In reference to Ricky the Ranter on CNBC and his Chicago Tea Parties protesting the mortgage holder bailout plan as "unfair", these protest occurred this week-end. From all accounts, very few "protestors" showed up anywhere, and for all intent and purpose, the venture appears to have been a bust.
In the meantime, some internet bloggers have been digging into this Rant/protest story, because to many progressives, it felt to forced, phony and rehearsed, to say the least (did you check out Ricky's appearances all over MSNBC the following day? Let's just say you are lucky if you missed them)... and this is what investigative Bloggers have unearthed to date -
Robert Johnson on PBS's Bill Moyer's Journal puts it this way , after he read the Playboy article which first raised suspicions of the possibility that the Right Wing organized Chicago Tea Parties that Rick Santelli of CNBC incited were perhaps not the spontaneous grassroot activism that we have been led to believe, but rather a preplanned drama a la Brook Brother Protest of election 2000.
Democratic Underground Blogger drm604, in reading Redearth's take decided to look into the matter further, and did some investigating of IP addresses connected to the chicagoteaparty.com website and another website called angryrent.com. drm604 had taken notice of this angryrent.com site back in May of last year with some suspicion at the time; so much suspicion that he wrote about it. To put it midlly, drm604 found some interesting information that appears to link both the angryrenter.com site and the chicagoteaparty.com to some of the same cast of characters, and to a time that predates Ricky's rant, as documented by another blogger, GinaMaria in this excellent post.
In reading the various blogger links I have provided, it appears that there may just be some shady manipulation of public opinion going on, and it appears that the cast of character include some of the biggest Corporations in the U.S.
Now, we might just need to ask why Big U.S. Corporations would want to have "citizens" revolt over a plan in where the new administration is proposing helping citizens save their homes (considering the billion dollar bailout banks just received)? And we might want to ask why a Wall Street Cable Media Business Commentator would be the one to lead such a revolt? And while we are at it, why is CNN and other supposed mainstream media showing us so much of Rush Limbaugh? OK, well perhaps that one is for another time. But make no mistake, we need to get to the bottom of this Chicago tea party action game ASAP!
