My favorite part of Rick Santelli's now-famous CNBC rant is when he waves to the floor traders around him and shouts, "This is America!" And after his rant went viral, he claimed 99% of the emails he received were supportive.

Really? Rick Santelli, meet America.

dday:

Lost from this complaint is the plain fact of predatory lending, that lenders got cash rebates to put people in crappy, high-interest mortgages, that they hid terms of the agreement and denied disclosure, and that all of those hardworking folks are seeing their property values plummet as a result of millions of foreclosed homes glutting the market. To the tune of $6 trillion dollars in home value.

Jane Hamsher:

Rick Santelli is just the explosive Id of CNBC, saying what everyone else thinks. Somehow it's not the pervasive institutional rot, the criminal malfeasance at the highest levels, or the Chairman of the Federal Reserve telling Americans over and over again that housing prices would never go down. They have convinced themselves that the real problem is once again people at the absolute bottom of the economic scale. If they'd only used appropriate "judgment" and lived within their means, we'd all be fine.

David Sirota:

the question is the same question that's always been at the heart of economic politics: Which side are you on? And the answer, if you look at the hard data, is that most Americans are Grassroots Populists: those who think Wall Street and the government are colluding to rip off taxpayers, and who think the crumbs of aid for so-called "losers" that Santelli is ragging on is way too small - not way too much.

The gap, of course, is in the portrayal. If you watch television or read op-ed pages, the Market Populists get most of the attention. Indeed, Market Populism is portrayed as the "centrist" mainstream sentiment in the United States. Just look at David Brooks' New York Times column this morning. He non-sarcastically insists that Santelli's comments were "lustily" representative of mass popular anger at "these injustices" - not the injustices on Wall Street, mind you, but the supposed injustices of people now losing their homes. Meanwhile, Grassroots Populism - ie. seething populist anger at Corporate America - is depicted as the ideology only of a tiny fringe. It's as if the media is a funhouse mirror on society - a bizzaro world where up is down, black is white, and free market fundamentalism is portrayed as a mass-based movement.

Ryan Chittum:

What sent Santelli, CNBC’s hot-air, oops, “On-Air Editor,” over the edge? The homeowner bailout. Of course, he didn’t get himself into nearly this much of a lather over the trillions of dollars we’ve given to Wall Street welfare cases and the busted banks. Oh no. He’s mad that non-financial-service-professionals, otherwise known as homeowners, or, according to Santelli “losers,” are up now for help—to the tune of $275 billion, much of which would go to the banks anyway...

We at The Audit have written repeatedly about the blame-the-homeowners meme that’s been so popular in misdirecting people away from the real culprits in the crisis: the financial-services boiler rooms that created all those junk mortgages and bundled them into crap securities for sale to all-too-trusting rubes (aka “clients”) around the world.

I understand there’s a powerful undercurrent of outrage from some people who are paying their mortgages (or renting) who disdain those who aren’t or can’t.

But let’s understand what’s going on here. This homeowner bailout isn’t really even aimed at easing people’s suffering. It’s aimed at the banks, whose downward spiral will not stop until the housing market stabilizes.

The question is do we step in and try to engineer the softest landing we can—or do we let it feed on itself until we all go down?

kayinmaine:

There is lots of blame to go around, of course, but what pisses me off is Santelli is one of those assholes who keeps blaming the poor in this country for the downturn of our economy, when it’s guys like him who have made MILLIONS BY SUCKING OFF THE SHADOW ECONOMY TIT and can’t understand why our nation has spun out of control! They’re the ones who are to blame and who are the losers.

Assholes. I’m so sick of them. Could someone please round up the greedy fuckers of our nation and shove some tea bags up their asses so they can have a party as Santelli suggests in his little rant? Thank you!

What is happening today in the stock market and in our economy was already underway under George Bush, you know, the president who didn’t do a damn thing to plug the hole in the ship. Had his neocons in the House & Senate in 2005 passed laws to regulate the banking industry, our economy may very well be a ton better today. Instead, we have President Obama who is being blamed by the greedy wingers like Santelli for trying to make right with the American people, which tells me that Wall Street and the companies associated with it don’t give a flying rats ass about this country. At all.

Santelli is the loser. And a maggot. The End.

Update 1: Eric Boehlert laughs at Santelli's "populist" credentials:

Rick Santelli is a Bond Market Reporter for CNBC. He joined CNBC Business News as on-air editor in 1999, reporting from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. His focus is primarily on interest rates, foreign exchange and the Federal Reserve. A veteran trader and financial executive, Santelli has provided live reports on the markets in print and on local and national radio and television. He joined CNBC from the Institutional Financial Futures and Options division at Sanwa Futures. 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. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana.