Shy and quiet? I still remember his Obama rant... Yeah our viewers smart enough to vote for the Resident. No, people can not be trusted with science you moron.
Love Santelli. Tells it how it is. One of the few on TV that actually acknowledges just how fucked up everything is under the surface.
This is so true....just look at the recent OPEC+ agreement. In the USA we have a show called "American Greed" on CNBC. BUT....We need a new show: "International Greed". Man, these oil countries are so greedy.
OBAMA adresses this in his new book: The day after the rally, Gibbs mentioned that a CNBC business commentator named Rick Santelli had launched a lengthy on-air rant about our housing plan. Gibbs, whose radar on these things was rarely off, seemed concerned. “It’s getting a lot of play,” he said. “And the press pool’s asking me about it. You might want to check it out.” That night I watched the video clip on my laptop. I was familiar with Santelli; he seemed no different from most of the talking heads populating the cable business shows, delivering a mix of market gossip and yesterday’s news with the glib conviction of a late-night infomercial host. In this instance, he’d been broadcasting live from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, charged up with theatrical outrage and surrounded by traders who were smugly cheering from their desks as he regurgitated a bunch of standard Republican talking points, including the (incorrect) claim that we’d be paying off the mortgages of irresponsible spendthrifts and deadbeats—“losers,” Santelli called them—who had gotten in over their heads. “The government is promoting bad behavior!” he shouted. “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” Santelli went on to declare that “our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson, what we’re doing in this country now is making them roll over in their graves.” Somewhere in mid-monologue, he suggested “a Chicago tea party in July” to put a stop to big-government giveaways. It was hard for me not to dismiss the whole thing for what it was: a mildly entertaining shtick intended not to inform but to fill airtime, sell ads, and make the viewers of Squawk Box feel like they were real insiders—not one of the “losers.” Who, after all, was going to take such half-baked populism seriously? How many Americans considered the traders at the Chicago Merc representative of the country—traders who still had jobs precisely because the government had stepped in to keep the financial system afloat? In other words, it was bullshit. Santelli knew it. The CNBC anchors bantering with him knew it. And yet it was clear that the traders, at least, fully embraced what Santelli was peddling. They didn’t appear chastened by the fact that the game they played had been rigged up and down the line, if not by them then by their employers, the real high rollers in wood-paneled boardrooms. They didn’t seem concerned by the fact that for every “loser” who had bought more house than he could afford, there were twenty folks who had lived within their means but were now suffering the fallout from Wall Street’s bad bets. No, these traders were genuinely aggrieved, convinced that they were about to get screwed at the hands of the government. They thought they were the victims. One had even leaned into Santelli’s mic and declared our housing program a “moral hazard”—deploying an economic term that had entered the popular lexicon, used to explain how policies that shielded banks from their mounting losses might end up encouraging even more financial recklessness in the future. Only now the same term was being wielded to argue against help for families who, through no fault of their own, were about to lose their homes. I clicked the video feed off, feeling irritated. It was a familiar trick, I thought to myself, the kind of rhetorical sleight of hand that had become a staple of conservative pundits everywhere, whatever the issue: taking language once used by the disadvantaged to highlight a societal ill and turning it on its ear. The problem is no longer discrimination against people of color, the argument goes; it’s “reverse racism,” with minorities “playing the race card” to get an unfair advantage. The problem isn’t sexual harassment in the workplace; it’s humorless “feminazis” beating men over the head with their political correctness. The problem is not bankers using the market as their personal casino, or corporations suppressing wages by busting unions and offshoring jobs. It’s the lazy and shiftless, along with their liberal Washington allies, intent on mooching off the economy’s real “makers and the doers.” Such arguments had nothing to do with facts. They were impervious to analysis. They went deeper, into the realm of myth, redefining what was fair, reassigning victimhood, conferring on people like those traders in Chicago that most precious of gifts: the conviction of innocence, as well as the righteous indignation that comes with it.