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Blogs by David A. Schwinghammer
Rick Santelli's Rant 1/18/2012 8:28:43 AM
Supposed journalist rants about Obama's mortgage
proposal one month after the president took office.
I recently finished reading a book by the author of WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS, Thomas Frank. The new one is entitled PITY THE BILLIONAIRE and is an attempt to explain how conservative politicans managed to turn the mortgage debacle on big government instead of Wall Street.
Eventually Frank gets around to Rick Santelli's rant on the Chicago Board of Trade, which is given some credit for starting the Tea Party movement. I had never watched it before because I have about as much respect for Wall Street gamblers as I do for Jack the Ripper. And the Ripper may have had more human empathy. In the clip I saw, Santelli was talking to some other reporters back in the studio. It's not really a Howard Beale type rant, because they keep interrupting him. I wasn't able to nail down exactly who Santelli works for, but if he's a real journalist he didn't learn much in school with all the gross generalizations he makes. Santelli's main complaint is the TARP "requirement" that banks renegotiate housing loans, allowing people to stay in their homes and avoid foreclosures. Santelli says he doesn't want to pay for "losers" who don't want to pay their mortgages on houses with two bathrooms they couldn't afford in the first place. You know, Ayn Rand stuff. Well, that's just nuts. First off, that's an "all or none" statement and as a journalist he should no better, even if he is talking off the cuff with his fellow town criers in the studio. Then he makes the reference to the Boston Tea Party, which apparently gave the movement its name. Okay, let's back up and try to figure out why he thinks he's paying for renegotiating those mortgages. I suppose because he pays some taxes on investments he makes with all that inside information he stumbles across as a reporter. If he's like Mitt Romney he pays 15%, which should be more like 35%. His mistake, the same one most Tea Party followers make, is that the Boston Tea Party was all about taxes. No way, Jose. It was about taxation without representation. With the Supreme Court on their side, Teabaggers, who tend to be richer than the rest of us acoording to a New York Times, now have more representatives than the rest of us because of the Super PACS. We see them in action in South Carolina. Watch one of their ads once. There's little regard for fairness. But the Boston Tea Party was about a lot more than that. The East India Company, one of the biggest corporations in the world at the time, was trying to force the colonists to buy their tea, and that's why they disguised themselves as indians and threw the tea overboard. In other words, they had more in common with the Occupy Wallstreet people than the Teabaggers.
This whole Tea Party movement had more to do with sore losers, with some racism thrown in, than any protest against government intrusion in the market. The GOP has been making that pitch ever since FDR. But they forget, we had forty years of prosperity after the government began regulating the banks and Wall Street. These days we have boom periods and recessions every couple of years, thanks to their deregulation and their attempts to pull the teeth of agencies like the Securities Exchange Commission.
One of the most telling facts Frank makes in his PITY THE BILLIONAIRE book is that the gross national product went up by double digits every year from 1933 to 1937, despite conservative attempts to blame deficit spending for the Great Depression. The GNP only went down after FDR made the mistake of trying to balance the budget in 1937, and the economy really took off after we were forced to spend like crazy people fighting two wars simultaneously. The national debt didn't really take off until Super Ron Regan increased it from under a trillion dollars to four trillion by the time he left office. All we got for that was a military industrial complex. Reagan got credit for ending the Cold War when in reality the communists' war in Afghanistan and other mistakes did them in.
I'm not saying we don't need to balance the budget. Of course we do, but not at the cost of giving in to some 19th century ideology and forsaking social services. We just need to raise the cap on social security, forbid the government from borrowing from it, and tame the hospitals, clinics, and insurance companies who charge unreasonable fees, and come up with a fair tax code. If Warren Buffett, the second richest man in the US, says he doesn't pay enough taxes, it's pretty sure other billionaires don't either.
