Prioritizing the Bailouts
Anyone remember Rick Santelli? He became famous for a day or two when he assailed the Obama stimulus for “rewarding bad behavior” because it included money for mortgage relief.
http://youtu.be/or-EKjfVCoA
While many tea party types cheered Santelli’s rant for exposing the Indonesio-Kenyan socialist usurper President Obama for the Leninist Hitlerite he is, as it turns out, Obama’s mortgage relief plan would spend $85 billion to help keep beleaguered Americans who were upside-down on their mortgages in their homes.
Yet as of early 2009, the federal government committed $7.77 trillion to bail out the banksters, Santelli made no noise whatsoever about rewarding their bad behavior.
This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hand.
Um, I think you have a decimal point out of place there. Still a lot of money though.
The bankers’ bailouts experienced heretofore will be like chump change when the Euro financial crisis manifests itself and U.S. banks having European exposure will be looking to the Fed’s “Helicopter Ben” for liquidity who’ll come forth with a flood of dollars. By the time it’s all done, we’ll be needing those “Weimar Wheelbarrows” to haul them around….
Two wrongs don’t make it. So you paid too much for a house and the mortgage is expensive and now the rest of us who live within our means pay for you, a person who could afford to stay within their means. CNBC people have little compassion anyways.
Santelli continually rails about the bailouts provided by the Feds (and the Fed) to banks rendering the central ‘point’ of this entire post entirely off-base.
You can dislike the guy for serving as a starting point for the tea party but at least get the facts right.
Remember that time when Santelli’s continual railing about the bailouts became a national sensation, and the touchstone for the #Occupy movement?
Me, neither.
Oh I see. Because the nation didn’t turn it’s entire attention to Santelli while he railed against the bank bailouts, you’re right to say he “made no noise whatsoever about rewarding their bad behavior.” So you’re modifying the age old ‘if a tree falls in a forest, does it make a noise’ question to ‘if a tree falls in a forest on national television and only a couple million people saw it and heard it but 200 million people didn’t see it and hear it, does it make a noise.’ Very thoughtful.
Did you see where Santelli rails against the banksters, denigrating the idea that taxpayers should bail out the “losers” and that it “rewards bad behavior”?
Me, neither.
Yes, of course you didn’t see it because a) it’s unlikely you watch CNBC ever and b) it wasn’t posted on Democratic Underground or Mother Jones. But it’s happened, over and over. The guy is a libertarian for christ sakes, of course he is against every kind of bailout. That simplistic ideology enables believers to glibly make black and white decisions without having to think too much – that’s what Santelli does. And that’s the criticism of him, not that he was only against bailouts for mortgagees and not against bailout for banks.
Oh, here’s one example of him expressing opposition to bank bailouts and this was found in approximately 37 seconds on google. The url is google.com.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSKrQt4e5ug
Or rebroadcast EVERYWHERE.
I got it. So by ‘made no noise whatsoever’ you mean he didn’t get a rant rebroadcast everywhere. It makes a lot of sense to hold him accountable for this and to call him a hypocrite. I’m impressed by your judgment.