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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: Last night on PMSNBC, there was a panel discussion there with Barney Frank and Ralph Nader, and they are debating Barney Frank’s proposed financial regulations, and Ralph Nader said this.

NADER: Giving shareholders nonbinding authority on gigantic executive bonuses won’t work. If you give shareholders binding authority and the shareholders should have, in these giant companies, a small staff so they could take on the executives —

FRANK: I agree.

NADER: — but the important thing is — and this is where I think Barney is the weakest — in 2000 he voted for a bill that continued the deregulation of the burgeoning derivative racket. And now he’s supporting a bill that has a huge loophole in terms of exempting trillions of dollars of certain categories of derivatives.

RUSH: Now, you know, Ralph Nader doesn’t know how close to right he is. I don’t think he actually does. Basically what Ralph Nader is saying, wait a minute, Barney, you’re the one that made these banks do what they did, you sidled up to them, you enabled them to do this stuff this was irresponsible, well, you didn’t enable them, you forced them to do it, and now you’re taking it out on them with all this. Barney, of course, he doesn’t sit still for this kind of stuff.

FRANK: Ralph gets to luxuriate in the purity of his irrelevance. We’re in there fighting these things. The right wing took control of government and ruined it. They gave it a bad reputation. Now that we are trying at every front to increase the role of government in the regulatory area, we run to this public opinion that says, hey, those are the guys who screwed up Katrina. So the frustration is they’re benefiting from their own incompetence.

RUSH: So that’s Barney Frank saying that Ralph gets to luxuriate in the impurity of his irrelevance. The right wing took control of government and ruined it. (laughing) So Barney insults Nader, admits the Democrats’ goal is to expand government on every front, and blames Republicans and Bush for giving government a bad reputation. This is a Saturday Night Live script. And then Barney, he kept going. He was on Anderson Cooper last night, which I think is garnering about 200,000 viewers a night. It’s in fourth place, it is losing to reruns on Headline News, reruns on Headline News, it’s losing, CNN, Anderson Cooper. So he had Barney Frank on there, which is a great way to get the numbers up, isn’t it? I’m sorry, John King was sitting in for Anderson Cooper. John King says, ‘You have the new plan to deal with the institutions deemed too big to –‘ is CNN too big to fail? We need to start asking that question. They have already failed. CNN invented cable news. I am said to have invented modern talk radio. When I started in 1988, CNN was it. Now look at my chart and my graph compared to theirs. I mean their chart looks like employment in this country, down, down, down, down, down. Well, anyway, Barney Frank was asked if a new plan to deal with the institutions deemed too big to fail, help us to understand how this works.’

FRANK: There’s going to be a systematic risk council. The systematic risk council will have the duty of monitoring to see in any institution or any pattern is causing a risk. If it is they will step in well before we’re faced with this kind of collapse. They would have said to AIG, you may not sell any more credit to false swaps, we are going to use the bankruptcy authority of the Constitution to put these — this regulatory body in charge of putting these people out of their misery. When the right wing started talking about death panels, they were right for the wrong reason. We are going to have death panels, but they’re going to be death panels that are going to put to death these institutions before they can cause us problems, not old people.

RUSH: This is just too much. This is great. (laughing) This is great. How do they expect anybody in the country to listen to this, to love it, buy into it, (imitating Frank) ‘There’s going to be a systematic risk council, this systematic risk council will have the duty of monitoring to see who (blubbering) the institution, pattern is causing a risk, is coming at risk, death panel, shut it down, like that, (blubbering) the old people, it’s one of these institutions like AIG, we’re going to whack ’em.’ Somebody get me some Lysol for the Golden EIB Microphone. I wonder how many regulators Barney whacked trying to stop what was going on in the subprime mortgage stuff. By the way, these guys want to try to take risk out of everything. I made the point last week, this is a nation built on risk-taking. That’s what entrepreneurism is.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: You know, I was thinking, Barney Frank is worse, ladies and gentlemen, than any executive who has ever been a crook in the private sector. Barney Frank uses his position and the law to promote the destruction of the housing market and all that goes with it. Then he blocked efforts to correct what he and others of his ilk had unleashed. If you want to know who Barney Frank is, he is Enron, AIG, WorldCom, Global Crossing, all the rest wrapped up in one, and worse. Barney Frank is an example of what is wrong with Soviet-style industrial policy.

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