American Rebellion
There is a supreme irony buried in the heart of the comprehensive investigation of the Tea Party Movement in this morning’s New York Times. The governing principle of the movement is described as a,
Patriot ideology, which holds that governments and economies are controlled by networks of elites who wield power through exclusive entities like the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Many of us who grew up in the Sixties have heard this rhetoric before, ironically from the left. Here is a paragraph from the Port Huron Statement, the founding manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society.
It is not possible to believe that true democracy can exist where a minority utterly controls enormous wealth and power. The influence of corporate elites on foreign policy is neither reliable nor democratic; a way must be found to be subordinate private American foreign investment to a democratically-constructed foreign policy. The influence of the same giants on domestic life is intolerable as well; a way must be found to direct our economic resources to genuine human needs, not the private needs of corporations nor the rigged needs of maneuvered citizenry.
I would hope that Glenn Beck, who clearly seems to be the driving force behind this new American Rebellion, might print out a copy of the Port Huron Statement to read in the comfort of his private jet as he flies to his next $60,000 speaking engagement. To deny that the American economic and political life is controlled by the elites is a fool’s mission. That this narrative is shared by both the right and the left is not indicative of some mass “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” paranoia, but rather a sign that the collective consciousness has woken up to the facts of this chart.
My greatest fear is that the sad men in the picture at the top of this post are being played by another elite, the media hucksters long prefigured by Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd
True Patriots Beware! All the simplistic proto-fascist solutions offered you by organizations like the Oath Keepers are a smokescreen, meant only to keep you in fear. Perhaps look back to those ideals you once had as a student in 1965 as the kids from SDS wrote.
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people — these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.
As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract “others” we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution…Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity — but might it not better be called a glaze above deeply felt anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these anxieties produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe there is an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal. The search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which moves us and, we hope, others today. On such a basis do we offer this document of our convictions and analysis: as an effort in understanding and changing the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century, an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life.
Bravo, Jon. Well-said.
Terrific thread! Yes, the right, left and middle are played well, it’s actually become an art form. So much is known about the human psyche, and today there are so many outlets in which to manipulate that knowledge to bring about desired outcomes.
The irony, everyone sees but few understand. Why? Because we’ve been conditioned to see with our emotions instead of rational thought.
It’ll will interesting to watch how these hapless souls (teabaggers) are manipulated and maligned over the next year, not by the left, but those of their own cloth.
Funny, is not the control and manipulation of markets and powers that regulate same the endgame of the Free Market Economy? Why would those with the power not want to arrange things to their benefit? The public, and in this particular case, the short and stout Teabaggers, are the proverbial suckers born today. And your aforementioned threesome are the hucksters waiting around the corner to fleece them.
P.T. Barnum would have been so proud.
Here’s an “Endgame of the Free Market Economy” for you: Recruit dying people to front yet another no-risk, privatized-gain, socialized-pain “investment.” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704479704575061392800740492.html
Hey all you Free Market Lovers, let us know how this kind of thing fits into your Beautiful Self-Regulationg Based-on-Reputation world, huh? And gee, you have to wonder why The People Are Angry. And be very afraid of what happens when that overloaded tailings pond breaks its banks… No telling WHICH direction is “downhill” from that event.
Eliminate Medicare, privatize social security, make reverse mortgages the “smart investor” thing to do, eliminate the minimum wage, OSHA, the EPA, taxes for the top ten percent and corporate taxes. That should about do it. Am I a Republican yet?
After reading that, I wonder if the US is even worth saving anymore
Essentially the Tea Partiers loath sitting politicians (especially legislators) left and right. In Massachusetts, the GOP benefited from the Tea Party movement, but not because the movement favors Republicans. Brown avoided identifying himself as a Republican at all, and Coakley was successfully portrayed as an establishment candidate mostly because she was one and was too lazy to try and re-write the script. A competent, independent Democrat will often be able to convice the electorate that a Republican defends the interests of big business, so I’m not sure the rise of the Tea Party movement is an unambigouous benefit for the GOP.
So what to make of them?
They want politicians to represent the voters not the campaign donors. They are highly skeptical of some public sector solutions to problems, but they still love Medicare and Social Security. They like low taxes but they still love Medicare and Social Security. They like strong foreign policy (whatever that is) but don’t want to pay for it. They liked Obama in 2008 because he seemed smarter than GWB and more reasonble. They don’t like him now because he seems like a wimp who coddled greedy bankers and insurers and let his party pork up the health care bill. They hate the sitting Republicans and Democrats nearly equally.
I don’t think they are yet captured by either party. That may change; right now they lean a little Republican. They have no program, just a lot of slogans. They will probably fade.
Ed, the Tea Party people are an odd mix of citizens: college grads concerned about the exploding deficit; libertarians who see too much government and hate the Council of Foreign Relations (an evil covert organization bent on taking over the world!); uneducated elderly who don’t understand that Medicare and Social Security are western-style socialist programs; and others who are just plain sick of the way DC works, with all of the lobbyist money influencing legislation, etc.
However, with the like of Palin and Beck influencing these people, they’re being pushed into the Republican camp, and certainly the Republicans are working really hard to shepherd them into the party at least for voting purposes.
The Democrats would have a hard appealing to these people because they’ve been told over and over again ad infinitum that the causes of this recession and budget deficit were solely caused by Democrats. Republicans had nothing to do with the problems; they are the party of fiscal responsibility and would never have put the economy at risk; the Democrats, like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, took out the economy all on their own because they hate Americans; and the Republicans will keep Americans safe by waterboarding every terrorist and trying them in Gitmo in military tribunals.
Dems don’t deal well in fear-mongering and they lost the early conversation by not going on the defensive. They just didn’t clearly state what had happened and why they were taking extraordinary measures and spent time working on jobs, jobs, jobs and said that every single day in every way possible. Plus, they let the health care sausage making get out of control. They failed to realize the public was watching and didn’t keep the bills clean.
As a result, the Tea Party people have a very bad impression of Dems, even though most of the information they’ve accepted is false. It would be hard for the Dems to attract them at this point.
One thing maybe you people can help me with. When I listen (or read) Tea Party people they say they want more freedom. What freedom? What freedoms have they lost over the last year? What freedoms are they missing?
I don’t get it. I just keep shaking my head in consternation…and confusion.
Reminds me of the phrase “inchoate scream of rage”.
Valerie, don’t forget “the government death panels”…
But we now have Death Panels…they work for insurance companies. They are fully privatized Death Panels. Why the hell hasn’t anyone made that point to the poor Pee Baggers who will all be carrying their colostomy bags in their pockets sooner than later…
I’d rather take a crack at appealing a government death panel than an insurance company death panel…
Hey, is that a big yellow dildo that the guy in the center has, or is he just glad to see Sarah?
Valerie, Well might you ask. I suspect that when they say ‘freedom’, they mean ‘jobs’. But being right-thinking patriotic sorts, they are too proud (repressed?) to say so. If the government would just lay off trying to help them with borrowed money scattered in various and sundry directions, then naturally loads of high paying jobs would appear a week from Thursday.
Such is the American faith in the cargo cult of global capitalism.
The right has borrowed a lot of leftish techniques in their agit-prop over the past generation. Didn’t the Cato Institute describe the ‘starve the beast’ strategy as “Leninist” when they first proposed it? Don’t all the fat cat Republicans constantly play “victim” in hopes that wealthy white males will get to be the next beneficiary of identity politics?
But I seriously doubt any of the Tea Party crowd took any interest in the Port Huron statement — unless it was to burn it. People’s politics are practically innate. We’re just born seeing the “Necker cube” one way or the other. It takes a lot of effort to understand the other perspective. And the difficulty is magnified by the fact that we tend to hear from the more vocally emotional representatives of the other group. Because we hear mostly a tribally intensified, absurdist version of the opposing view, it never becomes more plausible as we listen.
do you think the Harley hat is a paid for product placement?
2 other things
the first is from the Newsweek article “Know Your Conspiracies
NEWSWEEK’s guide to today’s trendiest, hippest, and least likely fringe beliefs.”
By David A. Graham | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Feb 12, 2010 http://www.newsweek.com/id/233518/page/1
1. Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
It’s not clear where he must have been born instead: some say Indonesia; some say Kenya (initial suggestions that Hawaiian natives weren’t citizens when he was born in Honolulu in 1961 were quickly dismissed). The point, so-called birthers say, is that he wasn’t born in the good old US of A, hence isn’t a natural-born citizen and therefore cannot legally be president.
Proponents: Chief birther and Beverly Hills dentist and attorney Orly Taitz, WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah, Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.), former presidential and Senate candidate Alan Keyes, assorted tea partiers.
Kernel of Truth? It’s fully debunked. Forged Kenyan birth certificates have been exposed, and—despite protestations to the contrary—Obama’s birth certificate has been certified by the state of Hawaii, and images have been shown on national television. And that’s leaving aside plenty of circumstantial proof, like birth announcements in both major Hawaiian papers from August 1961.
[...]
13. The Omnibus One-World Government, Unified Currency, Dollar-Abolishing, Free Trade–Advocating Theory of Everything:
To make, first reheat old theories about elite organizations that supposedly control various world governments and would like to create a single, unitary, global regime—the Bilderberg Group, the Council of Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. Add a healthy portion of slightly newer but equally discredited theories about the Amero, a pan-North American currency, and the NAFTA superhighway, a planned thruway from Canada to Mexico said to be six football fields wide. Freshen with the economic-crisis-born idea that Ben Bernanke is trying to destroy the value of the dollar. Add a pinch of tea-party spice from former Alabama State Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who believes there’s a plan underfoot to have a United Nations guard at every American’s door. The finished product should taste a little like this.
Proponents: Alex Jones, finance blog Zero Hedge, WorldNetDaily, conservative news site NewsMax, Roy Moore.
Kernel of Truth? Eh, sounds plausible to us.
___________________________________________________________________________________the second thing I’d like to share that is of far greater value is the latest from Garrison Keillor
I think he’s making a similar point
TUESDAY, FEB 16, 2010 20:20 EST
Conspiracy shopping
Tired of the feds setting your clock for you? Join the Free Time movement!
BY GARRISON KEILLOR
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/garrison_keillor/2010/02/16/free_time_movement/index.html
If you wake up in the morning with the blues because people treat you mean, you could sing a song about it, or you could shop around for an enormous conspiracy that has denied you your constitutional right to liberty and happiness — and how about Central Standard Time? What gives the feds the right to set your clock for you? It’s tyranny.
So you join the Free Time movement. You go to meetings. You tune in “The Bob Glenn Show” every day on Fox for your marching orders and set your clock as you darn well please and feel liberated from lockstep uniformity.
Before, you were worried about your novelty taxidermy business and the declining sales of mummified mice on tiny surfboards, but now that it’s gone under, thanks to Obama’s bank bailout, and you lost your mansion on Wyandotte Lane and Joan took the kids to Toledo and you moved into a studio rental, you have time to write scorching letters to authorities and attend Free Time rallies and go to the shooting range preparing for the Revolution.
You used to be a Republican, a Kiwanian, a Presbyterian, a go-along get-along kind of guy, but now, at age 62, you’ve awakened from decades of indifference — which, you now know, was caused by chemicals the Department of Agriculture puts into snack foods to induce torpor, and so you only eat dried organic veggies ordered from a Patriot company in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho — and you are filled with enormous energy. You join the good fight on all fronts. You are anti-union, opposed to the eight-hour workday, the 24-hour clock, the Gregorian calendar and the New York Times.
You don’t necessarily agree with all the other Free Timers, e.g., the religious wing that says Only God Can Know The Time and is opposed to the use of the future tense, or the wing that believes Barack Obama is using metal detectors at airport security checkpoints to program the minds of all who pass through, but these minor differences disappear in the joyful enthusiasm of the rallies and marches, which focus on Washington’s attempts to rule our daily lives and its indifference to you and to others in the novelty taxidermy business.
Meanwhile, your health insurance runs out and your gut hurts and it takes you 20 minutes to empty your bladder. You go to the E.R., but they want to check your prostate and you happen to know, thanks to Bob, that the digital prostate exam is how the CIA inserts GPS chips into Patriots to monitor their movements, and so you go home and suffer.
And then the New York Times publishes a big story about the Free Time movement. All your fellow Patriots are thrilled. Sarah Palin is quoted as saying that the movement has raised important questions and that we must look to God for answers and put our clocks in His hands. David Broder says Free Time is an authentic voice of grass-roots anger. The chairman of the Republican National Committee meets with Free Time leaders and is “deeply impressed.” Democrats, meanwhile, are silent, confused, disheartened by the fact that Free Time has a 23 percent approval rating in some polls.
But in your own heart, you know that the crest has passed. Once the Times has recognized you, you’re on the way down. It’s the kiss of irrelevance. Meanwhile, your old friends avoid you, your own mother doesn’t call. You’ve burned through your savings and Joan is talking divorce.
And then a job offer. Teaching science to middle-schoolers, $900 a week through June 10. Your brother the school board liberal twisted an arm and you have two hours in which to decide. Congress doesn’t care what you do, neither does the president. Will you continue donating your life to Bob, or will you be a dad to your kids? They miss you. You may be a wingnut, but your kids don’t care about that. They love you deep down in their hearts, Daddy, and they always will.
And that’s what you’re going to do, pal. I’ve been there. I know.
I was with Che Guevara in Bolivia, selling T-shirts and fomenting revolution, and I got the offer to write a weekly column and had to decide: Do I want to die in the jungle and become an icon, or would I rather live in Minnesota and enjoy macaroni and cheese and quarter-pounders with cheese and deep-fried cheese curds. Call me a coward but I chose cheese.
(Garrison Keillor is the author of “77 Love Sonnets,” published by Common Good Books.)
© 2010 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc
Same idea just a different way of putting it…
TUESDAY, FEB 16, 2010 20:20 EST
Conspiracy shopping
Tired of the feds setting your clock for you? Join the Free Time movement!
BY GARRISON KEILLOR
If you wake up in the morning with the blues because people treat you mean, you could sing a song about it, or you could shop around for an enormous conspiracy that has denied you your constitutional right to liberty and happiness — and how about Central Standard Time? What gives the feds the right to set your clock for you? It’s tyranny.
So you join the Free Time movement. You go to meetings. You tune in “The Bob Glenn Show” every day on Fox for your marching orders and set your clock as you darn well please and feel liberated from lockstep uniformity.
Before, you were worried about your novelty taxidermy business and the declining sales of mummified mice on tiny surfboards, but now that it’s gone under, thanks to Obama’s bank bailout, and you lost your mansion on Wyandotte Lane and Joan took the kids to Toledo and you moved into a studio rental, you have time to write scorching letters to authorities and attend Free Time rallies and go to the shooting range preparing for the Revolution.
You used to be a Republican, a Kiwanian, a Presbyterian, a go-along get-along kind of guy, but now, at age 62, you’ve awakened from decades of indifference — which, you now know, was caused by chemicals the Department of Agriculture puts into snack foods to induce torpor, and so you only eat dried organic veggies ordered from a Patriot company in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho — and you are filled with enormous energy. You join the good fight on all fronts. You are anti-union, opposed to the eight-hour workday, the 24-hour clock, the Gregorian calendar and the New York Times.
You don’t necessarily agree with all the other Free Timers, e.g., the religious wing that says Only God Can Know The Time and is opposed to the use of the future tense, or the wing that believes Barack Obama is using metal detectors at airport security checkpoints to program the minds of all who pass through, but these minor differences disappear in the joyful enthusiasm of the rallies and marches, which focus on Washington’s attempts to rule our daily lives and its indifference to you and to others in the novelty taxidermy business.
Meanwhile, your health insurance runs out and your gut hurts and it takes you 20 minutes to empty your bladder. You go to the E.R., but they want to check your prostate and you happen to know, thanks to Bob, that the digital prostate exam is how the CIA inserts GPS chips into Patriots to monitor their movements, and so you go home and suffer.
And then the New York Times publishes a big story about the Free Time movement. All your fellow Patriots are thrilled. Sarah Palin is quoted as saying that the movement has raised important questions and that we must look to God for answers and put our clocks in His hands. David Broder says Free Time is an authentic voice of grass-roots anger. The chairman of the Republican National Committee meets with Free Time leaders and is “deeply impressed.” Democrats, meanwhile, are silent, confused, disheartened by the fact that Free Time has a 23 percent approval rating in some polls.
But in your own heart, you know that the crest has passed. Once the Times has recognized you, you’re on the way down. It’s the kiss of irrelevance. Meanwhile, your old friends avoid you, your own mother doesn’t call. You’ve burned through your savings and Joan is talking divorce.
And then a job offer. Teaching science to middle-schoolers, $900 a week through June 10. Your brother the school board liberal twisted an arm and you have two hours in which to decide. Congress doesn’t care what you do, neither does the president. Will you continue donating your life to Bob, or will you be a dad to your kids? They miss you. You may be a wingnut, but your kids don’t care about that. They love you deep down in their hearts, Daddy, and they always will.
And that’s what you’re going to do, pal. I’ve been there. I know.
I was with Che Guevara in Bolivia, selling T-shirts and fomenting revolution, and I got the offer to write a weekly column and had to decide: Do I want to die in the jungle and become an icon, or would I rather live in Minnesota and enjoy macaroni and cheese and quarter-pounders with cheese and deep-fried cheese curds. Call me a coward but I chose cheese.
(Garrison Keillor is the author of “77 Love Sonnets,” published by Common Good Books.)
© 2010 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc
Valerie,
For the democrats to reach this group, they would need to abandon progressivism and command-and-control “reform” in favor of the honorable pre-FDR era of Jacksonian Democrats. In other words, they need to be more libertarian.
People should remember that the progressive movement took hold of power in the GOP with Teddy Roosevelt, not the democrats. Wilson came next with all kinds of horrible tyranny, thus beginning the end of the democrats as defenders of liberty and the constitution, a document he had little interest in preserving.
Ah yes. Because the monopolist government “regulators” are all angels looking out for us, right JT?
Come on. Crooks are crooks. They exist in private and public life. The difference is that the public crooks has access to the gun and can use it to fund their operation on a massive scale. They have no competition. The private crooks are dastardly indeed, but they face the greatest regulators of all: competition and reputation. Government is immune to these great regulators and seems to make it its core objective to ignore both of these vital systems at every turn.
But, yeah, keep those anecdotes coming as “proof” that competition and reputation don’t provide superior long-term regulation on the knaves of our society.
JP, I’m not the only one who’s invited “proof” from your perspective. I have yet to see a single “anecdote” from the Alternate Universe of Hayek that “proves” or even hints that Competition and Reputation have even a prayer of doing more than a tiny bit of nibbling around the edges of that Naked Human Predatory And Parasitic Greed Salad that is the main dish on the species’ plate. Oh, sorry, forgot about those “Scottish Bankers.” Yeah, that “example,” that bald-statement-without-all-the-real-world-details-of-what-actually-went-on-in-the-Club-rooms-and-board-rooms-and-related-Government-Offices “detached retina” of a figure’s probative and QuisEratDemonstrative, now isn’t it?
Tell you what, maybe we’ll keep pitching underhanded to one another, and maybe you might acknowledge (even if not for attribution — would not want you to be compromised vis-a-vis all the other True Believers In Free Market Eden) that there has to be “government” (beyond that somehow perfectly tuned and staffed and operated Magical Mystery Force you invoke as the necessary DetectorAndStopperOfFraudAndCoercion that is a sine qua non of your Transactional Eden, since I guess you silently assume that otherwise, Competition and Reputation might not be enough to overcome ordinary human impulses) and “regulation” and I might (off the record, of course,) hint that maybe the Holy Elements of your Creed of Perfectible Human Intercourse might have a place among the sacred relics and Holy Writ and Dogma of what might be necessary to a polity that approaches embodiment of the old Golden Rule. Or is the GR just a Hayek-declared anathema also?
Shoot, the Truth is around here somewhere — I just had it in my hand a minute ago, caught by the middle…
Oh, and if you believe Government as Crooks has “no competition,” well, you were apparently born and bred after the Age of Zero-Based Budgeting, which was a shibboleth in Bidness before some asshole imported it into the realm of Government. I’ve worked within and against “government,” and been at least an observant bit player in the World of Business. Through the peephole of my experience at least, the Libertarian Idealist notions are the product of seeing things through a carefully selected and maintained diffraction grating that only passes a fraction of the spectrum and orders the colors to suit a hypothesis-driven whim and fancy.
Hang on to those Ideals of yours — The Tilt-a-Whirl of Reality in all its complex motions and accelerations produces more “G” forces than you imagine, and it’s hard to keep a grip on ANY slippery notion, unless it serves your self-interest well enough to make you latch on all the harder. Or you can get somebody else in your whirlycar to grab on do a different part of the Beast and subdue it. Or at least keep the fangs away from the throats of anyone you care about.
Valerie, I wish Jon Taplin would spend some thought time on that whole area of mentation that whirls around Central Themes like the inchoate (Webster’s “being only partly in existence or operation : incipient; especially : imperfectly formed or formulated : formless, incoherent <misty, inchoate suspicions that all is not well with the nation — J. M. Perry) and I would assert tribal and identity-bound notion of "freedom." Maybe if the Fainting Wuss Democratic "leadership" had an examined notion of how that memeframe works in the black recesses of the psyche, there might be a chance of steering the Ship of State away from the iceberg. Do I remember correctly, or was part of the problem of the Titanic a communication failure, whereby the Old Wooden Ships And Iron Men Ways command to "port your helm" was interpreted by "conservative" training and thinking to induce the steersman's reaction to a New Ways command from an officer who wanted just the opposite reaction?
"Freedom" is right up there with "The Bible Says…"
Please, young fella — show a fragment of respect for a person who likely imbibed deeply from the well of illusions that he “served his country” by taking part in a war. I’ve had a taste of that brew myself, and it does tend to turn your head around.
And if you look close, you will see that it’s a yellow flag, wrapped neatly around its staff, with who knows what slogan on it… Might even be something most of us would agree with or at least resonate to somehow or other…
Pet peeve number 3008: Do not ever “thank me for my service,” that insincerely or simply ignorant my-country-right-or-wrong weepy bullshit notion that by killing Wogs and using up munitions and equipment bought with tax-anticipation bonds to enrich a few or foster “policies” of assholes who do not give a shit about “the common man,” on “missions” that in reality are antithetical to the proclaimed Grand Goals, or the survival of the nation much less the species, I or any of the other patriotic (good definition, or bad) did a “service” to my fellows.
Manual de Landa, in “A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History”, points out that there is a constant tension between markets and anti-markets, and that large corporations are as much anti-markets as governments. (Having spent 16 years doing strategic consulting, I can attest that this is true.)
The mechanism to keep governments accountable is elections. The mechanism to keep large companies accountable is primarily regulation – competition has little effect at the “too big to fail” level. Competition really is effective only in real markets, think the chaos of a bazaar vs. the semi-monopolies of cable TV, health insurance and telecoms.
I’d say that there is a dawning realization that the anti-markets have joined forces, and that thanks to the gutting of regulation, the corporate + financial giants are now in the driver’s seat.
Check it Dawgs; mofo m.c.John set this hoary old argument to music.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122944753
Better watch it JT, the man will throw down on you and make you his biatch.
For the Dems to reach this group, they would have to have a megaphone as loud as Fox News, which is shaping a key segment of the “movement” and offering the narrative that the GOP is the source of fiscally responsible alternatives to the Party of the Incumbents.
Sure it’s a fib, but it’s a well constructed fib pitched to a segment that wants to believe that hopey changey thing = anti-My-America Socialist Nazis. Unite them with a common enemy and you can do with them what you will once they ceed power to you to Fix Things.
The problem for the GOPhox is that it is more likely to play out like Nadar than a genuine Bull Moose Redux.
It’s the freedom to set the clock back to a time that never existed. And because it’s that nebulous, it’s easy to manipulate.
Given any consulting model, the overview is disenfranchisement. The choices made of elected officials to regulate and control business have failed to do the jobs for which they are elected. The point is even if are able to focus our attention for long enough on THAT issue, will we be offered a choice of candidates that can do the job.
Power is about choice of choices. Our parties have failed us. It can’t be any clearer than that.
There’s other kinds of “regulation” too — from decades ago, so long that I can’t find the referent any more, I recall a local community on an estuary in some Third World country (Madagascar/Malagasy Republic?) being “handled” by a combination of Central Government Bought And Paid For By CIBA-Geigy or one of those entities. Which “corporate person” was dumping, as I recall, some heavy metals and organic crud into said estuary, thereby poisoning the “powerless local Wogs” via their fishy food source. And after multiple meetings with the plant people and “government officials,” and being feathered for years, the “powerless locals” burnt the plant down one dark and stormy night. (I’m not talking about the Minamata methyl mercury poisoning thing.)
Steven Segal stole (sorry, “built upon”?) that plot to make a movie out of. Which goes to show, once again, that no good deed goes unpunished.
I believe this is where you miss the true impetus behind the Tea party Movement.
It is not Glenn Beck.
It is not Sara Palin.
It’s not even the underlying racism.
It is, in fact, the same impetus that brought out people en masse to vote for Barack Obama a little over a year ago.
It is mass dissatisfaction with the establishment. A feeling of disenfranchisement.
It’s people who want Change in Washington (as Obama promised) but don’t have any Hope that they can elect someone into Washington to do the job (as those who voted for Obama hoped).
The internet has allowed an unprecedented flow of information. If once we merely felt that the banks are in cahoots with government – we now know it for sure. If once bank bailouts could have gone on largely unnoticed, nowadays the numbers are available to everyone (well, maybe not all the numbers are available – but the unaccountability of government with citizen’s money is glaring).
The veneer of democracy is being stripped away – figuratively and literally, through legislation and Supreme Court rulings.
What’s truly shocking is how thin the democratic coating actually was.
Glenn Beck is riding this popular dissatisfaction to benefit corporate America.
Obama rode this same dissatisfaction straight to the White House.
One offered hope. The other offers fear.
Neither offer any true change.
Both are doing their part to keep those in power in power and keep the people disenfranchised.
John Papola- Yeah that reputation thing sure slowed down Goldman Sachs! Your faith in competition and reputation is so naive. You clearly never spent a minute actually working with the masters of the universe on Wall Street. I can assure you, having spent 4 years there, you are in Hayek Dreamland
Three words for these tea partiers, flash mob politics.
I saw Jim Leach, the chairman for the National Endowment for the Humanities, speak at Iowa yesterday, and he put it pretty well. He spoke about how the Tea Party is a group that you hear about and sometimes agree with. Yet, underlying the headlines and the catch phrases, there is a scarier side to what they’re after. People are angry and dissatisfied. I feel sort of like that, though I’m optimistic that over time things will continue to improve. The strange thing about tea-partiers is that they seem to be using the playbook that 60′s liberals used, and I was convinced that this style of protest was dead. They’ve proven us wrong simply by the attention that they continue to get. Still, I feel that liberals have moved forward from public protest to utilizing social media and grassroots efforts which is what elected President Obama. There should be a way to answer the volume of the tea party outcry, though I’m not sure what that might be. Could it be a similar movement, only slanted the other way?
And here, in a cheery fugue on bits of “Copyleft BS,” is a little squib on “Brave New World,” one of many web sites that will “help you with scholarship.” I was hoping to find the cite to the bit in Huxley’s Libertarian Utopia where the Epsilon Minus elevator operator expresses his delight at getting to elevate some upper-class Betas and Alphas all the way to the “Roof! Oh, Roof!” As high an ambition as many Teabaggers may have in mind when they aspire to LIBERTY AND FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY AND PATRIOTISM! And America is a melting pot, too…
Interesting that ethyl alcohol was the material used to bokanofsky-ize the little fetuses in their silica wombs that became the “lower orders.”
Jon, I’m 110% SURE, that if you showed up at any Tea Party, and told them they would pay the same taxes, but they’d keep 75% of the money and power in their state, and DC wouldn’t make any rules – they’d disband.
The NYT and you are deluding yourself that those railing against the DC, NYC, LA elites are mis-informed, even a little bit.
They aren’t against schools, they are against the Dept of Education being run by someone who their own city’s teachers dislike.
They aren’t against their state being involved in government health care or social services, they are against a Dept of Healthcare.
Much like Germany doesn’t want to pay for Greece… Georgia doesn’t want to hear what California thinks. States that are liberal need and deserve to really enact liberal policies, and the same goes for Texas.
Careful with the reification,Warstler — leads to some pretty fuzzy thinking…
What amazes me is that the one change that could have given options to non-elites to make life choices was health care, the single service no one can do without and which therefore limits choices in terms of career risks.
And that is the one proposal squelched quickly and effectively.
If it were me, I’d do what the Sheriff in Georgia did way back when: go march in front of them. IOW, and this is the hard bit to swallow, they have a point to make and if you don’t want them to make it violently, make sure the law isn’t against them. The candidates that win in 2012 will be the ones that master the old “Democracy is loud, these are citizens, they’ve a right to speak and I’ve an obligation to listen, so let’s do that.”
The problem of the class war again, is there isn’t a single uniform in the beginning. It really is the one kind of conflict that is bottom up when it starts. However, once it gets momentum, organization will grow within and quickly be reinforced or supplanted from without. The danger to the candidate and the candidate that is a danger comes from that second wave.
Beck is there to see to it that the tea partiers don’t fight the wrong people. He knows this is class war. His bosses want the budding antagonists to fight each other (ensure bubba and progressives fight) and they want enough of that to keep it from fusing into mainstream politics (why did George Wallace leave the stage).
Meanwhile they mount campaigns to use the spin cycle to put the mainstream back to sleep. The critical items are jobs that give them enough subsistence to hook back up and accept the ‘social contract’ again while making sure no really serious candidate emerges who can directly challenge their hegemony. For all that to work, people have to start forgetting what they’ve seen for the last decade back into the Clinton administration. They have to forget that Alan Greenspan eventually admitted he was wrong. They have to forget derivatives. They have to not ask where the bailout money went after the American banks got it.
Otherwise, candidate or candidates with real populist appeal will rise and they will have to buy them out or move them out. People worried that Obama would be assassinated. It was/is the least of my worries. Palin? Maybe. It depends if like Wallace she overplays her hand.
Palin and Beck are not the same thing. Don’t make that category error regardless of funding.
“It is not Glenn Beck.
It is not Sara Palin.
It’s not even the underlying racism.
It is, in fact, the same impetus that brought out people en masse to vote for Barack Obama a little over a year ago.
It is mass dissatisfaction with the establishment. A feeling of disenfranchisement.”
They sure do cheer themselves hoarse when Sarah deigns to speak to them for a fat speaker’s fee, though.
And if you want to see somebody who feels dissatisfied and disenfranchised, look at me. I’m a great example. Yet I wouldn’t go within a million miles of the Tea Party. Something in it smells very, very bad.
With all due respect, when I read the NY Times article this morning on the Tea Party movement, It care the you-know-what out of me. Not because of the people who are rightly angered by the bank bailout or the people who lost their jobs, their homes, and their savings, but by the groups joining in with them. The KKK, the neo-nazis, the Birchers in particular as well as the anti-immigrant contingent, the anti-trade/globalization grouping, and others seeking to make a fortune for themselves regardless of the consequences of their rhetoric.
Of true libertarians, I have no fear. I often log into the Cato Institute to learn from them. I also log into the Federalist Society to learn from them. But I do fear the KKK and neo-nazis and Birchers.
As a Tea Party leader in Idaho said, we want peaceful solutions, but if we have to we will resort to violence. Meanwhile, they gather their guns and ammo, build up stocks of food, and prepare for a violent revolution. It’s unfortunate but true that the Tea Party people are being influenced by the very worst proponents of violence in our society while righteously claiming the evils of the government for stopping/ending violence, child abuse, and radical racism. The KKK proudly defends its infiltration of the Tea Party movement, saying that once people accept them they can “educate” people of the evils of multi-racialism, multi-religions, and that God wanted this country to be White and Protestant.
Last weekend the Washington Post (or perhaps the NY Times) posted an article on the Texas school board. Because TX is so large and has so many student, the TX school board holds uncommon sway with school books publishers. In other words, because the TX school board requires the books to read a certain way, the books for the nation read that way.
Currently the school board is controlled by a group of far right religious members who claim this nation was created as a Christian (meaning protestant) nation and that the world is only about 7,000 years old per the Bible, and that global warming(new term: global weirdness) is a hoax, and that evolution of the species is a myth. Included in the books must be myths and stories which subscribe to moral Christian ideas as the board sees them, including changing ancient Greek myths to align the stories with Christian ideology.
This kind of ideology is what is infecting the angry Tea Partiers. They’re being fed crap from a whole range of racist, conspiracy theorist groups. While many espouse the slogans of Libertarians, I venture to say few of them even know what “libertarianism” or “federalism” means. However, they’re being told over and over again that the federal government is going to station UN soldiers outside their doors, that Interpol has joined into a “dark” conspiracy against them, that the nation is being taken over by Al Queda-like Muslims, that every Democrat hates America and wants to destroy both the country and them, and that the federal government (aka President Obama) is going to take away all of their rights as citizens of this country.
This evening I read that VA passed a bill that allows patrons to wear concealed weapons into restaurants serving liquor as long as the person does not drink. This kind of bill has passed several statehouses. What does this say about our nation? Fear, perhaps? Even sheriffs are leading the parade of parade. For myself, there’s no way I’d take my family into a restaurant where guns are permitted. I’d be too scared. But this is the nation we’re now dealing with because of the far right, including all those crazy groups like the KKK, neo-nazis, Birchers, and so-called Christian right.
The inmates have taken over the institution!…and while the Republicans have the moral and ethical obligation to cool tempers and elicit sound reasoning, instead they play up to the Tea Partiers while at the same time hiding their association such as Steele did today: Use ‘em but don’t let anyone know.
Sen. McConnel is a perfect example of Republican duplicity. He speaks populism but he is anything but populist. His voting record supports corporate interests, his own wealth and pleasure, and an undying hatred of democratic principles. I know those KY racists. My family lived in Ft. Knox. My eldest daughter, in 1969, was called some of the most hateful names imaginable because she befriended a Black girl of her age who lived two doors down from us. This is the mentality of McConnell. He won’t say it out loud, but he hates Obama even more than he hated Clinton. Regardless of what Republican apologists say, racial hated still runs deep in the elder gentry of old South. So they pander to the Tea Partiers to make political gains against Obama, their enemy.
I could go on ad infinitum…but the simple fact remains that good, honest, scared, middle class people are being manipulated and used…and no one is reassuring them that things will get better. No one of any stature and believability on both sides of the aisle is explaining clearly what happened and why the measures the government took were necessary to stop a depression that probably would have been worse than the Great Depression…and that no one, regardless of party affiliation, likes what had to be done and that we all want business to be a free and open enterprise with moderate but citizen and economic protective rules to prevent another melt-down. Churches aren’t doing it. Republicans, looking after their own self (and money) interests aren’t doing it. No one is.
Even though the Tea Party movement represents only about 10% of the population, that’s still a lot of people.
Gods, what happened to men like Sen. Howard Baker?
Last Friday’s thread “Election Strategy 2010” quoted from a recent NY Times/CBS News poll. What didn’t get a lot of attention were the poll’s findings concerning the tea baggers
“The Tea Party movement, which has grown out of the strain of discontent, so far commands relatively little public support; 18 percent of respondents said they considered themselves supporters of the movement, while 55 percent said they had heard little or nothing about it.”
George Will’s cloumn today puts the Palin phenomenon in its proper perspective. Basically, she’s serving a purpose with a limited shelf life. She and the tea baggers will be courted by the parties, pundits and MSM in pursuit of their own narrow interests, and after they’ve been met, they’ll be discarded.
Has anyone seen a “Perot for President” sign lately?
Warstler, the liberal states have enacted liberal policies. That is why states like California, Michigan, Massachusetts, etc. are on the verge of bankruptcy. That is why those states are standing at te alter of their liberal dieties, Obama, Reid and Pelosi, with their hands out. The liberal policies have failed and failed miserably. The conservative ideas of individual responsibility, limited government and lower taxes have kept states like Texas in a far better fiscal position. WE DO NOT WANT TO PAY FOR THE MISTAKES OF YOU WHINING PISSANT LIBERALS!!!! Ruin your own state finances. Don’t expect us to bail you miserable little socialist faggots out.
Have a nice day.
And yes, Valerie, I have stockpiled food, water, weapons and ammunition. Thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition. I intend to keep what is mine from you sorry little whining progressives.
Roman, is your reference to teabaggers because you secretly want my balls on your forehead. Silly faggot.