This article was first published on AlterNet

With the elections for governor just around the corner, most California voters probably think they have a pretty good grasp of the pros and cons of Republican candidate Meg Whitman: on the downside, she’s an aloof billionaire who can’t be bothered to vote or remember her own servants’ names after nine years, and she’s dabbled in the sort of insider double-dealing with Goldman Sachs that’s brought the nation’s economy to its knees.

On the plus side, many still regard Whitman as one of the most effective and successful business leaders around. Three decades of relentless pro-business PR have convinced a lot of voters that our best business leaders know best, and that’s been Whitman’s main selling point, going back to her first campaign ad:

“I have run large organizations. I know how to create jobs. I know how to focus. I know how to balance a budget. And, I think, a business perspective is a bit of what California needs right now.”

But what few people outside of the investment community know is what a disaster Meg Whitman’s business career really was. In fact, Meg Whitman’s record in the corporate world reads like a laundry list of failure: it’s a resume marked by fraud, gross incompetence, wasteful spending and gross disregard for anyone’s interests but her own. In her obsessive drive to become a billionaire, Whitman left a legacy of bitterness among untold numbers of jilted employees, shareholders and eBay clients, while enriching herself and a handful of fellow executives and investment bankers. (more…)

This article was first published in Alternet.

Why are the hoppin’-mad Teabaggers so oddly quiet these days, ever since the BP oil disaster? That’s what Thomas Frank, author of What’s The Matter With Kansas? asked last week in his column, “Laissez-faire Meets The Oil Spill.” Ideologically, it’s painfully obvious why the Teabaggers are now the Teagaggers: their free-market gospel got mugged by oil-drenched reality — a reality so horrific that even pollster Frank Luntz couldn’t spin the BP disaster as the government’s fault. Best to just shut up when you’re that wrong.

But there’s another, more concrete reason why the Tea Party revolutionaries melted back into their suburbs as soon as the enormity of the Gulf spill disaster hit: The Tea Party evolved out of the pro-offshore drilling astroturf movement in 2008. They even share some of the same organizers and front groups, from PR operative like Eric Odom, to advocacy groups like FreedomWorks, whose combined efforts on the “Drill Here! Drill now!” astroturf campaign succeeded in opening up all of America’s coastlines and waters to offshore drilling, overturning a 27-year ban thanks to threats of “a Boston-style Tea Party,” as one Republican put it in the summer of 2008. (more…)

We’ve been getting a lot of letters from our readers complaining to us about a case of journalistic theft: one after another, the liberal media is ripping off our 6-week-old scoop exposing the Tea Party-FreedomWorks AstroTurfing connections, and they’re not citing us as the source. Yes, even the crunchy do-gooders can behave like sleazy little vultures. We just want all our readers out there to know that we’re aware of the situation, we’re on top of it, our people have been debriefed, and we are taking appropriate measures that we cannot comment on at this time. Plagiarists and literary thieves should know that eXiled Online does not take your plagiarism and sleaze lightly. Ask the Guardian newspaper, which was forced to post this humiliating admission and apology at the TOP of an article that their correspondent stole from us; or ask James Frey, who was first outted by John Dolan as a fraud months before Frey was forced to apologize on Oprah. So, readers, we appreciate your letters, which we’re publishing below. Keep vigilant, kids! Like McGruff says, let’s take a bite out of journalistic slime! (more…)

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!!! (more…)

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. (more…)

Our article last Friday exposing the familiar old rightwing corporate machine behind the fake “tea party” protests, and Rick Santelli’s highly questionable role as the one-man MC for the protests’ launch event, wound up crashing the tea party’s mojo, and forcing Santelli to issue a giant apologia on CNBC’s site. It’s titled “I Want To Set The Record Straight,” but it should be called, “I want to keep my shitty second-fiddle job and not get thrown out of my 2,500 square foot house.” You can hear Rick’s pain as the spiked CNBC legal department butt-plug is shoved deeper and deeper in, paragraph after paragraph… especially this one line that will have Santelli sleeping on his stomach for months, where he bleats: “I hope that the President and the final stimulus plan succeed.” Thank you sir, may I have another! (more…)

This article first appeared on Playboy.com

Chris Matthews: “You’re up there with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity… It’s quite a team.”
Rick Santelli (smiling and nodding): “It is quite a team!”
Hardball, MSNBC, Feb 20, 2009

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. (more…)