(Just a note: "Raymo" is just a nickname that some folks at work call me.  I thought it sounded catchy for this posting)

Before following up the Lifeboats posting from last time, we just have to spend some time on this ridiculous Rick Santelli and Jim Cramer business. I don't watch either of these guys on CNBC, or anything else on CNBC, for that matter.  But I do catch clips of them on the Daily Show of Colbert every so often.  Having just seen some recaps of Santelli's ranting denunciation of "loser" homeowners, and of Cramer's absurd scolding of Obama for destroying wealth, I just gotta say: "What the F?"

Appropriately, Jon Stewart skewered all of these bozos last night: http://www.commondreams.org/video/2009/03/05.  In classic Daily Show style, we are treated to the awful inaccuracies and outright lies of these financial gurus, and they deserve as much skewering as we can muster. So in that vein, I'd like to throw in my two cents and pile on.  But we can look at Cramer and Co's pronouncements a little more closely, as relates to some of the main themes of this blog. 

Cramer's histrionics are nothing if not entertaining.  But what strikes me most about is attitude is something that I've also recognized recently amongst other members of the chattering pundit class.  In the mornings before coming to work, I will occasionally catch "Morning Joe," the MSNBC show with Joe Scarborough and his cronies.  The news reader on this show is Mika Brzezinski, the daughter of former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.  Aside from being annoyingly non-substantive, she is constantly spewing out this faux outrage at bailouts, pork, Big Bankers with their Big Bonuses, all with a totally unearned self-righteousness. I have also noticed this same attitude among other glorified Teleprompter jockeys, at least the ones who are given some precious unscripted seconds which they can fill with their valuable opinions. 

As with Cramer and Santelli, these exasperated millionaire personalities are acting as if the current catastrophes are simply cyclical bumps in the road, traceable to some limited and specific misdeeds.  Television does not deal with historical trends very well, so these folks are always trying to ferret out the drama, the story, and the villains.  If things are f'ed up, there have to be people to blame. And as we have described elsewhere, most recently in the last post, the general conservative and liberal narratives are essentially grand blame stories, looking for the cosmic scapegoats responsible for derailing the American Express.

Now, we can't expect news readers and other fluffy TV folks to delve too deeply into historical trends and sociological structures.  After all, they have boner pills and Acuras to sell, and nothing turns viewers away like a bunch of non-confrontational, professorial BS.  But their smug scolding of Henry Paulson, Obama, bonus-granting companies, and the like, is infuriating. Like the current crop of victimized Republicans, they are pretending that the last decade or so never happened. They're acting as if they have been doing cutting-edge reporting on fraud, deregulation, wealth inequality and the like, all along. They are taking it as a personal affront that the system is letting them down. But it would be too much to admit that the system itself is simply working out its gruesome algorithm in a perfectly rational manner, so they scramble around to blame bankers, deadbeat borrowers, non-regulating regulators, etc.

But let's remind ourselves of the deep background on this stuff.  The American economy has grown steadily and impressively since WW2.  Up until the early to mid-70s, the United States had wealth distribution patterns similar to other Western industrialized societies.  But after the mid-70s, while economic growth continued its upward trajectory, the financial rewards of the system started skewing upwards.  Income and wealth concentration has been accelerating, and the United States has diverged sharply from other Western democracies, which have used heavier taxation on the wealthy to fund more substantial social safety nets and other collective projects. The result, of course, is that wealth and income inequality is now at Gilded Age levels in America. Household income has been almost flat for the lat 35 years, and that is with many more two-income families. People are working longer hours, commuting longer distances, and have steadily improved their productivity -- yet they are barely keeping afloat. Oh yeah, and also during this same period, household savings have plummeted, personal debt has skyrocketed, company-funded health care and pension programs have all but disappeared, union membership has atrophied, and unemployment has swelled (especially if we include the hidden unemployed in our prisons).

So the economy has been churning out a lot of money, and it's all been funneling upwards, to financial elites like Cramer and his cronies. Regular people, who worked hard and played by the rules, got left out in the cold. For stock market traders, the last 30 years have been a steadily producing goldmine, so the recent collapse is an aberrant affront.  But for the rest of us, who have relentlessly fallen behind for decades, the current catastrophes are simply what happens when there is no more give left in the system. We have given all the time, consumption, and borrowing that we can give -- there's nothing left. So for Rick Santelli, people who can't pay their mortgages are losers. They're irresponsible for taking on debts they couldn't repay. But the bigger question is, why were so many families in a position to have to take out a subprime mortgage? Sure, they couldn't afford it.  But why should the richest country in world history have millions of households that can't afford a standard mortgage, health care, and a good savings to debt ratio?  Why? Because we have allowed the profits from the system to flow upwards, so that the top 1% of the population now controls more wealth than the bottom 90%. That's not an economic picture to be proud of.

So Rick Santelli and Jim Cramer, you guys need a reality check. Big business and big finance has reaped the rewards of economic growth for the last 35 years, destroying the livelihoods of regular working people, turning us into a nation of debtors and deadbeats. Obama destroying wealth?  Please.