I heard snippets of Rick Santelli’s…ecstatic utterances from yesterday last night on the way home from the office but didn’t catch up on the bruhaha until today.
I don’t watch CNBC (I don’t even subscribe to cable) but occasionally find a clip entertaining. I agree with Santelli in principle (assuming there’s a principle somewhere beneath Santelli’s rhetoric), even while I find his manner of speech is delightfully absurd. Kudlow, somehow, comes off as more of a buffoon, though. Mercifully – though satire is my favorite type of humor, so maybe I am missing out on something truly wonderful – I’m unfamiliar with the rest of the pundits and empty skirts on the channel.
One fascinating aspect of all this is the galvanization of the Right – Santelli’s rant tapped the disenchanted conservative zeitgeist with startling effectiveness, doing something off the cuff and with relatively no expense that McCain/Palin weren’t capable of during back in the Fall. Take this for example. Of course, they didn’t have a tanking stock market on a Democratic president’s watch or quite so many trillions of dollars of debt to rally around. Whether this will truly mobilize anyone and to what effect remains to be seen – but I’m highly doubtful.
A, there were some pretty intelligent responses to that rant. For example, look here:
http://oldprof.typepad.com/a_dash_of_insight/2009/02/be-like-mike.html
Be sure to read the comments. Some of them were pretty good. One person in particular even puts up a link to an old Milton Friedman interview — that one in particular will raise at least one of your eyebrows, if you aren’t already familiar with the myth of Friedman.
Cheers
Comment by The Lonely Trader — February 25, 2009 @ 9:45 pm
Good stuff at A Dash of Insight – I should visit there more often than I do; somehow “A Dash” reminds of me of baking which turns me off (Mrs. Dash, maybe) – silly.
I puttered around reading some other reflections on Santelli, pro and con, but came out torn on the topic he was railing against. I’ve been torn on a lot of this lately, though: what’s absolutely necessary and humane short-term v. the inevitable consequences an aggressively interventionist short-term response will have over time. All I know for certain is that I’ll never be able to fully settle on one side of the fence.
Comment by andrewunknown — February 26, 2009 @ 8:20 am
The plot thickens:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/02/rick-santellis-faux-rant/
Comment by andrewunknown — March 2, 2009 @ 2:37 am
[...] I was commenting on some of the responses to the rant in the comments section of one of Andrew Unknown’s posts. Andrew is that friendly, talkative guy eulogizing the financial apocolypse. Today he posted this link from The Big Picture: [...]
Pingback by Is Santelli a rightwing shill? « The Lonely Trader — March 3, 2009 @ 12:00 am
Ok ok…I may not agree with everything he says and I am not ruling out that it was planned, BUT the timing of the website is not substantial enough in this technological age. I am watching GMA right now and can have a website up in 15 mins about a topic if I so please. Also, I am not one to judge, but the journalistic integrity of playboy should be brought into question here.
Comment by bgin2end — March 3, 2009 @ 7:39 am
I’m with you – in fact, the article was retracted by Playboy, the veracity of its claims called into serious question, and Santelli even posted an open letter on cnbc.com to set the record straight. The machinations of the Left are just as plentiful as those on the Right.
Comment by andrewunknown — March 3, 2009 @ 10:25 pm
Oh, so since the article was retracted, the claims called into question, and an open letter was published, the case is closed?
Please.
Can anyone say “Dan Rather”?
But yeah, I agree with you about the machinations…except that that character of those machinations on the right seem to be quite a bit more toxic to the commons these days. I’m not arguing on principle here, I’m arguing on facts.
Perhaps nobody in finance cares about the commons….
Comment by The Lonely Trader — March 5, 2009 @ 9:10 pm
I’m sure there was some back-room legal BS involved and that it wasn’t a tacit admission of cut-and-dry shoddy investigative journalism. Then again, with the attention this received, even if PB buckled under CNBC’s legal press, why wouldn’t anyone else pick this up? Damn, I don’t know. It could be either case, really – and that’s the problem: we’ll never extricate ourselves from the imbroglio of claims and counter-claims, inexplicable retractions and more-than-mysterious coincidences (the date of the “tea party” domain registrations for example) to get at what happened. But that’s just the kind of incidental obscurantism that follows from the back-and-forth between Left and Right that works for the benefit of politicians and to the detriment of the public. Really, it’s basic scam artistry.
Machinations abound: but I couldn’t say whether R or L is more or less for the people: any “facts” come immediately to mind contrasting one with another?
And other than free credit counseling and front-line commercial retail banking, I think you’re right.
I’ve studied ideology extensively, specifically from the angle of contemporary critical theory and Marx’s capitalist critique; utterly fascinating, and never more pertinent than now. My conclusions in this area have me identifying more closely with Left than Right; but then it’s difficult to subscribe to anything that carries partisan support or gives a read of political bias because there is a culture of subterfuge, lies and exploitation pandemic to our politico-economic way of life.
Comment by andrewunknown — March 6, 2009 @ 3:04 am
I knew there was something we had in common, if not in our opinions and the sizes of our vocubularies, then certainly in our educational backgrounds — but why frame these these the false dichotomy of left and right, even a little bit? Seems too pedestrian for you. I, on the other hand, can get away with it because I’m a coarse SOB with a smaller vocabulary.
Not incidentally, I wonder if Marx would have thought of himself as a leftist…or if he would have taken a more thoughtful, nuanced approach to the question. I don’t see him as a leftist at all — at least not in his historiography. He certainly sympathized with labor — but those were very different days than today, as I’m sure you know. (If one wants to see just how bad things can get in an industrial society and the effects of urbanization on the commons, take a look at early nineteenth century England.) It would be difficult for Rush Limbaugh not to have been pro-labor in those days. Not that I pretend to compare Rush and Karl — that would be absurd.
By commons, I refer to the proper definition as found in Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay, for example. The idea of a commons goes back much further. It’s treatment by Neo-Classical economists and the Chicago School in particular is infamously incompetent and foolish. Free markets may be the most efficient way to mobilize capital for individual prosperity, but they are incredibly destructive to the commons and, as it turns out.
Take our problems with soil degradation, deforestation, fresh water pollution, air pollution, erosion and desertification, and the depletion of marine fish stocks, to name a few — all driven by a race to accumulate and consume. We really are in very, very big trouble. And some think free markets can get us out of these pickles, too, via some interesting idea that come from what can only be described as tortured logic.
Let’s see what happens in fifty years, shall we?
Comment by The Lonely Trader — March 6, 2009 @ 10:05 pm
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