Bill Moyers: The Tea Party Crowd Needs to Wake Up to Who the Real Villains Are

[marmar]

AlterNet / By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

The Tea Party Crowd Needs to Wake Up to Who the Real Villains Are
The Wall Street banks are the new American oligarchy -- but the Tea Party crowd can't seem to see it.

April 16, 2010 |


With all due respect, we can only wish those Tea Party activists who gathered in Washington and other cities this week weren't so single-minded about just who's responsible for all their troubles, real and imagined. They're up in arms, so to speak, against Big Government, especially the Obama administration.

If they thought this through, they'd be joining forces with other grassroots Americans who in the coming weeks will be demonstrating in Washington and other cities against High Finance, taking on Wall Street and the country's biggest banks.

The original Tea Party, remember, wasn't directed just against the British redcoats. Colonial patriots also took aim at the East India Company. That was the joint-stock enterprise originally chartered by the first Queen Elizabeth. Over the years, the government granted them special rights and privileges, which the owners turned into a monopoly over trade, including tea.

It may seem a bit of a stretch from tea to credit default swaps, but the principle is the same:when enormous private wealth goes unchecked, regular folks get hurt -- badly. That's what happened in 2008 when the monied interests led us up the garden path to the great collapse. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146502/the_tea_party_crowd_needs_to_wake_up_to_who_the_real_villains_are

[Captain Hilts]

1. Where WHERE would we be without Bill Moyers?

[Bitwit1234]

2. If Fox didn't have such a stranglehold on the brain of the simple

minded tea bags, they would see that. But they have no sense of what is going on in this country. All they see is a black president with a Democratic congress. And they don't want that. They don't give a darn how bad the republicans screw things up as long as it is republican.

They are such simple minded dolts, they can't fathom the fact that Fox, because of big corporation connections, pushes business and wall street. If there ever was a time that people were said to cut their nose off to spite their face this is it. tea bags are a bunch of dolts who don't know where in the where their butt is until Fox tells them.

[fasttense]

3. I have finally been able to put into words the feelings I get from the tea-baggers.

Their events have a surreal quality to them. As if the tea-baggers are a parody of a political party.

They spout nonsensical slogans and decry minor issues. They broadcast rabid hatred of policies that do them no harm. They carry hastily misspelled signs against issues that would help them. Their viciousness is too overblown for such minor complaints. Their lies are transparent and silly. It's like really bad acting that comes across as funny. Yet, they don't mean to be funny, so it comes across as merely sad.

It all has an overacted fake feel to it.

And the reason it looks and feels so absolutely phony and overblown is because it is organized, advertised, and funded by Corporate America. Corporate America has no real understanding of genuine political movements. The only experience they have in that regard is how to stop progress and prevent the success of grassroots movements.

So when they try to orchestrate a fake movement, when they attempt to advertise a political group into existence, they are only able to bring out the hate-filled racists, homophobic and selfish money grubbers.

As each successive tea-bagging event gets more polished and better organized, the artificial, exaggerated feel gets worse and worse.

The tea-baggers will never wake up because they are not a real movement. Some people at the events will change out, some will see the failure of their ways, but they will never wake up. If they can't see and feel the over-polished and overblown essential falseness surrounding them at these events, they have no capacity to wake up.

[jtrockville]

5. +1: excellent observations

[handmade34]

8. good observation

they won't wake up because they have lived in their delusions for too long... the world is changing and they don't understand, can't and won't... they need something to blame that is acceptable in the eyes of their peers. They can't admit that they have been so wrong about so many things for so long. They have been tricked into accepting a corporate system and bought into all those things that corporate marketers have led them to believe were good...

[depakid]

10. More often than not, they're protesting against programs they themselves are on!

If these folks lived down under, they'd be laughed right off the continent.

[truedelphi]

11. That is exactly how my dad and his friends felt about Hitler.

He used to have a couple of beers back in the thirties and then stand on the bar stool with his comb to his lips, and do a little parody of Hitler.

When he talked to me about it many many years later, he said that Hitler was not taken seriously by most people that he knew. (And these were second and third generation German Americans. They had relatives in Germany writing to their grandmothers about the rallies and what not.)

He felt that Hitler and his people were but a parody of a real political event.

And we know how that turned out.

[Enthusiast]

14. Good stuff, fasttense.

I agree. The Tea Bags were created with a specific purpose in mind. They are a tool for powerful corporate interests but remain largely ignorant of this fact. Their controllers know what buttons to push. They are an easy bunch to manipulate.

[Overseas]

4. K&R ! //nt

[Cobalt-60]

6. baggers = Republican Splinter Group

These mobs are being financed and supported by the full strength of the Republican Party.
The use of a splinter group to hold aloft the foul standards of Racism and Ignorance is meant to keep their favorite voting blocks active and intact without openly endorsing their behavior.
Make no mistake, at the moment of truth, they'll be instructed to vote straight Republican.

[Uncle Joe]

7. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, marmar.

[elleng]

9. It may seem a bit of a stretch from tea to credit default swaps,

but its NOT!

[tom_paine]

12. As much a chance of that as the Brownshirted SA turning on their real enemies, their Nazi Masters

No chance of that there. Such questioning doesn't exist in Brownshirts and Teabaggers, who are largely RW Authoritarain Follwers.

I wouldn't want to be the 1 in 10 Brownshirts or Teabaggers who DID ask such questions.

[Enthusiast]

15. If you recall, Hitler's

henchmen assassinated a number of early Nazi Party leaders to make room for their little power grab.

[classysassy]

13. "What fools we mortals be"

That disloyal bunch of tea baggers,sea baggers and old hags don't seem to realize that the rest of the world see us as a bunch of racist clowns.