RUSH: In the New York Times today in their opinion section, it’s not really a news story, it is somebody’s opinion and the title: “Rich People Just Care Less.”

Yep. “Turning a blind eye. Giving someone the cold shoulder. Looking down on people. Seeing right through them. These metaphors for condescending or dismissive behavior are more than just descriptive. They suggest, to a surprisingly accurate extent, the social distance between those with greater power and those with less — a distance that goes beyond the realm of interpersonal interactions and may exacerbate the soaring inequality in the United States.”

Now keep in mind this soaring inequality has taken place under a euphoric, almost utopian Democrat administration. We’re coming up on five years of this now. Almost at a five-year mark here on the Obama Regime and the gap between rich and poor is indeed wider than ever because the poor are getting poorer. Everybody wants to talk about the rich getting richer. The poor are getting poorer, and the middle class is getting poorer. I’ve got a great piece about what’s happened in California. We’ve talked about this on several previous occasions. California is really two different parts of the country, abject poverty and obscene wealth.

The obscene wealth is in San Francisco, the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. And elsewhere in the state it is abject poverty. Victor Davis Hanson has written about this extensively at National Review Online. He says it’s becoming almost medieval and feudal the way California is ending up economically. And it’s run by Democrats, and what that means is the gap between the rich and the poor in California is widening and that state has been run by Democrats for who knows how long. The rich in California are almost exclusively, not totally, of course, but the vast majority of the uber wealthy in San Francisco, even though this is a contradiction, even though many of them are entrepreneurial, they line up with the collectivist Democrat Party.

They do so for the social reasons. To be able to say they have compassion. To be able to say they care about people. To be able to be progressive on social things like gay marriage and abortion and this kind of thing. So the gap between rich and poor is widening because the poor are getting poorer. The rich are getting richer, but that always happens. The one thing about this country has always been that the rising characteristics of the middle class were paramount. People were striking out seeking their fortunes every day, every month, every year, every generation. And that’s changing. And it’s extremely upsetting.

So anyway, here we have on cue this piece in the New York Times: “Rich People Just Care Less,” and I’m convinced that pieces like this are why otherwise conservative oriented people in business identify with the collectivist, socialist politics so that it will not be said of them that they don’t care. So it will not be said of them that they are indifferent. In fact, this guy’s Daniel Goleman. Goleman is the author here. It’s a G, G o l e m a n. Goleman.

“A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power,” kind of like Obama and the bitter clingers. But that’s not what this guy has in mind. “This tuning out,” the socially powerful “paying scant attention to those with little” power, “has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing.”

Can you believe this? I’m not kidding you. Folks, there’s an attack on masculinity taking place in this country and it has been for quite a while, and you see it manifest itself every day in this country. In the month of October it really manifests itself in a very prominent way. But this all-out assault on achievement now, I mean, it is being fired with both barrels in the midst of economic downturn, this effort to continually divide us.

So the readers of the New York Times are now learning that the powerful, when they meet somebody that’s not powerful, ignore them and don’t pay any attention to them and don’t smile and basically are not polite to them. As though this is something new! As if it’s something new here in 2013 and has hooks into certain aspects of America that are really bad that poor Barack Obama’s trying to fix but just can’t quite do it.

“Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker,” as though this is somehow… You know, it used to be in America… Did you know this, that Warren Buffett would talk to the guy, a homeless guy and actually have a conversation with him? The homeless guy would crack jokes and Warren Buffett with laugh and smile, give him a pat on the back?

Buffett would give him, you know, a couple of million bucks and say, “Have a nice day.” That’s the way it used to be — and then Bill Gates, he is over in Africa and he’s trying to keep people from getting AIDS and malaria. So he runs around and he sees these poor people and he stops. He has a nice conversation with them. “Oh, how are you doing?” “Just fine!” They crack jokes and Bill Gates laughs at them. J.P. Morgan? Did you know J.P. Morgan left his home each and every day and did this?

He went outside — he ran — and he purposely sought out people with no power and he engaged them in conversation, asked them how they were and whatever they said, he smiled, he laughed, he put his arm around them, he welcomed them to his home. Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! The Rockefellers, too. To this day, he will run into a poor guy with no power, invite him to the house and say, “What’s going on? How can I help you? What are you doing” The guy will start talking to him and Rockefeller will not look away.

Yeah, he’ll act very interested. Oh, yeah, this used to happen. I don’t know what brought this on. Romney? Maybe it’s talk radio that’s causing all of this incivility? (interruption) (interruption) Oh, you’re not aware of Buffett seeking out homeless people, giving them $2 million, asking them how they are, listening to what they say and smiling and laughing at their jokes? You’re not? Oh. Oh. Don’t you see it on the trains? The rich get on the train and they mingle with the commuters. (interruption)

Yes, they do. The rich ride the trains. Did you ever see the rich in the first class section of the airplane? They go back and talk to the people in coach. “How ya doin’? I’m sorry I can’t sit here with you but if you’ve got any jokes, I’ll be glad to listen to them and I won’t act like I’m bored. I won’t ignore you.” That used to happen all the time. Didn’t it? Yes, and now something’s happened, folks, and we’re just plain flat-out mean, particularly the rich. They look at somebody and they say, “You know what?

“You’re a powerless boob. I don’t have time for you. Get the hell out of my face!” Apparently, this is common in America. “Of course,” writes Mr. Goleman, “in any society, social power is relative; any of us may be higher or lower in a given interaction, and the research shows the effect still prevails. Though the more powerful pay less attention to us than we do to them, in other situations we are relatively higher on the totem pole of status — and we, too, tend to pay less attention to those a rung or two down.”

So it doesn’t matter where you are. A, there’s always somebody who has more. I don’t care who you are. But what this guy’s saying is no matter where you fall on the income ladder, say, the people that are lower than you, you treat them like dirt now, and you used to not. When they would come up and speak to you, you’d stop what you were doing and smile and shake their hands and act engaging, and basically be polite. Now everybody’s just rude.

“A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain.” I’m not kidding; I could go on with this. This is research by a guy named Dacher Keltner, and his “research finds that the poor, compared with the wealthy, have keenly attuned interpersonal attention in all directions, in general…” So not only do the rich treat other people rudely, impersonally, and make them feel like dirt. The poor are attentive to everyone. The poor are nice to everyone. The poor are more attuned to how other people are feeling and want them to feel better than the rich ever are.

It’s right here in the New York Times, and the guy is dead serious about it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Speaking of this guy Goleman in the New York Times, do you remember how the Obama campaign went out and found one of Romney’s garbage men who complained that Romney never came out to talk to him?

This is something that the Democrats and the media use.

It’s all part of this class envy stuff.

I just find it fascinating that this income gap between the rich and the poor’s growing during five years of what is supposed to be just the exact opposite. We have five years utopia here! These five years the poor are supposed to be getting rich, the rich are supposed to be getting poor because Obama’s going to take all their money from them. And all the middle class and the poor are supposed to get even better off because all that money that used to be theirs and was stolen by the rich, is going to be taken and given back to them.

But all that’s happening is so many people… Wait until you hear it in the next segment. I have two choices, just ideal examples of people who voted for Obamacare and have found out what that means. They voted for Obama, supported Obamacare and they have found out what that means for their insurance premiums. It is, it’s just, it’s tremendous.