When Barack Obama took office as president of the United States he inherited from his predecessor George W. Bush a financial disaster of epic lineage. Many traders said they had never seen a day like it. I admit he had to take quick action and did not have adequate time to think things through. It is difficult to do the rational thing in the midst of general panic.

Obama immediately took action to quell the disaster. Now some of the things he did were dubious. For example, he arranged for massive  bailouts of businesses that had caused the market tank while being much less generous with ordinary people who could not pay their mortgages.

One month after his inauguration, in February of 2009, an event occurred when the  an analyst named Rick Santelli was heard live on CNBC the financial news network, standing on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and said this:

I have a proposed modification. You know the new administration is big on computers and technology. How about this: Let’s put up a website on the Internet to have a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ or would we like to at least buy cars and houses in foreclosure and give them to people who might actually have a chance to prosper down the road and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water…We are thinking of having a Chicago tea party in July.

It really was a plea for the ordinary people who got screwed by paying for bailouts for rich bankers while they got no help at all. It was a legitimate cry for justice for those that Obama ignored in his rush to save the financial system.  This later morphed into the Tea Party which of course was another failure to drain the swamp in favour of feeding the swamp creatures with expensive caviar and champaign. But they had a point. A very good poiiint in fact.

Donald Trump would later repeat exactly the same thing when he promised to help the little guys by draining the swamp and actually rewarded the wealthy with deep tax cuts instead. This is what has happened over and over again in American politics and Obama was not immune.

Republicans actually took this idea to heart and organized an informal Tea Party, but their efforts were of course confined to working for the rich rather than the ordinary citizens of the US. For a few years they were very powerful on Capitol Hill and were a definite thorn in the side of Obama.

According to Justin Ling  in his podcast “Tehe Flamethrowers,” where he went through the history of the right wing in talk radio said Mark Williams became the defacto leader of the Tea Party. The Daily News said this about him: “the flamethrower leading the battle against the Ground Zero mosque, was kicked out of the National Tea Party Federation Saturday for a racist blog post.” Williams  started out as a radio commentator in Sacramento where he took over from Rush Limbaugh.  He organized a series of rallies across the country to celebrate Tax Day, the day that supposedly people had paid their taxes on their earnings so they started to work after that for themselves. It was a grass roots Republican uprising. And they loved dressing up in the regalia of the American revolutionaries. Wearing their tri-corner hats, breeches while carrying muskets and crying to reduce taxes, smaller government, and support individual liberty. It really was a bit of a party–for awhile.