America’s whining reactionaries

Market fundamentalism as identity politics

Thomas Frank critiques the plutocratic wing of the GOP mostly by describing it in plain English:

Just as the financial crisis has created toxic assets and "zombie" financial institutions, so has it transformed conservatism into a movement of the living dead. Its partisans cling to a now-toxic portfolio of discredited notions, rhetoric, gestures and strategies. They lumber comically on, their only goal being to obstruct efforts to save the economy from catastrophe.

These days the zombie right is rallying around CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, who won fame last month when he railed against a rescue of the economy's "losers."

Mr. Santelli claimed he was backed in his outrage by "the silent majority" — meaning a floor full of traders at the Chicago Board of Trade — and he called for a "Chicago tea party" to protest the administration's mortgage plan.

Next thing you knew, there were "tea parties" all over the land. When I showed up for one last Friday in Washington's Lafayette Park, however, my suspicions were immediately raised. A fellow in an expensive-looking pinstriped suit came hustling into the gathering knot of the discontented, handing out pink pig balloons. This had to be a put-on, I thought, one of the "Billionaires for Bush" pranksters in his capitalist costume, preparing to lead us in a chant of "Four More Wars."

But no, this was for real: the pigs symbolized "pork," the stuff of which President Barack Obama's stimulus package was supposedly made. Suits were common among the protesters. And the slogans on the signs made their undead politics impossible to misinterpret: "Liberalism Socialism Communism," read a typical one, "What's the Difference?"

Lending proletarian authenticity to the proceedings was the famous Joe the Plumber, who took up the bullhorn to deliver a dose of working-class cynicism that would have been convincing in, say, 1978. "Our politicians up on the hill, Republicans or Democrats, don't give a rip about you, and that's the bottom line right there," Joe Wurzelbacher declared.

Banks are insolvent, asset prices are falling, GDP has taken a nose dive, but what exercised this bunch was the possibility that government — understood as a force of pure evil — might get too big.

Frank gets it wrong when he claims that the market fundamentalists consider the government a "force of pure evil." These folk mostly were not troubled by Bush's police state methods, his deficit, his wars, his torture regime, etc. They merely wish to maintain the class and identity asymmetries promoted during the Reagan Era.

Jon Stewart rips Santelli and CNBC

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

A link, article and discussion of the broadcast can be found at the Washington Post.

Santelli’s losers

Homeless children in America

Rick Santelli’s phony populism

Writing for Playboy, Mark Ames and Yasha Levine assert that:

…Santelli's "rant" was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19^th call for a "Chicago Tea Party" was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.

Ames and Levine use the rest of their article to connect the dots in what must be considered a conspiracy!

The problem posed by this report should be obvious, as DailyKos makes clear:

…CNBC has staged the news, not just a single incident, but a whole string of discussions and programs that have been at the center of CNBC's programming since Santelli's staged rant. And from the evidence — including the fact that the website used to organize the so-called tea party was created well in advance by the same right wing sources who orchestrated the Obama-Ayers story — it appears that at least some of those involved were in on the scam [emphasis deleted].

Of course, a fair and sober reader can easily locate the actual news in this story, namely: The staged populist reaction to the Obama stimulus program.

Will CNBC, a key actor in this play, do anything to repair the damage their complicity in this hoax has inflicted on the public?

Market populism vs. grassroots populism

David Sirota's take on the Santelli meltdown

The rhetoric of American class conflict grows hotter by the day. Sirota's recent article directly addresses this conflict when it gives his take on Rick Santelli's now famous if not infamous CNBC-Chicago Mercantile Exchange piece and on Lansing, MI mayor Virg Bernero's response to — actually, his beat down of — a Fox News talking head.

While Santelli's "let them eat cake" moment may turn out to be another spectacle which merely diverts attention from the real problems now confronting the country, the event may gain greater significance than that. For instance, as Sirota rightly points out, the mass media in America routinely treat market populism as populism per se; it also deems grassroots populism as a kind of political irrationalism which expresses mass resentment, ignorance and fear. This bias becomes a problem when the difference between the market populist ideology and common lived experience of most Americans grows starker and more disturbing every day. Such has been the case since 2007 for many Americans. Many Americans may now reasonably wonder whether good, hard work and honest intentions matter for much. They may doubt that these "goods" count at all since the discrepancy between ideology and reality reflects the dissolution of the "American way of life" that has proceeded apace since 1968. Given the secular decline of the American economic system, I suspect that the Reaganite consensus founded on this social disintegration has now reached its limit point and appears for what it always was: A commitment to extend and secure the national and global powers of American finance capital. Santelli's belligerence, his crude manner and sub-rational thinking, may reflect the sense of entitlement embedded within the market fundamentalist ideology.

If this characterization of the situation is accurate, then the issue of the day becomes: Which one among America's many possible futures will the country select, a future which includes American militarism and Wall Street-led globalization or a future which respects the ecological limits imposed upon humanity as well as the dignity that necessarily inheres within the world's diverse assortment of human ways of life?

Update (2.22.2009)

Glen Greenwald's latest reflects upon the Santelli outburst by comparing it to a noteworthy forerunner, namely, the resentment-laden, tribalist militia movement which opposed Bill Clinton's presidency, "fought" the culture wars and brought about the Contract with America Congressional class of 1994. Greenwald continues by considering the civil war mongering that has begun to take hold of the rightwing dead-enders who seemingly cannot accept that the world will never again mirror their vainglorious imaginings. It is in cases like this where one can see the paranoid political style generate fearsome dangers for everyone involved, especially since this hard core has access to the mass media. Greenwald then rightly asks: "…I wonder what would happen if MSNBC broadcast a similar discussion of leftists plotting and planning the imminent, violent Socialist Revolution against the U.S. Government."

Catching up

With the many links I failed to note over the past week

Christopher Ketcham believes the economic crisis will cleanse the land of kitsch, crap and the pimps who market the stuff. This is his silver lining and he considers it a praiseworthy endgame to America's binge-driven consumer culture.

A grim assessment can be found in Michael Hudson's latest essay:

The financial "wealth creation" game is over. Economies emerged from World War II relatively free of debt, but the 60-year global run-up has run its course. Finance capitalism is in a state of collapse, and marginal palliatives cannot revive it. The U.S. economy cannot "inflate its way out of debt," because this would collapse the dollar and end its dreams of global empire by forcing foreign countries to go their own way. There is too little manufacturing to make the economy more "competitive," given its high housing costs, transportation, debt and tax overhead. A quarter to a third of U.S. real estate has fallen into negative equity, so no banks will lend to them. The economy has hit a debt wall and is falling into negative equity, where it may remain for as far as the eye can see until there is a debt write-down.

Mr. Obama's "recovery" plan, based on infrastructure spending, will make real estate fortunes for well-situated properties along the new public transport routes, but there is no sign of cities levying a windfall property tax to save their finances. Their mayors would rather keep the cities broke than to tax real estate and finance. The aim is to re-inflate property markets to enable owners to pay the banks, not to help the public sector break even. So state and local pension plans will remain underfunded while more corporate pension plans go broke.

Mike Whitney argues that:

Eastern Europe is about to blow. If it does, it could take much of the EU with it. It's an emergency situation but there are no easy solutions.

Peter Phillips argues that the Obama administration has not abandoned the neoconservativism of the recent past; it has only softened or 'humanized' this strategic focus so that a fragmented world might accept it as legitimate. Yet, continuing to rely upon this strategy would spell misfortune for more than the non-Americans killed, maimed or jailed by the American security and war apparatus. In fact, militarism has already thoroughly corrupted America's national politics, according to Phillips. The developmental path that would lead the country away from this political impasse begins with an active and self-sustaining anti-war movement.

Chris Hedges warns that the economic crisis, not the "terrorist threat" abroad, might bring down America's democratic republic. The penultimate situation: The economic crisis motivates Americans to take to the streets in defense of their interests and the federal government responds to this "provocation" by declaring martial law, thus abolishing the democratic-popular threat to the security apparatus and the economic sectors that depend on this apparatus.

Tom Englehardt wonders if the current economic crisis will endure until that time when it can meld with the pending ecological catastrophe.

Benjamin Netanyahu will attempt to form the next Israeli government, according to the New York Times. If Netanyahu is successful, the new government will sit on the far right and will not likely include the moderate Kadima party or its leader Tzipi Livni who are expected to join the opposition.

And Rick Santelli's now infamous rant: