Rick Santelli: Tea Party Time

Yesterday Rick Santelli, who reports from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade the for CNBC, unleashed a rant against Obama’s newly announced housing bailout plan, intended to help some homeowners refinance mortgages and avoid foreclosure. The clip was quickly linked to and embedded in Web sites everywhere, and provoked intense reaction that pretty much broke along partisan lines.

At National Review Online, for example, Kathryn Jean Lopez was busting out the Palin-Santelli 2012 posters:

I’ve had a case of deja vu today.

I’m noticing the tone. I’m seeing the enthusiasm. And I’m digging out from the sheer volume of e-mails I’ve been getting today about that CNBC dude. The reaction to Rick Santelli’s Chicago-trading-floor incident this morning echoes the emotional reaction my inbox had to Sarah Palin’s convention speech this summer.

I make no endorsements. It’s just an observation.

I think people are hungry for someone who is fed up with the way things are and who seem to believe in something enough to know there in an alternative worth fighting for. Some of the voices may be far from perfect, but Americans are looking for signs of the life of an alternative. And so if a representative pops up — someone who appears to have roots and energy, folks will cheer them on in the hopes there’s a candidate here. Maybe not a presidential candidate, but a leader of some sort. Someone who can offer a vision of something other than a culture of bailout.

Today, Rick Santelli was that sign of life.

Also at NRO, Larry Kudlow seconded Santelli’s call for a Chicago Tea Party to protest the housing plan:

Team Obama is rewarding bad behavior. It is enlarging moral hazard. It is expanding its welfarist approach to economic policy. And with a huge expansion of government-owned zombie lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Team Obama is taking a giant step toward nationalizing the mortgage market. . .

Reporting from the Chicago commodity pits, my CNBC colleague Rick Santelli unleashed a torrent of criticism against this scheme. Santelli said: “Government is promoting bad behavior. . . . Do we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages? This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage? President Obama, are you listening? How about we all stop paying our mortgages! It’s a moral hazard.”

All this took place on the air, to the cheers of traders. Santelli called for a new tea party in support of capitalism. He’s right.

Across the aisle, Scarecrow at Firedoglake had a different take:

Thanks, Rick and CNBC, for making the case for a surcharge on transactions, greater securities regulations, and an increase in the top marginal tax rates.

At My DD, Charles Lemos weighed in with his experience of Wall Street:

After watching the [Santelli clip], I first had to check my calendar. Somehow I felt I traveled back in time to the early 1970s to witness first hand Richard Nixon’s “northern strategy,” his pursuit of white ethnic voters who were so deeply disaffected over Great Society programs ranging from desegregation (remember the Boston busing madness?) to affirmative action among others that they would desert the Democratic Party becoming “Nixon’s silent majority” and “Reagan Democrats”. . . .

Rick Santelli is heir to this legacy laced with racist overtones. Note the promo before the rant in the video link at CNBC. CNBC has an upcoming special entitled The Rise of America’s New Black Overclass. Fear mongering, it’s worked before so let’s try it again. It’s back to the 1970s for the GOP and their rabid white ethnics.

I spent a decade on Wall Street working for Alex. Brown & Sons, Deutsche Banc Securities and Goldman Sachs. I found Wall Street a largely liberal environment with one major exception, the trading floor. In my experience I found traders, who are largely white ethnics — Irish, Italian, Greek, Polish or Slovak among others — and graduates of the Seton Halls, the Boston Colleges, the Notre Dames, the Penn States were the most rabid conservative and foul mouthed people on the planet. Nor could any of them ever get my name right. “My name is Charles, not Chuckie” was something I would repeat whenever I had the misfortune to have to interact with them. Some of these folks made William Buckley appear moderate.

At Balloon Juice, John Cole marveled at Santelli’s “audacity”:

The most amusing thing to me about this Rick Santelli faux populist broker revolt is not his invocation of the Nixonian silent majority, but the utter lack of perspective it displays. Yes, there is a simmering discontent and anger out there, and clearly the Republicans are going to try to tap into it, but the problem for Santelli and his crowd is that the anger is not directed at the people who are losing their homes, but at the people Santelli spends every day rubbing shoulders with at the trendy Chicago restaurants the brokers go to these days.

The audacity of Santelli’s “revolt” is that a mere 75 billion is being spent to help struggling families repackage loans- a mere pittance in the terms of the gargantuan amount of money being thrown at the banks, the Wall Street wizards, and the rest of the rocket scientists who are the root of this problem. . .

As a rebuttal of sorts to Santelli, David Sirota at Open Left offered a clip of a Fox News interview with Virg Bernero, the mayor of Lansing, Mich., from earlier in the week, in which “Bernero demands to know how anyone can be calling for wage/benefit cuts for workers at a time the government is taking workers’ tax money and handing it to the very speculators that Santelli is whooping it up with.”

Along the lines of Cole, Sirota frames the debate as one between market populism (Santelli) and grassroots populism (Bernero):

After watching these two clips, 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. . . . 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. . . .

This divide between the Market Populism people are fed through the media and people’s own Grassroots Populism is a major catalyst that has turned the last two elections into backlash moments. And as bailouts and handouts now become daily news, and the Market Populists get ever more outrageous, that backlash is intensifying. Channeling it into something positive is the challenge of our time.