RUSH: New York City, Ezra, you’re next on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Well, mega dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I just first want to say, I consider myself to be in an elite group of Americans because this is my third time on this show.
RUSH: Ezra, what kind of phone are you using?
CALLER: Just using a regular office phone that I hope no one knows I’m on right now.
RUSH: Oh, it’s an office phone.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Do you mind telling me the brand? It’s one of the best sounding phones, the best phones that people use in this program they get at Wal-Mart.
CALLER: I don’t know where this was bought. I wouldn’t want to reveal the brand, though.
RUSH: You would not want to reveal the brand.
CALLER: No.
RUSH: Why? They might be happy to hear the brand referred to as such a great phone. You’re afraid it would give away where you were calling from?
CALLER: Yes, I’m calling from a very liberal establishment, Rush.
RUSH: I figure you have to be, you’re in New York City.
CALLER: You might say the belly of the beast.
RUSH: You’re on the Upper West Side, then.
CALLER: Yes. Yes indeed.
RUSH: The belly of the beast. That’s a pretty good clue to me, as one who knows New York, where you’re calling from.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Okay. Well, we won’t keep you any longer than necessary in case you’re being triangulated even now because they suspect you just on general principles each day. What’s up?
CALLER: Well, Rush, I have to say, you know, we expect Pelosi, Frank to go through this whole dance, but it broke my heart to see all these stories this morning that the Bush administration is lobbying Republicans behind the scene to support this bailout. This is the Medicare prescription drug bill, this is amnesty all over again, and Republicans need to think where has this gotten us, where has this approach gotten us over the last eight years and what do we want to do going forward, and if we just sign on to this, then over the next four years, even if it doesn’t work we’re not going to be in a position to say, ‘Look, we had a different plan, we told you so.’ Forty-nine Senate Republicans have a chance to change our economy going forward. Bailing out the auto industry is like, you know, bailing out canals after the railroad started, you know? This is an industry that hasn’t modernized in 30 years and we all know what this loan is. This loan is what Pelosi thinks can pass politically now to hold them over until the next Congress where they will become a fully subsidized industry. This is a golden opportunity for the Republican Party to put a stake through the UAW and woe to us if we blow this.
RUSH: I don’t know that they can put a stake through the UAW but they can stand up for themselves and prepare themselves to come back running for reelection down the road. The American people, poll after poll, are opposed to this. But you are more right than you know. This is a bridge amount of money, $15 billion to get these people through Obama’s inauguration. I mean, when I listen to what’s going to happen with this money, we’re going to have a car czar, and the car czar is going to make sure — and we don’t know who it is. They’re talking about Paul Volcker — and the car czar is going to tell these people how to make cars, he’s going to tell ’em where they can spend money, why they can’t spend money! To approve any expenditure over $25 million, he’s gonna make sure that they follow through on all the federal demands that are part and parcel of the loan, so-called, $15 billion. This is scary stuff. I mean, this is corruption, this is nationalization. It’s propaganda.
CALLER: It absolutely is, and this is going to be the last chance of the Republicans to really put their mark on something in a long time. You know, all you Republicans out there who just lost reelection, you know, why don’t you go out with a bang?
RUSH: (laughing) And those that are going to be up in two years, this is a great way to stake their claim to reelection.
CALLER: Absolutely. And, you know, there’s areas of the country that are not in a terrible recession. Yeah, you know, some people in Detroit are going to be laid off, but, you know what, they can go get jobs in Texas.
RUSH: Barry, see, you have just highlighted one of the problems. You have no heart. That’s their home! That’s their home, Ezra. And what do you say, pack up, go where the jobs are. That’s the old America . That’s not what happens, Ezra. The jobs come to where you are, and sometimes you don’t even have to work to get paid.
CALLER: Well, this is what we’ve been seeing this past year, you know, we can’t have any short-term pain.
RUSH: No.
CALLER: You know, if you look at how economies work historically and what’s happened over American history, it’s been one migration after another; people have moved from one part of the country to another; industries have changed. If we have the attitude that every job we have can never be replaced, that no industry can change, then we’re sowing the seeds of our own decline here, and it’s unnecessary.
RUSH: It’s totally unnecessary. It’s like this almost now permanent extended unemployment benefits.
CALLER: Absolutely, and we all know the statistic, you know, your chance of getting a job miraculously goes up a hundred percent in the week that your unemployment benefits are about to expire.
RUSH: (laughing) That’s right, athletes in their contract year seem to play better than they have in the previous four years.
CALLER: I wonder why.
RUSH: Plaxico Burress, great example. He got the money and then said, ‘Screw you. I’m going to shoot myself, so I won’t have to work.’ Okay, look, Ezra, I appreciate the call. Folks, nobody has more compassion for people in bad economic times that are having job pressures than I, ’cause I have been there. Remember, now, I’ve been fired seven times. Maybe eight. One of them was justified. The other times it was just the vagaries of the business that I’m in. Format change, we were playing oldies, I called it salted rotten mold. Can you imagine playing an oldie format and a play list of 150 songs? You get tired of it. Anyway, they sold the station, the new guys came in, changed the format to Chinese opera, didn’t need me for that. Those are the kind of vagaries that happen in this business. I think one of these times I went out and I availed myself of the unemployment checks in one of those jobs. Even though I supposedly had paid, you know, money had been withheld, technically it was mine, I don’t like it. It’s just human nature. The longer you pay people enough to get by, not to work, the longer they’re not gonna work.
And you know me, I cringe when we destroy people’s ambition, when we take away their dreams, when we take away their drive, their desire, and then when we take away their need, it’s not pretty, and it’s not a compassionate thing to do to people. I know we balance this, ‘Well, Rush, we’re in a recession, we’re losing all these jobs, what are people going to do, it’s Thanksgiving time, they gotta have their turkeys.’ I understand all of that, I really, really do. What did I get fired for? It was the same station. I started playing the songs I liked the most. If there’s only going to be 150 of them in the list I’m not going to play the trash I don’t like and I told them that. Actually, that’s not why. That’s not why I got fired. That’s what they said. It was Under My Thumb by the Rolling Stones. I just played it over and over again, played it once a day, because I wanted to hear it. And in the rotation it would come up every other day but not on my show.
That’s not why I got fired. I got fired because I was working for a psychopath boss who was the biggest pathological liar, and when people lie to me openly about things it just insults my intelligence. I got called in by this guy for a coaching session one morning — and I hated those anyway, these coaching sessions, the program directors bring you in and tell you what you did wrong and sometimes what you did good and so forth. It’s just BS. (interruption) No, no, back then you didn’t refuse to leave. They told you after you left, after a show, they escorted you out the door, and then they sent you your things. But that’s how it worked and probably still does in this business. They don’t want you going on the air and bleeding on the audience. But anyway, this guy was lying about people he knew, he was lying about places he had worked, was lying about his expertise, lying about this or that, lying about where he went to dinner.
I couldn’t put up with it anymore and I finally called him on it, ‘Would you just stop lying to me? I can’t handle it, you’re not the big shot you make yourself out to be,’ and I went home, and the owner of the radio station called me and said, ‘You know, we just can’t have this kind of insubordination and you blowing up like this.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Well, I mean, you walk into my program director’s office and you veritably attack him and you claim you’re not going to work.’ ‘That’s not what happened.’ I said, ‘The guy’s a psychopath, he’s a pathological liar.’ Well, I didn’t know how the game was played. The program director had iced me before I even got home, ’cause that’s the kind of guy he was. So that’s when I got fired. First job upon leaving home. But I was back two weeks later at a bigger station and I did not go on unemployment then. It was 1972. We were nationalizing health care then, were trying to, OSHA, Nixon was wage and price controls. It was not pretty back then. It was not pretty making $150 bucks a week and I didn’t do the unemployment thing then. I’m not being critical of people that do, don’t misunderstand, I’m just saying that constantly extending this, it’s the American people that run this economy, the American people that make the economy work. The American people creating jobs, inventing jobs, doing things out of necessity, love, desire, what have you.
The more you pay people to not work, not enough to make ’em comfortable, but just satisfy enough needs, they can continue to carry the credit card debt for a while, it’s the same when you pay union people not to work — we support the workers, but not union. And we learned that some of these UAW guys, I forget the term now, it’s a mental block I’m having, but they’re not working, they’re getting paid for it and if a job comes up at some factory out of town, they don’t have to take it and they can continue to get paid. It defies the laws of economics and at some point the golden goose is going to get killed and that’s what happened here. Here, grab audio sound bite number 36. This is Tom Coburn, Senator from Oklahoma , today on Capitol Hill. He was talking about the automobile bailout and the numbers that he had here are stunning.
COBURN: GM sold $9.37 million cars worldwide. Toyota that same year sold $9.37 million cars worldwide. GM lost $38.7 billion. Toyota made $17.7 billion. Therein lies the problem.
RUSH: 2007, GM and Toyota sold the same amount of cars, same number of cars worldwide, $9.37 million. General Motors lost $38.7 billion. Toyota made $17.7 billion.