The other night I was talking to someone who doesn't follow politics but who happened to randomly catch Andrew Breitbart on Eliot Spitzer's show selling the notion that the Tea Party is hostile to Wall Street. He was convinced that this was true and told me that this was going to be a fruitful bipartisan coalition and that it was going to result in a huge change in politic.
Let's set aside Brietbart for a moment. We all know he's an unbalanced, racist con artists who will say anything. But Breitbart notwithstanding, there are a lot of people who believe that the Tea Party is anti-Wall Street. I don't think this is true. The far right is anti-bailouts, but their reasoning is that the government should never "interfere" in the economy, not that Wall Street did something wrong. Indeed, if you look back at the famous Rick Santelli rant that's credited with inspiring the Tea Party movement (beyond Ron Paul) it was rage at the idea of rewarding all the undeserving poor people who bought houses they couldn't afford:
RICK SANTELLI: The government is promoting bad behavior. Because we certainly don’t want to put stimulus forth and give people a whopping $8 or $10 in their check, and think that they ought to save it, and in terms of modifications… I’ll tell you what, I have an idea.
You know, the new administration’s big on computers and technology– How about this, President and new administration? Why don’t you put up a website to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages; or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water?
TRADER ON FLOOR: That’s a novel idea.
(Applause, cheering)
JOE KERNEN: Hey, Rick… Oh, boy. They’re like putty in your hands. Did you hear…?
SANTELLI: No they’re not, Joe. They’re not like putty in our hands. This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hand.
(Booing)
President Obama, are you listening?
TRADER: How ’bout we all stop paying our mortgage? It’s a moral hazard.
SANTELLI: Don’t get scared, Joe. They’re already scaring you. You know, Cuba used to have mansions and a relatively decent economy. They moved from the individual to the collective. Now, they’re driving ’54 Chevys, maybe the last great car to come out of Detroit.
KERNEN: They’re driving them on water, too, which is a little strange to watch.
SANTELLI: There you go.
KERNEN: Hey Rick, how about the notion that, Wilbur pointed out, you can go down to 2% on the mortgage…
SANTELLI: You could go down to -2%. They can’t afford the house.
KERNEN: …and still have 40%, and still have 40% not be able to do it. So why are they in the house? Why are we trying to keep them in the house?
SANTELLI: I know Mr. Summers is a great economist, but boy, I’d love the answer to that one.
REBECCA QUICK: Wow. Wilbur, you get people fired up.
SANTELLI: We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.
The far right does not care about Wall Street. They care about "government" the big boogeyman that's taking their hard earned money and giving it to the wrong people. And while they may not have liked the TARP, they conflate it with the auto bailout and "cash for clunkers" and think it was socialism. So I'm afraid we aren't going to find a lot of common ground on this.
But just in case, the Big Money Boyz are putting some of their spare change to work just to make sure. And they're doing it in a very clever way, putting together a whole bunch of catch phrases, many of them contradictory, in scare quotes that simply reinforce the idea that the gummint is "taking over." Think Progress reports:
In February, while attending the Tea Party Patriot Summit in Phoenix, Arizona, I came across the grand opening of a new front group called “Dodd Frank Exposed.” Two staffers for the new group were eagerly shaking hands of Tea Party activists while asking them to fill out a survey about their perception of the Dodd Frank Wall Street reform law passed last year.
On a television set up at the booth, a video played on loop claiming Wall Street reform is an “unconstitutional takeover of the U.S. economy.” The video, set to scary attack ad music, argued that Tea Party activists should be as angry at financial reform as they were against President Obama’s health reforms:
NARRATOR: From the same people who brought you Obamacare comes a controversial sequal: Dodd Frank. Last year, President Obama and the Democrat-run Congress rushed through the sweeping overhaul of healthcare amounting to the unconstitutional power grab followed quickly by Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform And Consumer Protection Act. Just like Obamacare it created a massive, unconstitutional regulatory bureaucracy. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a runaway regulatory machine completely unaccountable to the president, the Congress, and the courts.
I spoke briefly to a young staffer for the group, who told me that the entire law had to be repealed. “All of it?” I asked. “Anything to stop the bleeding,” she replied. According to the survey results posted on the Dodd Frank Exposed website, Tea Party Patriots by a wide margin agreed: repeal the financial reform law.
Read on to find out who's behind this. Nobody knows exactly where the money's coming from but this may provide a little clue:
Notably, the Dodd Frank Exposed website applauds litigation sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is funded by banks like Citigroup and Bank of America, for challenging the constitutionality of Wall Street reform.