The Truth about the Tea Party

A recent article in the New Yorker, August 30, 2010, by Jane Mayer, entitled: Covert Operations: The Billionaire Brothers who are Waging a War against Obama, documents the pivotal role played in the rise of the Tea Party by the right-wing political organization called Citizens for Prosperity. This organization was created and is funded by two of the world's richest men: Charles and David Koch (pronounced "coke"), owners of the oil-refinery conglomerate: Koch Industries. The combined wealth of the two brothers ranks behind only that of David Gates and Warren Buffet. They were the founders in the 1970s of the right-wing Cato Institute and have funded scores of right-wing causes over the years. Please read the New Yorker article on the Koch Brothers and the Tea Party at: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

The key role played by the immensely wealthy, right-wing Koch brothers finally makes the whole episode of the rise of the Tea Party make sense. It explains how the government deficit created by 10 years of Bush tax cuts and a financial crisis caused by the greed of Wall Street, was blamed on a Democratic administration left to pick up the pieces. It explains how anger at our government's failure to regulate the industry was redirected toward the governments attempt to assist the victims.

From the beginning, the rise of the Tea Party was strange. I understood the anger, I was angry myself. To hell the deficit, we were told, if trillions of federal tax dollars weren't immediately pumped in to the banking system, the entire world would be plunged into another great depression. The American people were quite united about one thing. These banks by all rules of fairness should just be allowed to go out of business and everybody connected to their fraudulent mis-management should be in the street like the greedy speculators who lost everything in 1929. Derivatives, repackaged mortgages, ponzie schemes, junk bonds, things too complicated for the public to understand had led to immense fortunes. These people deserved to pay the price for their failed schemes. But hey, two presidential administrations came forward to say that these banks were too big to fail, so we went along with it.

Fast forward to 2012. How are the Wall Street mega-banks doing? Great. Stock market? All the way back. How about the 8 million people who lost their jobs from 2008-2010? Still unemployed. There has been no recovery for the working class. Employment is exactly where it was in the depths of the crash. (Yes, you hear how we create jobs every month, but it has only been enough to make up for the young people coming in to the labor force.) In Ohio, I read today that 4 out of 10 school children are on the free lunch program due to the financial difficulties of their families. And how about reforming the big banks? At least we can say they were broken up so that this would not happen again, right? But no. They are still there. They never once stopped paying the mega-bonuses, and now they are looking at smaller, more local banks as targets for future mergers.

All this left me mad as hell. Deeply disappointed in both political parties. Feeling powerless at the impotence of democracy in the face of immense wealth. Here again, I think my feelings were shared by the overwhelming majority of the American people.

I first became aware of the Tea Party sometime in 2009. Finally, someone was expressing my anger, I thought. But then it started to get really weird. These people had no concern for the bailout of the wealthy banks. They had no concern for the 8 million people who had lost their jobs through Wall Street greed. No concern that the Wall Street crisis had left us with homes worth half what they were. Indeed, one of their main objects of attack was the stimulus program, a modest, totally inadequate attempt to help the victims.

Today, the Tea Party is pushing the agenda of the Right-Wing propaganda machine the Kochs helped create. The Tea Party claims to be concerned with the deficit. But this is only the means to get at what really drives them. Nobody truly concerned with the deficit, would be talking about cutting taxes by 2.9 trillion dollars. What drives the Tea Party is hatred of government. This means, first of all, hatred of the programs of the New Deal: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and hundreds of lesser programs ensuring children are educated and our people can maintain steady employment. But this also explains the meanness of the Tea Party. The goal of their propaganda is to make you think that our political system is a joke and that all our elected officials are morons. This is why they are completely brazen about lying and repeating lies. Their goal is to make us think that politics is all about lies. Everybody in politics lies, right? When ordinary citizens naively pass on insulting stories about our congressmen, senators and president, they are contributing to the Tea Party agenda (or should I say the the agenda of Charles and David Koch). The right-wing propaganda machine wants to make hatred of government a national sport.