There is a debate out there about the origins of the tea bagger movement. Some say it was during a rant by CNBC’s Rick Santelli on Thursday, Feb. 19, 2009, about the new administration’s plan to help mortgage holders who were underwater:
RICK SANTELLI: 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 [by employees of the exchange behind him on the trading floor])
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 economny. 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 percent on the mortgage…
SANTELLI: You could go down to -2 percent. They can’t afford the house.
KERNEN: …and still have 40 percent, and still have 40 percent 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)
The Ron Paul wing of the right-wing fringe believes the tea bag movement was born a year earlier, in December when Paul’s quixotic campaign for the presidency surprised Beltway types by breaking single-day fundraising records — taking in $6 million — on the 234th anniversary of the actual Boston Tea Party.
The third possibility — shown in the video at the top — comes from another libertarian source, Reason magazine:
While submerged in the WGBH archives, watching old clips on the busing battles that gripped South Boston in the 1970s, I came across this “The 10 O’Clock News” coverage of a September 9, 1974, rally at Government Center denouncing Judge W. Arthur Garrity, who ordered the desegregation of Southie schools. Sen. Ted Kennedy attempts to calm the crowd, but is shouted down and pelted with newspapers and tomatoes.
The WGBH anchor notes a “new touch” to the protest movement, “the abundance of teabags, apparently to signify that the demonstrators were in the same vein of those who tipped the tea into the harbor.”
