Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High On Koch?

[Christa]

snip

But was Santelli’s rant really so spontaneous? How did a minor-league TV figure, whose contract with CNBC is due this summer, get so quickly launched into a nationwide rightwing blog sensation? Why were there so many sites and organizations online and live within minutes or hours after his rant, leading to a nationwide protest just a week after his rant?

What hasn’t been reported until now is evidence linking Santelli’s “tea party” rant with some very familiar names in the Republican rightwing machine, from PR operatives who specialize in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns (called “astroturfing”) to bigwig politicians and notorious billionaire funders. As veteran Russia reporters, both of us spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape. To us, the uncanny speed and direction the movement took and the players involved in promoting it had a strangely forced quality to it. If it seemed scripted, that's because it was.

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.


Full article:

http://www.playboy.com/blog/2009/02/backstabber.html

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. Here I go again!

The Koch Family. Throughout the Dark Age of The Chimp, they were in charge of The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, during a time when more oil was pulled off the market and ostensibly pumped into huge underground salt domes in Louisiana and Texas than has ever been pumped. The last number I saw reported was 773 Million Barrels of crude. Even at the height of gasoline prices. Or especially, depending how you look at it.

One of the Koch brothers is married to Doro Bush, Chimpy's sister.

To date, no serious audit of the real numbers of the SPR has been done, to find out how much oil is REALLY in those salt domes. My gut tells me there could well be some divergence between reports and reality, for this is one of the ways of The Oil Field Trash.

[gratuitous]

2. I've called Santelli's rant prefabricated from the start

Cleverly positioned in a room full of fellow unproductive overrich assholes, he sure sounds like a populist. I'd sure like to see how far he'd get into his well-rehearsed cri de coeur in Flint MI or South Central L.A. I'd advise Mr. Santelli to wear some no-nonsense body armor.

[AllieB]

3. Thanks for the link. K&R

Another irony is that this is linked to a RW advocacy group called the 'Sam Adams Alliance'. Poor Sam Adams is porbably spinning in his grave.

[Cha]

4. Kicked for

staged rwing protests.

[Subdivisions]

5. I wonder if this made it to the print version. KICK! n/t