A year after Rick Santelli's heated objections in February 2009 to the moral hazard posed by government efforts to bail out troubled mortgagers with $75 billion from the taxpayers, the foreclosure crisis only continues to worsen. Foreclosures have steadily increased in number from 1.3 million in 2007, to 2.3 million in 2008, to 2.8 million in 2009. An additional 3 to 3.5 million are expected in 2010.
At the time, Santelli intended to take a little time off in July for a tea party on Lake Michigan:
SANTELLI: We’re thinking of having a Chicago tea party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.
The people of the country didn't wait for July to organize, however, and by April 15th last year hundreds of tea party protests had already materialized all across the country, and their influence has been felt in elections in New York, New Jersey, Virginia and most of all Massachusetts.
Today, tea partiers everywhere stand poised to throw their weight behind candidates in the November elections who oppose everything that's happened under Pelosi, Reid, and Obama to interfere with the operations of free markets and the aspirations of free peoples. They understand that government isn't a magic money machine, churning out a buck and a half for every buck they put in. They understand with Santelli the threat left-wing Democrats represent to the very meaning of America, and who the real subversives are:
SANTELLI: You know, they’re pretty much of the notion that you can’t buy your way into prosperity, and if the multiplier that all of these Washington economists are selling us is over 1, then we never have to worry about the economy again. The government should spend a trillion dollars an hour because we’ll get 1.5 trillion back.
QUICK: Wilbur?
WILBUR ROSS (chairman, W.L. Ross & Co.): Rick, I congratulate you on your new incarnation as a revolutionary leader.
SANTELLI: Somebody needs one. I’ll tell you what, if you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson, what we’re doing in this country now is making them roll over in their graves.
When the tea parties succeed at the polls, the Founders will stop their spinning and return to their rest, and we to our labors rebuilding our broken country.
