A Tea Party Celebrating Fake Populism

All you really need to know about the so-called Great American Tea Party [1], the series of protests a coalition of right-wing organizations and bloggers is fanning around the country, is that they draw their inspiration from Rick Santelli, the CNBC on-air personality who joined the network after a stint as a vice president at Sanwa Futures LLC, where he was a hedge-fund trader.

Santelli, you may recall, went off on a live-TV rant [2] on the floor of the Chicago Options Exchange against President Obama's plan to help families struggling with their mortgages. The essence of his foam-at-the-mouth tirade was that the Obama plan "is promoting bad behavior" and that the government should instead "reward people who can carry the water instead of drinking the water"—whatever that means. "This is America," Santelli says, pointing to his fellow bond traders. "How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors' mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills?" As the traders tell their disapproval, Santelli yells into the camera, "President Obama, are you listening?"

(CNBC has turned this Howard Beale moment into an on-air promo, and Santelli has told the Chicago Tribune [3] that he's now being offered book deals. At least someone is profiting from the economic crash.)

Santelli is riding a crest of populist outrage that depends on a whole host of right-wing tropes and distortions, from the 2009 version of President Reagan's steak-buying, Cadillac-driving welfare queen to the conflation of the no-strings-attached money given to Wall Street financiers (by the Republican friends of the Santellis of the world) with the far more careful, accountable and transparent attempts by the Obama administration to help ordinary families.

J. Peter Friere, the managing editor of the hard-right American Spectator, now wants to fan that outrage. On the Great American Tea Party website, in fact, he invites people to show up at events, tea begs in hand, and post videos "so everyone can see how outraged everyone is."

It's a neat trick: Focus attention on "how outraged everyone is," and you can divert attention from such realities as what the Wall Street Journal reported today [4]: that the same corporate lobbyists who helped set the stage for today's economic problems are spending millions of dollars to undermine the effort to repair the damage. For example, the former chief of a health insurance company is leading a $20 million effort to block a public-private health care solution along the lines of our own Health Care for America NOW! plan. Twice that amount is being budgeted by a consortium of energy companies to fight the Obama administration's clean energy initiatives, even though the administration, by embracing the concept of clean coal, is not going as far as some environmentalists would prefer. Add to that mix the defense and agricultural lobbies, grand porkers, with conservative buddies in high places, who don't want to see their industries have to give up their access to the federal budget trough.

Left out of that Wall Street Journal article is the financial services and real estate industry, which spent a combined total of almost $455 million in 2008, according to OpenSecrets.org [5], largely to defend the deregulated playpen of greed where today's stew of subprime loans and toxic mortgage securities was brewed. They will certainly be arming themselves to fight tax proposals in the budget the Obama administration sent to Congress today that represent a form of rough justice for struggling homeowners.

Consider this: What the Obama administration has proposed spending on his homeowner rescue plan [6] is about $75 billion. Who is actually being asked to step up to the plate to bear that cost? Not working-class families, at least directly. As Obama promised in his campaign, their taxes are being lowered. The reality is, as Congressional Quarterly reports: "Obama would let the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for upper-income Americans lapse in 2010, raising $636.7 billion over ten years. The Obama budget also takes a large swing at so-called corporate tax loopholes, including $353.5 billion in revenue-raisers and tax hikes aimed at groups ranging from oil companies to hedge fund managers."

These basic facts expose this tea party as fake populism. We're asking the Santellis of the world to help fix the damage their compatriots did with their unbridled greed to homeowners who they sucked into their cesspool. (By the way, in response to Santelli's who-wants-to-pay-your-neighbor's-mortgage question, none other than Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the House Financial Services Committee that yes, the right thing to do when the house of your neighbor who smokes in bed catches fire is not to let his house and all of the neighboring houses burn down to teach him a lesson, but to put the fire out first. "In many of these situations we have to trade off the moral hazard issue against the greater good," he said.)

The right-wing noise machine has nothing to say about the financial industry abuses—including the illicitly written subprime mortgages and unethical business practices—and lack of government oversight that brought the economy to its knees. It is no surprise that they'd rather fan false outrage than, to use Santelli's words, "carry the water."