CHALLENGING CNBC’S RANTER IN CHIEF RICK SANTELLI
MARKETS DROP AGAIN
REMEMBERING GARY CONDIT, THE KILLER THAT WASN’T

A RANT FOR RICK

I just love to see CNBC coming out of the closet of feigned impartiality. Now that it has gotten that denunciations of greed out of its system with that House of Cards docutract, it’s time to get back to cheerleading for the wrong side of the economic war. I did my own rant about CNBC, which was actually recorded by CNBC and run for a few seconds on its power lunch show taking the network to task for rarely giving homeowners a fair break in terms of news coverage.

Now, Rick Santelli confirms my worst fears with a rant from the pits of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange denouncing “losers” as in the people victimized by predatory lending, a term he doesn’t use or seem to even recognize exists. He turns to his colleagues who cheer him on and he, in turn, praises them as real Americans.

Picking on struggling homeowners, he denounces the Obama Housing Plan comparing it to policies in Cuba, a country that doesn’t have mass foreclosures as far as I know. He was rallying his fellow traders in an on-air call for a Chicago Tea Party as if he and his groupies are the aggrieved parties in this crisis. (This is historically consistent in that the original Boston Tea Party was actually a protest by merchants, not the masses, against British taxes that undercut their businesses.)

Rather than repudiate his use of a TV News slot for agitational and political advocacy purposes, The New York Times tells us that CNBC is capitalizing on his new found celebrity. “Once upon a time, cable channels were embarrassed by on-air outbursts or other anchor antics, “ reports the paper of record. “Now, some are glad to post the video clips on the Internet as quickly as possible to maximize publicity and Web traffic.”

You can imagine how quickly CNBC would cut me off if I tried a stunt like his. (When I did try, they aired a few secs and refused to have me on to elaborate. Why wasn’t I surprised?)

Who is Mr. Rick and what’s the agenda here? He is being treated like the TV incarnation of Joe the Plumber. When on the air he said flamboyantly:

“We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that wanna show up to Lake Michigan, I’m organizing,” Santelli fumed yesterday. “We’re gonna be dumping in some derivative securities, what do you think about that?”

Turns out, according to the Atlantic, “Santelli may not be the one organizing after all: the conservative American Free Market Fund’s American Future Fund’s petition, launched yesterday afternoon, invites signers to attend such a party in Chicago in July. 3,500 people have pledged to attend, the group says, and the idea of busing people in has been floated. That’s on top of two smaller sites dedicated to promoting Santelli’s suggestion.

“The Chicago Tea Party of 2009 will reinvigorate that American and Patriotic spirit; one that demands respect for individual rights and property,” one of the sites, ReTeaParty.com, promises.”

Reaction in Chicago has not all been excited as I discovered in visiting JackandJillpolitics.com, a self described “black bourgousie perspective on US politics” with this post, ‘Rick Santelli’s Offensive Rant Against the Housing Bailout‘ and the following comments:

“Who is this Rick Santelli….a freakin poster boy for deregulation…he’s made his career off of it…MR. HEDGE FUND himself
 from cnbc.com. 

He joined CNBC from the Institutional Financial Futures and Options at Sanwa Futures, L.L.C. There, he was a vice president handling institutional trading and hedge accounts for a variety of futures related products.

Prior to that, Santelli worked as vice president of Institutional Futures and Options at Rand Financial Services, Inc., served as managing director at the Derivative Products Group of Geldermann, Inc., and was Vice President in charge of Interest Rate Futures and Options at the Chicago Board of Trade for Drexel, Burnham, Lambert.

Santelli began his career in 1979 as a trader and order filler at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in a variety of markets including gold, lumber, CD’s, T-bills, foreign currencies and livestock.


he should have been screaming…I’m a greedy bastard..and I don’t want ANY regulation so that I can continue to be a greedy criminal, because Wall Street’s behavior can be likened to crimes, so greedy to the point that those like me will continue to cripple the economy with our fucked up economic philosophies.

This prick is see-through

I wonder if this mofo was this outraged when WALL STREET went begging for 700 BILLION DOLLARS. President Obama’s housing plan is ONE-TENTH of the money that went to WALL STREET, and I bet his ass didn’t say JACK about THAT money.

I can’t be stronger than that, but the significance of his association with his former firm, Drexel, Burnham, Lambert was glossed over. That is the firm closed down by the government. Its guru Michael Miliken went to prison for his illegal trading activities. Funny, how we you scratch a moralizer like Santelli, you find quicksand in his closet.

Why isn’t our media reporting on all the people who are talking back to Rick The Ranter, but who don’t have a General Electric owned channel behind them?

Here are other comments:

“And now, that we’re trying to help people on the ground - sure, some of them took out loans that they couldn’t afford. But, how about those who were straight up DEFRAUDED. How about the ones who SHOULD have qualified for CONVENTIONAL mortgages, but because of INSTITUTIONAL RACISM IN THE BANKING INDUSTRY, were herded into SUBPRIME mortgages. How entire communities of this country - on MAIN STREET - are being wiped out because of this foreclosure crisis. And, foreclosures just don’t devastate those who lost their homes. Their neighbors see their property values plummet with every foreclosure in their neighborhoods. This is the reality on MAIN STREET. Oh, to drop his ass off on Main Street, give him a megaphone, and see if he’d be that big and bad THEN.

The conversation continues:

Thanks for the shout out rikyrah…..

I damn near lost it when this dude referred to those who were losing their homes as “losers”. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s mythical “welfare queen” who was content at home, watching soaps and eating bon bons on the govn’t’s dime. This dude and the rest of his trader buddies have no clue! Instead of getting pissed off at the victims, how ’bout taking to task their employers who gave out these subprime like candy on Halloween, so that they could make money trading those on them via CDOs.” Hey Rick, lost your tongue?

Columbia Journalism Review on Ranting Rick:

In the annals of CNBC cluelessness, the outburst by the channel’s Rick Santelli last Thursday morning is up there with the worst. On Friday, CJR’s Ryan Chittum took Santelli on in The Audit, CJR’s online business desk, and garnered about eight zillion comments, a good many of them defending Santelli.

Still, we maintain that to blame “loser” homeowners in the housing meltdown is to fail to report reality. In a follow-up piece on Friday, Ryan pointed this out: We know that some half of all subprime borrowers actually qualified for prime mortgages, with better terms, lower interest rates and lower payments, but were fraudulently put into more expensive ones by brokers who were incentivized with bonuses by the Countrywides of the world. But the vast majority of people, and I’ll bet you just about every last one of the commenters on my Santelli post yesterday, don’t know that.

Whose fault is it that they don’t know that? Well, what was the role of the press?

CNBC Editor: The People Are Revolting! By Ryan Chittum: Santelli plays Mel Brooks playing Louis XVI

WHAT ABOUT THE PLAN?

By my criticizing Santelli, that doesn’t mean that Obama’s economic plan goes far enough. Paul Krugman was in the Times yesterday calling for temporary nationalization of “Zombie Banks.” He is trying to push the Administration to acknowledge the real problem and respond more forcefully even as the GOP seems to be viewing him as a Socialist in centrist clothing.

James Howard Kuntsler who is kinder to Santelli than I am sees that even the wrong spark can get a prairie fire going.

“The public perception of the ongoing fiasco in governance has moved from sheer, mute incomprehension to goggle-eyed panic as the scrims of unreality peel away revealing something like a national death-watch scene in history’s intensive care unit. Is the USA in recession, depression, or collapse? People are at least beginning to ask. Nature’s way of hinting that something truly creepy may be up is when both Paul Volcker and George Soros both declare on the same day that the economic landscape is looking darker than the Great Depression.

Those tuned into the media-waves were enchanted, in a related instance, by Rick Santelli’s grand moment of theater in the Chicago trader’s pit last week when he seemed to ignite the first spark of revolution by demonstrating that bail-out fatigue had morphed into high emotion — and that the emotion could be marshaled against public policy. The traders in the pit on-screen seemed to color up and buzz loudly, like ordinary grasshoppers turning into angry locusts preparing to ravage a waiting valley. “Are you listening, President Obama?” Mr. Santelli asked portentously.

In the broad blogging margins of the web that orbit the mainstream media like the rings of Saturn, an awful lot of reasonable people have begun to ask whether President Obama is a stooge of whatever remains of Wall Street, with Citigroup and Goldman Sachs’s puppeteer, Robert Rubin, pulling strings behind an arras in the Oval Office. Personally, I doubt it, but it is still a little hard to understand what the President is up to. For one thing, the stimulus package, so-called, looks more and more like national sub-prime mortgage itself, a bad bargain made under less-than-realistic terms, with future obligations fobbed onto whoever inhabits this corner of the world for the next seven hundred years — and all to pay for a bunch of granite counter-tops and flat-screen TVs.”

REAL HOUSING ISSUE

If you are interested in housing issues, check out this appeal from the Aaron Krowne, editor of the ML-Implode.com site that monitors all these issues. You would think Rick cares about this but of course prefers yelling at the President.http://ml-implode.com/sfdpacampaign.html

We have just put out a bit of counter-propaganda regarding awful LA Times coverage of the FHA down payment money laundering scam. Here is the link, and a clipping of our piece:

Reading this, you might naively assume that Jones’ home was being innocently marketed for $208,000, and he bought it with “charitable” down payment assistance. But this isn’t very likely. In fact, backing out 3.5% and a few hundred in fees, the more likely REAL PRICE of the Jones house was $199,000.

Indeed, we looked up county records and found that a model match for the Jones home sold in January for $190,000 — which was also an REO (there are quite a few REOs on the Jones street, which, incidentally, suggests that home prices aren’t exactly on an upward trajectory there). A larger home is even listed for $199,000. So the Jones home likely started out a bit expensive, then had the price inflated another 3.5% through the Nehemiah scheme. Because the seller could simply roll all immediate costs into a taxpayer-insured loan, they didn’t have to adjust the sale price in accordance with the realities of the market. Is this fair?

It certainly isn’t fair to Mr. Jones, who (regardless of what he might think right now), is in all likelihood about $20,000 underwater on his new home.

Folks, this is an outright battle between banks, builders, the real estate complex, and a bunch of mortgage crooks who happen to be ensconced with a few friends in Congress; versus little more than us on the other side. We really need your help publicizing and gleaning support to the maximum extent possible.

As some of you know, one of these seller-funded down payment laundering companies has been pursuing a nuisance lawsuit against us for simply outing their activities. We cannot survive much longer against the expensive costs of fighting this suit (even though our case is overwhelmingly strong).

Some of you have already lent some support to covering this issue and our lawsuit. I would appreciate if you could continue that support with this piece, and I hope the rest of you will join in. I don’t know if I could underestimate the importance of us marshalling all of our resources to stop things from regressing on three fronts related to this fight: (1) continued distortion and fraud in the housing market, (2) toleration of corrupt lobbying arrangements between industry and government, and (3) free speech for bloggers and other independent media outlets.

Again the link to the piece is above, and here is a link to our standing statement on SFDPA:

Please encourage your audiences to support us, and complain to their Congressman about this legislation. This is the LAST way in the world we need to be exhausting taxpayer resources to “help” the housing market.