Great Quotes

"I'm a mother. I'm a wife. I'm an American veteran, and I'm one of your middle-class Americans. And quite frankly, I’m exhausted. I’m exhausted defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for, and deeply disappointed with where we are right now. I have been told that I voted for a man who said he was going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class. I’m one of those people, and I’m waiting, sir. I’m waiting."

Velma Hart, to Barack Obama during a "Town Hall Discussion on Jobs" airing on CNBC

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 - 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/>.

I Gotta Chill

http://checkingforelves.blogspot.com/2009/04/i-gotta-chill.html

I Gotta Chill
Herbert Barry Woodrose
Saturday, April 18, 2009

The country's wetting itself over dead teenagers in Somalia, and not asking how the fuck that all started. The AP is cheerleading a feel good campaign that most of State Media is joining in - Time, ABC, CNN, all of 'em are lining up - I heard that whacko that Jon Stewart nearly beat to death, that whacko from CNBC, declared the Depression over -

All of them are starting to get real stern about whether we really need Unions or whether we have to entertain the oligarchs for just a little longer and hope they meant what they said all those years: that we didn't need Roosevelt to create Minimum Wage, we really could've trusted the corporate Masters to take care of us. The Af-Pak war is burning brightly, banks are being encouraged to lie (again) in order to calm down the public. Mike Albert over at Z Mag had a plan for fair economics, and no one in this country is listening - he does decent business around the world it seems, but here he might as well be speaking in binary. Or Economics, for that matter, for all anyone seems to know about that subject.

I gotta chill. I'm gonna burn the hell out and there's no point to that.

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?

Anchors Mortified That Paul Was Allowed Air Time

http://www.infowars.net/articles/february2009/260209CNBC.htm

CNBC Anchors Mortified That Ron Paul Was Allowed Air Time
"This is not going as planned"
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Thursday, Feb 26th, 2009

CNBC anchors were left dumbfounded and acted overtly cantankerous yesterday after Congressman Ron Paul's opening statement at the House Financial Services Committee was broadcast live to an audience of millions.

CNBC went live to the House, clearly without knowing that the Texas Congressman had the initial Republican statement at the hearing of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.

After the Congressman spent two and a half minutes lecturing Bernanke on sound money principles, warning that the financial crisis cannot be solved by merely creating credit out of thin air, CNBC cut back to the studio.

Anchors Erin Burnett and Mark Haines were so perturbed by what they had just heard that they immediately cut to a commercial break:

Haines: "This is not going as planned"

Burnett: "No it is not"

Haines: "We were told that there would be a very limited number of opening statements, and it seems to be getting out of control."

Burnett: "Here's what we forgot, everybody is taking this live, you know what that means? Why would they miss an opportunity for free air time?"

Haines: "We're going to take a commercial break and get them out of the way, so that when something really substandard [he must mean substantial?] is happening, we don't have to interrupt them."

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.