RUSH: Athens, Georgia. This is Benjamin. Benjamin, great to have you on Open Line Friday. You are up first, and that carries with it a profound responsibility. Up to you to get the show off on the right foot caller-wise.
CALLER: Rush, mega dittos from Athens, Georgia.
RUSH: You want to pass that responsibility to the next caller? I know it’s a daunting responsibility. Do you want to take it?
CALLER: Well, I’m here. Can you hear me, Rush?
RUSH: I hear you. Okay, he’s up, he’s game. Go.
CALLER: Mega dittos from Athens, Georgia. First-time caller, 14-year-listener since my mom used to drive me to piano lessons at age 12 and we listened to Rush.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: Well, I missed your comments earlier in the week on JPMorgan, and I had a question in the way of an analogy. If McDonald’s made a new hamburger and marketed it and it flopped and they lost a hundred million dollars, would the FBI investigate McDonald’s and would the CEO be called up to Washington to testify to the Senate?
RUSH: No. The FBI and the regime would investigate McDonald’s for selling food with too many calories.
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: Your point is well taken. We played the sound bite yesterday, little Treasury secretary, Timmy Geithner — now, by the way, they passed Dodd-Frank, financial regulatory reform law. It’s supposed to fix all this. There is not supposed to be any more cheating. There is not supposed to be any more fraud. There is not supposed to be any more insider trading. After Sarbanes-Oxley and Frank-Dodd and all the other liberal financial regulatory reform legislation, there’s not supposed to be anymore chicanery, and yet JPMorgan Chase, a series of trades ended up going bad, $2 billion loss. Geithner goes out and says, “Well, my gosh, we don’t have enough regulation. This is a great example,” he said. “We’re gonna need even more regulation.”
It’s maddening. In capitalism, you lose as well as win. People win and lose every day, sometimes multiple times. There are no guarantees. There are no guarantees in life. That’s why I’m joking, if the Facebook thing goes south today, is somebody gonna suggest it get bailed out? We don’t know what’s gonna happen. But it’s not skyrocketing like the original prognostication said it was. It’s hovering right about the open price at 38. I don’t know where it’s gonna end up. Now, these people are taking every opportunity to have the government control as much of the free market as possible. They love the fact that that happened to JPMorgan. That’s the bottom line.
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RUSH: Yes, of course I’m gonna talk about that literary agent blurb that Obama was born in Kenya. Of course I’m gonna talk about it.
You know, Barney Frank ought to be on TV all day today. Mr. Frank, how did you miss this? JPMorgan Chase, how did that loss slip by your legislation?
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RUSH: Yeah, really, folks, I have a serious question. JPMorgan Chase loses $2 billion on a bad trade or two, whatever. This is after the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform law. It’s supposed to make sure that kind of stuff doesn’t ever, ever happen again, right? Why isn’t Barney Frank on all the networks since that happened being asked, “What did you miss? What slipped by you, Congressman Frank? You were the author with Chris Dodd of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform bill to stop these kinds of shenanigans from going on. What did you miss? What went wrong in your legislation? What did you forget to put in it?”