Cnbc Live Quotes

People aren’t really needed for anything else in the Griftopia, but since Americans require the illusion of self-government, we have elections. To make sure those elections are effectively meaningless as far as Wall Street is concerned, two things end up being true. One is that voters on both sides of the aisle are gradually weaned off that habit of having real expectations for their politicians, consuming the voting process entirely as culture-war entertainment. The other is that millions of tenuously middle-class voters are conned into pushing Wall Street’s own twisted greed ethos as though it were their own. The Tea Party, with its weirdly binary view of society as being split up cleanly into competing groups of producers and parasites—that’s just a cultural echo of the insane greed-is-good belief system on Wall Street that’s provided the foundation/excuse for a generation of brilliantly complex thievery. Those beliefs have trickled down to the ex-middle-class suckers struggling to stay on top of their mortgages and their credit card bills, and the real joke is that these voters listen to CNBC and Fox and they genuinely believe they’re the producers in this binary narrative. They don’t get that somewhere way up above, there’s a group of people who’ve been living the Atlas dream for real—and building a self-dealing financial bureaucracy in their own insane image.

Minimalism is a way of living at the maximum of your potential.

The often-told tale was that the remarkable awakening of antigovernment rage that spread across the country in 2009 was triggered by an unplanned outburst on live television from Rick Santelli, a former futures trader, who was a regular on-air contributor to the CNBC business news network. The date of Santelli’s tirade was notably early in Obama’s presidency, February 19, 2009, less than one month after Obama was sworn in as president. At the time, Obama enjoyed approval ratings of over 60 percent. A year later, a congressman championing Obama’s health-care proposal would be spat on, and two years later his party would lose control of the House of Representatives, effectively ending his ability to enact “change you can believe in,” as promised in his campaign. Arguably, the precipitous downhill slide began that day.