This is Not My Beautiful Economy, Part 4

Could we have a more dramatic picture of our current economic climate than the displays of outrage in two widely covered news clips yesterday? And how is it that our advanced media culture appears to be exacerbating misunderstandings and miscommunications?

The first piece has been thoroughly and perfectly dissected by both Andrew Leonard of Salon and OS's Saturn Smith. Exuberant CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli amid traders on the Chicago Merc's trading floor were passionately angry about the Obama home foreclosure plan that gives assistance to people who can't pay their mortgage. To Santelli the plan is, in essence, rewarding bad behavior and he even referred to delinquent homeowners as "losers." (To be fair to Santelli, he has since said he regretted calling them that.)

The video was resonating because of the irony of a man sitting on a trading floor where investment bankers, who have received much larger "capital infusions" from the government, ply their trade expressing outrage at the government rescuing people from what he sees as their irresponsible behavior. How could he not see how hypocritical it was to cajole traders on the floor to express outrage for bailouts when the investment banking system itself ALSO received governmental bailouts?

But the more I thought about it, the more I started to think that the irony may not be at all apparent to them because there's a good chance that the investment bankers and many of those on Wall Street place the burden of responsibility for the problem entirely on the shoulders of those who took out the risky loans in the first place.

Santelli said a very revealing thing today when going over the controversy from yesterday's tirade. He said  "the market is a mechanism" through which the economy operates. Structurally speaking, Wall Street and the investment banking system sees itself through a free market lens in which all they are doing is providing the "mechanism" to meet the existing demands of consumers. The packaged and bundled high-risk loans were merely, in their eyes, tools they devised to help respond to the needs and demands of the market.

So, if one follows through with this focused view of their role, it doesn't seem a stretch that many might feel genuine anger toward the people who made demands from them and then later were unable to meet the terms of their arrangement. In a very strange way, then, the tirade was not at all tone deaf or hypocritical - it was perfectly appropriate and properly focused in the eyes of those who work in the investment banking system.

I've long felt that many people who extoll free markets don't actually understand or acknowledge that they do more than simply supply a product to meet a demand. The free market system, particularly the very unregulated kind we have in the United States, not only responds to demands - it works very hard to create new and often unrealistic demands. That they feverishly fueled the housing market demand by creating what we are now calling toxic assets perhaps doesn't seem to them to be their problem. In fact, it seems realistic that investment bankers believe they were just doing their job. And the tragedy here is that, actually, they were. This is a reality of free markets Santelli can't accept - people in the market can follow the rules and just do their job and this kind of catastrophe can STILL happen. But not for Santelli or the people who celebrated what he said - there must be SOMEONE to blame.

That Santelli and the floor traders could not see the larger picture where responsibility for this mess extends from the bottom to the top is more a problem with perspective than outright class hostility. Without a sober assessment in which we see all pieces of the system and the failures in each link of the chain, we're bound to continue pitting one against each other.

The second very revealing clip is from a Fox News interview with Lansing, Michigan mayor Virg Bernero (who bears an eerie resemblance to Chrissy from The Sopranos). When asked about his reaction to the plan that GM & Chrysler are going to pitch to the government, Bernero heatedly runs off course and berates the anchor about the assumption that UAW workers are the cause of the auto industry's problems.

Bernero is clearly on the defensive as there has been much (extremely misleading) reporting on the wages and benefits of US auto workers. The mayor's anger is deep and, from my perspective, understandable yet ineffectively delivered. That he doesn't bother to pay much attention to the specific questions he's asked clearly irritates the anchor to the point of rank dismissal and condescension.

It's difficult for me to watch for a few reasons:

1.  Bernero too quickly became defensive and attacked the Fox anchor (perhaps anticipating more critical questions later) and therefore gave the anchor the upper hand in dismissing him;
2.  What he's saying is sadly truthful about the disproportionate blame and criticism that's heaped on working people and unions as opposed to white collar business leaders; and
3.  The anchor's facial expressions and mannerisms demean the mayor and his final statement that "it's not a campaign speech, you're not the Ever Ready battery" deliver a message that the real, palpable anger felt in Michigan by working people is not taken seriously by the mainstream media.

Both videos show the real and genuine anger that's out there and both sadly display limited perspectives and some major failures in sending and receiving important messages. We're left still in the dark, it seems to me, as we continue to lurch adrift on a sea of uncertain shifting winds where blame is easy and understanding seems so very far away. As Cool Hand Luke said so presciently, "What we have here is a failure to communicate.”