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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: Looks like I was right, ladies and gentlemen. It looks like it’s a little soon to say definitively, but it looks like some high-powered opinion leaders on the left are starting to come around now. Something’s just not quite right with this Obama guy, and what he’s trying to do here. Great to be back, great to be with you, Rush Limbaugh, behind the Golden EIB Microphone here at the distinguished and prestigious Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. As I told you all along, folks, what has apparently been the plan here, drive down the economy, not just sit by and let the economy sink, but drive it down, drive it down, create all kinds of class envy. These protests over the weekend at the homes of AIG executives in Connecticut sponsored by ACORN, subgroups of ACORN, Obama coulda shut that down, he coulda told these guys this is going a little bit far, 90% retroactive tax rate and so forth. So they’ve been driving down the economy so that they’d have the excuse to go in and seize control of troubled companies. Now companies are possibly being seized or could be seized, even companies that are not taking TARP money.

I saw this headline on Saturday night, Sunday when I was working on show prep for today: ‘The Obama administration will call for increased oversight of executive pay at all banks, Wall Street firms and possibly other companies as part of a sweeping plan to overhaul financial regulation, government officials said.’ What this is all about is returning the nation’s wealth to its, quote, rightful owners, unquote, the poor and the middle class. This is a bunch of people that believe a bunch of things. One of the things they believe is that the nation’s achievers and so-called wealthy have acquired their wealth by stealing it or not allowing others to have it, and this has created the middle class and the poor, and so we’ve gotta go get that money back, and that’s what we’re in the process of doing. Remember Obama told some people in a California town meeting not to be investment bankers, the same thing his wife did during the campaign in Zanesville, Ohio. I tell you, this is one angry guy. He’s a bad guy, he’s one angry guy, his wife is angry, everybody around him is in full rage, although they’re probably happy now to see him sit around.

Now, on Sunday it was interesting. The New York Times had four moderate hit pieces on Obama, the lead editorial, Frank Rich, Thomas Friedman, and Maureen Dowd, and then yesterday Paul Krugman with another hit piece in the New York Times on Obama objecting to this toxic asset plan that Geithner’s up announcing today in hearings before Barney Frank’s committee. So you had four people in the New York Times raising red flags. Now, most of what they were raising flags about was Obama’s substance. The poor performance on Leno, the laughing on 60 Minutes, he’s not the guy, he’s not the smooth, suave guy they thought that he was. There was some disconcertedness with some of the policies. But where we are right now, see, the left believes in the ideas. This is the conundrum for the left, or the dilemma. The left believes in what Obama wants to do. They believe in seizing as much of the private sector as possible and taking it over. They believe in punishing achievement, they believe in all of this. But they’re concerned about Obama’s style now. Most of these pieces in the New York Times on Saturday were devoted to Obama’s style not being as smooth and suave and cool and calm as he was during the campaign.

What you have to understand about leftists, they can never and they will never admit that their ideas are bad, they will never admit that their policies are bad. They never admitted that what was going on in the Soviet Union was bad. They came up with other excuses, ‘Well, they had the wrong leaders. Who was going to follow Yuri Andropov?’ They loved Gorbachev because he was relatively young and stylish, and they thought that Gorbachev could finally bring it off. They’re not going to rip Obama’s plans. So that’s why they’re starting to rip Obama a little bit, and it’s a mild rip, don’t misunderstand. It’s a mild ripping. But at least it’s a ripping, and it’s happening within two months, 60 days of The One’s inauguration. So you can’t rip the plans. Well, Krugman is. Krugman is just distraught over this toxic asset deal, and I have to tell you Krugman may be more right than wrong. This is a tough thing to explain and understand, which is one of the reasons why it’s being done. But Krugman’s complaint is the toxic asset plan, which caused the market to go up nearly 500 points yesterday, it’s down 83 today. They gave the plan all this credit yesterday. Actually it’s housing starts, surprisingly higher than what the experts said.

Speaking of that, every month we get new economic figures, and every month everybody’s shocked and surprised by them, whether they’re up or down, they’re surprised by them, the experts. Anyway, this is a tough thing to try to explain to people, which is I think part of its allure to people in government. It’s complicated. The whole concept of toxic assets is complicated. How do you explain to people what a toxic asset is? After you’ve explained what it is, how many people still are going to understand it? So okay, we gotta get the toxic assets off the books. The real crux of the plan here is that the Obama administration needs the private sector to bail it out of this. That’s why private sector investors are being given the chance to go in and buy these things up, try to set a price for them and then they get to keep a majority of the profits. The private investors that take the risk here will get to keep the majority of the profits and nobody knows if this is gonna work. Nobody has the slightest clue. We won’t know until it gets underway. We’re not going to know for a year or two whether this has worked. If it works, investors get the profits rather than the taxpayers. If it doesn’t work, and the reason they need the private sector is because they’ve so maligned the public sector, so maligned Wall Street and so forth that they can’t appear to be doing anything that favors them.

So they’re trying to get any of you in the private sector to want to invest in these things, these toxic assets. If there are losses, the government takes the heat. The taxpayers will absorb every loss. So there’s no downside — and this is what Krugman doesn’t like — there is no downside for the private investors who are going to take a risk buying up and then reselling these toxic assets. There is no risk. The taxpayers absorb any losses. The private sector investors get whatever profits there are. But then the private sector guys have to be worried about, okay, if there’s too much profit, am I going to get a 90% tax break? Can’t show too much profit here, this administration is making it clear they don’t like profit. I’ll tell you what, these private sector people who are going to start this plan had better get a prenup on this marriage from the Obama administration, they’d better get a prenup, because if they don’t get a prenup, if they make too much money they’re going to end up being demonized and what happened today on these hearings on Capitol Hill is going to be totally ignored. We’re going to forget it just like we forget the fact that everybody knew about the AIG bonuses. This remains one of the biggest feints, one of the biggest distractions, this whole AIG bonus thing, it is an outrage.

We don’t have a Constitution anymore. Do you realize that if they can just singularly disregard the Constitution in this 90% retroactive tax on bonus payments, then what good’s the Constitution anyway? They can just discard the Constitution anywhere they want. Very, very serious stuff that is happening here, folks. There are as many people that don’t like the Geithner plan as do. In fact, there may be more people that don’t. Washington Post today, ‘Geithner Seeks Broad Power to Seize Firms.’ So they get to make taxes high, they get to make regulations impossible, they get to make unions strong, and then when your company fails, the government can go in and seize it. They are raising the chances, they’re raising the odds against success with every passing day, as they talk about raising taxes, increasing regulations such as the EPA and carbon dioxide becoming a poison, cap and trade, making the unions stronger with card checks, after they have made it doubly tough for anybody to run a profitable business, then they can go in and seize it, when you can’t make a profit. This is all part of a plan. This is not a rescue. This is a plan. They are focused on the destruction of the private sector. This is an all-out assault on capitalism.

The Obama administration is going to ask Congress to give the Treasury secretary unprecedented powers to initiate the seizure of nonbank financial companies, like large insurers, investment firms, hedge funds, whose collapse would damage the broader economy, this from White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. They’re going to use it until they get control of as much in the private sector as they want. They are going to use the line that any collapse would damage the broader economy. That’s why we had to bail out the banks back in October, November, they’re going to use the line as long as it continues to work on people. If you’re the government and people believe you, and you keep running around talking about, ‘My God, there’s going to be a collapse if we don’t seize this hedge fund the country is going to collapse, oh, no, it’s horrible.’ ‘Okay, go ahead and seize it and save us, President Obama, because we don’t want the economy to collapse.’ They’re going to keep using it as long as they can get away with it, and you’d have to say they’re getting away with it. You see the opposition to it on Capitol Hill? The Republicans have just told Cheney to shut up. Republicans on Capitol Hill, ‘Yeah, we’re trying to reinvent ourselves. Cheney comes along, we love Cheney, but he’s not popular. Everybody hates Cheney. We wish he would just shut up.’

They’re trying to reinvent themselves? How so? We have a glorious, golden opportunity to poke all kinds of holes at what the Democrats are doing, and there’s barely a whisper from Republicans in Washington. The government right now, folks, at present only has the authority to seize banks, but Geithner is going to advance the argument that the government needs more tools in its arsenal in order to right the nation’s economic ship. Don’t let a good crisis slip through your fingers, and so it’s going to continue to be portrayed as a horrible economy and getting worse, the government needs even more power to save it, I warned people, I predicted this. This is the aim from the get-go. Create a crisis, create a collapse, create all these things, chaos. It’s all about chaos. The more chaos, the more people will seize or relinquish, I should say, their own freedom and let the government do what the government says it has to do in order to save things. At the end of the day what people have lost is their freedom and their liberty. ‘Giving the Treasury secretary authority –‘ this is from the Washington Post today ‘– the power to seize a broader range of companies would mark a significant shift from the existing model of financial regulation which relies on independent agencies that are shielded from the political process. A Treasury secretary, a member of the president’s cabinet, would exercise the new powers in consultation with the White House, the Federal Reserve, and other regulators, according to an internal administration document.’

So they’re going to get rid of the independent agencies that examine the health of various aspects of the economy, they’re going to turn that over to Geithner. Geithner is going to get total control over determining whether something needs to be seized or not, whether it’s working or not. It just keeps on coming, folks. There’s nothing on the road to stop these people, no boulders in the way, and even if there were boulders, these people are in a jet. They’re flying over the land, they’re not driving over it, and they’re proceeding full speed ahead with Barney Frank running cover for the Democrats and all that they’re doing as he chairs his committee up on Capitol Hill.

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