We talk about the Villagers a lot on C&L, and you'll hear the term used in many progressive blogs as well. Tom Friedman is a high ranking beltway Villager and Rick Santelli is a free market CNBC/wingnut Villager. Remember, he did his rebel yell that helped kick off the tea party by blaming homeowners for the mortgage crisis instead of his Wall street pals who actually created it. However, Santelli told us that the economy was healthy right before the meltdown. Anyway, this is what you get when you put two Villagers together on one screen. The debate was about Social Security. Rick Perry, the new tea party favorite calls it a Ponzi scheme. Obviously Santelli wants to privatize it so he and his CEO pals can make tons of cash off of the backs of the middle class again and put their retirements at risk.

They'll attack it from any angle, even if it's an insane one. I hadn't heard that Social Security is like a chain letter before, have you?

Texas Gov. Rick Perry stuck to his claim during last night’s presidential debate that Social Security is “a Ponzi scheme.” The media are getting a lot of mileage out of that sound bite, and the Ponzi-scheme debate is very much alive this morning. On Thursday’s “Squawk Box” on CNBC, CME Group floor reporter Rick Santelli, known to some as the father of the tea party movement, challenged New York Times columnist and Rick Perry critic Thomas Friedman on that claim. “I’d just like to know — you know, I was watching that debate last night, although it really wasn't a debate,” Santelli said. “It was like a weird press conference. But I would like to know — does Mr. Friedman think Social Security is a Ponzi scheme?”

That led to a heated back-and-forth between Friedman and Santelli:

FRIEDMAN: No, I don’t think it’s a Ponzi scheme.

SANTELLI: Earlier in the show you said that we’re putting a burden on our kids that’s unsustainable. What’s the definition of a Ponzi scheme?

FRIEDMAN: It’s a program that made promises that it cannot keep in full and it needs to be fixed and reformed.

SANTELLI: Isn’t that exactly what a Ponzi pyramid is?

FRIEDMAN: I don’t think it is a Ponzi scheme as a criminal endeavor.

SANTELLI: No, no — forget the criminal side. You need more people to perpetuate a myth because if the people stop the myth is known to all. That’s my definition of a Ponzi scheme. Let’s call at it chain letter, a pyramid scheme. Isn’t that by definition what Social Security is? Take the legalities and fraud out.

STEVE LIESMAN: Why is it a Ponzi scheme, Rick?

FRIEDMAN: It is pay as we go. Ronald Reagan fixed it. Why can’t we fix it?

SANTELLI: What does Ronald Reagan have to do with my question?

FRIEDMAN: What does your question have to do with reality?

MICHELLE CARUSO CABRERA: We brought it up.

Continue reading »

Rick Santelli, the CNBC talking head who helped launch the Tea Party/John Bircher/Angry Conservative movement, was at it again on CNBC on Monday. We credit his rant against homeowners as playing a major role in originating the Tea Partiers in our new book, Over The Cliff.

He's like a lot of these free-market religious freaks who believe that tax cuts magically pay for themselves, even when Ronald Reagan proved that a fallacy. For anyone to deny the First Commandment of Conservatism was too much for him to handle and he stormed off the set.

Think Progress:

Contributor Steve Liesman rebutted, asking Santelli, “Unaffected how? Unaffected by being much higher if more teachers and policemen were laid off?” Liesman also challenged the familiar conservative tax refrain, stating, “In general, I would say the rule is this, is that lower taxes generally do not pay for themselves.”

Liesman’s points threw Santelli into a mental breakdown. When prompted on whether tax cuts would truly help address the deficit, he and fellow right-wing economist Jeff Nielson launched into a childish tirade against government spending and the capital gains tax:

LIESMAN: Let me get this straight, all you guys wanna cut taxes en route to bringing down the deficit,

SANTELLI: No I didn’t say anything about taxes Steve. I want the government to stop spending! Stop spending! Stop spending! Stop spending! Stop spending! That’s what we want! Stop spending!

NIELSON: And cut capital gains spending! Cut capital gains. Cut capital..make it zero percent and see what happens. [...]

LIESMAN: You know, you know I just — I just keep saying what the data show and the data show that the tax cuts don’t pay for themselves. By the way –

SANTELLI: Oh you wouldn’t know data if it bit you on the nose.

NIELSON: Boo.

SANTELLI: Go read some Austrian economist instead of the funny pages!

Liesman tried one more time to question how “we are going to cut taxes and deficit spending at the same time.” Santelli yelled in reply: “Go back to Russia where you understand the state and the citizen” and walked off the set.

Santelli and Nielson are just flatly wrong on their stance on federal spending and taxes. As Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman recently noted, “[P]enny-pinching at a time like this isn’t just cruel; it endangers the nation’s future” and “doesn’t even do much to reduce our future debt burden, because stinting on spending now threatens the economic recovery, and with it the hope for rising revenues.”

Santelli acts just like your typical WATB conservative when confronted. I had a similar situation with Andrew Breitbart at a panel we were on together in Los Angeles. He's a typical bully and he didn't like it very much when I got into his face after he picked up my notebook when I wasn't looking and began reading my notes. Santelli doesn't appear to be drunk, as did Breitbart, but a hissy fit is still a hissy fit. It tells us everything we need to know about them.

(via CNBC)

Remember Rick Santelli's rant that put the bow on the tea party movement for FOX News? The media seems to willfully forget how important this rant was to mobilize them and shift the blame for the mortgage crisis from Santelli's Wall Street fat cats to the working class. The poor under-appreciated mortgage lenders and CEO's were the victims of people who couldn't afford to pay for a mortgage because they were too stupid to understand the legal documents, but got themselves a house anyway.

CNBC had one of their talking head panels with Larry Kudlow at the helm which focused on financial reform and the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Once the idea of predatory lending comes up the CNBCers get their freak on and blamed the uneducated poor people for all the destruction the housing bubble caused during the Bush administration as usual except for Janet Takakoli.

Matt Taibbi takes the lead:

Look at about the 5-minute mark of this video — Janet Tavakoli debating Rick Santelli about predatory lending. You basically have a whole panel of CNBC goons pooh-poohing the idea that predatory lending took place, setting up the inevitable revisionist history that the 2008 crash was caused by individual homeowners borrowing beyond their means.

My favorite part of this comes roughly at the six-minute mark. Tavakoli has just deftly explained how a lot of the predatory practices worked — people with limited financial literacy were presented with long and complicated mortgage deals, and told they would have a fixed payment in perpetuity or a guaranteed re-finance, or were nailed by fraudulent appraisals. Then she mentioned the big one, the fact that investment banks then took all these mortgages and with eyes wide open securitized them and sold them off as worthy investments to suckers on the other end of the chain.

While she’s saying all this stuff, Santelli, who is one of the fathers of the Tea Party movement, is shaking his head furiously, video-scoffing at everything she’s saying. When he finally does get a chance to speak, this is what he says:

Here’s my problem with this. It takes two to tango. You can’t cheat an honest man.

You can’t cheat an honest man? What the f*&k does that mean? This whole scene sort of encapsulates what’s wrong with the Tea Party movement

Amen, brother Taibbi. Not many people watch these CNBC programs, but this is the narrative that Santelli and his brethren like Melissa Francis have helped to propagate into the main stream.

Digby caught Taibbi's post and observes Santelli at his circus clown best:

The Fox/CNBC types have very cannily latched on this narrative to rewrite the history of the financial crisis. They know that Tea Partiers will go for any narrative that puts blame on poor (and especially poor minority) homeowners, because the idea of poor blacks and Hispanics borrowing beyond their means fits seamlessly with their world view. But this is a situation where poor minorities were really incidental to a much larger fraud scheme that culminated in a welfare program — the bank bailouts — that dwarfs the entire “entitlement” infrastructure. But the millions of people who are actually in the Tea Party movement seem to have absolutely no idea that their so-called leaders, the Santellis of their world, are shilling for tax cheats and crooks and welfare bums of the sort they would despise (perhaps even more than their black and Hispanic neighbors), if they could actually see them.

Unfortunately all the elites, political and otherwise, have a vested interest in keeping the rubes focused on the blacks and browns so it's hard to see the mechanism by which they will be revealed. And that's the whole purpose of right wing populism.

Anyone who has taken out a mortgage knows how complicated the paper work is and you depend on the mortgage broker to be honest with you. That's not what happened when the money was flying around and these predators were sucking on the economy like Vampires in heat. Only they didn't stop with their usual victims (the American people) because of their blood lust and they sucked on it all the way through their own system as Taibbi points out until it crashed and burned.

He's baaaack. Rick Santelli, the right wing hero and the man who too cowardly to represent CNBC on The Daily Show is now calling the payouts of bonuses to AIG executives nothing more than a bathroom product compared to other monies being spent. He says he's outraged as anyone over it though, but a contract is a contract.

SANTELLI: Now, think about it this way. Maybe I'm missing something. But the outrage seems to be about M's, millions of dollars, right? $165 million, OK? But I would think that it should be looked at as a pretty big positive, because when you go from the M, maybe you should try to go to the B's, which is the billions of dollars, and maybe that's going to even enlighten it for the T, trillions of dollars. You know, $165 million is like worrying about 16.5 cents, while $165 maybe necessitates a little more outrage. What do you guys think?

Watch the beginning of the clip and notice how CNBC's Melissa Francis and MSNBC's Contessa Brewer defend Santelli calling Americans who got underwater in the housing market as "losers," by saying it was just in the heat of the moment.

Brewer: ...he called them losers... Francis: I think he regretted that word. Brewer:...and his rants, well you know sometimes we say things in the heat of the moment that is easy to regret...

CNBC ran an ad promotion based on Santelli's Rebel Yell rant so do you think he regretted it at all?

Francis: This time Santelli's making waves, trying to put the AIG bonus outrage into perspective.... The man the legend, CNBC's Rick Santelli joins us now live from Chicago. Rick, alright you've got to explain the logic to us here because the people who love to misinterpret you are already out there doing there work. Santell: I am as outraged as anyone for rewarding bad behavior, however if there were contracts in place....We are now focusing on a sixteen dollar towel rack in the bathroom, but times that by a thousand....

Francis, who I watched say that Joe the Plumber was a star on this time block for MSNBC certainly has Santelli's back. Is she saying he was misquoted when he called average American "loser?" It's amazing how tone deaf these pundits and politicians have been over AIG and their feelings about Wall street. The public is furious and to think that a meager 165 million dollars of bonuses wouldn't upset America is insane. And Obama's people have not done a good job on explaining this situation either. I'd like to see Santelli forfeit his entire salary since he's been a leading voice on CNBC throughout the worst economic meltdown in generations as a show of solidarity with the American people, who he believes are losers. And the amount of signatures on our FiX CNBC petition is now higher than the DOW.

Just another day and just another conservative scandal. I thought the organization around Rick Santelli's rant was a little too smooth, a little too perfectly orchestrated for something not to be very, very wrong about it. That's why I've been so vocal about it and that's why it infuriated me so much, but I had no idea how deep this deception went.

The right wing moneychangers tried once again to control the message and lie to the American people to push their agenda that only hurts America. The right wing elite hated FDR because he turned on his own class of people and put the average American worker ahead of them. They were shocked that he would care about the state of our nation over the vested interests in a very small few. I did write that Rick's behavior was indicative of most talking heads that appear on the Wall Street shows because they are slaves to the very wealthy. These same people are terrified that Barack Obama may indeed reach America in the same way that FDR reached into the hearts of a depressed and hopeless American population that was beat down by the the depression back in 1929.

Rick Santelli is a traitor to this country and he should be fired immediately along with all those that participated in this fraud. The rest should be exposed and made to answer for this charade.

What a great job of reporting by Mark Ames and Yasha Levine of Playboy:

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.

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.

Please read the entire article: Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High On Koch?

All I can say is thankfully we have blogs to help expose this massive corrosion that has seeped into the bowels of our nation and uses our national media on all levels to mainline their corruption. Shame on them all.

As whenwego at DKos writes:

It appears that this is the brain child of the shadowy Sam Adams project:

The Sam Adams Alliance, a nonprofit conservative organization, has started an ambitious project this year to encourage right-leaning activists and bloggers to get online and focus on local and state issues.

And the coordination is now expanding to business interests that are opposed to Obama's programs:

Industries from health care to agribusiness to mining that stand to lose under President Barack Obama's policy agenda are ramping up lobbying campaigns to derail or modify his plans.

The day after Mr. Obama formally laid out his policy goals in his first address to Congress, the former chief executive of HCA Inc. unveiled a $20 million campaign to pressure Democrats to enact health-care legislation based on free-market principles.

And don't bother to ask who is behind the Sam Adams Alliance, because all that is 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.

Rick Santelli went on the air with ex-con G. Gordon Liddy and said the White House was threatening him after his Wall street-wingnut-frat boy rant on CNBC.

SANTELLI: He started that press conference saying, "I don't know where he lives. I don't know where his house is." This is the press secretary of the White House. Is that the kind of thing we want? Is that what it --

LIDDY: That's a veiled threat.

SANTELLI: It really is. You know what? This isn't about left or right. I wasn't for any of the bailouts under the last administration. But I don't realize or recall reading the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution where it says that once you vote for somebody in November, you put duct tape over your mouth and you can't say a word for the next four years. That's just not right.

LIDDY: No, it isn't. And that's a veiled threat, you know, "We know where you live," and so forth.

SANTELLI: It really -- it's quite scary.

I watched him on the TODAY Show this morning, which gave him plenty of air time and when Matt Lauer confronted him by saying it's very silly to think the White House was threatening him, he actually blamed his wife. Kinda shows you the make up of these carnival on air bullies. He actually blames his wife. What a phony.

These same Wall Streeters whining about average Americans getting a bailout have themselves been saved by the government already -- otherwise, these clowns would be going lining up at the soup kitchen. But if American families are being helped, people like Santelli are appalled. What kinda populism izzat?

LAUER: Let me take this a step further. Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, commented, called you out in the briefing room, and after you heard his comments, you said that he was threatening you. Are you serious about that?

SANTELLI: Listen, let's put it this way. Matt, you're married, are you not?

LAUER: Yeah, I am.

SANTELLI: OK. This is more about the feelings my wife had when she watched the body language and listened to what he was saying, and I think you understand --

LAUER: But this is the White House press secretary. Do you think he's going to threaten you on national television?

So now his wife is a body language expert like Bill O'Reilly uses, and she found hidden meanings in Robert Gibbs comments. Talk about Zombie excuses.

SANTELLI: Well, let's rephrase the question. Do we think it's normal to be named by name, as opposed to the general media at large, say the cable guy or some of the comments? I find, my wife finds, and many of my friends find that the direct confrontation and pointing me out by name just is not ordinary, and I'll leave it at that and let people make their own judgment.

Continue reading »

Santelli's rant is getting a lot of media attention, but listen to him say right before the economy collapsed that he thought it was healthy. Wow, just like his hero John McCain. And you know how that worked out for him.

“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?

On September 2 of last year, just two weeks before the financial markets crashed and we entered this global depression, he was on the same CNBC program, standing in the same stock exchange, saying that the economy is healthy and that the reason there’s talk of recession is just because the business media was itself in a recession.

But suddenly he's a genius that's speaking for all Americans now...Right before the markets and financials collapsed, the majority of stock show talking heads were all saying about the same thing.

Watching Rick Santelli's embarrassing diatribe at the expense of the American people made me realize that these Wall Street frat boys still don't get it. America is sick and tired of the riches they have manipulated out of the system and then be lectured by people who make more money than 100 middle class workers put together. The next time I want advice on how to live I'll be sure to ask a man who was deeply involved in "derivatives."

California hates Enron and all the damage it caused us and America, but these are Santelli's peeps. I watch the Saturday FOX Stock shows religiously and he fits right in with Cavuto's crowd. Don't blame the crooked mortgage lenders who were having bidding wars to acquire their next mansion, but blame first time buyers or average Americans, the lifeblood of our society and call them "losers."

Santelli needs to own that he is the loser and if it wasn't for the gasbag insider crowd that gives his words a modicum of respect, crowds would gather outside his home with torches and pitchforks. Jane nails him and his ilk.

Rick Santelli is just the explosive Id of CNBC, saying what everyone else thinks. Somehow it's not the pervasive institutional rot, the criminal malfeasance at the highest levels, or the Chairman of the Federal Reserve telling Americans over and over again that housing prices would never go down.

They have convinced themselves that the real problem is once again people at the absolute bottom of the economic scale. If they'd only used appropriate "judgment" and lived within their means, we'd all be fine.

Chris Matthews labelling Santelli another "Sean Hannity" is cool with me because he backs up their positions, but that's what most of CNBC and FOX news are all about. On the TODAY show, Santelli went on about how all home owners should get help. That's what, like 100 million homes? Is he asking for another 10 trillion dollars? Part of President Obama's plan is to keep the values of homes as high as possible. By helping out the few, he is actually saving the overall housing market thousands of dollars per home. Do people want to see their houses lose half its value and then get a tax break? I don't think so...

With Chris Matthews, the idiot Bush Depression trader says shame on them for signing something without reading the fine print. I read it and didn't understand it either. That's why I hired a freaking mortgage broker.

Chris got him to admit that he voted for John McCain. What a shock. We were all lied to at almost every level so these slickly dressed charlatans could pillage the country for all it was worth.

And if anyone has bought a house and tried to get a mortgage, they would know that the documentation is gibberish to most of us. We rely on the lenders to accurately navigate the system and not get abused by it. Santelli knows this too. I was lied to when I bought a house many years ago. The escrow agent even manipulated my trust and I watched what happened in California as these greedy money changers almost destroyed the entire economy.

I go to the DMV to get a license and I have to go through a series of requirements to meet what's needed in order to acquire it. If the same principle had been applied to the mortgage lenders, then people would not have been qualified to refinance or get into a house they couldn't afford. It's really that simple.

I hope he keeps it up because Americans are in need of help and not lectures from the likes of Rick Santelli. He only helps to expose the disturbed world view shared by the Bush loving-John McCain Wall Streeters.

See his Today Show spot below:

Continue reading »

Robert Gibbs took to the podium today to defend President Obama's foreclosure recovery plan and took direct aim at Rick Santelli and his hysterical rant on CNBC yesterday.

"I'm not entirely sure where Mr. Santelli lives or in what house he lives in. But the American people are struggling every day to meet their mortgage, stay in their jobs, pay their bills to send their kids to school, and to hope that they don't get sick or somebody they care for gets sick that sends them into bankruptcy. I think we left a few months ago 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.

"I would be more than happy to have him come here and read it. I'd be happy to buy him a cup of coffee....decaf."

Hey, I'd love to see Rick Santelli sit down with these families and explain to them what losers they are - compared to the Masters of the Universe like Santelli who got the country into this mess, I mean. Moral hazard, my ass:

The orders came while Navy Lt. Adam Diaz was winding down a one-year stint in Baghdad: Report to the Navy Annex in Arlington for a new assignment in April. -- Given the military lifestyle, the prospect of a move came as no surprise to Diaz, 31, who has spent his adult life in the Navy. The shock came when he spoke with his wife, Stephanie Diaz, about the value of the Jacksonville, Fla., home they bought in June 2006, near the height of the housing bubble. -- "Hey, by the way," she recalls telling him. "The house has been valued for about 50 grand less than when we bought it."

The housing crisis is hitting military families particularly hard, according to real estate agents and service member advocacy groups. Many who bought during the boom and must now relocate because of fresh orders are faced with selling their homes at a big loss. They are finding few buyers, or even renters, particularly in the hardest-hit markets. That is leaving some families facing options including renting at a loss, separation from their loved ones or, in some cases, foreclosure.

The issue has caught the attention of Congress, which included language in the economic stimulus package to compensate service members who sell their home at a loss or have been foreclosed upon because they were forced to move after a base closure, reassignment or a combat wound required them to be relocated near a health facility. The program also covers surviving spouses of those killed in combat.

Under the new provision, the government will cover 95 percent of a loss if a service member is forced to sell. The government can also choose to acquire the title of a home by paying off the balance of a service member's mortgage or paying the owner up to 90 percent of the home's previous value. No dollar ceiling has been set.

The $555 million undertaking expands the Defense Department's Homeowners Assistance Program, which helps military and federal personnel whose homes have lost value because of a base closure. The new measure would likely help the Diazes, and would expand the homeowner assistance program to as many as 17,000 claims, according to the office of Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.), who sponsored the measure.