Yesterday I posted about Lansing Mayor Verg Bernero’s full-throated defense of working people. But who knew that so shortly after that, financial news network CNBC would present the Bizarro version?
Yesterday, standing on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, CNBC editor Rick Santelli launched a bizarre rant crying for the real victims of the financial crisis — the poor, oppressed rich — to launch a “Chicago Tea Party” in protest of having to help pay for relief for homeowners facing foreclosure, while the traders around him cheered and applauded:
Santelli’s executive-suite call-to-arms made him an instant hero to some on the right. Kathryn Jean Lopez at the National Review’s Corner blog was so taken with it that she even floated a GOP dream ticket for 2012: Sarah Palin for President, Santelli for VP.
To me, the primary reason to pay attention to Santelli’s rant is that it is the polar opposite of Bernero’s. Both men are passionately defending their points of view, but those points of view could not be further apart.
In other words, the battle lines on the economy are being drawn. One side wants to put ordinary working people first; the other sees ordinary working people as parasites leeching off the accomplishments of the real heroes, the financial sector’s Masters of the Universe.
And the question America will have to answer — the question that will define the direction of our economy for a generation — is: which side are you on?
REAX FROM AROUND THE WEB: At Open Left, David Sirota sees the parallel too:
With the economy in meltdown, I’m convinced that part of why the public is so angry is because what they see on television and in their newspapers is so fundamentally at odds with how they are feeling and what they are dealing with. As Santelli shows, large swaths of the media and political Establishment actively and publicly denigrate the people who are most hard hit by the downturn.
At Firedoglake, Jane Hamsher observes that Santelli’s rant is symptomatic of something larger:
Rick Santelli is just the explosive Id of CNBC, saying what everyone else thinks. Somehow it’s not the pervasive institutional rot, the criminal malfeasance at the highest levels, or the Chairman of the Federal Reserve telling Americans over and over again that housing prices would never go down. They have convinced themselves that the real problem is once again people at the absolute bottom of the economic scale. If they’d only used appropriate “judgment” and lived within their means, we’d all be fine.
At Gawker, Alex Pareene calls Santelli’s speech “the least sympathetic populist rage ever”:
How the hell did we come a point where a former financial executive speaking from a trading floor pretends to be a raging populist little man fighting against the powers-that-be? The powers-that-be, in this case, are people who can’t afford their homes. They are getting a sweet hand-out from the government: renegotiated mortgages on homes that are losing value anyway!
And Ryan Chittum at the Columbia Journalism Review calls it a moment of cluelessness:
This is an example of what’s wrong with a certain kind of financial journalism, the kind where people of like backgrounds spend all day staring at tickers and interviewing each other.
The segment couldn’t more clearly illustrate the disconnect between the financial-services sector, certain financial journalists, and, you know, “reality.”…
Watching CNBC lately is like stumbling onto Easter Island just after the natives chopped down their last tree. It’s like a lost world over there. Somebody send up a chopper.
UPDATE (5PM): White House press secretary Robert Gibbs responds to Santelli: