The government’s massive economic stimulus package has divided America again between the wealthy and the working class. The two videos in this article represent opposing viewpoints: In the first, the automotive worker is attacked by a TV news reporter for receiving health care benefits. In the other, a wealthy stock market floor trader yells that we should not be bailing-out “the loser’s mortgages” because they don’t deserve it.
NASCAR whole-heartedly supports a massive government bail-out to the automotive industry while Southern Senators are adamently against it. NASCAR’s fans are mostly working people who are being hit hard by the economic recession. But the market-populists who believe that any economic stimulus given to the working class is a government hand-out, have no problem with a giving millionaire Wall Street traders who caused this economic mess $2 trillion. Where does NASCAR stand on these issues? Do the billionaires that control NASCAR “relate” with the automotive worker and NASCAR fan or are they market populists who believe Rick Santelli is right?
If NASCAR really believes in grassroots populism and the rights of the middle class who, by the way, built this country, then why not come out and denounce the Southern Senators who think GM and Chrysler should be allowed to fail so their Toyota factories can flourish. NASCAR wrote a letter to US Senators telling them to support the auto industry bail-out. Why not send another letter telling those Senators who voted against the stimulus package for working families that these Americans who work hard each day represent the NASCAR fan base and they need their stimulus money more than Wall Street executives who will just hand out billions in taxpayers dollars as bonuses.
In two separate television clips yesterday, we saw the two most powerful political forces in America in their most pure form - and it’s important to watch both clips back to back to see what I mean.
On one side, you have what Thomas Frank has called “Market Populism” - the portrayal of Wall Street’s agenda as an impassioned mass-based populist movement. Check out this clip from CNBC, where the network’s correspondent, Rick Santelli, is literally on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange surrounded by multimillionaire traders railing on the Obama administration for trying to help struggling homeowners, and berating people who are getting foreclosed on as “losers.” Santelli is praised as a supposed “revolutionary” and the mob of financial elites around him is whooping and hollering, pretending to be a populist mob of regular Joes:
Virg Bernero, the mayor of Lansing, Michigan, presenting the antithesis of Market Populism - let’s call it Grassroots Populism. Bernero demands to know how anyone can be calling for wage/benefit cuts for workers at a time the government is taking workers’ tax money and handing it to the very speculators that Santelli is whooping it up with:
After watching these two clips, the question is the same question that’s always been at the heart of economic politics: Which side are you on? And the answer, if you look at the hard data, is that most Americans are Grassroots Populists: those who think Wall Street and the government are colluding to rip off taxpayers, and who think the crumbs of aid for so-called “losers” that Santelli is ragging on is way too small - not way too much.
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