{"id":11210,"date":"2013-10-07T16:31:28","date_gmt":"2013-10-07T16:31:28","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2013-10-07T16:31:28","modified_gmt":"2013-10-07T16:31:28","slug":"new_york_times_rich_people_care_less","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2013\/10\/07\/new_york_times_rich_people_care_less\/","title":{"rendered":"New York Times: Rich People Care Less"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Listen<\/a><\/p>\n

RUSH: In the New York Times today<\/a> in their opinion section, it\u2019s not really a news story, it is somebody\u2019s opinion and the title: “Rich People Just Care Less.”<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

Now keep in mind this soaring inequality has taken place under a euphoric, almost utopian Democrat administration. We\u2019re 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\u2019ve got a great piece about what\u2019s happened in California. We\u2019ve talked about this on several previous occasions. California is really two different parts of the country, abject poverty and obscene wealth.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s becoming almost medieval and feudal the way California is ending up economically. And it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s changing. And it\u2019s extremely upsetting.<\/p>\n

So anyway, here we have on cue this piece in the New York Times: “Rich People Just Care Less,” and I\u2019m 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\u2019t care. So it will not be said of them that they are indifferent. In fact, this guy\u2019s Daniel Goleman. Goleman is the author here. It\u2019s a G, G o l e m a n. Goleman.<\/p>\n

“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\u2019s 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.”<\/p>\n

Can you believe this? I\u2019m not kidding you. Folks, there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

So the readers of the New York Times are now learning that the powerful, when they meet somebody that\u2019s not powerful, ignore them and don\u2019t pay any attention to them and don\u2019t smile and basically are not polite to them. As though this is something new! As if it\u2019s something new here in 2013 and has hooks into certain aspects of America that are really bad that poor Barack Obama\u2019s trying to fix but just can\u2019t quite do it.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

“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?<\/p>\n

Buffett would give him, you know, a couple of million bucks and say, “Have a nice day.” That\u2019s the way it used to be — and then Bill Gates, he is over in Africa and he\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

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\u2019s going on? How can I help you? What are you doing” The guy will start talking to him and Rockefeller will not look away.<\/p>\n

Yeah, he\u2019ll act very interested. Oh, yeah, this used to happen. I don\u2019t know what brought this on. Romney? Maybe it\u2019s talk radio that\u2019s causing all of this incivility? (interruption) (interruption) Oh, you\u2019re 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\u2019re not? Oh. Oh. Don\u2019t you see it on the trains? The rich get on the train and they mingle with the commuters. (interruption)<\/p>\n

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\u2019? I\u2019m sorry I can\u2019t sit here with you but if you\u2019ve got any jokes, I\u2019ll be glad to listen to them and I won\u2019t act like I\u2019m bored. I won\u2019t ignore you.” That used to happen all the time. Didn\u2019t it? Yes, and now something\u2019s happened, folks, and we\u2019re just plain flat-out mean, particularly the rich. They look at somebody and they say, “You know what?<\/p>\n

“You\u2019re a powerless boob. I don\u2019t 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.”<\/p>\n

So it doesn\u2019t matter where you are. A, there\u2019s always somebody who has more. I don\u2019t care who you are. But what this guy\u2019s 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\u2019d stop what you were doing and smile and shake their hands and act engaging, and basically be polite. Now everybody\u2019s just rude.<\/p>\n

“A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain.” I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s right here in the New York Times, and the guy is dead serious about it.<\/p>\n

BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n

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\u2019s garbage men who complained that Romney never came out to talk to him?<\/p>\n