VOICE: The Glenn Beck program presents more truth behind America's march to socialism.
GLENN: Oh, socialism -- I learned this from kids -- socialism is great. What's wrong with socialism? It's fantastic. It will work. You're right. I mean, France is socialist. Well, today's march to socialism is a preview of the things to come. About a year and a half ago when Paris embarked on a mission to make the city more green. Wow, just like Obama's doing today. Well, they deployed a massive fleet of bikes for everybody to ride. Remember they got bikes, put them all over the city. It was going to be the same thing that most green initiatives claim, they would save the taxpayers millions of dollars and everything is going to be sugar fairies and lollipops and there will be big butterflies in the sky. Well, you're going to find this hard to believe, but that green program is now actually costing the taxpayers more money and the company that Paris is using, you know, to provide the bikes, they need a bailout now because they can't afford the expenses associated with the program. What expenses? They bought the bikes. They put them there for free. People just used them and they just returned them and it's great. Nobody has to use a car. There's no expenses there. Well, the popular bicycle rental scheme in Paris that has transformed travel in the city has run into problems -- this according to the newspaper -- run into problems just 18 months after its successful launch. Successful launch, they might want to look that up. I don't know exactly how you would call a year and a half before a collapse as successful, but let's go with it.
Remi Pheulpin, the bike's company's director general, says that the current contract is just unsustainable. It's simple: All the receipts go to the city and all of the expenses are ours. What are the expenses, you might ask? Well, the quote more than anticipated vandalism and theft. What do you think "More than anticipated" would be? I mean, 10% as opposed to 5%? 20% of the bikes instead of 10%? No, uh-uh, no. Actually they've had to replace nearly all of the original fleet. There were 20,000 bicycles at the beginning that cost 400 Euros to replace. That's $515. 7800 of the bikes have been stolen. They just vanished. 11,600 of the bikes have been vandalized. They have been hung from lamp posts, dumped in the river, torched, broken into pieces. Some have turned up in Eastern Europe and Africa. The new phrase in renting and using the Velib program -- I guess that translates to bicycle freedom, or free bicycle -- apparently most users use the latter of the two translations, they are using them now to make YouTube videos. They popped up all over showing people riding them in the subway system, on BMX courses, down large flights of steps in the city. Since the scheme's launch, nearly all of the bicycles have been replaced at the cost of 400 Euros. That's 19,400 bikes needed to be replaced out of the original 20,000 bikes. It's weird, and this is what I don't understand because this is so not socialist. It's weird to think that people treat property they own differently than socialist bikes left on the street for everyone just to share. It's almost like a capitalist principle there.
Well, the capitalists are taking charge there in Paris. They have agreed to pay towards the cost of replacing the stolen or trashed bikes, but it's refusing to bail out the company. I'm trying, I'm trying to -- oh, no, no. No, no, this makes sense. I was trying to figure it out. I had to go to a capitalist example, you know. I was looking at congress. That's exactly the way capitalists now do it. They change the original agreement to give them more money, which is totally different than a bailout.
VOICE: That was even more overwhelming evidence that we are destined to be a bunch of socialist pigs very, very soon, on the Glenn Beck program.