Rush Limbaugh points out what a dictator does, dictate:
RUSH: This is what you get. I don't know if you've heard this or not, ladies and gentlemen. But John Thain, who was running one of these places out there, Merrill Lynch. (I don't know which one it was. They all run together.) It was learned that he spent $1.2 million redecorating the office, during all of this bailout shenanigan, all the talk about how they're not lending and they're in deep trouble and the country's going to go to hell in a handbasket if we don't get this money pumped into them fast. So everybody's outraged now, everybody is outraged: $1.2 million for a new office; $47,000 for a rug or some such thing. President-select Obama found out about this and had something to say about it this morning at the White House.
OBAMA: Some of the reports that we've seen over the last couple of days, uh, about companies that have received, uh, taxpayer assistance, then going out, uh, and renovating bathrooms or offices or in other ways, not managing those dollars appropriately -- and, uh, I'm looking forward to having conversations with all the leadership here about how even as we move swiftly and aggressively on, uh, the recovery package, we are also starting to put in place the kinds of reform elements, oversight, transparency, accountability, that's going to be required in order for American people to have confidence in what we're doing.
RUSH: Oh, gee. There's so much here that needs to be picked apart, ladies and gentlemen. Now, this is what you get in a command and control economy. This is what you get with central planning. I'm not justifying what these guys in Merrill Lynch did, or wherever it was, you know, $1.2 million to redecorate an office, especially with money that was given to them by the US taxpayers. But I'm probably like another lone wolf on this, given the sorry state of ignorance as to the country's founding and the kind of country we are and how we're structured. But it ain't the job of the president of the United States to decide how these dollars are spent "appropriately," to this degree. He wants to have conversations with the leadership. The leadership was supposed to be the secretary of the Treasury. Am I the only one that remembers?
The TARP bill named one person the czar of all it is, and that's the secretary of the Treasury. I've read it to this audience multiple times. The Treasury of the secretary is the only person authorized by this law to pass out the money and he's got some responsibilities to "ensure the economic prosperity of the American people." There's nothing in this, there's nothing in the law that says how these people have to spend it. If there were, they would be doing it that way. We gave the money away, requiring that they loan it, but they're not lending it because their customers don't have the ability to pay it back. Their customers aren't in the position to start borrowing now. The banks don't want to lend anyway, they want to use the money to shore up their own reserves for whatever reason.
Now, the Treasury secretary is part of the executive branch, but it doesn't say the president has the authority. I guess the president could go in and tell the Treasury secretary what to do in terms of an order, and he could assert control that way, but it's a small step. It's a small step. Once we accept the notion that the president of the United States can dictate to companies with federal money how they decorate their offices or what they do with the money, it's a small step from that to the president dictating to companies who do not get money from the government, how they can build their cars. We're already there with all these green initiatives. This is why we're troubled out there, ladies and gentlemen, over what we see heading down the road.
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