This afternoon, groups of angry conservatives will gather on street corners and in parks across the country to protest.
They will carry signs and deliver speeches expressing outrage over the Democrats’ stimulus bill, over entitlements, over budget pork, over taxes. They will dump boxes of tea on the ground and wear three-cornered hats. The leading lights of the Republican Party will be on hand to cheer them on.
But as with so much on the right, these apparent displays of populist rage are not what they will seem.
Six weeks ago, two of us (Mark Ames and Yasha Levine) published an investigation exposing the nascent “Tea Party” protest movement for what it really is: a carefully planned AstroTurf (or “fake grassroots”) lobby campaign hatched and orchestrated by the conservative advocacy organization FreedomWorks. Within days, pieces of the scam had crumbled, exposing a small group of right-wing think tanks and shady nonprofits at its core. (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…)
CNBC’s Jim Cramer has positioned himself as yet another champion of the people against the evil government. A couple of days ago, the method-actor/ CNBC host of “Mad Money” stirred up a hullabaloo when he pretended to be angry and attacked the Obama government’s economic program as “the greatest wealth destruction I’ve seen by a president.”
Right. Let’s leave aside for a moment the fact that Cramer is a giant welfare queen whose salary is subsidized by the $139 billion taxpayer dollars to his parent company, General Electric. For now, let’s just try and answer this simple question: ”Who destroys your wealth more: Obama or Jim Cramer?” (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…)
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…)
There aren’t a huge number of constants in the world of finance. First of all, that word, finance, includes a guy sitting in a cube cold-calling retirees while he’s working at Fidelity. It also includes Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock, who runs a firm of over 3000 people with (even now) over a trillion dollars of other peoples’ money he’s running. However, there are a few constants. Most of us make a decent living (just so you don’t quit reading, I’m easily in the bottom 25% of this business, I’m a computer programmer at a small fund and they can always threaten to send my job to Bangalore, which the probably would if it weren’t an annoyance to do so). All of us know people who make way, way more money than we do. We’d like to have their jobs. We’re all scared to death we’re going to blowup and go broke. (more…)
Today, Drudge and the rightwingers are going crazy red-alerting CNBC’s Rick Santelli as some kind of righteous anti-Obama freemarket revolutionary. There’s a clip of him standing in the middle of the Chicago Exchange, yelling: “The government is promoting bad behavior! Do we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages?!!!! This is America!!!!!” (Does anyone recall Santelli screaming like this over the much larger bailout of his Wall Street friends? Or does he only squeal when regular middle-class Americans get some help?) The big question for Santelli is this: Why does this idiot, who talked about how the global economy was “healthy” and America’s soon would be too, still have a job? (more…)
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