I get a daily email from Rush Limbaugh with highlights from his show, and a friend sent me this excerpt from his show recently, about unions and why people who work on union jobs think the way they do. This is one of the brightest things I’ve seen about the whole union controversy recently, and I have to say that in general Rush Limbaugh is one of the brightest people commenting on government issues today. The left attacks him mercilously, which they do to anyone they view as a threat, and if there is one person more of a threat to the insanity of the liberal/left/socialist/statist group in America today, it is Rush Limbaugh.
John Eberhard
RUSH: Here’s Richard, Michigan City, Indiana. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Yes. Rush, it’s a pleasure to talk to you. It’s an honor to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you very much, sir.
CALLER: I don’t want to hold you too long. I just wanted to tell you, I grew up as a young man from McKeesport, Pennsylvania. I heard you mention that one time on the radio but you never elaborated, but I moved the family out here to Indiana a long time ago, 40-some years ago, worked for the second largest steel mill in the nation —
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: — Bethlehem Steel.
RUSH: And what their legacy costs, what it was I don’t know if Joanne or what’s her name was up in Wisconsin realizes it, but Bethlehem Steel was pushed against the wall with their legacy costs, and it came to a point where they had to turn out the lights, close the door, and let 95,000 employees go.
RUSH: Same thing with General Motors.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: They had to off-load their pension to the federal government. Now look who owns them?
CALLER: Well, I don’t know what’s wrong with these people. I’m ashamed of the Democratic Party. And as a Hungarian, I cringe when I hear the name George Soros. He’s a disgrace to our nationality.
RUSH: Let me try to explain it to you from their standpoint. This might be a useful exercise. And, by the way, I mentioned McKeesport because that’s where the first radio station that I worked at when I left home was. It’s the Pittsburgh market, but it was a suburban station in McKeesport. It was WIXZ, salted rot and mold, played oldies. Well, it was solid rock and gold, WIXZ, “solid rock and gold,” the jingle. And I called it “salted rot and mold” ’cause after two years I’d heard every song on the playlist 20,000 times. At any rate, let’s look at this from their perspective. You mentioned Mary Jo who called. Now, I know a lot of these public sector union people have become activists. A lot of them are political, ideological activists in addition to whatever else they are.
Okay, you end up going to work for a union, a school teacher or whatever your job is that requires you to be a member of a public sector union. Let’s just say Wisconsin. And your union goes out and through the vehicle of collective bargaining they arrange a compensation package for you, and it’s gonna pay you X, and you’re gonna get your health care paid for, mostly, large percentage of it, you’re gonna have a pension and they tell you this and then every three or four years you’re gonna expect a bump in all of it. And along the way you think that you are a crucial cog in the wheel. You are educating the future of America. You’re making a difference. You are teaching the children. You’re doing all of these wonderful things. And besides that, you didn’t have to choke anybody or bend their arm to get this deal. Your union might have, but you didn’t.
Whether it’s General Motors or whether it’s the state, somebody agreed to this. And it goes on like this, and occasionally you might have to threaten to go on strike if your demands aren’t met, but eventually it all works out and you keep going on like this until one day the bottom falls out, and you hear that there just isn’t the money to pay you anymore. But yet the people saying this made a deal with you. This is what you’re gonna get. And then out of the blue they come out and say, “Sorry, we don’t have the money for it anymore.” What are you gonna do? I understand where these people are. I understand their mentality. Taking away their political activism for a moment — and it’s hard to do because it’s very much a part of who they are — but still, as far as they’re concerned, they made the deal, General Motors made the deal. Yeah, yeah, a lot of people don’t have it but they’re gonna give me my health care and a pension until I die, even after I retire. And, you know what? I’m only gonna have to work 15 to 18 years to be totally vested.
That was the deal and then somewhere somebody comes along and takes it all away from you. What are you gonna do? You’re not just gonna sit there and say, “Well, okay,” especially when you don’t know how to earn money any other way. And all along there’s probably a little voice in the back of your head that tells you you’re really not earning anything anyway. This is the government. The government owes you and the government owes everybody and in reality you ought to be getting even more than what you’re getting, but you’re satisfied. But then the bottom drops out. That’s why when Mary Jo called here I knew it was gonna be impossible but I really wanted to get her answer on why do you think your neighbors are obligated to pay you for nine months a year, twice what they make? Why do you think your neighbors are required to pay your health care until you die and pay your pension? I want to know. I would love to know when you first realized that’s what was happening and think that it’s justified.
I’d like to know the mind-set because, see, I don’t have that mind-set. I’ve never had it. And I really would like to know how those people think. Rather than sit here and assign an ideology to them, “Well, they’re liberals and they think they’re entitled and so forth,” which is probably true, but just in the human being sense, in the humanity sense, where does that attitude come from? Who teaches that? Well, we know guys like Alinsky, angry multiculturalists and leftists. People who hate the country end up telling other people that it owes you a living because it’s mistreated you, it’s screwing you left and right, all these rich people and it’s your money. You understand how these people get to the point that they are. They’ve had nothing but hatred and anger being preached to ’em for who knows how long depending on whether or not they grew up in a union household. This is what’s always bothered me about how much hatred for this country there is that it’s institutionalized in our education system. It’s taught. It’s codified. It’s part of the multicultural curriculum.
The multicultural curriculum is based on the premise that America is flawed, that America is a fraud, that America is a lie. I mean that’s the thrust, that’s the whole reason for multiculturalism in the form of a curriculum. So take these people and they’ve had all this stuff, they’ve soaked it up like sponges, and then the fateful day comes when everybody who thinks about it knows has to come, the money runs out. Well, it is kind of expecting a bit much for them to say on a dime, “You know what? You’re right. I have been earning too much. I shouldn’t be taking this much from my neighbors. I ought to be paying for my own health care and retirement.” That’s not something people are going to willingly agree to. That’s something that’s going to have to be enforced as a matter of law, as it’s happening now. There’s gonna be civil disobedience. There’s going to be riots. There will be burnings and so forth. We’ve seen it in Greece, wherever this happens.
The Democrat Party, the American left — look at it this way — have had their boot on the neck of the golden goose for 50 years, and that golden goose is down to its last breaths. And when the golden goose is dead, when the private sector no longer generates the wealth necessary, and it hasn’t for a long time, all of this is fake money, all of this is unreal. Everybody who has anything, from a state or federal government, has it because of debt, borrowing, or what have you. It isn’t real. The golden goose got killed off long ago, in terms of reality. This country’s not producing the wealth that will sustain all of the demands being made on the country. This country is not producing the wealth to provide for all the services we want: the military, border control. We’ve long ago passed this. This is why I keep talking about how nothing’s real anymore. All of this is borrowed time. And yet the people who are living on all of this illusionary money, they don’t want to give it up. Where else are they going to go to earn it? How are they gonna replace it? What do they know, other than having some thug negotiate a contract for ’em? What do they know?
Mary Jo, if you’re in Madison, or any of the rest of you, if you are a public sector employee and you’re mad as hell at me right now ’cause I don’t get it, because you think I have no compassion for you, because I don’t want you to have a decent life and decent living and so forth, when this does eventually implode, there’s one or two places you can go to complain. One would be Beijing. Go talk to the ChiComs. Another would be Havana. Go talk to Fidel Castro. Find some old Soviet communist still alive, go talk to him, because they’re the people responsible for it. The people who have made you believe that you can score all these riches, the people that have made you believe that all you need for everybody to be wealthy and fair and equal is a fair and just government redistributing wealth, when it all implodes, and it’s not working, and it’s not working now, don’t complain to me, because I’ve been telling you for years it won’t work. You need to go to the people who have been lying to you from the get-go telling you that it does work, ’cause they’re the ones that screwed you.
Governor Walker is not screwing you. Fidel Castro screwed you. Hugo Chavez screwed you. Che Guevara, I don’t care, whatever communist leader you idolize, they’re the ones that have screwed you. They’re the ones who lied to you. Saul Alinsky, Karl Marx, whoever, Hegel, whoever you believed, Barack Obama, whoever has told you that the redistribution of wealth, that liberalism, socialism makes things equal and fair, can create a utopia, that’s where you go to complain because those are the people who have lied to you.