RUSH: Rush Limbaugh on the cutting edge. I told you this yesterday. We were the firstest with the mostest about a secret backroom deal between the White House and labor unions over the Cadillac health insurance tax. ‘Officials say the White House and labor leaders have reached a tentative agreement on how to tax high value health insurance plans to help pay for a revamped medical system. The proposed tax has been a major sticking point because labor union leaders fear that their members with some of the more lucrative benefit plans out there would be hurt. President Obama supports it as a way to hold down costs by nudging workers into less pricey coverage.’ People going out and buying what they want, or getting what they want, Obama thinks they’re spending too much. Barney Frank today is all over, (paraphrasing) ‘We are going to legislate compensation everywhere we can on Wall Street. There’s no reason for these high bonuses to be paid. I’m not aware these guys could all play Major League Baseball.’ They’re moving in for the kill of the capitalist system.
Now, the unions were always going to be exempted from the Cadillac tax plans, they were always going to be exempted. They are the major contributors to the Democrat National Committee and to Obama. They are the foot soldiers. They’re the goons that are dispatched to keep people in line at town hall meetings and so forth. The only problem here is how to justify it because everybody else with a Cadillac health insurance plan is going to get this big tax, and it could be as much as 40%. The unions would be exempt from it. The trick here is how to justify it and how to avoid, if possible, not ticking people off who don’t get the exemption. The Amish, by the way, will be totally exempted on religious grounds from any of the new health care mandates. That religion may grow in tremendous numbers. And other religions say, ‘Why just them? You know, why not us?’
‘Retail sales unexpectedly fell in December –‘ This is State-Controlled Associated Press. ‘– leaving 2009 with the biggest yearly drop on record and highlighting the formidable hurdles facing the economy as it struggles to recover from the deepest recession in seven decades. In another disappointing economic report, the number of newly laid-off workers requesting unemployment benefits rose more than expected last week as jobs remain scarce.’ Here’s a quote from Jennifer Lee, a senior economist at BMO Capital Markets: ‘We cannot expect a true turnaround in consumption until the jobs numbers improve significantly and consistently.’
Now, given this obvious statement, why is any negative economic news unexpected? I swear it’s in the template. Command-U writes ‘unexpected.’ When the private sector’s capital is deleted, job creation is depressed. This leads to spending decreases by consumers. That leads to lower sales and profits, and it all results in the erosion of the tax base, which then shrinks tax revenues. And only an anti-capitalist statist would conclude that this situation requires tax increases, which starts the process all over again. None of this is unexpected. This is totally predictable. I, your host, El Rushbo predicted it on the same day that I expressed my hope that Obama fail in his policies.
So let’s go through the progression here. When the private sector and its capital, money, is depleted, when it shrinks, job creation is depressed, that leads to spending decreases by consumers. That, in turn, hurts sales and profits. And it all causes an erosion of the tax base, federal and state, which reduces tax revenues, which reduces revenue to run governments in Washington and state capitals. At this point, only somebody intending for all this to happen would then talk about tax increases. Because tax increases will start the whole cycle all over again. It will lead to more unemployment, more depletion of the private sector’s capital, spending decreases by even more consumers, more sales and profits hurt, more tax base erosion, less tax revenue to state and federal governments. And then, oh, my God, another double down, more tax increases. Only a statist, somebody doing this on purpose, would employ the policies that we are employing.
‘Decline in Auto Purchases Sinks Retail Sales.’ ‘Sales at US Retailers Unexpectedly Fell in December.’ What is unexpected? I just gave you the progression of how things happen. It would be insane to expect sales to go up in this climate. As more and more people file claims for unemployment more and more people are obviously out of work, more and more people are not even looking for work anymore. The situation is bleak. Why would it be unexpected that retail sales would fall in December? Even the media told us it’s not going to be a good Christmas. Who told us it was? Who are these people that expected retail sales to go up in December? ‘Consumers spent less on cars and an array of other goods during the holiday shopping month, data showed on Thursday, raising concerns about the durability of the economic recovery.’ There is no recovery! Right after Christmas they said we were in a recovery. They’ve been saying we’re in a recovery since November, but we’re not. ‘Compared to December 2008, sales rose 5.4% but fell 6.2% for the whole of 2009. That’s the biggest decline on records that go back to 1992. The only other year that sales had fallen was 2008, when they slipped by 0.5%. Motor vehicle purchases fell .8%.’
Anybody want to take a guess as to why? We predicted this! Cash for Clunkers. All Cash for Clunkers did was move purchase decisions up a month or two. It didn’t increase auto sales at all. We predicted this. We are not economists here at the EIB Network. We are not highly trained economic experts. But we know more about it than those who are. We are able to predict it more than those who are. Cash for Clunkers came along and it was designed to make it look like Obama had done something spurring economic growth. ‘Wow, it’s going, it’s going, it’s going,’ but we knew that this was facilitating people buying cars earlier than they were already going to, and this statistic proves it. ‘Decline in Auto Purchases Sinks Retail Sales. The data coming in the wake of a report last week showing a surprise drop in non-farm payrolls in December could add to worries that the economic expansion that started in the third quarter of 2008 could falter once government stimulus –‘ this is just plain old ridiculous.
‘Stubbornly high unemployment remains the weakest link in the recovery from the worst economic downturn since the thirties.’ Stubbornly high unemployment? Oh, so unemployment out there is an ‘it.’ Unemployment is a thing, and it’s stubborn. Unemployment is fighting Obama. They’re in a death match, unemployment versus Obama, and Obama is raising taxes, and unemployment is saying, ‘Screw you, buddy, I’m not working.’ What is this stubbornly high unemployment, as though unemployment is working against Obama’s great and courageous efforts to do something about it. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is not all of the bad news. From those unfazed at Reuters: ‘US foreclosure actions shattered all records in 2009 and will do so again this year, with unemployment and wage cuts overcoming programs to remedy failing home loans, RealtyTrac said on Thursday. A record 2.8 million properties with a mortgage got a foreclosure notice last year, jumping 21 percent from 2008 and 120 percent from 2007, the Irvine, California-based real estate data company found. The loan failure rate — and thus the fallout for home prices and the economy — would have been even worse without foreclosure prevention programs and loan processing delays caused by sheer volume, the company said.’
It would have been even worse had it not been for Obama’s foreclosure program, but we have also heard that hardly anybody is accessing the foreclosure program. They’re behind on their payments and it’s worse than being said because some lenders exempted December payments because of Christmas just to be compassionate and keep Obama off their back, like he’s on the backs of the bankers right now. ‘US foreclosure action shattered all records, despite aid.’ Despite Obama’s courageous efforts to help, foreclosure actions shattered all records. It’s no wonder that only 39% of the American people would again vote for Obama if the presidential race were held today.
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RUSH: In the latest attack — and it’s right out of the Saul Alinsky playbook. In the latest attack on the American private sector, Barack Obama this morning in Washington at the White House spoke about a new tax on banks.
OBAMA: When I see reports of massive profits and obscene bonuses at some of the very firms who owe their continued existence to the American people — folks who have not been made whole and who continue to face real hardship in this recession — we want our money back, and we’re gonna get it. And that’s why I’m proposing a Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee to be imposed on major financial firms until the American people are fully compensated for the extraordinary assistance they provided to Wall Street.
RUSH: Now, folks, I’m telling you: This is right out of Saul Alinsky. He is trading on the fact that he believes you despise Wall Street, that you despise fat-cat bankers, and that anything done to punish them you will agree to and support Obama for doing. They have paid back the TARP money. They were forced to take it in the first place. Let’s get the history of this right. Many of these CEOs at these institutions were dragged into an office at the Treasury department by then-Secretary Henry Paulson, and they were given three hours to sign a document saying that they will accept bailout money. The CEO of Wells Fargo bank did not want any bailout money. They weren’t in any problem. They had no exposure to the subprime mortgage crisis. Still, they had to take $25 billion. These firms who were forced to take the TARP money have mostly paid it back. This is, again, a flat-out lie and disingenuous as hell. ‘When I see reports of massive profits and obscene bonuses at some of the very firms who owe their continued existence to the American people…’
They were said to be ‘too big to fail’ by you, sir! You said they couldn’t fail. We were told an economic crisis of biblical proportions would happen if we didn’t do this. You forced it on them, and you forced it on everybody else. Folks, don’t make a mistake here of assuming that I don’t think bankers and financial people ever do anything wrong. What I’m objecting to here is this move by Obama to run in and control every aspect of what they do. It’s just another grab at a portion of the private sector that is none of his business, and he’s relying on this class envy, him thinking that you hate these people. That’s why he didn’t object to any of the protests at AIG headquarters homes, the CEOs’ homes (which were, by the way, conducted and organized largely by ACORN). So he forces the banks to take the TARP money, they mostly pay it back and now he’s going to tax them for forcing them to take it in the first place! Here’s another sound bite, before we get to the Alinsky connection here.
OBAMA: Our goal is not to punish Wall Street firms but rather to prevent the abuse and excess that nearly caused the collapse of many of these firms in the financial system itself.
RUSH: Yeah, yeah. Right, right.
OBAMA: We cannot go be back to business as usual, and when we see reports of firms once again engaging in risky bets to reap quick rewards — when we see a return to compensation practices that seem not to reflect what the country has been through — all that looks like business as usual to me.
RUSH: Well, it seems to me, Mr. President, the one area of our economy that’s doing well is Wall Street! There’s money being made on Wall Street, Mr. President. Is that what bugs you, Mr. President? There’s money being made there. That’s the reason bonuses are being paid. Have you seen what happened to the Dow Jones Industrial Average? It’s climbing. It’s up 22 points right now. It’s at ten six: 10,600. It’s the only area of the economy doing well and now you’re assaulting it. There’s nowhere in the private sector left to invest. That’s why money is going to Wall Street, pure and simple. ‘Business as usual.’ Not punish Wall Street firms? Yes, it is. It’s exactly what you’re doing. ‘Prevent the abuse and excess that nearly caused the…
It was not bonuses and salaries that caused the collapse. What caused the collapse was Saul Alinsky, Saul Alinsky and ACORN taking over the banks and demanding that banks make loans to people that they knew could never pay ’em back. The banks were holding worthless paper. So they came up with a bunch of new Financial Products to sell to try to get some insurance on this worthless paper they were forced to lend. This is just mind-boggling here. It’s more manipulation. It is another undisguised attack on free markets, and the president of the United States insisting that go there aren’t going to be free markets anymore. He’s going to regulate it. We’re not going to have risks. We’re not going to have up and down cycles. We’re not going to have any entrepreneurism, and we’re not going to have any qualified people in these institutions because they’re all going to leave to find jobs elsewhere, even if they have to leave the financial services industries. One more bite…
OBAMA: We’re already hearing a hue and cry from Wall Street suggesting that this proposed fee is not only unwelcome, but unfair, that by some twisted logic it is more appropriate for the American people to bear the cost of the bailout rather than the industry that benefited from it, even though these executives are out there giving themselves huge bonuses. What I say to these executives is this: Instead of sending a phalanx of lobbyists to fight this proposal, or employing an army of lawyers and accountants to help evade the fee, I suggest you might want to consider simply meeting your responsibilities. And I’d urge you to cover the costs of the rescue not by sticking it to your shareholders or your customers or fellow citizens with the bill, but by rolling back bonuses for top earners and executives.
RUSH: They’ve already paid most of the TARP money back, and getting rid of these bonuses would not make a dent in how much TARP money there was. There’s nowhere near $700 billion in bonuses. There’s still $200 billion of TARP money that’s not spent. What the hell is he talking about here? I’ll tell you what he’s talking about: 100%-pure class envy. He wants you to hate these people, and he wants your support because he wants you to believe he hates ’em, too, and he’s getting even with them. At the end of the day you’re no better off. Regardless what he does to these Wall Street executives and these fat cats and their compensation packages and their bonuses — he could strip ’em, he could cut ’em in half — it’s not going to change your life at all. It’s not going to put an additional dollar in your pocket. ‘Repaying’ you, the taxpayers, is another one of these euphemisms that’s just that. This guy has already placed us $12 trillion in debt! Repaying this is chump change, it’s nothing. This is pure, 100% politics. And Valerie Jarrett, his cohort, was on TV this morning. ‘The banks should step up to their responsibility and be our partners and not try to fight their obligations.’ Obligations! These people have largely paid back the TARP money to get out from under the federal fist and the hand that is regulating and running these businesses. I wonder what the buyer’s remorse factor is on Wall Street, because a lot of those people are liberal Democrats, and a lot of those people voted for Obama. I wonder if they’re having buyer’s remorse yet.
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RUSH: I think Obama has the same speechwriter as Hugo Chavez. He’s down there nationalizing businesses left and right, all kinds of threats aimed at businesses. I’m going to tell you what Obama’s doing here, folks. Obama is doing all of this, engaging in these unwarranted attacks, class envy oriented attacks on banks and Wall Street firms to divert attention from his monumental failure as president in dealing with the economy and job losses and foreclosures. He is a dismal failure, dismal. And in his mind he’s a success, he intends to do this, but he is failing to reignite this economy so he has to distract people’s attention from that. This is what sociologists and what Marxists do. You could take every bonus given on Wall Street and add ’em all up, and it wouldn’t add up to anywhere near the trillions of dollars in fiscal waste and deficit spending of Barack Obama. It wouldn’t come anywhere near it. It’s too bad that Obama doesn’t show the same outrage about the waste of taxpayer dollars by ACORN or the enormous costs passed on to the consumer by big unions or the enormous cost of government created by all of these unions that work in the government public sector. This has a direct impact on our quality of life.
Now, let me tell you why bank profits are up. It’s not because of any chicanery on their part, it’s not because they’re cheating people. Do you know what the cost of money, the Fed fund transfer rate is? It’s practically zero. There’s no interest rate, bank-to-bank borrowing. Larry Kudlow says that any idiot can make money when money costs them nothing. That’s why they’re not lending to anybody else. Why would you lend to somebody that is kind of risky when you can get money for nothing and buy Treasuries with it or invest in the government for a guaranteed three-and-a-half percent? And this is exactly what’s happening. That is why they’re turning a profit, not because they’re stealing from anybody. The big banks paid back the loans with interest. They bought back the warrants. But who didn’t? General Motors didn’t. Chrysler didn’t. Fannie and Freddie. They are the people who need to be taxed. They are the people who need to have taxes placed on them because they have not paid back the TARP money. The big Wall Street firms paid back the TARP money with interest, and now they’re still being taxed and they were forced to take it in the first place.
Now, to Saul Alinsky. Bank stocks took a big hit a couple days ago due to this intent to tax ’em. Not General Motors, not GMAC, not Fannie Mae, not Freddie. And this is all under the guise of paying back TARP money which they’ve already done. The fact is that Obama is returning to his roots here, folks. This has been the playbook for years, controlling banks, controlling mortgages, has been the goal of people like Alinsky and organizations such as ACORN from the beginning. Now, what Obama is doing now is what he used to do for ACORN, only now it’s much easier, and he can cripple the entire private sector, not just one banking organization at a time. Some background on this to help you understand this, Peter Schweizer in his book Architects of Ruin, and I read to you here from pages nine and ten.
‘Alinsky understood the world of finance because many of his early backers were financiers. Alinsky would brag, ‘I feel confident I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution on a Saturday, out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday, even though he was certain to be executed on Monday.’ Alinsky directed much of his fire against banks. He understood not only the power of banks but their potential to act as a fulcrum by which he could advance his ambitious agenda. They also make a convenient enemy. As Alinsky taught, finding an enemy was important. And thus he was quoted in Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis.’ This is what Hillary wrote about Alinsky: ‘In order to organize, you must first polarize. People think of controversy as negative, they think consensus is better, but to organize you need a Bull Connor.’
Now, on page 23 of Schweizer’s book: ‘ACORN and other activist organizations also subscribe to the view that the banks were part of a larger structural effort to keep minorities and the urban poor oppressed. Banks were not simply in the practice of making money, they were political institutions whether they knew it or not, part of the privileged white power structure. Lending practices, therefore, were less a function of rational criteria than racial politics. With the arrival of the Community Reinvestment Act, the crusading housing activist discovered that they now had a seat at the table and a vehicle for their redistributionist schemes. By using a cadre of lawyers and an army of activists, ACORN believed it could dramatically alter the terms of the financial free market and force banks to lend to those they would ordinarily not consider qualified. As the sympathetic professor Heidi Schwartz put it, ‘Through the CRA, activists could extract resources from banks, take money out of them, give them to the poor and working class people, simply a euphemism for extortion and income redistribution.”
Alinsky taught to target the banks. They’re a convenient enemy. Everybody hates ’em. They think bankers steal and cheat and lie, inside information making them and nobody else rich. Alinsky said go after the banks, intimidate them and we take ’em over and we get the money outta there to our constituents. And that’s exactly what Obama has done from day one. It’s all in Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.
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RUSH: Now, don’t we want the bank profits to go up, folks? Isn’t that what this was all about, bailing out the banks? What did that mean? Don’t we want bank profits to go up? Haven’t we just spent hundreds of billions of dollars because we want bank profits to go up so that we would no longer have to subsidize them? And now the profits at banks are up and all of a sudden they’re an enemy, they’re a demon and they’ve gotta be cut down to size. This is how Alinsky radicals work. Obama is one.
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RUSH: Okay, Obama is taxing the big banks. I want to spend a little bit more time on this in the monologue, and we’ll get to your phone calls shortly in the next segment of this hour. But this is important. Not only is Obama doing this to distract everybody from his utter failures with the economy: Job losses, foreclosures. He’s also attacking one of the highly visible sectors in the private sector, the banking industry, because that’s how he has been trained. It affords multiple opportunities for him to advance his agenda. It all requires (which is something pretty simple in their view) hatred of the rich, hatred of big banks, hatred of people who seem to be making out really good during a recession and capitalizing on that. Basically give you people the pitchforks and have you storming Wall Street, metaphorically, you’re so outraged. So Obama, your savior, comes along and starts punishing them for making profits in a recession and you’re supposed to cheer him on.
Your life won’t change at all. In fact, it might get worse because your ATM fee is going to go up. As these banks are taxed, they’re going to pass it along to you and all of us as possible; it’s just how it works, which Obama also knows. So again I ask: Didn’t we want the bank profits to go up? Wasn’t that the purpose of bailing them out? If we didn’t want them to remain profitable and they must remain profitable to remain open, why bail them out? If we didn’t want them to remain profitable, we wouldn’t have bailed them out. We bailed them out so they could make profits, and now they’ve done it and they paid it back with interest, and now we are going to tax them for being successful, for profiting! Here’s a story from December 7th of last year: ‘Administration to Slash Bailout Cost Estimate.’
Our memories are long. He’s not counting on that, but our memories are long. ‘The Obama administration will lose $200 billion less than expected from the federal bailout program and is looking at using part of the savings to fund new job creation efforts. A Treasury official said Sunday that the administration now believes the cost of the financial rescue program will be at least $200 billion below the $341 billion estimate it made in August. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the administration’s new projection has not been released, said the lower estimate reflected faster repayments by big banks…’ I’m just reading this to prove to you the claim that they’ve paid it back. This is December 2009. ‘The reduced cost of the bailout is reflected by faster repayments by the banks and less spending on some of the rescue programs as the financial sector recovered from its free fall more quickly than the administration originally expected.’
So rather than take a tack that says, ‘Look, the bailout worked!’ Rather than say, ‘Whoa, it’s good! It’s great! The banks have money. You can start seeing some lending now. Maybe we can start seeing some private sector activity.’ No! Rather than do that, cover up the fact that they paid it back with interest and now make them the enemy — and I urge all of you not to fall for this. This is not to defend the banks. This is not to line up on their side unilaterally and without exception. It’s simply an attack on the private sector, folks, and this man is in the process of destroying it; and we have to stand up against that. I want to go back to Saul Alinsky. This is where Obama was trained. He was a community agitator in Chicago. Every one of them learned Alinsky. Hillary Clinton loved Alinsky. She wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley on it. Leftist radicals all swear by Alinsky.
His primary work, the book Rules for Radicals, was dedicated to ‘Lucifer, the first-ever rebel.’ ‘Pages 162 and 163: New Tactics and Old. Speaking of issues, let’s look at the issue of pollution. Here again we can use the haves against the have-nots to get what we want, or the haves against the haves in fact. When utilities or heavy industries talk about the people, they mean the banks and other power sectors of their own world. If their banks, say, start pressing them then they listen and hurt. The target therefore should be the banks that serve the steel, auto, and other industries and the goal: Significant lessening of pollution. Let us begin by making the banks live up to their own public statements. All banks want money, and advertise for new savings and checking accounts. They even offer premium prizes to those who will open accounts.’
Now, you gotta remember this stuff is written in the Sixties. So you’d have to replace now the steel industry and some of these other businesses that banks are in league with, with high-tech industries. But the theory holds. And of course banks no longer give you a toaster for opening a savings account but they still lure people in. The point is they’re still offering all kinds of things to get new customers to give them their money. ‘All banks want money and advertise for new savings and checking accounts. They even offer premium prizes. You open a savings account in a bank and to do that it’s more than just a routine matter. First you sit down with one of the multiple VPs or employees and begin to fill out forms and respond to questions for at least 30 minutes. If a thousand or more people all moved in each with five or ten dollars to open up a savings account, the bank’s floor functions would be paralyzed.
‘Again as is in the case of the shop-in, the police would be immobilized. There’s no illegal occupation. The bank’s in a difficult position here. It knows what’s happening, but still it does not want to antagonize would-be depositors. The bank’s public image would be destroyed if some thousand would-be depositors were arrested or forcibly ejected from the premises. The element of ridicule is here again. A continuous chain of action and reaction is formed. Following this the people can return in a few days and close their accounts and then return again later to open new accounts. This is what I would call a middle class guerrilla attack. It could well cause an irrational reaction on the part of the banks, which would then be directed against their large customers, for example, the polluting utilities or whatever were the obvious stated targets of the middle class organizations.
‘The target of a secondary attack such as this is always outrage. The bank thus is likely to react more emotionally since it, as a body, feels that it’s innocent, being punished for another’s sins. At the same time, this kind of action could also be combined with social refreshments and gathering together with friends downtown as well as with the general enjoyment of seeing the discomfiture and confusion on the part of the establishment. The middle class guerrillas would enjoy themselves as they increase the pressure on their enemies.’ Well, in this example in the Sixties, instead of a thousand people showing up opening a five or ten dollar savings account and paralyzing the bank it was ACORN that went in with the Community Redevelopment Act and demanded loans for people that couldn’t pay them back. The whole point was to damage the bank, not to paralyze banks.
The whole point was to get the banks to give money to people that they otherwise wouldn’t give it to — people that had no business being lent money or having money given to them — for the express purpose of income redistribution. Now, for all this to happen, the banks needed to be demonized. The banks had to be demonized, so the banks were lumped with, back in Alinsky’s day, the big businesses of the time: The big utilities, Big Steel, Big Polluters. In this era, 2010 America, rather than big banks being associated with those kinds of industries (they still are associated with utilities and pollution) now the big banks are in league with other big banks, and the big banks are in league with themselves. The big banks are seen to be giving themselves all kinds of money and profit. The big banks are seen to be in league with the Federal Reserve. But the Alinsky theory still holds.
You run and you paralyze the bank for the express purpose of seeing to it that people who otherwise would not have access to bank money get it, and they succeeded. The Community Redevelopment Act was precisely based on the concept of ‘affordable housing,’ and as people like Barney Frank define affordable housing, affordable housing is housing you don’t have to pay for! The subprime mortgage crisis is the root of all of what we are still facing today. Yet after forcing these banks to take TARP money, they pay it back with interest, and now Obama today announces a new tax on them because they’re insensitive! In times of trouble and stress they’re continuing to reward themselves with high compensation and big bonuses. Well, if you look at the activity on Wall Street, they’re having a pretty good year. It’s the only place in our economy people feel comfortable investing money, those that have money to invest.
There’s nothing in the private sector worth investing in right now on a large-scale. Nobody knows what’s going to happen to the private sector. It’s largely stagnant. But Wall Street’s sitting there and it’s doing pretty well. It’s the only place to put money — and gold, of course. But the point is that these people are now made targets because they did exactly what they were told to do. They took the money, they paid it back, and they’re now showing profits. We wanted them to show a profit, did we not? That’s the whole purpose of bailing them out. We want them to show a profit. There’s no reason to stay in business if you’re not profiting from it. So it’s a healthy rebound, and rather than take the tack, ‘Look, our bailout worked,’ you demonize ’em. Because the purpose of this is it’s just the latest salvo on the private sector. It’s to create chaos among the middle class and get them to hate as many of the institutions in the private sector as possible.
Hate the banks. Hate Wall Street. Hate whoever has more than you do. Paint them as insensitive, getting rich while you’re unemployed. It’s all designed to get people comfortable with the idea that Obama and the government would be more fair and more just if they just seized control and ran these institutions themselves. It’s frightening, and it is genuinely scary. Now, there are a bunch of firms that got bailouts who have not paid them back. Not even close. General Motors. General Motors Acceptance Corporation. Chrysler. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In fact, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Barney Frank bragged the other day, have now essentially been taken over as government entities. They have the cap on the amount of money that they can be in debt. It was raised to $111 billion. The amount of money that people that work there get, the $6 million salaries, are no problem.
Daniel Mudd got $10 million for screwing up and leaving Fannie Mae. So there are institutions that took big bailout money and haven’t paid it back… Obama owns the car companies, so he’s not going to tax himself. And he owns GMAC and Freddie Mac. He’s also in charge now of student loans. There is now, essentially, a single payer in student loans. The government is the only place you can go to get a student loan. So inch by inch the private sector is being taken over, and you can just follow the Alinsky tactics in Rules for Radicals to find out how it’s being done — and it has to happen. Remember, now, you can’t have — as Hillary Clinton quoted Alinsky… You cannot have… Uh, what’s the phrase? I’m having a mental block here on one word. Basically you need an enemy, but… (interruption)Yeah, you need a Bull Connor but it’s what came before that. Hang on, I’ll find it here. (muttering) I put it somewhere. I’ll find it.
I’ll find it. But you need a demon, you need an enemy. Oh! ‘Before you get consensus you need polarization.’ You have to divide people. This is the essential element to Alinskyite-ism. You have to divide people, and you have to keep them upset and despondent. The more they think that there’s no hope, the more they think that there’s no chance for a job… There was just a story yesterday: People think the opportunity to get rich no longer exists in the country. This is by design. Obama wants people to think this way because that opens the floodgates, it opens the doors to revamping the system. At some point, Obama’s going to say — and he’ll probably use almost these exact words. He’s going to say: ‘Capitalism hasn’t worked. The old ways have been shown not to work. It’s time for a new direction.’
He may not use the word ‘capitalism,’ but the whole point — if you want to remake a country, remake a culture, remake a society — is it takes time. Your first step is you have to make the citizenry absolutely miserable. You have to make the people of the country think that there is no hope. You have to convince them that the system in which they’re living will never succeed, will never help them, that the system in which they live is rigged against them. That’s how you make them open for ‘change.’ So this business today of coming out and announcing a punitive tax on banks is just the next incremental step in forcing as many Americans as possible to essentially give up on the last 200 years of America and accept a transformation to a socialist or fascist-type of (probably more likely fascist) private ownership that’s government-directed.
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RUSH: Now, one more thing here then we’ll go to the phones. Compare, ladies and gentlemen, Wall Street to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both had their cap removed on how many failing mortgages they can hold to above $400 billion, meaning it’s still on the government take. The cap for both was raised $111 billion, meaning there are still hundreds of billions of dollars of worthless mortgages out there. The subprime mortgage crisis is still with us and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have had their cap raised so they can increase the number of failing mortgages they can hold. Their CEOs can get paid upwards of $6 million, and you’ll never see Obama go on television to bitch about it because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are part of the government now. There’s not even any precedence that there’s a private sector component to either of these. Fannie and Freddie have not returned a dime of bailout money. Ex-CEO Daniel Mudd, like I mentioned, got $10 million for being part of the mortgage debacle. GM, Chrysler, ditto. They haven’t paid back anything. Their profits, such as they are, are not being taxed, they are not being targeted; they’re not being demonized. Only the banks; only Wall Street; only conservatives.
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RUSH: Here’s Bill in Parkland, Florida. Welcome to the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, it is a pleasure to finally speak with you. I have to tell you your opening monologue today was absolutely stunning. I’ve been listening to you since you’ve been on radio.
RUSH: I forgot what I said. What did I say, what did I open with?
CALLER: It was stunning. I mean you went through, you know, the whole economic reasons why —
RUSH: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
CALLER: And that brings us back to your four pillars, you know, the media, education, science, government, that the liberals have taken control of.
RUSH: The Four Corners of Deceit.
CALLER: The Four Corners of Deceit. Perfect. Liberals demonize everything, that’s so true. Finally today, and Mr. Snerdley was kind enough to put me on the air, the banks are coming back at Congress and saying, ‘Hey wait a second.’ It was Alan Greenspan who two times put this country in a state of mania. If you remember, the stock market crash of 2000 was Greenspan’s lack of acting on those famous words, what were they in December 1996 —
RUSH: Irrational exuberance?
CALLER: You betcha. And when it really came to irrational exuberance, he sat with his thumbs — I’m not going to say any more, and he did nothing. And Obama says today, ‘Business as usual.’ That’s code for Goldman Sachs. So everything comes out of Goldman Sachs, all these bankers, all these things, but the main point today is the Drive-Bys are starting to look at Alan Greenspan. This is what I do for a living, I sit home with my wife and we trade stocks. We were handed a 21-year gift last year when everybody was throwing their stocks out the door, they were throwing them into our hands, although we were caught in it as well, and it nearly bankrupted our family but we were lucky enough to have had some cash aside to buy up these companies, pennies on the dollar. Now, when we talk about companies that have failed, what about the company that took no money, Ford Motor Company? It went to a dollar.
RUSH: Well, you know, that is another excellent point. Even financial institutions that took no TARP money are subject to this tax. You are exactly right. And the Obama-owned or operated companies that also took bailout money who paid none of it back, are not going to be taxed.
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RUSH: The Obama administration, in addition to taxing the profits of Wall Street firms today and bonuses and everything else is now prepared to criminalize capitalism. This a story from today by Daniel Wagner at the State-Controlled Associated Press: ‘Attorney General Eric Holder told a bipartisan panel exploring the roots of the US financial crisis that the Justice Department is using ‘every tool at its disposal’ to fight the financial crimes that contributed to the meltdown and could cause another.
‘Holder said fighting financial crime will foster confidence in the system. He is appearing before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in its second day of hearings. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro will tell the panel her agency has been reviewing its operations in light of crimes exposed by the crisis. … Holder highlighted the work of a new interagency Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force created by President Barack Obama to coordinate efforts between the Justice Department and other agencies. The regulators and officials are expecting to discuss investigations into crimes that became known during the crisis, including mortgage fraud and the large financial crimes like the landmark pyramid scheme perpetrated by Bernard Madoff.’
Holder highlighted the work of a new interagency financial fraud enforcement task force created by Obama to coordinate efforts between the Justice Department and other agencies. The regulators and officials are expecting to discuss investigations into crimes that became known during the crisis, including mortgage fraud and the large financial crimes like the landmark Ponzi scheme perpetrated by Bernard Madoff. Now, this is part and parcel of going after the banks, right out of the Alinsky Rules for Radicals. You now criminalize all of capitalism, and when they start talking about mortgage fraud, you know, I swell up to the point of bursting when I hear mortgage fraud. This whole mortgage fraud was forced by a federal government program called the Community Redevelopment Act, which was authored in part by ACORN. The whole point was to make mortgaging that were worthless; to make loans that were worthless.
Where is the fraud? The fraud exists in people not being able to pay the mortgage back or to make monthly payments on the loans. The fraud’s giving them one in the first place, but the banks were forced to do this. Janet Reno was threatening these banks with all kinds of things if they didn’t start making these kinds of loans. If only the Obama administration would go after terrorists with the same zeal that they are pursuing evil capitalists. What they’re doing, my friends, Obama, the Democrats, are criminalizing the making of money, capitalism itself. And you can see it in the bank tax. They’re persecuting the very people who do so much to help create investment and wealth in our country and around the world. The very people whose industriousness creates the wealth that is on display now in bailing out people in Haiti. The government can’t do this. It is capitalism that made this country the greatest country on the face of the earth.
But speaking of terrorists, will these bank CEOs and other financial criminals be afforded the same presumption of innocence and other rights that we are now extending to those confused innocents who have been captured red-handed on the battlefield? Will the CEOs and the bankers be able to retract any and all statements they have made or might have appeared to be an admission of guilt? Will they be provided a dramatic forum where they can present their side of the story to the world without any fear of future retribution? Probably not. They will not be given the same presumption of innocence that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is given. After all, these banks and mortgage lenders were following the mandates of previous Congresses and presidents. They should be shown no mercy. This is exactly what is going on.