Why Rick Santelli Is An Investment Bank Finger Puppet
Some of us remember when news organizations actually employed journalists. Remember them? They were reporters and editors who worked hard every day to report facts, not opinions. Sometimes they were actually able to tell us something new, something we hadn’t heard before. If they tried to slip an opinion into their reporting, they were rewarded with a slap upside the head, and were sometimes even fired.
Those days are gone. The television networks now routinely employ political hacks, retired lobbyists, and even investment bankers to tell us what’s happening in the world. And they are quite generous with their opinions. Some are even paid to simply spout opinions every night.
Funny thing about opinions. They are cheap. Most everyone has one. But only a select few are chosen to pose as ‘pundits’ on TV. A handful of opinionators are now crowding our news channels, telling us what to think, how to vote, what to do. For years we’ve been getting more bullshit and less news.
Enter the latest B.S. artist with a flashy pitchfork, Rick Santelli of CNBC. His recent rant about President Obama’s modest plan to reduce housing foreclosures was covered as if it was something real and honest and from the gut. Consider that Obama plans to spend 75 billion to help homeowners (not speculators) avoid foreclosures, while the previous administration spent 300 billion on the TARP program to bail out banks. That includes some of Wall Streets biggest investment banks, what’s left of them. And much more TARP money will be forthcoming to the banks.
Nowhere have we seen anything about Rick Santelli’s background and history. A little digging reveals Mr. Santelli was a Vice-President of an investment bank, Drexel Burnham Lambert. Does that name ring a bell? It should. Drexel, Burnham was a notorious junk bond purveyor which was forced into bankruptcy only a few years ago because of illegal dealings in junk bonds and mortgages. Gosh, mortgages? That rings a bell, doesn’t it?
So what we have here is a national news network, employing a former investment banker and allowing, even encouraging him to make commentaries on mortgages and investment banking! They also recruited an artificial group of cheerleaders composed of floor traders at the Chicago Board of Trade, perhaps one of the most overpaid, under-educated groups in the nation. And this is the group that proposes to launch a Chicago-based Tea Party? This is not a silent majority. This is a very vocal and well-to-do, minority.
But this is much bigger than Santelli. Consider that NBC is owned by General Electric, a huge conglomerate which itself operates financial and mortgage divisions and received taxpayer support through the Federal Government’s Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program.
In essence, Rick Santelli has joined the ranks of the finger puppets posing as news personalities, propped up by investment banks.
Why investment banks? They created this mess. Not only did the investment bankers stampede into toxic debt with all the enthusiasm of hogs to the garbage dump, they helped create the huge conglomerates that now employ former investment bankers, political hacks and retired lobbyists that pretend to give us the news!
