A Tea Party Celebrating Fake Populism

[marmar]

from ourfuture.org:



A Tea Party Celebrating Fake Populism
By Isaiah J. Poole

February 26th, 2009 - 10:49am ET



All you really need to know about the so-called Great American Tea Party, 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 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?"

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." .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009020926/tea-party-celebrating-fake-populism