Tea Party Told to Embrace Republican Platform

http://www.prisonplanet.com/subverted-tea-party-movement-told-to-embrace-republican-platform.html

Subverted Tea Party Movement Told to Embrace Republican Platform
Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
Friday, February 5, 2010

The Tea Party movement is now almost completely unrecognizable from what it was a few short years ago. It came to prominence in 2008 when the Libertarian Party of Illinois planned to hold an April 15, 2009 anti-tax “Boston Tea Party” in Chicago. In February 2009, the idea grew after CNBC personality Rick Santelli, speaking from the floor of the Chicago stock exchange, criticized the Obama administration’s tax and economic policies and urged Americans become Tea Party activists.

Establishment Republicans plan to run Sarah Palin as the Tea Party presidential candidate.

In fact, the idea began as the Boston Tea Party in 2006. It was founded by a group of former Libertarian Party members who criticized the party for its “abdication of political responsibilities,” declaring that “Americans deserve and desperately need a pro-freedom party that forcefully advocates libertarian solutions to the issues of today.” The Boston Tea Party opposed statism at all levels. “The Boston Tea Party supports reducing the size scope and power of government at all levels and on all issues, and opposes increasing the size, scope and power of government at any level, for any purpose.”

How things have changed.

It didn’t take long for establishment Republicans to steal the idea and claim it as their own. A few weeks after Rick Santelli made his comments, Ron Paul’s media coordinator Steve Gordon went on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show and complained about what he characterized as an attempt by Republicans to hijack the idea. Gordon specifically blamed former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.

It didn’t take long for Republicans to embrace the idea. RNC Chairman Michael Steele, Sarah Palin, and Rep. Michele Bachmann from Minnesota have suggested the Tea Party should be rolled into the Republican Borg hive.

Now there will be a national Tea Party convention in Nashville. It will be a parade of Republican statists with former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin leading the charge. “I look forward to meeting many Americans who share a commitment to limited government, common sense and personal responsibility. This movement is truly a grassroots, organic effort. It’s not a top-down organization,” Palin wrote for USA Today, “it’s a ground-up call to action that already has both political parties rethinking the way they do business.”

Ground-up? Tea Party candidates for the 2010 mid-term elections “will be expected to support the Republican National Committee platform,” according to Fox News. “If a particular candidate meets the proposed Tea Party criteria he or she would be eligible for fundraising and grassroots Tea Party support.”

“Once elected to office, members would be required to join a Congressional Tea Party Caucus, attend regular meetings and be held accountable for the votes they cast. Those who stray from the Tea Party path would risk losing it’s support and a likely re-election challenge.”

In other words, business as usual. Under the rule of George W. Bush and the Republicans, “inflation-adjusted spending on the combined budgets of the 101 largest programs they vowed to eliminate in 1995 has grown by 27 percent, according to the libertarian Cato Institute. Eight years of a Republican president, six with a Republican-controlled Congress, resulted in bigger government, the biggest expansion of entitlements in 40 years and a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street that continues to grow,” writes Donny Ferguson of the Libertarian National Committee.

Bush and the Republicans also invaded two sovereign nations and killed more than a million Iraqis. Democrats by and large supported these war crimes. They also overwhelmingly supported the Republicans when they attacked the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (the so-called Patriot Act being only the most egregious example).

If the co-opted Tea Party embraces the Republican National Committee platform, it will finalize its mutation from a grassroots libertarian organization into an establishment statist tool pushing a national debt for the banksters, bloated government, taxation, perpetual war, and continued attacks on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

It should be obvious by now that the Republicans plan to run Sarah Palin against Obama in 2012. This will be a disaster for the Republicans because many Americans are not fooled by her sudden Tea Party plumage. Republicans are desperate to regain control of the White House and Congress and give us four or eight more years of Bush and his warmongering statist neocons. It is a shabby and absurdly transparent gimmick.

Real Tea Party activists and supporters need to reject Palin, Huckabee, Gingrich, and the Republicans out of hand. They should be vocal about their rejection. Otherwise we will end up with another ideologue and teleprompter reading cigar store Indian for the ruling elite.

Beast of the Month - July 2009

Glenn Beck
Right-Wing Propagandist

"I yam an anti-Christ..."
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"

"And if I may speak to Glenn directly for a moment, dude, you are rocking it. I know some people say you're an unstable individual and to give you a public forum is grossly irresponsible, but remember: they crucified Jesus. Crank up the crazy and rip off the knob."
Stephen Colbert on Mr. Beck

Okay, we admit it, The Konformist isn't the biggest fan of Barack Obama. Still, even if you hate a guy, it should be on what he actually is and not on what he isn't.

Over the last few months, criticism of Obama in the mainstream press has been dominated by two groups of people: the "teabaggers" (seriously, stop snickering!) led by noted "men of the people" such as multi-millionaires Rick Santelli of CNBC and Sean Hannity of Fox News, who protest O's supposed far left economic policies; and the "birthers" led by the entertaining Orly Taitz, who insist that Obama can't even be president due to his alleged secret birth in Kenya (or perhaps some even more exotic and sinister locale, such as Russia or - God forbid - France.) The end result of these two movements is the image of Barack Hussein Obama as an evil socialist totalitarian who is secretly plotting to destroy America for his foreign masters. (Never mind that Obama actually occupies the far right of the Democratic Party economically, and that if he's destroying America for any foreign master, it's the banking system.) Suddenly, the charges of Larry Sinclair seem tame that Obama is merely a closeted crack-smoking homosexual.

True, maybe The Konformist has little leg to stand on in mocking others for engaging in elaborate paranoid conspiracy theories. Still, one recent news hysteria perfectly exemplifies how most of the right-wing paranoia surrounding BHO is not only silly, but seems to be a designed misdirection of a mass movement. Consider what happened in April after the Department of Homeland Security’s report, titled Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment, was leaked onto the Internet, detailing the DHS contention that right-wing politics was a breeding ground for not-so-future terrorism. Immediately, a frenzy of reactionary frothings exploded over the web and right-wing radio about the report. Leading the charge was host Michael "Weiner" Savage, yet another right-wing establishment media blowhard who is a millionaire faux populist. The report, Savage and others insisted, was proof that the Obama administration was a crypto-Marxist cabal plotting to destroy America. So The Konformist must give credit to Kurt Nimmo of Alex Jones' excellent PrisonPlanet.com website, which has been a leading source for top notch political analysis in the age of Obama. Because of the supposed conservative leanings of Mr. Jones (though a review of his site would show his opinions are far more nuanced and certainly more honest than the mainstream media's right wing shills) Prison Planet became one of the sites the DHS report was leaked to. Unlike most other sites that followed with delusional rants, Nimmo noted something about the report that should have been immediately obvious: it was written in January 2007, when the Bush Administration was in charge. Likewise, another DHS report released earlier this year was titled Leftwing Extremists Likely to Increase Use of Cyber Attacks over the Coming Decade. This pretty much proves that the Rightwing Extremism report wasn't an Obama Kult assault on the right but rather part of an attack embraced by both George and Barack on anyone deemed a political misfit of any stripe.

Of course, perhaps it says something about the current political climate that Alex Jones and The Konformist can now be described as moderate voices of reason. (We don't mean this as a knock on Jones, but even his biggest fans would concede central to his appeal is a sensational style that resembles a carnival barker.) Chalk it up to a political dialogue dominated by the likes of Rush, O'Reilly, Hannity, Coulter and Savage. Still, in recent months even these mouthpieces have been overtaken by radio and TV host Glenn Beck, The Konformist Beast of the Month.

Mr. Beck has been host of his own nationally syndicated radio show since 2000. His astounding success over the radio has led to a TV career as a host, first on CNN Headline News since 2006 and then moving to Fox News in January. (His success on TV is all the more remarkable considering he is a decidedly physically repulsive specimen.) He has also written two New York Times bestsellers, making him a multi-media sensation who rivals Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern.

How has Mr. Beck become so popular? Simple: by behaving in a decidedly unhinged manner over the airwaves, all while espousing a reactionary political philosophy.

This was highlighted in March, when he choked up on air, wiping tears from his eyes and declaring, "I'm sorry. I just love my country, and I fear for it." For this one, Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert (who has had a field day over the entire Glenn Beck trend) spoofed him by choking up on his own show and saying, "I'm sorry. I just love Glenn Beck's sanity. And I fear for it." Colbert also earned some chuckles after Beck had a close-up of his "crazy eyes" so viewers could see just how serious he was. Colbert one-upped this by having an anal exam with a camera so viewers could literally see just how full of crap he was.

On a more serious note, FAIR columnist Norman Solomon had this to say about Glenn: "Beck has become a national phenom with his nightly hour of polemics... urging war on Iran, denouncing 'political correctness' at home, trashing immigrants who don’t speak English, mocking environmentalists as repressive zealots, and generally trying to denigrate progressive outlooks." Eric Boehlert of MediaMatters.org notes that on his show, Beck "disparages liberals, gays, Democrats, blacks, immigrants, and Muslims at will."

That's not all he's tried to disparage. In 2005, he called the victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans "scumbags." He then added: "I didn't think I could hate victims faster than the 9-11 victims." He said both after admitting that nobody "in their right mind is going to say this out loud," proving that Beck himself knows he's insane. Not to leave bad enough alone, in 2007, he mocked victims of the Southern California forest fires as "a handful of people who hate America... a lot of them are losing their homes." It got even funnier the end of June, when Beck had on his show "former" CIA agent Michael Scheuer. Scheuer declared, "The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States... Only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently and with as much violence as necessary.” To this adovocacy of mass terrorism, Beck nodded in approval.

Pretty hilarious stuff.

Hilarious, at least, until someone dies. That's what happened in April, when 22-year-old Richard Poplawski killed three Pittsburgh policemen and wounded two others in a bloody shootout. It soon was uncovered that Poplawski, a neo-Nazi, was a huge fan of Beck and his right-wing rantings on Fox News. He was also a fan of the white supremacist Website Stormfront, posting videos of Beck's show on the site. Poplawski was obsessed with right-wing conspiracies, believing that Obama was going to start confiscating guns and rounding up right-wingers in FEMA concentration camps, all part of a New World Order plot to turn Team USA into a Maoist dictatorship.

To be fair, much of this thinking is central to the appeal of Alex Jones, who Poplawski also was a fan of. What Jones did not share, however, was his racist world view, including a belief that America was secretly controlled by a gang of evil Jews. While Beck also eschews the anti-Semitic plots (perhaps because Jews are fortunately not a socially sanctioned scapegoat group anymore) he does, as noted before, engage in trashing of minorities in the same vein as Limbaugh does. Perhaps it isn't overt, in-your-face racism, but it is there.

Certainly it is too much to blame the Pittsburgh murders on Glenn Beck. After all, many "liberal" sites tried to smear Alex Jones with the same brush after it was discovered Poplawski was a fan. But it is hard not to listen to the venomous rage spewed out by Beck (as well as Rush, O'Reilly, Hannity, Coulter and Savage) and imagine what it could do to borderline personalities. Somehow The Konformist suspects the Poplawski murders are the first shot of what may turn into a very disturbing fad.

Which, of course, is only part of what is dangerous about Beck. The bigger issue is that he, along with his fellow right-wing blowhards, are channeling the legitimate anger and frustration of the masses into options controlled by the GOP. Thus, the protests of Ron Paul that once frightened the Republican establishment (tellingly, Paul was even more marginalized on Fox News than CNN in 2008) has morphed into the teabagger movement, which is backed by mainstream GOP politicians such as Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey. The controlled teabagger movement focuses all its rage on the Obama stimulus plan that marginally aided the poor and middle class, while remaining silent about the obscene bailout of Wall Street (which Ron Paul vociferously opposed.) Likewise, Beck will embrace the conspiracy theories of Alex Jones, provided they can be packaged in a way where viewers can use them to support the Republicans. And perhaps even more important, Beck and his cohorts will ignore any criticism of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else the Pentagon decides to attack in the future, even though an anti-war message is central to both Jones and Paul.

Of course, whenever Beck gets cornered by his own reactionary beliefs, he tries to dismiss himself as a rodeo clown, a harmless buffoon who is more of an entertainer than a political ideologue. On this issue, The Konformist must concede that as pure theater, Beck is indeed very entertaining. But looking at what the Poplawski murders might lead to, and looking how Beck is manipulating the anger of the masses into faux-populist movements, we have to wonder who will get the last laugh.

In any case, we salute Glenn Beck as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Glenn!!!

Thanks to ColbertNation.com, Fair.org, MediaMatters.org, PrisonPlanet.com & RawStory.com for help on this article.

Tea Party Co-Founder Blasts Mainstream GOP

http://caivn.org/article/2009/11/30/tea-party-co-founder-blasts-mainstream-gop-imitators

Tea Party Co-Founder Blasts Mainstream GOP Imitators
by Chad Peace
Mon, Nov 30th 2009

In 2007, the modern tea party movement took shape, in a vastly different form than it now presents itself. Spurred by an impending recession, a government overrun by deception and corruption, and an unprecedented expansion of government under eight years of “conservative” leadership, the first modern day tea partiers had positive causes of action: honesty, respect for the rule of law, and protection of the rights of the smallest minority; the individual.

In late 2007, on the anniversary of the original Boston Tea Party, positive protestors laid hope in a solution. In a 24 hours period, in concert with symbolic and peaceful re-enactments of the Boston Tea Party in over 50 cities across the country, energetic tea partiers dumped over 5.2 million dollars into a long-shot presidential campaign to support a candidate that embodied honesty, respect, and sincerity in the pursuit strict constitutional leadership. The goal: to entrust our highest office to a man of principles, who would be shackled by a devotion to the constitution, rather than obligations to special interests.

I am proud to have been a participant in that tea party. In witnessing the tens of thousands of “patriots” that peacefully marched through the streets and donated extravagantly to a candidate relegated to a status of “darkhorse” by the mainstream, my respect turned to passion. I was convinced that the average American was beginning to see through the veil of scripted partisan sermons, designed to coddle fears and perpetuate the superficial battle between a “left” and “right”.

Over the next year, I harvested an addiction to contrarianism. An incessant hunger for serious political debate, fueled by coffee, cigarettes and eighteen-hour workdays changed my world. I was a dark-horse political enthusiast, with blinders on.

Then, in mid-February of 2009, Rick Santelli gave a now infamous rant on CNBC, calling for a modern day “tea party” in July. Immediately, my business partner and I set up on online tea party website. Within days, we received tens of thousands of e-mails and passionate pleas for government accountability. Our vision was to change the political debate focused on general divisions to one centered on specific solutions. We asked our supporters to question party-line politicians and demand that our leaders take a more independent and reasoned stance on the issues facing our country.

In short time, desperate partisans were soiling the sheets. Knowing we had neither the financial means nor man-power to out-publicize political perverts, I was never-the-less convinced that this independent movement would not be overrun by golden idols. I wrote to our supporters, asking them to be wary of old Republican figureheads like Newt Gingrich and current political strategists Patrick Leahy, hiding their identity behind make-shift “grassroots” websites. I was hopeful that the same talking heads, like Hannity and O’Reilly, that asked us to bend over blindly to past leaders would not have enough credibility to grandstand in front of an independent-minded movement.

At some point, reality began piercing my passion. The tea party boat started becoming a wagon of whiners. Propelled by the moving mouths on TV and the talking heads of such ironically named organizations such as the “American Family Association” (one must agree that for an admitted adulterer with three ex-wives heading the AFA is ironic, right?), the movement lost its focus. No longer were tea partiers upset with the bipartisan corruption in Washington D.C., they are mad at the socialists communists Hitler-like Democrats. No longer did Constitutionalism mean respecting the rule of law, it meant Obama is not really our president. A movement founded on the principles of independent analysis, it has become a yelling fest for punch-drunk cynics armed with incoherent talking points.

Slowly, I’ve lost some of my unrealistic idealism. As I pull back the blinders, I try to look at the tea party from the eyes of an outsider, the average American. What I see is a bunch of people reciting partisan political sermons, coddling fears, and perpetuating a superficial battle between “left” and “right”; drowning the well intentioned idealists that remain.

As the battle rages, I have more faith than ever that an independent revolution will come. When the absurdity of our political process rises to the point where tea bags become a right wing rally cry and the left still manages to drop in the polls, there is a growing opportunity for the increasingly disenchanted to drive a stake right down the middle.

Beast of the Month - May 2009

Beast of the Month - May 2009
Timothy Geithner
Obamanomics Mastermind

"I yam an anti-Christ..."
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"

"While the boss man takes his bonus pay and jets on out of town
And DC's bailing out them bankers as the farmers auction ground
Yeah while they're living it up on Wall Street in that New York City town
Here in the real world they're shuttin' Detroit down"
John Rich, "Shuttin' Detroit Down"

Well, it's been 100 days into the Obama Administration, and already a picture of the next four years is becoming pretty evident. True, he isn't the combo of Hitler, Stalin and Chairman Mao that the "teabaggers" (quit snickering!) of the Beck-Hannity-Limbaugh crowd try to make him out as. On the other hand, he clearly isn't the perfect mixture of JFK, MLK & Jesus Christ that the so-called "progressive" cultists fantasize he is either.

Say what you will about the teabaggers, but their anger at Barack Hussein Obama, however misdirected, at least seems like the logical response to the looting of America that has continued under his reign. Indeed, it seems that the left is far more delusional about what Barack Obama is than the Fox News watchers could ever be as they continue to wave pom-poms for the dude. For the general direction of the Obama Administration is exactly what The Konformist warned it would be: a sniveling betrayal of the duped progressives who supported his election victory as he bootlicks Wall Street and the Pentagon.

To be fair, Prez Obama hasn't been as terrible as some predicted he'd be. (And he certainly isn't as bad as George W. Bush, though that's hardly an amazing feat.) The good news: he has yet to launch World War III against Russia and/or China. Of course, the main reason is because there's no money left to finance WWIII after the massive swindling by the banksters and Wall Street under his reign, and that of his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, The Konformist Beast of the Month.

Under Geithner and Team Obama, the siphoning of bucks to prop up the Wall Street monoliths has continued unabated. And though the Obama Administration pushed through a $787 billion "stimulus" program as well as a $75 billion plan to help homeowners facing foreclosure, the general direction of the Obama years is definitely still slanted towards funneling money to the powerful few. Indeed, though the $787 billion was more than the Wall Street Bailout - no doubt done to convince the public they've received more help than the bankers have - the vast majority of these dollars will only come to the poor, working class and middle class indirectly, if at all. Likewise, the foreclosure plan appears to be just enough to help only the subprime debtors who the financial system can profit off via the aid. Tellingly, it is the stimulus program and the homeowner plan that became the focus of the rage ranted over the airwaves by reactionary blowhards like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rick Santelli rather than the Wall Street Bailout. This appears to be a calculated obfuscation by these loathsome pundits. The end result is threefold: one, to channel the legitimate anger of the masses at the economic crisis towards those who are the victims rather than the perpetrators; two, to make it seem that it is only right-wing nut jobs and racists who oppose Obamanomics; and three, to frame the Obama economic policies as far left via distortion and shift the entire debate even farther to the right than before.

After the stimulus plan was pushed through, the Obama Administration offered up a trillion dollar "toxic assets" bailout for Wall Street. (In fact, it appears the push to get the stimulus program passed so quickly was because another round of obscene Wall Street handouts without a penny to the public would've been too in-your-face class warfare.) The plan puts federal funds to back 97 percent of the money used to buy away these bad assets, with the loans and three quarters of all losses backed by Uncle Sam. The investors in this scam will thus have their losses pretty much covered with a big upside for any financial rewards. All in all, the plan seems to be born from the big business philosophy of "socialize the costs, privatize the profits."

While the Obama team has been warm and snuggly to Wall Street, they have been equally ruthless to anyone with a United Auto Workers union card. While they coddle the bankers with trillions in bailouts, the pocket change handed to the Detroit Big Three was conditional on UAW workers accepting massive layoffs, pay cuts and reductions in retiree benefits. This shouldn't be too surprising, as the head of Obama's Auto Task Force is a real life Gordon Gekko in Steve Rattner, a corporate raider who has made a living crushing worker benefits for personal profits.

All this seems to follow the reactionary pattern that's been in place since the Wall Street Bailout of last October. Which leads to a logical question: just who was behind the bailout in the first place? As it turns out, a key player in creating the TARP program was the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank at the time. This was none other than (drum roll please) Timothy Geithner himself.

The appointments of guys like Rattner and Geithner shouldn't be too surprising either: as has been noted on The Konformist, Obama has long surrounded himself with the most right-wing elements economically tied to the Democratic Party. This includes Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago professor who is on the "left" side of the far-right economic program made famous thanks to Milton Friedman. Goolsbee was named staff director and chief economist for the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, whose chairman, also appointed by Obama, is former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, the man whose ruthless monetary policies (also inspired by Milton Friedman) led to a nasty recession that nearly destroyed Ronald Reagan's presidency in its first term.

Beyond just surrounding himself with right-wingers, Obama's positions, even before his election, were decidedly to the right of Edwards and Clinton. Indeed, though it is almost never acknowledged, by the end of the 2008 campaign, John McCain had offered a far more generous solution to foreclosure victims than any Obama proposal. Of course, Obama may have been too busy raising a record $650 million dollars to show any concern for these bitter financial victims. And though the sales job of Obama feigns his campaign was fueled by small donors, the Campaign Finance Institute concluded Obama "raised significantly more large-donor money in absolute terms than any of his rivals or predecessors." (It should be mentioned as almost an afterthought that Obama's VP pick, Joe Biden of Delaware, is so tied to the banking industry he has earned the nickname of "Credit Card Joe" for his efforts.)

The punch line in this rightward tilt in Obamanomics: after repeatedly being accused of being a far-left socialist by the Beck-Hannity-Limbaugh crowd, the left will be blamed for any failures in his economic programs. The general suspicion of The Konformist staff is the stimulus program will be enough to stop a major depression, but not enough to stop a lingering recession. Meanwhile, in January, economist Paul Craig Roberts warned the deficit would be $3 trillion in 2009, and his projection looks more accurate by the day than the predictions of others. With the unemployment rate looking to hit double digits soon, it appears there's a lot of failure ready to be pinned on the left in the coming years.

In any case, we salute Timothy Geithner as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Timmy!!!

Sources:

Allen, Mike. "Volcker Will Head New Obama Board." Yahoo News 26 November 2008 <http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20081126/pl_politico/15997>.

"Credit Card Joe." The Real Joe Biden. 24 August 2008 <http://therealjoebiden.wordpress.com/2008/08/24/credit-card-joe>.

Eley, Tom. "Buyer Beware! Obama Named 'Marketer of the Year'." World Socialist Web Site 6 December 2008 <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/dec2008/obad-d06.shtml>.

Grey, Barry. "Wall Street Celebrates Government Windfall for Banks and Big Investors." World Socialist Web Site 24 March 2009 <http://wsws.org/articles/2009/mar2009/toxi-m24.shtml>.

Marshall, Bruce. "Barack 'Hoover' Obama." Rense.com 11 March 2009 <http://rense.com/general85/hoov.htm>.

"Obama: 'Everybody Thinks They’re Economists'." Infowars 6 February 2009 <http://www.infowars.com/obama-everybody-thinks-theyre-economists>.

"Reality Check: Obama Received About the Same Percentage from Small Donors in 2008 as Bush in 2004." The Campaign Finance Institute 24 November 2008 <http://www.cfinst.org/pr/prRelease.aspx?ReleaseID=216>.

Roberts, Paul Craig. "Another Real Estate Crisis Is About to Hit." Online Journal 23 January 2009 <http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4274.shtml>.

Sirota, David. "Obama's Gordon Gekko Targets Union Workers." OurFuture.org 31 March 2009 <http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009031431/obamas-gordon-gekko-targets-union-workers-0>.

Tarpley, Webster G. "Defeat Obama - Advice For Voters." Rense.com 3 November 2008 <http://www.rense.com/general83/advi.htm>.

Tarpley, Webster G. "Motormouth Joe Biden - Warmonger, Wordmonger And Political Hit Man." Rense.com 25 August 2008 <http://rense.com/general83/biden.htm>.

Beast of the Month - April 2009

Beast of the Month - April 2009
Rick Santelli
Pseudo-populist Cable Shill

"I yam an anti-Christ..."
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"

Populism in America is a funny thing. When it comes from the mouths of guys like Michael Moore, Jim Hightower or Greg Palast who focus their energy defending the little guy against corporate abuse and the collusion of big business and big government, the work gets either ignored or relentlessly attacked. When so-called populism focuses its ire on lesser (and often uglier) targets, on the other hand, it gets highlighted as something to take notice of.

Take Glenn Beck, for example. (And we really mean it, PLEASE take him.) He has become a leading doomsayer in the Obama hackathon that takes place daily on Fox News, and a ratings champ on the "We report, you decide" network. This despite (or perhaps because of) the fact any examination of Beck's rants would reveal a man who isn't a populist like often hyped, but rather someone who is utterly psychotic. Stephen Colbert recently had fun with this on his show, urging Beck to "crank up the crazy and rip off the knob!" He did so after Beck presented an apocalyptic scenario Colbert described as "the most terrifying fictional future I have ever heard yanked right out of someone's ass." He summed up Beck's future vision of America as a land of "ignorant, illiterate, whacked-out hillbillies with nothing to lose. Terrifying! But, more viewers for Fox News!" It's hard to believe that Fox, already the home of borderline personalities such as Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, could actually lower the bar for unhinged behavior, but, by golly, we gotta hand it to them, they have.

Then there's good old Rush Limbaugh, who is being touted as the new leader of the GOP. Limbaugh, much like O'Reilly, has long portrayed himself as a champion against the establishment, though already unconvincing after any comparison of his deranged oxy-fueled radio rants with Republican talking points memos. Besides this, it's hard to take seriously a multi-millionaire who has never worn blue jeans his entire life when he feigns to be a common man, especially when he froths about right-wing economics that screws the working class in favor of the rich.

Speaking of the working class, how about Joe Wurzelbacher, AKA Joe the Plumber, who was made into a working class hero near the end of the desperate McCain campaign? This after Joe whined to Obama about plans to raise taxes on people making over $250K a year (not a major working class concern.) To be fair, Joe W. deserves some sympathy after the Obama machine began illegally digging into his private files in order to uncover dirt after McCain used him as a political prop. However, Plumber Joe has since exploited his faux-celebrity status as a tool for reactionary political forces. Recently, he was hired by the Orwellian-named Americans for Prosperity to speak at rallies against the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to unionize. Actual blue collar workers managed to sneak in to the events and heckle Joe while wealthy right-wingers cheered on his anti-worker pandering. Plumber Joe, hope you're enjoying your Warholian fifteen minutes while they last.

Still, the most offensive faux-populist moment of recent has not come from Rush, Beck or even Joe W. Instead, the award must go to CNBC's Rick Santelli, The Konformist Beast of the Month.

Santelli was, until February 19th, a fairly unknown third-rate correspondent for the minimally watched CNBC business news network. That all changed when discussing Barack Obama's Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan to help nine million families avoid foreclosure with a $75 billion fund. On the network, he blasted the plan: "The government is promoting bad behavior... Why don’t you put up a Web site to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages, or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water... It's time for another tea party!"

(As he said this, Santelli was on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, and the traders who cheered him on appeared to be the wimpiest, most pasty-skinned mob since the Brooks Brother riot in Florida during the 2000 election.)

The so-called "Rant of the Year" was curious in many respects. Imagine, for example, if a cable news correspondent had pulled something similar about the Iraq War being a scam right before it was launched. Just what would've been the reaction to that? No doubt he/she would've been blasted for lacking journalistic objectivity and likely would've lost their job. Or perhaps for an even more recent comparison, when the Wall Street $700 billion dollar bailout was being debated in September and October, where were the Rick Santellis blasting the promotion of bad behavior and declaring the recipients of the boondoggle to be losers? Instead, all objectivity was thrown out the window and the swindle was pushed through with establishment media hysteria behind it, promoting bad behavior be damned. Yet suddenly, when the issue becomes providing $75 billion in aid to help victims of subprime loan scams keep their homes, outrage becomes acceptable. This, of course, is the bigger point: attacking trillion-dollar war rackets and Wall Street handouts isn't kosher, but calling poor and middle-class home owners "losers" while they struggle to remain afloat is okely-dokely.

The hypocrisy in this case is even worse: on the Website The eXiled, Mark Ames and Yasha Levine reported that General Electric, the parent company to CNBC, received $139 billion in government-backed loan guarantees to keep GE Capital from going bankrupt and sinking the GE empire, CNBC included, with it. That amount, incidentally, is $64 billion more than what nine million subprime victims Santelli mocked as losers are to receive in the Obama plan. Noting these facts, Ames & Levine sarcastically dismissed Santelli as a bailout welfare queen.

The response to Santelli's rant proves just how okay the media establishment was with his hypocritical stand. As Santelli frothed, the folks in the CNBC anchor booth chuckled as though it was entertaining truths. Quickly, the rant went "viral" on YouTube, which is quite unusual since media/entertainment oligopolies such as NBC normally ruthlessly suppress any free distribution of their copyrighted work over the Internet. The "viral" nature of the video was pushed on cyberspace by Matt Drudge, who seemed flushed with an excitement he normally gets only from gay porn. On CNBC's big sister MSNBC, it was promoted by smiling mouthpieces who gushed about the - here comes the "P" word - populist nature of his rant.

Of course, perhaps the fault here lies in the continuing promotion of the George Magazine philosophy which has turned politics into entertainment, reducing actual debate about substance and ideas into shallow celebrity cults of personality. In that context, Santelli is indeed a "populist" hero, as his manufactured celebrity status qualifies him for the name brand certification.

But laying the blame at the feet of poor John-John (who even in death has been the most influential man in journalism over the last decade, though that is definitely influence to the worst) wouldn't be honest. For it wasn't mere celebrity narcissism behind the promotion of the Santelli rant, but rather a heavily financed right-wing machine. A Playboy article by Ames and Levine links Santelli's demand for a "tea party" with a project backed by the deep pockets of the ultra-right Koch family. Santelli’s call for a "Chicago Tea Party" was a mainstream push for an Astroturf "grass-roots" campaign for “tea parties” nationally protesting Obama's economic policies from the right. The case made by Ames and Levine is pretty simple: if Santelli wasn't pimping out his minimal journalistic cred for major Koch bucks, he was definitely selling himself short.

Here's another case study to show how out of whack the framing of "populism" is in the USA: the telling reaction to the AIG bonus scandal. When it was revealed that AIG had paid $165 million out of $170 billion in bonuses to employees, there was legitimate widespread outrage in the public, outrage that was neither orchestrated nor anticipated. (And yes, let's ignore for a second that, at this point, $165 million is chump change for Wall Street.) Establishment politicians chimed in, feigning outrage as well, including Barack Obama, who unconvincingly pretended to be upset, even though his administration directed legislation allowing the bonus loophole. Faced with mass anger, Congress originally pushed for 90 percent surtaxes on Wall Street bailout company bonuses for anyone making over $250K, but after Obama declared opposition to the plan, it appears to be dead on arrival. (Obama's excuse, that to stop the bonuses from going through would interfere with legal contracts, oddly wasn't used when he forced UAW members take massive pay cuts in Detroit.) Quickly, the korporate media, rather than helping the AIG outrage go viral, tried to squash it, with Michael Gerson of the Washington Post decrying the controversy as "demagoguery" rather than genuine.

To be fair, there was some backlash against Santelli as well. Still, it seems the main source of any mainstream outrage against him was not for his crude dismissal of struggling homeowners, but rather for how his rant was an attack on Barack Obama, the patron saint of yuppie liberalism. (Tellingly, it was Jon Stewart, the leading media mouthpiece of yuppie liberalism, who smacked up CNBC the most, using Jim Cramer of the news network's Mad Money as a stand-in after Santelli wimped out on a Daily Show appearance.)

Meanwhile, after Team Obama later announced their trillion dollar "toxic asset" bailout for Wall Street, there was again no populist rant on cable news against subsidizing losers and promoting bad behavior. Putting it all together, let's note the pattern:

* $700 billion TARP bailout deal for Wall Street: Mass cheerleading for the plan

* $787 billion Obama Stimulus Plan that was somewhat aimed at the middle and lower class: Controversy and vigorous debate

* $75 billion Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan fund to help homeowners avoid foreclosure: Smug “journalist” denounces it as a plan to help "losers"

* Attempt to tax $165 million in bonuses at bailout recipient AIG: Controversy is denounced as "demagoguery"

* $1 trillion plan to bailout Wall Street's "toxic assets": No controversy whatsoever


It seems the only time any controversy is hyped in the mainstream press is when the recipient of the money is even partially the poor, the working class and the middle class. Meanwhile, though the public is indeed outraged by the massive swindle over the last year by Wall Street (with up to $9 trillion in government resources pumped in to these korporate parasites) blowhards like Santelli are trying to intentionally confuse the public, equating the Wall Street bailout with the stimulus package and focus the ire of rage against the poor and disenfranchised rather than the bankers.

Perhaps most important, there appears to be a concerted attempt by the right wing to frame Barack Obama's positions as far left, even though he has pushed more to give handouts to Wall Street than even the Bush Administration. With unemployment at 8.5 percent and rising, hopefully the image of Obama as the great progressive champion will soon be gone (and good riddance.) Until then, it appears that even Santelli isn't the worst example of phony populism coming from Chicago.

In any case, we salute Rick Santelli as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Ricky!!!

Sources:

Ames, Mark and Levine, Yasha. "Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High On Koch?" Playboy 27 February 2009 <http://www.playboy.com/blog/2009/02/backstabber.html>.

Ames, Mark and Levine, Yasha. "'Slick Rick' Santelli Is A Bailout Queen." The eXiled 3 March 2009 <http://exiledonline.com/%E2%80%9Cslick-rick%E2%80%9D-santelli-is-a-bailout-queen-tea-party-mascot%E2%80%99s-company-took-139-billion-in-bailout-funds-ge-uses-taxpayer-money-to-censor-its-critics-destroy-bailout-program-f/>.

Ames, Mark and Levine, Yasha. "Victory Gloat: Ames & Levin Serve Up Santelli's Head on The Daily Show." Huffington Post 5 March 2009 <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/05/jon-stewart-eviscerates-c_n_172057.html>.

Calmes, Jackie and Story, Louise. "Outcry Builds in Washington for Recovery of A.I.G. Bonuses" New York Times 19 March 2009 <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/business/19bailout.html>.

"CNBC's Santelli Rants About Housing Bailout." ABC News 19 February 2009 <http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2009/02/cnbcs-santelli.html>.

Donmoyer, Ryan J. "Dodd Blames Obama Administration for Bonus Amendment." Bloomberg 19 March 2009 <http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aT_tMXRy2vDs>.

"Doom Bunker - Glenn Beck's 'War Room'." ColbertNation.com 4 March 2009 <http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/220649/march-04-2009/doom-bunker---glenn-beck-s--war-room->.

Edwards, David and Webster, Stephen C. "Colbert Mocks 'Crazy Eyes' Beck with 'Doom Bunker' Segment." Raw Story 5 March 2009 <http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Colbert_mocks_Glenn_Beck_with_doom_0305.html>.

Ford, Glen. "So President Obama Is Finally Pissed Off? So What?" Black Agenda Report 18 March 2009 <http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/so-president-obama-finally-pissed-so-what>.

Grey, Barry. "Wall Street Celebrates Government Windfall for Banks and Big Investors." World Socialist Web Site 24 March 2009 <http://wsws.org/articles/2009/mar2009/toxi-m24.shtml>.

Oswald, Rachel. "Union Plumbers Heckle and Jeer 'Joe the Plumber' at Rally." Raw Story 31 March 2009 <http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Union_plumbers_heckle_Joe_Plumber_at_0331.html>.

Ritholtz, Barry. "Rick Santelli’s Planted Rant?" The Big Picture 28 February 2009 <http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/02/rick-santellis-faux-rant>.

Sirota, David. "Welcome to Double-standard America." Salon 21 March 2009 <http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/03/21/sirota>.

Spitzer, Eliot. "The Real AIG Scandal." Slate 17 March 2009 <http://www.slate.com/id/2213942/>.

VICTORY GLOAT

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/05/jon-stewart-eviscerates-c_n_172057.html

Gloats / Santelli Watch
VICTORY GLOAT: AMES & LEVINE SERVE UP SANTELLI’S HEAD TO THE DAILY SHOW
By Mark Ames and Yasha Levine
3-5-9

Thanks to the slam dunk investigative piece by your humble correspondents, Rick Santelli was forced to cancel his appearance on the Daily Show last night, leading to this massively-blogged segment ripping Santelli and CNBC a gigantic bleeding asshole. If words could be giant foam hands with pointing index fingers, then these words would be jabbing annoyingly into the ears of every Michelle Malkin/Freedomworks/rightwing tool who tried to cover up their half-baked “grassroots tea party” flop. As the stadiums of foam index finger-waggers chant, “You! You! You!” As in “the whole fucking country is laughing at you idiots!” Ah-ha-ha-hahahahahahaha!!!

So, who else wants some? Huh? You? You want a little?

All of America is laughing at “tea party” mascot Rick Santelli and the sloppy Freedomworks-led rightwing machine that tried to push his protest movement. Do you hear that? Huh, Megan McArdle? Watch this video and weep, every time the audience laughs, multiply it by 300 million laughing Americans, and that’s what’s going on: they’re laughing at you! You tried to shill for the super-wealthy, but you’re all a bunch of fuckin’ amateurs.

Still, thanks for the memories. And for the material. You all played your role of evil corporate-preppy goons like perfect foils, as perfectly as Dean Wormer and Niedermayer to our Belushi. And seriously, you know, there’s a place in the order of things for slapstick goons like you–for, without you, how would the rest of us laugh? As Robert Plant wistfully sang, “Does anybody remember laughter?” And he meant it. So to you rightwing goon amateurs, we say this: Just as there is a place on God’s planet for the guinea worm or the hydatid cyst, there is a place for you slapstick goons too. After all, laughter is a beautiful thing. When we’re doing the laughing, that is. Guess it’s not so funny when you’re laughed at. Ah well, sucks for you.

“Slick Rick” Santelli Is A Bailout Queen

http://exiledonline.com/%E2%80%9Cslick-rick%E2%80%9D-santelli-is-a-bailout-queen-tea-party-mascot%E2%80%99s-company-took-139-billion-in-bailout-funds-ge-uses-taxpayer-money-to-censor-its-critics-destroy-bailout-program-f/

Santelli Watch / eXiled Alert!
“Slick Rick” Santelli Is A Bailout Queen
By Mark Ames and Yasha Levine
March 3rd, 2009

If you’re wondering why disgraced pseudo-rebel Rick Santelli and his pals at CNBC kept strangely quiet about the hundreds of billions in bailouts right up until a couple weeks ago, when the government finally extended its bailout program beyond the corporate world and to regular American citizens, there’s a simple explanation. Rick and his coworkers at CNBC have been living high on the government bailout hog. Yup, “Slick Rick” Santelli and his fair-weather free-market comrades are nuthin’ but old-fashioned welfare queens pimping a newfangled libertarian hustle to cover it all up.

Since last October, CNBC’s parent company General Electric has taken at least $139 billion in government-backed loan guarantees to keep GE Capital Corp from going belly-up and taking the whole company, including Rick Santelli, with it.

No wonder Rick signed that confession on CNBC’s site, professing his love for Obama and the government stimulus package. To quote Tray’s father in Don’t Be A Menace In South Central: “Ain’t nuttin wrong with welfare checks, that’s somethin called ‘free money’!”

We repeat: Rick Santelli, along with Lawrence Kudlow and all the other free-marketeer hustlers at CNBC are nothing but bailout queens posing as angry, principled anti-bailout crusaders. Repeat again, to get it into your thick heads: Rick Santelli’s salary is underwritten by government bailout money… YOU, PROTESTERS AGAINST BAILOUTS, PAY RICK’S SALARY! And yet, gosh, he’s just soooo angry about his taxdollars going to bail you out, because as he said in his famous “rant,” he doesn’t want to bail out “losers” like you. He just wants losers like you to bail out winners like him and Kudlow. And you know, in a way, he’s right–you really are losers if you don’t demand that Rick pays you back the money he took from you and all of us.

This is just too fucking funny, and perfectly captures the off-the-scale hypocrisy, corruption and laughing-in-your-peasant-fucking-face culture that defines America’s ruling elite. Not that it’s helping the company much–GE is up to its sweaty bald-spot in credit default swap instruments, in such deep shit that there might not even be a GE to shovel American taxpayer billions to come summertime, reports Bloomberg.

As for you regular folks out there, all we can say is that anyone who took Santelli seriously (and granted, there are few who really did, most of you were paid to pretend you supported him, right Megan McArdle?) will go down as the biggest jackass suckers that our sucker-infested country has produced since… well, yeah, suckers are born and born-again every nanosecond here, so skip that. I mean let’s face it, you people give “sucker” a bad name. You’re not even Tootsie fucking Pops.

Meanwhile, those of us who are genuinely pissed off about funding ungrateful bailout queens like Santelli–welfare queens who want to deny us our day at the feeding trough, that is– need to take action. We need to demand that “Slick” Rick Santelli returns his bailout money-which is OUR fucking money–money he’s not even gracious enough to say “thank you” for. Give it back, Rick!

HEY RICK, GIVE ME MY FUCKING TAX DOLLARS BACK!

Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High On Koch?

http://www.playboy.com/blog/2009/02/backstabber.html

02.27.09
Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High On Koch?
By Mark Ames and Yasha Levine

Last week, CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli rocketed from being a little-known second-string correspondent to a populist hero of the disenfranchised, a 21st-century Samuel Adams, the leader and symbol of the downtrodden American masses suffering under the onslaught of 21st century socialism and big government. Santelli’s “rant” last-week calling for a “Chicago Tea Party” to protest President Obama’s plans to help distressed American homeowners rapidly spread across the blogosphere and shot right up into White House spokesman Robert Gibbs’ craw, whose smackdown during a press conference was later characterized by Santelli as “a threat” from the White House. A nationwide “tea party” grassroots Internet protest movement has sprung up seemingly spontaneously, all inspired by Santelli, with rallies planned today in cities from coast to coast to protest against Obama’s economic policies.

But was Santelli’s rant really so spontaneous? How did a minor-league TV figure, whose contract with CNBC is due this summer, get so quickly launched into a nationwide rightwing blog sensation? Why were there so many sites and organizations online and live within minutes or hours after his rant, leading to a nationwide protest just a week after his rant?

What hasn’t been reported until now is evidence linking Santelli’s “tea party” rant with some very familiar names in the Republican rightwing machine, from PR operatives who specialize in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns (called “astroturfing”) to bigwig politicians and notorious billionaire funders. As veteran Russia reporters, both of us spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape. To us, the uncanny speed and direction the movement took and the players involved in promoting it had a strangely forced quality to it. If it seemed scripted, that's because it was.

What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.

As you read this, Big Business is pouring tens of millions of dollars into their media machines in order to destroy just about every economic campaign promise Obama has made, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal. At stake isn’t the little guy’s fight against big government, as Santelli and his bot-supporters claim, but rather the “upper 2 percent”’s war to protect their wealth from the Obama Adminstration’s economic plans. When this Santelli “grassroots” campaign is peeled open, what’s revealed is a glimpse of what is ahead and what is bound to be a hallmark of his presidency.

Let’s go back to February 19th: Rick Santelli, live on CNBC, standing in the middle of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, launches into an attack on the just-announced $300 billion slated to stem rate of home foreclosures: “The government is promoting bad behavior! Do we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages?! This is America! We're thinking of having a Chicago tea party in July, all you capitalists who want to come down to Lake Michigan, I'm gonna start organizing."

Almost immediately, the clip and the unlikely "Chicago tea party" quote buried in the middle of the segment, zoomed across a well-worn path to headline fame in the Republican echo chamber, including red-alert headlines on Drudge.

Within hours of Santelli's rant, a website called ChicagoTeaParty.com sprang to life. Essentially inactive until that day, it now featured a YouTube video of Santelli’s “tea party” rant and billed itself as the official home of the Chicago Tea Party. The domain was registered in August, 2008 by Zack Christenson, a dweeby Twitter Republican and producer for a popular Chicago rightwing radio host Milt Rosenberg—a familiar name to Obama campaign people. Last August, Rosenberg, who looks like Martin Short's Irving Cohen character, caused an outcry when he interviewed Stanley Kurtz, the conservative writer who first "exposed" a personal link between Obama and former Weather Undergound leader Bill Ayers. As a result of Rosenberg’s radio interview, the Ayers story was given a major push through the Republican media echo chamber, culminating in Sarah Palin’s accusation that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” That Rosenberg’s producer owns the “chicagoteaparty.com” site is already weird—but what’s even stranger is that he first bought the domain last August, right around the time of Rosenburg’s launch of the “Obama is a terrorist” campaign. It’s as if they held this “Chicago tea party” campaign in reserve, like a sleeper-site. Which is exactly what it was.

ChicagoTeaParty.com was just one part of a larger network of Republican sleeper-cell-blogs set up over the course of the past few months, all of them tied to a shady rightwing advocacy group coincidentally named the “Sam Adams Alliance,” whose backers have until now been kept hidden from public. Cached google records that we discovered show that the Sam Adams Alliance took pains to scrub its deep links to the Koch family money as well as the fake-grassroots “tea party” protests going on today. All of these roads ultimately lead back to a more notorious rightwing advocacy group, FreedomWorks, a powerful PR organization headed by former Republican House Majority leader Dick Armey and funded by Koch money.

On the same day as Santelli's rant, February 19, another site called Officialchicagoteaparty.com went live. This site was registered to Eric Odom, who turned out to be a veteran Republican new media operative specializing in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns. Last summer, Odom organized a twitter-led campaign centered around DontGo.com to pressure Congress and Nancy Pelosi to pass the offshore oil drilling bill, something that would greatly benefit Koch Industries, a major player in oil and gas. Now, six months later, Odom's DontGo movement was resurrected to play a central role in promoting the "tea party" movement.

Up until last month, Odom was officially listed as the “new media coordinator” for the Sam Adams Alliance, a well-funded libertarian activist organization based in Chicago that was set up only recently. Samuel Adams the historical figure was famous for inspiring and leading the Boston Tea Party—so when the PR people from the Chicago-based Sam Adams Alliance abruptly leave in order to run Santelli’s “Chicago Tea Party,” you know it wasn’t spontaneous. Odom certainly doesn’t want people to know about the link: his name was scrubbed from the Sam Adams Alliance website recently, strongly suggesting that they wanted to cover their tracks. Thanks to google caching, you can see the SAA’s before-after scrubbing.

Even the Sam Adams’ January 31 announcement that Odom’s fake-grassroots group was “no longer sponsored by the Alliance” was shortly afterwards scrubbed.

But it’s the Alliance’s scrubbing of their link to Koch that is most telling. A cached page, erased on February 16, just three days before Santelli’s rant, shows that the Alliance also wanted to cover up its ties to the Koch family. The missing link was an announcement that students interested in applying for internships to the Sam Adams Alliance could also apply through the “Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Program” through the Institute for Humane Studies, a Koch-funded rightwing institute designed to scout and nurture future leaders of corporate libertarian ideology. The top two board directors at the Sam Adams Alliance include two figures with deep ties to Koch-funded programs: Eric O’Keefe, who previously served in Koch’s Institute for Humane Studies and the Club For Growth; and Joseph Lehman, a former communications VP at Koch’s Cato Institute.

All of these are ultimately linked up to Koch’s Freedom Works mega-beast. Freedomworks.org has drawn fire in the past for using fake grassroots internet campaigns, called “astroturfing,” to push for pet Koch projects such as privatizing social security. A New York Times investigation in 2005 revealed that a “regular single mom” paraded by Bush’s White House to advocate for privatizing social security was in fact FreedomWorks’ Iowa state director. The woman, Sandra Jacques, also fronted another Iowa fake-grassroots group called “For Our Grandchildren,” even though privatizing social security was really “For Koch And Wall Street Fat Cats.”

If you log into FreedomWorks.org today, its home page features a large photo of Rick Santelli pointing at the viewer like Uncle Sam, with the words: “Are you with Rick? We Are. Click here to learn more.”

FreedomWorks, along with scores of shady front organizations which don’t have to disclose their sponsors thanks to their 501 (c)(3) status, has been at the heart of today’s supposed grassroots, nonpartisan “tea party” protests across the country, supposedly fueled by scores of websites which masquerade as amateur/spontaneous projects, but are suspiciously well-crafted and surprisingly well-written. One slick site pushing the tea parties, Right.org claims, “Right.org is a grassroots online community created by a few friends who were outraged by the bailouts. So we gathered some talent and money and built this site. Please tell your friends, and if you have suggestions for improving it, please let us know. Respectfully, Evan and Duncan.” But funny enough, these regular guys are offering a $27,000 prize for an “anti-bailout video competition.” Who are Evan and Duncan? Do they even really exist?

Even Facebook pages dedicated to a specific city "tea party" events, supposedly written by people connected only by a common emotion, obviously conformed to the same style. It was as if they were part of a multi-pronged advertising campaign planned out by a professional PR company. Yet, on the surface, they pretended to have no connection. The various sites set up their own Twitter feeds and Facebook pages dedicated to the Chicago Tea Party movement. And all of them linked to one another, using it as evidence that a decentralized, viral movement was already afoot. It wasn't about partisanship; it was about real emotions coming straight from real people.

While it’s clear what is at stake for the Koch oligarch clan and their corporate and political allies—fighting to keep the hundreds of billions in surplus profits they’ve earned thanks to pro-rich economic policies over the past 30 years—what’s a little less obvious is Santelli’s link to all this. Why would he (and CNBC) risk their credibility, such as it is, as journalists dispensing financial information in order to act as PR fronts for a partisan campaign?

As noted above, Santelli’s contract with CNBC runs out in a few months. His 10 years with the network haven’t been remarkable, and he’ll enter a brutal downsizing media job market. Thanks to the “tea party” campaign, as the article notes, Santelli’s value has suddenly soared. If you look at the scores of blogs and fake-commenters on blogs (for example, Daily Blog, a slick new blog launched in January which is also based in Chicago) all puff up Santelli like he’s the greatest journalist in America, and the greatest hero known to mankind. Daily Bail, like so much of this “tea party” machine, is “headquartered nearby” to Santelli, that is, in Chicago. With Odom, the Sam Adams Alliance, and the whole “tea party” nexus: “Rick, this message is to you. You are a true American hero and there are no words to describe what you did today except your own. Headquartered nearby, we will be helping the organization in whatever way possible.”

It’s not difficult to imagine how Santelli hooked up with this crowd. A self-described “Ayn Rand-er,” one of Santelli's colleagues at CNBC, Lawrence Kudlow, played a major role in both FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth.

So today’s protests show that the corporate war is on, and this is how they’ll fight it: hiding behind “objective” journalists and “grassroots” new media movements. Because in these times, if you want to push for policies that help the super-wealthy, you better do everything you can to make it seem like it’s “the people” who are “spontaneously” fighting your fight. As a 19th century slave management manual wrote, “The master should make it his business to show his slaves, that the advancement of his individual interest, is at the same time an advancement of theirs. Once they feel this, it will require little compulsion to make them act as becomes them.” (Southern Agriculturalist IX, 1836.) The question now is, will they get away with it, and will the rest of America advance the interests of Koch, Santelli, and the rest of the masters?

Sheryl Gay Stolberg, please define "populist"

http://mediamatters.org/countyfair/200902210004

NYT's Sheryl Gay Stolberg, please define "populist"
Sat, Feb 21, 2009
Eric Boehlert

The Times reporter dutifully anoints the previously unknown Rick Santelli of CNBC a "populist" because he uncorked an on-air rant about the Obama housing recovery while reporting among all-white, all-male traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It was a rant where Santelli suggested Obama was leading America down the road to communism.

But nowhere in her article does the Times reporter explain why Santelli, who Chris Matthews rightfully likened to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, in any way tapped into a "populist" feeling. The former VP for Drexel Burnham Lambert (you remember that `80's hothouse of populist fever, right) simply mouthed divisive, right-wing talking points, and disconnected media elites crowned him a populist anyway. The closest Stolberg came to suggesting Santelli articulated populist rhetoric was when she pointed out:

[Santelli] called for the creation of a Web site where Americans could vote on whether they "really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages."

She might think that's "populist," but probably lots of Times readers simply chalk that up as being idiotic.

Gibbs Assails CNBC Personality

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/02/defending-presi.html

Defending President's Housing Proposal, Gibbs Assails CNBC Personality
February 20, 2009
Political Punch
Power, pop, and probings from ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper

The White House lashed back today at CNBC'S Rick Santelli, a CNBC personality who assailed President Obama's housing rescue plan Thursday on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

"I'm not entirely sure where Mr. Santelli lives or in what house he lives," said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs during a press briefing. "But the American people are struggling every day to meet their mortgage, stay in their job, pay their bills, to send their kids to school, and to hope that they don't get sick or that somebody they care for gets sick and sends them into bankruptcy. I think we left a few months ago the -- the adage that, if it was good for a derivatives trader, that it was good for Main Street. I think the verdict is in on that."

"Mr Santelli doesn't know what he's. talking about," Gibbs said a little later. He was responding to a question about public anger at the fact that some people who acted irresponsibly may benefit from the president's plan, a question which mentioned "that cable rant on the floor of the exchange."

"Mr. Santelli has argued -- I think quite wrongly -- that this plan won't help everyone," Gibbs said. "This plan will help, by the money that's invested in Freddie and Fannie, will drive down mortgage rates for millions of Americans."

Concluded Gibbs, "now, every day when I come out here, I spend a little time reading, studying on the issues, asking people who are smarter than I am questions about those issues. I would encourage him to read the president's plan and understand that it will help millions of people, many of whom he knows. I'd be more than happy to have him come here and read it."

"I'd be happy to buy him a cup of coffee," Gibbs wryly added, in remarks he seemed to have prepared. "Decaf."

"Let me do this, too," Gibbs said. "This is a copy of the president's home affordability plan. It's available on the White House Web site, and I would encourage him, download it, hit print, and begin to read it."

Santelli, who has been a member of both the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade, lashed out at the Obama administration yesterday for "promoting bad behavior."

"We certainly don’t want to put stimulus forth and give people a whopping $8 or $10 in their check and think they ought to save it," effused Santelli on CNBC from the floor of the Exchange. "And in terms of modifications, I tell you what, I have an idea. The new administration is big on computers and technology – how about this, President and new administration? Why don’t you put up a Web site to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages, or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water.”

There were some cheers from those surrounding Santelli on the floor.

“This is America. How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hand."

There were boos.

"President Obama are you listening?” Santelli asked.

Santelli said, “We’re thinking about having a Chicago tea party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing it! We're going to be dumping in some derivative securities, what do you think about that?"

Asked about the general benefit of cable news discussions on the economy, Gibbs said "people are entitled to their own opinion, not just their own facts."

Gibbs said "I don't think anybody can sit in front of some of the TV and listen for an hour and not hear somebody that's making a case that just -- I've got to assume they knowing -- they know just isn't true."

He added that if "I hadn't worked on the campaign, but simply watched the cable news score-keeping of the campaign, we lost virtually every day of the race...If I would have just watched cable TV, I long would have crawled into a hole and given up this whole prospect of changing the country."

Rick Santelli: Asshole of the Year...

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2009/02/cnbcs-santelli.html

CNBC's Santelli Rants About Housing Bailout
February 19, 2009

CNBC's Rick Santelli made a splash this morning. It is being called "Santelli's Rant" or "Santelli's Chicago Tea Party".

Santelli derided the Obama administration's housing rescue plan, which aims to spend more than $200 billion when all is said and done to try and keep people in their homes. The goal? By helping the hardest hit, you help everyone by raising home values.

Back to Santelli. He was at his perch on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade and with a nod to those around him he blasted Obama's plan. Here is a transcript of what he said:

Rick Santelli CNBC transcript (video):

"Mr. Ross has nailed it. The government is promoting bad behavior. We certainly don’t want to put stimulus pork and give people a whopping $8 or $10 in their check and think that they ought to save it.

And in terms of modifications, I tell you what. I have an idea. The new administration is big on computers and technology. How about this, Mr. President and new administration. Why don’t you put up a website to have people vote on the internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers mortgages? Or would they like to at least buy buy cars, buy a house that is in foreclosure … give it to people who might have a chance to actually prosper down the road and reward people that can carry the water instead of drink the water?

This is America! (he turns to the traders nearby)

How many people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgages that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hand!

President Obama, are you listening?

You know Cuba used to have mansions and a relatively decent economy. They moved from the individual to the collective. Now they're driving '54 Chevys.

It's time for another tea party.

What we are doing in this country will make Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin roll over in their graves."