are selling cars out the wazoo internationally. You know what they don’t face? The same kind of onerous regulation they have here. You want to fix the Ford auto industry, General Motors, local, domestic auto industry, just get rid of the CAFE standards. The idea that people that run the auto companies do not know how to make cars that people want has been obscured by the fact that they’ve been forced to make cars fitting mandates offered by government, people in government who have never built a car, have never designed a car, have never marketed nor sold a car. Just get government out of their way, and then let ’em sink or swim on their own. How is it that all three of them are up the creek? All three of them face the same onerous regulations.
What about oil prices and the effect on the price of a car and the mileage and the kind of car you want? Get Washington out of the way on that, not this phony bill that Nancy Pelosi ushered through the House. We can drill everywhere there isn’t oil now, and you know why they had to usher this through? ‘Cause they knew it was a losing issue for them. We had ’em right between the eyes. We had ’em right in the palm of our hands. They were on the wrong side of this drill, drill, drill, right here, right now, business, so they usher through this stupid thing. It’s the same, the Gang of Ten, gang of 16, now gang of 20 in the Senate — oh, yeah, we’re going to allow drilling, we’re going to drill, drill, drill, but it’s gotta be further than 50 miles offshore. Most of the oil is closer than that, so Big Oil has been told go ahead and invest and drill where there isn’t any oil, which they won’t do.
We are on the verge of becoming a socialist country. This election puts the private sector directly at odds with the public sector. And we are about to find out which will control the vast majority of jobs and wealth creation in this country. Committed liberals, socialists are in charge of both houses of Congress, the media is pushing them over the finish line in November, trying to. They are salivating at the chance to keep this ball rolling — Jay & the Techniques, 1967. Barack Obama is not just the most liberal senator in the country. Barack Obama is a committed socialist, trained by Marxists like Saul Alinsky who bows at the feet of Jeremiah Wright. Democrats don’t have solutions, my friends. All they have is blame. All they have is complaints. Most of their complaints, as Barack’s economic plan is, is a complaint about capitalism. Why do they hate capitalism? Because they don’t control it, capitalism is where you have more freedom and liberty, and they don’t have any control. That’s why they don’t like it. They just have blame for Republicans and Big Business. They have been targeted for slaughter. They don’t tell us what they’re going to replace all these things with, but by connecting the dots it’s a no-brainer.
By the way, how is the state of Illinois being run by Obama, Daley, Durbin, et cetera? Let’s look at some things here. Change Chicago style, body count. In the last six months, 292 people have been murdered in Chicago, 221 have died in Iraq. Senators Obama and Durbin, Jesse Jackson, Jr., Governor Rod Blagojevich, House Leader Mike Madigan, Attorney General Lisa Madigan, the daughter of Mike Madigan, Mayor Richard Daley, son of Mayor Richard Daley, our leadership in Illinois, all Democrats. Look at the murder rate. It’s a combat zone in Chicago. Of course, they’re all blaming each other. They can’t blame any Republicans in Chicago because there aren’t any. The state pension fund, Illinois, $44 billion in debt, worst in the country. Cook County, Chicago, sales tax, 10.25%, highest in the country. Look it up if you want. Chicago school system, one of the worst in the country, the students there just protested! This is the political culture that Obama comes from in Illinois. He is going to fix Washington politics?
I mentioned Michigan, look at Michigan. Liberals wreak havoc with everything they touch. They wrecked the mortgage industry. They’re wrecking the oil industry. They have wrecked retirement and elderly health care systems. They are hell-bent on wrecking the rest of the health care industry. And for good measure, they actively try to humiliate our military and see to it that they lose. We are playing for keeps, folks. This is not just another election. Events have brought us to where the government has become so invested in the affairs of the private sector that the next president will determine if the private sector or the public sector is going to be calling the shots. Barack Obama is one of the people who could be making those decisions. It’s crunch time in the big city.
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RUSH: One more way of saying what I just said, ladies and gentlemen, and then we will get to the phones. I know it’s going against the grain to say this, but these entities, Lehman Brothers, AIG, what have you, they need to fail no matter how big they may be, no matter the frantic and overblown predictions of economic demise. We’ve had many investment banks go south. We had a whole savings and loan industry go south. We’re here in more prosperity — Obama so full of it. America’s better today than it was yesterday; it’s going to be better tomorrow than it was today. When he says America is not what it was, tell me when it was better, sir. Even for you. You, sir, got rich during the Bush years. The Clintons got rich during the Bush years. And you whine and moan about the Bush years! You couldn’t even afford a rental car in LA in 1996. You got kicked out of the Democrat convention ’cause you couldn’t get a credential. It took George Bush getting elected in year 2000 for you to actually arrive and have some money, that and meeting Tony Rezko. But it happened during the Bush years.
All these companies we’re talking about here are international companies. We’re not only bailing out American investors and customers, but investors and customers worldwide. The issue here I don’t think is regulation. The issue is the wrong kind of regulation, the wrong kind of regulating. To say that any industry in this country is free of regulation is utterly ignorant. You cannot build an extension on your home without receiving an endless number of permits from local government. Hell, half the time you can’t build a house where you want to build it because you gotta walk a tightrope and a minefield of environmentalist wacko regulations, stupid tax laws from your local community. In some places — ahem — you even have to get permission for the color of your house you’re going to paint. Ahem. Some places you have to submit plans for the interior decorations that you are going to have. In some places don’t you dare fly an American flag. And certain times of the year, don’t you dare turn your lights on in your backyard because some turtles might head in the wrong direction, even when the turtles aren’t there for three months, you can’t turn your lights on in certain places in this country. We are so over-relegated, it’s absurd!
And now they want even more regulation, not just more regulation, they want to run the outfits they have been regulating. Unfortunately, liberals are demanding more and more low-interest loans for college, more great sounding populist interference with market forces, all while talking about we gotta get tuitions down, but they’ll never do that. We never hear about the corrupt Big University, Big Education. They’re ripping people off left and right, not only how they’re not educating them, but what they’re charging them not to be educated. The liberals whine and moan about the high cost of tuition but never do a damn thing about it because it’s their buddies running the schools. Part of the old boys network and they’re going to continue to make sure those old boys get paid well, the instructors, the professors, university presidents and so forth. Companies have to fail so that more capital doesn’t follow bad capital and more risk doesn’t follow already bad decisions. One of the reasons all this happened was that there was no risk, or there was thought to be no risk, government is going to bail everybody out here, thought these people, and so there was no responsibility. The whole concept of risk was lessened considerably. When you go into a risky situation thinking there isn’t any, then what’s to stop you? If you know on the back end that somebody’s going to bail you out, then why even run the place responsibly? Why not just bleed it dry? Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae, hundred million bucks, now Obama’s economic advisor.
Government has got to recede from the market. Government must stop the imposition of political decisions in lieu of sound market decisions. A lot of people have gotten very rich from all this. See, that’s the dirty little secret. Franklin Raines, a hundred million dollars in like seven years, running Fannie Mae into the ground, former Clinton administration official, now an Obama economic advisor. This is not American capitalism, what we’re watching. As we sit here today, more and more areas of the economy are essentially being nationalized. The government is taking over the responsibility for more and more of these businesses. And I’ll tell you, the auto companies, they’re asking, they’re knocking on the door, the airline industry, they’re going to be next. The sad thing is executives of these places might welcome all of this. Get rid of the responsibility they have, they think. This is the same government, keep this in mind, my good friends, this is the same government that has imposed trillions and trillions of dollars in debt on our society through irresponsible and unsound entitlement programs, has no intention of stopping, and as I say, while they ran your mortgage industry into the ground, while they sat by and watched because of their own actions the value of your house plummet, they attack Big Oil as corrupt, they attack Wal-Mart, they attack Big Insurance, they attack Big Fast Food, they attack Big Trans-Fat, they attack Big Pharma.
Their enemies list is the private sector of this country where you work. Their enemy, all of their enemies, are your employers. You have it, you can see, side by side, A-B comparison, government runs mortgages, what happens? Government gets in charge and runs health care, what happens? Government gets in charge, fixes poverty, Great Society, what happens? Affirmative action, feminism, you talk about creating a meaner America? It’s liberal policies that pit groups of Americans against one another, on purpose. There needs to be a cleansing of this process at some point, folks. Either we take control of events and address them now or events will take control with disastrous consequences, if not for us, surely the next generation or two. And all those people making these decisions today, the members of Congress and all that will be long gone, but your kids and grandkids will not.