Rick Santelli, Whose Epic Rant Launched the Tea Party Movement, to Retire
On the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on February 19, 2009: “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.”
I’m so old, I remember when Rick Santelli on CNBC lost his s–t on live TV on February 19, 2009, and thereby launched the nascent Tea Party movement. The context was post-2008 financial crisis bailouts:
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.
KERNEN: It’s like mob rule here. I’m getting scared. I’m glad I’m…
CARL QUINTANILLA: Get some bricks and bats…
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.
(Whistling, cheering)
Arguably the movement started earlier, but Santelli’s Rant definitely was a booster rocket. While Legal Insurrection never affiliated with any Tea Party organizations, I think it’s fair to say we were broadly part of the movement.
I covered the Tea Party rally in Corning, NY, in April 2009:
I attended the Tea Party in Corning, NY, yesterday. There was a good crowd in this relatively small town in western upstate NY (several hours from NY City), several hundred in total. Corning is home to Corning glass and Steuben glass. The entire region has been hit hard by the exodus of jobs to less tax intensive parts of the U.S. and abroad.
I don’t remember which speaker said it, but one of them described how politicians from New York City come up to the region so that they can say they have visited the countryside, and stare at the inhabitants as if through binoculars, like on safari.
And that description was a metaphor for what is motivating the Tea Parties and fueling the outrage. Taxes are the issue, but the problem is much deeper. There is a complete disconnect between the politicians who raise taxes to benefit people who do not pay taxes, and the people who pay taxes….
Lack of respect and a tax hell fueled the Tea Parties. But you wouldn’t know that if all you have are binoculars, and you are on permanent safari.
We started covering the Tea Party movement early on and eventually had almost 240 posts. We documented the smear campaign and attempt to portray Tea Party rallies as racist by, among other things, planting signs and provocateurs in crowds.
Nationwide rallies of hundreds of thousands of patriots in 2011 were — wait for it — completely peaceful, no stores were looted or burned. At one point almost one-third of the nation identified as a Tea Party supporter:
I gave a lecture at the Cornell Club in NYC in September 2011:
I gave a talk last night at the Cornell Club of New York City in Manhattan. The topic was the Tea Party Movement, and the thesis was:
Professor Jacobson will argue that the Tea Party movement has been among the most influential and most positive forces in American politics in a generation.
It was a hot topic and there was some hot discussion and argument afterwards. The crowd was about evenly split.
As part of the talk, I explored the many and varied smears of the Tea Party including false charges of racism, extremism and violence, topics explored here hundreds of times.
Our own Leslie Eastman (not yet an LI author) was one of the leaders of the San Diego Tea Party rally in April 2009:
Legal Insurrection readers were active:
[Tea Party participants and Legal Insurrection readers, Jersey City, NJ, 2013]
Arguably, the anger resulting from the suppression and demonization of the Tea Party movement led to Trump 1.0.
Which brings me back to Rick Santelli. He’s retiring in October 2026, Variety Reports:
Rick Santelli, the longtime CNBC economic-indicators analyst whose plain-spoken but passionate takes on the effects of federal policy on average Americans boosted his profile at the business-news outlet, plans to retire from the Versant Media-backed network on October 2.
Santelli’s decision was revealed to CNBC staffers Thursday, but announced on air Friday during a segment on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” …
In 2009, Santelli let loose with an on-air rant that some people credit with giving rise to the Tea Party in the U.S. The correspondent actually turned to traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and asked if they would like to bail out their neighbors who had overspent on their homes — a dig at President Obama’s Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan, designed to help certain homeowners avoid foreclosure.
Santelli addressed the camera at the close of his remarks and asked: “President Obama, are you listening?” The display at the time was a stunning one at CNBC, which tends to focus on numbers, not sentiment, and a clip of Santelli has been used time and again as a symbol of the frustration of a wide swath of Americans over certain Democratic policies.
“Rick’s passion and personality have led to countless memorable exchanges,” said David Cho, CNBC’s editor in chief, in a memo sent to staffers Thursday.
One rant changed the world. For the bettter.
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Comments
The Tea Party was killed by people wanting to be the leader of the Tea Party.
An early manifestation of the deep state.
The cooperation of the Republicans with the IRS attacking the Tea Party led to us calling them the GOPe
He will be missed very much
A sane voice in an insane world
Much like Maria, we are losing them all
Who will step up?
It’s been a long time since I cut the cable yet still have fond memories of Mr. Santelli’s market-opening rants. Highly intelligent man with a gift for succinctness.
Rick Santelli asked the important questions, refusing to allow the cheerleaders to obfuscate the potential and/or known risks of their policy preferences. He always seemed resigned to his role in pointing out that adding on debt, expanding spending, unconstrained growth was gonna have consequences. Unfortunately the sheer disparity in numbers of cheerleaders to realists among the TV investment/economic ‘gurus’ made him lonely voice.
Jubilant/carefree investors chasing increased stock prices unsupported by earnings, printing excess $ to keep the asset bubble afloat, massive Federal govt spending nearly 30% above revenue and a $40+ Trillion federal debt will eventually take its toll. In a true ‘free market’ asset prices/stock prices are allowed to fall as well as rise, to go through extreme declines as steep as the prior rise.
Classic. Thanks for the memory. My husband and I were audited by the IRS for that year. It turned out that the government owed US money, but in order to get it we would have had to file an amended return, so we opted out.
I remember that broadcast. The TP unnerved both parties to action and the weapons of government were turned on us then. In the final analysis, government will turn on all of us when needed. There will be no peace for a very long time if ever.
Ah, the good old days…when some of The People thought they’d get involved then their representative government would respond by, you know, representing them, too. Something rather different happened.
They learned The Apparatus isn’t there for them to govern themselves to their advantage; it’s there to rule them to someone else’s (Tbe Apparatus itself, first.). They were shown to be none of the served, nor the need, only the means declared for them by others.
What’s the old saw? If you don’t see the
suckerserf at the table, thesuckerserf is you. And now they know; we know; everybody knows.Interesting times; not hardly over.
Santelli’s rant inspires a thought experiment, starting with: that bail out didn’t go to the irresponsible borrowers or their lenders; not solid borrowers and lenders either.
The grand bail out was over $500 billion, or a trillion plus, or there were several bail outs, or…. to have something to work with:
— Call it one and done for a cool trillion.
— To inject into “the economy” to prevent lockup. That’s what they said.
— Because too many big finance houses were gonna collapse from crashing speculative investments. That’s what they said.
They “stabilized” a small number of big finance houses by injecting $ directly onto their balance sheets. Markets locked up anyway, parades of “reponsible mortgage holders” got clipped in the job losses n later rates, and it wiped out gaggles of small, regional banks n S&Ls before Dodd-Frank — another reaction — killed more.
A trillion dollars is ~$3,000 for every person then in the country. If we’re gonna backstop things, what happens if we drop that trillion onto individuals? $12,000 per family of four. That’s a couple months’ runway while new jobs found. That’s piles of capital into SnLs where lots of folks hold their money to say, buy up failed mortgages n forclosed properties. (Pronouncers upon financial architectures said that “people” would “just spend it.” much as they said those Tea Party Clowns had no points, outside their tricorn hats. Really? We know this?)
What spread it around is not is changing a couple numbers on a screen, or moving a decimal point, or a “plan” figured out at a restaurant table on a napkin. All descriptions which came out of the bigthink doers in publicly.
A “thought experiment” is a perspective not a plan, to illuminate from another direction. How, exactly would this play out? That question is the point.
We do know that with the actual napkin plan people responsibly holding good mortgages, working jobs, saving for the next thing got clipped anyway. They didn’t get relief or protection. Nobody changed a couple numbers on a screen, or shifted a decimal point for them. They weren’t in the room; it wasn’t their napkin.
The Tea Party was a bunch of people declaring they wanted to be part of the deciding. All US politics since follows from this hypothetical: what happens if this out group gets involved? Woulda been a lot easier if The Apparatus had never let it get that far. Or, at least listened along the way since.
Interesting times.