Outraged By The Outrage

That would be CNBC, our favorite non-source for non-financial news:

On Tuesday morning, it was Rick Santelli's turn to downplay the outrage. The CNBC host of 'rewarding-the-housing-market-losers' fame, urged the masses to show some perspective. After all, this was mere "millions" of dollars engendering the bonus-driven anger, as opposed to the "billions" that AIG has received in bailout bucks.

From CNBC's Squawk Box:

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?

Hey, Rick Santelli: I think you’re an idiot. Since you’re busy “going Galt” and all, I’ll take that $165 million, seeing as how it doesn't matter and all. Just sayin’ ...

It’s completely idiotic to say outrage should be proportional to the number of zeroes involved. Hey, conservatives have no problem feigning outrage over “earmarks,” which amount to a tiny percent of the entire federal budget. So excuse me while I get pissed off over $165 million in bonuses to people who need it the least. Mwah.

However, I would like to have a reality-based conversation about this AIG mess. So put down the torches and pitchforks, people. It should come as no surprise that a bunch of greedy Wall Street people acted like, well, greedy Wall Street people. This is why we need strict oversight and lots of strings. Not “free hands of the market” groping taxpayers in unpleasant ways. Remember: “Atlas Shrugged” is fiction, people. Just like “24.”

Look, I’ll be the first to admit: I don’t know what to believe about this AIG mess. There are plenty of folks who think AIG should have been allowed to fail--Atrios over at Eschaton has been preaching that message the loudest. File bankruptcy, reorganize, yada yada.

Others say if AIG had gone the way of Lehman Brothers, it would have taken the entire banking system down with it. And I guess I’m just not smart or savvy enough to know whether these arguments for why the AIG bailout was a good thing hold merit.

I do know that stoking the public’s ire is a pretty useless exercise, but that’s all I’m seeing in the media today. I’m just jaded enough to think that some might be stoking public outrage to boost ratings.

We’ve got some real problems, people, and we need to be clear-headed about fixing them. I’m just starting to doubt if that will ever happen.

Santelli Astroturf Fallout, Megalomania Edition

[UPDATE]:

Ooops:

The attention around Mr. Santelli’s views now appears to be a distraction at CNBC. (The New York Times has a content-sharing agreement with the network.) Mr. Santelli declined interview requests on Monday, and the network canceled his appearance on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” on Wednesday. “It was time to move on to the next big story,” a CNBC spokesman said.

Yes, indeed. How embarassing when the “big story” concerns your reporter’s ethics and your network’s questionable credibilty.
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CNBC’s Rick Santelli has been forced to issue a denial that he was affiliated with FreedomWorks, the Sam Adams Alliance, or any of the other groups whose planned “tea parties” mysteriously sprang up hours after his rant.

And what a denial it is. This one takes the prize for rank narcissisim:

First of all let me be clear that I have NO affiliation or association with any of the websites or related tea party movements that have popped up as a result of my comments on February 19th, or to the best of my knowledge any of the people who organized the websites or movements.

[...]

Anyone who has watched my thousands of appearances on CNBC is well acquainted with my aggressive and impassioned style. Over the next several days CNBC.com will put up some of my other passionate broadcasts of the past. Since joining CNBC in 1999 I have not traded the markets in any capacity. As a financial reporter I have never shied away from trying to promote discourse and dialogue of the important issues that affect markets and therefore our lives. The one spot in particular that occurred on February 19th at roughly 8:15 est time and maybe lasted for a minute probably wasn't even in my top 5 in terms of intensity, energy, or controversy. It was unique in that it obviously struck a chord with the public thus inciting what can only be described as a groundswell of feedback from the public, the White House, the Internet, and the media at large.

Oh, obviously. Cripes. The ego has landed. Oh, but there’s more:

Many millions of Americans seem to agree with my position otherwise why would this "rant" be so much different than many of my impassioned comments of the past. Why would the Internet light up the way it did if people did not feel so strongly. The answer seems pretty obvious; the nerve I struck resonated across the country.

Good lord. It seems Rick Santelli hasn’t spoken to Michelle Malkin, who claims:

The rebellion was already underway before Santelli took a stand on the Chicago trading floor. The Seattle anti-pork protest, spearheaded by independent mom-blogger Keli Carender who comments on this site, took place on Feb. 16. Santelli’s Tea Party call came three days later.

Glenn Reynolds blogged a similar defense, which must be devastating news to Rick Santelli, who seems to believe he started the whole thing. So, shhh. We don’t want Santelli’s head to explode.

Unfortunately for all involved, none of this proves the tea parties weren’t astroturf--especially since, as the folks at Sadly, No! have revealed, those earlier protests drew fewer than two dozen people and don't appear related to the "movement" that sprang up later. And Malkin herself appears pretty deeply entrenched with the right-wing cabal funding the tea parties.

So this leaves us with two choices where Rick Santelli is concerned: he was either a shill or a tool. The one thing he does not appear to be, for all of his wishing, is the spark that lit the flame.

Sorry, Rick.

There's Astroturf At The Tea Party

If you suspected Rick Santelli’s “spontaneous” tea party rant was actually a fake, you may be on to something. It’s starting to look like it was part of a conservative astroturfing campaign put together by FreedomWorks, Dick Armey’s right-wing propaganda operation.

FreedomWorks is one of those shady, GOP-affiliated organizations which use stealth propaganda campaigns to foist such unpopular policies like privatizing Social Security on the American people (Move America Forward is another one, but there are several).

Now they’ve used a phony “grassroots” campaign, a network of conservative blogs, and a willing mouthpiece in CNBC’s Rick Santelli to launch the first assault on President Obama’s economic plans. Journalists Mark Ames and Yasha Levine, both familiar with Russian-style propaganda campaigns, smelled a rat and did some digging. They broke the story on Friday here at Playboy.com (no jokes, please! I was directed there by Avedon Carol). Do read the entire thing, but here are a few excerpts:

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.

[...]

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.

Ames and Levine go on to link the “tea parties” to the bazillionaire arch-conservative Koch family, the folks behind the John Birch Society, the Club For Growth, the Cato Institute, and a network of smaller organizations like Chicago Libertarian activist group, the Sam Adam Alliance. Not coincidentally, that is where Eric Odom worked as "new media coordinator." Sam Adams, huh. Wow, what a coinky-dinky:

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.

Koch family money is behind all of these various different players, and while it may be a little difficult to follow along in blog excerpts, I urge you to read the Ames/Levine piece. Bottom line is, the vast right wing conspiracy is alive and well, and regular people across the country--including right here in Nashville--were turned into its tools.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen fake "grassroots" campaigns funded by conservative megabazillionaires like Howard Ahmanson, Tom Monaghan, Rev. Moon and the DeVos family. Conservatives have a whole group of these moneybags they can turn to when they need to finance a new astroturf operation.

But this is the first time we’ve seen evidence that a media figure like Rick Santelli knowingly took part in a conservative propaganda campaign. Why? Well, I'm sure the fact that his contract is up for renewal this summer had something to do with it. His Tea Party-enhanced national profile will no doubt help with those negotiations. But news that the entire thing was planned and orchestrated by conservative PR firms should be grounds for Santelli's firing--now. He just threw any suggestion that he had journalistic impartiality out the window to meet his own selfish ends. If CNBC doesn’t investigate this now their credibility is gone, too.

Not to be overlooked or understated is the entire purpose of the “Tea Party” propaganda campaign, which is just one piece of a larger strategy. Ames and Levine state it loud and clear:

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.

Indeed. This is, at its core, yet another battle in an unspoken class war. A group of Americans have unwittingly been conscripted into service for the wealthy establishment that oppresses the poor and robs the middle class. Don’t believe me? Just look at the past eight years under Bush. The past is prologue.

Progressives are going to have to step it up if we’re going to expose these charlatans and puppeteers. You’re being played, people.