So now…the debt limit is raised and everyone is happy. We have cuts in government spending, But what else happened? Nothing.
That is what the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party has been sent to Washington to do. Nothing. Or things we would call negative. In other words, cut Social Security. Cut Medicare and Medicaid. Shut down unions. Prevent regulations on huge corporations. Prevent tax loopholes from being removed. This is a Tea Party House of Representative, representing the Super-rich, global corporations and the lobbyist community. The only thing they want to do is: nothing. Stop government completely.
We finally know their motivation. The Tea Party wants to do it because they are haters. You might say that this sounds too dramatic. No one is a pure hater, you might say, except real racists, really disturbed religious fanatics or political fanatics. You’d be surprised at the variety of hate and the motivations, and how easy it is to slip into hating someone.
Have you ever been to Germany? These are people, if we could make some type of objective comparison, who would be found to be about five times more cultured than average American. It does not make them better or worse…except that they are today…and would have been even in the early part of the 20th Century, more cultured, more broad-minded than we Americans were in that segregated, Manifest Destiny and Robber Baron period.
Germans understood European History, international relations, how their government works, how other governments work, what religions believe…not just Evangelical religions but all religions from Judaism to Buddhism to Islam–and right across the entire Christian spectrum, from Roman Catholicism to Evangelical mumbo-jumbo. In the early 20th Century, Germans were exceptionally cultured people.
In the 1920s, Germany became one of the most advanced and cultured societies in the world, in medicine, music, art and architecture. After an initial period of hyper-inflation, and political unrest, the German economy stabilized and flourished. But much like our own racism problems against African-Americans, the Germans, like many Western Europeans, were latent anti-Semites.
(We have talked elsewhere, in the articles entitled “The Imported Americans” about the irony of hating someone that you have oppressed for 300 years based on the–perceived and real—results of that oppression)
In 1933, however, when Hitler took over a Depression-ravaged country, with unemployment up almost 250%, these cultured people began to succumb to the anti-Jewish propaganda that was thrown about on the airwaves about as regularly as Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck attack the President today.
That single hatred, so focused and government sponsored devastated Germany for about 50 years, killed millions, disgraced a fine nation and turned two generations of Germans into beggars and paupers before the nation could begin to recover. Hatred motivated them and caused them to follow a political party that led them to ruin.
Beginning in 2001, the Republicans built up a monumental debt with tax cut after tax cut, two wars, huge military build ups, Medicare prescription drug bills, and simple outsourcing of government jobs at five to ten times what it would cost for government workers to do the job. They deregulated Wall Street, told mortgage brokers to sell to anyone, anytime, anywhere because the mortgages were insured. They weren’t. The insurance default derivatives were phony…a fraud.
The Bush-Cheney Administration did their best to shut down government and send us into a full blown Depression…one that many financial scholars say could have permanently destroyed the United States economy.
Remember this. The Neocon Republicans knew that, if they shut down government, their friends, the billionaires would profit the most. When things go bad, the person profits who has money in his pocket and the more money, the more he profits. The reason is obvious.
Money is relative. For the very wealthy, who do not need more of it to live, it is simply a measure. I can make more by creating new business, but if that becomes difficult, I can also simply work to see that you make less. Then I still have more.
This is where we are today. The debt increase fight was to distract us from the facts. The fact is that a consortium of very wealthy people, buoyed up by their success in controlling politics under Bush, with the insertion of three of their own onto the Supreme Court, and hundreds onto the lower courts are now taking it much, much farther.
They have purchased an entire political party, the subgroup of Republicans known as the Tea Party. Who are they and why do the Super-rich want them? They are a combination of several types. The first type is the career politician, who, because of some trigger…maybe religion, maybe a certain kind of upbringing, maybe some kind of modest success in business, or maybe just a twisted mind….has chosen the ultra conservative points of view.
These people are anarchists in broad political terms, but these particular anarchists are for sale. Sharron Angle in Nevada, for example, was someone with weird ideas…do away with Social Security, Medicare and funds for education, for example. She seems to have been something of a religious nut, which may have been her original motivation. But she wants to be in politics. She lives on government money, her husband’s job is with government, but she has a professional (politics) position that involves trying to keep others from getting public money.
Sarah Palin had made a modest name for herself as mayor of a town that would have been merely a neighborhood of a city as small as Omaha, Nebraska, and then governor (before she resigned after only two years of experience) of a state smaller than the population of Greater Omaha.
We know now that Sarah Palin was an attractive woman, who was—and there’s nothing particularly wrong with wanting to make money for the security of your family—an opportunist and not much of a politician at all. She ran for Vice President thinking that the Vice President ran the Senate. This last year she made $12 million or more touting for the Right Wing Super-rich and the health insurance industry.
Then we had a woman in Maryland named O’Donnell who seemed to have run merely to have the campaign money to live on. Not only was she not a serious politician, she didn’t seem to be a serious anything. And after her came Michele Bachmann, this time an elected Representative who says that many of her colleagues in Congress are anti-American, seems to be on some kind of religious crusade to destroy the government from which her husband earns his living, and seems to harbor a thinly veiled hatred of all those who do not share her religious beliefs. (She is a graduate of Oral Roberts…the religious fanatic’s university).
But all these marginal candidates had the money to run. How? They capitalized on two things. First, they take the neo-conservative policies to their very illogical end. In other words, they advocate virtually no government, and no taxes but a strong military and a government that adopts all the tenets of Fundamentalist Evangelical theology…whatever that is. By doing so, they earn a following by the small but most rabid Right Wing.
For some reason, in the post-Bush age, where we had already had a dimwit for President for eight years, propped up by the Super-rich, these people became the next dimwits they could manipulate. Knowing that these hard core True Believers could be bought, the Super-Rich, and others, like Koch Industries, funded groups like Americans For Prosperity to do just that.
Remember the elderly man, marching against health care reform, who carried the sign “Hands off my Medicare” meaning “Keep Government Hands Off My Medicare?” This is the kind of rank stupidity that was encouraged by the Right Wing media paid for by the Super Rich. Here was a man on government health care telling government to stay away from his government-funded health care.
The successful attempt by the President to reform the runaway health care costs and the lack of access to any health care by 47 million people stirred up about half a billion dollars in money from an alliance of several organizations. And the money, through Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks went to people like the nut carrying the sign and to politicians like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.
The money to fund Right Wing campaigns came from the health insurance industry, the oil companies, the tobacco companies, the pharmaceutical companies, the hospital companies, the global corporations as represented by the National Association of Manufacturers through the Chamber of Commerce, and the Super Rich families, about 1800 people who campaign incessantly against the Inheritance Tax.
It turned out that the propaganda, the “death panels” and the fake stories that Medicare and Medicaid would be ruined, and the other stories put out by Fox news and about 1000 Right Wing lobbyist-paid radio commentators that health care costs would skyrocket was believed by the people. So when that worked, the Super-rich saw their opportunity. They began to pour more and more money into the campaigns with people like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck spewing out lies ever hour on the hour.
Newt Gingrich got into the act. He started an organization to rake in some of the money by attacking the health reform agenda. Rick Scott, astonishingly a man who had almost gone to jail (his boss did go to jail) for cheating the government out of at least $1.7 billion in Medicare fraud also jumped into the fray. He raised money to start a program against health care reform. That organization, a sham, carried him—as big a crook as any convicted felon—into the Governor’s office of Florida. (Ignorance costs: Floridians now give him only 28% approval, while he is dismantling the state government, piece by piece. Once a crook; always a crook.)
The secret that the Neocon-Fascists in the Tea Party have learned is that they can do what Dick Cheney did. They can create a diversion. Cheney launched the Iraq War. That diverted attention from his tax cuts and his energy programs, drilling and cutting timber in the national parks and national monuments and from an additional theft of money from the People in the form of a second tax cut gift to the rich in 2003.
We still don’t know if Cheney and Bush were involved with the Arabs in permitting or ignoring the attacks on the World Trade Towers on September 9, 2001. But we do know that in rapid fire succession, a number of programs were put into effect that gave the Republican Party almost dictatorial powers under the name of the Vice President.
He hired his own private army. At times, Blackwater worked directly for the Vice President. He had people picked up off American streets and sent abroad to suffer torture under interrogation. He had phones tapped and computer data monitored. And he had free rein to check your library records or your video store records and no one could tell you of it under pain of federal imprisonment.
Karl Rove, acting for the President, installed dedicated Neocons, often Christian Fundamentalist attorneys from Regent University Law School, into positions as U.S. Attorneys and put his own people into 93 locations around the country. He installed political operatives at the GAO, where there were on-line political training sessions at lunch time, and where GAO staff were asked to campaign for Republican candidates. Rove also asked a number of U.S. Attorneys to publicly investigate Democratic candidates immediately before the elections without sufficient justification.
While the Republicans were doing this, the Super-rich were watching it in amazement. Where was the opposition? This was great. The Republicans could take over the country.
But then in 2008, as the country was crashing, the Republicans lost the Presidency. The plan continued, however, in the form of a constant attack on the Presidency itself. They used the fact that the President was African-American to encourage and fund every below-the-radar racist hate group that was organized enough to participate in demonstrations and public expressions of disrespect.
They challenged everything from his citizenship to his college grades to his basketball skills. They called him a liar in public and got away with it. And in the Senate they vowed to stop all activity during his Presidency. And they did, with hundreds of filibusters that prevented any job-creating legislation.
We are now in the midst of a battle over whether the people will be allowed to run their own lives. The Super-rich who control the Right Wing Tea Party have shut down the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration, the organization that controls everything from pilot licensing to airport safety. Why have they shut it down? Because they want to destroy the unions, so they have put 4,000 people out of work. They know that in the long run, it is Democracy and an educated population that will defeat them. They also know that the only kinds of organizations that can provide the clout to change the way people think and vote are the unions.
Make no mistake about it, the Right Wing Republican Tea Party members use simple Fascist formulas. The Tea Party Republicans have acted cruelly and arbitrarily, just as any Fascist organization would do…disregarding the value of human life for the greater good of their Party. It is all about a political party’s ability to control people. And because they have no regard for human life, they are dangerous and should be removed from any acts that have any jurisdiction or control over the lives of their fellow man.
In addition to throwing FAA workers out of work, the action by the Tea Party transfers $200 million that the U.S. government collected, and needless to say, needs desperately at this time of budget deficit. It shuts down $2.5 billion in construction projects. This has thrown another 70,000 construction workers out of work, many of whom get paid only if they work and get no back pay when projects resume.
So why should the FAA be shut down now…which, by the way, will mean that all airports will shut down by around the middle of August if this is not resolved? The reason is not in what the Republicans, led by Rep. John Mica of Florida, an arch-Fascist, a card-carrying Right Winger say but in what they do.
Let’s just examine the Tea Party through the votes of this one person, Rep. John Mica of Florida. He’s on the payroll of the big corporations…big time. John Mica is a man who never saw a person’s life he would not intrude himself into. He has voted to keep your wife, sister, neighbor, or co-worker from having an abortion under any circumstances. He has voted to keep is in three wars, voted to give huge tax breaks to the rich, voted against safe food for your children, against good nutrition, and against alternative energy to cut your home and auto operating costs.
He supported $800 billion in tax breaks for the rich just last year, when the government was in the red, thanks to him and his fellow Bush Administration lobbyist-pandering Right Wingers, to the tune of $1.1 trillion a year. That $800 billion would have gone a long way to keep us out of the red ink. Even with the higher tax rates, the poor billionaires and millionaires will still quite likely pay less than $29 out of every $100 in taxes…so don’t feel sorry for them. You don’t pay much less but you DO need Medicare. They don’t.
Of course Mica the Tea Partier does not want you to know this. That is why he voted against funds for National Public Radio…the place where there are no advertisers and the truth gets out…no matter whom it hurts—and it would hurt Mica, you can count on that. Even the crackers in his district have a place in their hearts for kids and animals. Yeah, he hates animals too. He voted against preserving almost any species that is endangered. He apparently hates all species of living things equally.
But most of all, he hates workers. That is understandable when you know that he and his fellow Right Wing Tea Party members are bought and paid-for by the Super-rich and the global corporations. That is why they would put 4,000 FAA workers and 70,000 construction workers on the lists of the unemployed, unpaid…in the heart of the Great Recession which he enthusiastically helped to cause.
There are Robber Barons, like the Koch Family. Then there are Petty Thieves like Mica who do the bidding of the Super-rich. Like little mice, they scurry around looking for table scraps, polluting and leaving filth wherever they go.
Of course he voted against raising the debt limit. His masters, the Super-rich don’t want to raise the debt limit. They don’t need Social Security. Like Mica, they don’t care if our soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq get paid or if their families here have money to buy food for their children. They don’t care if the disabled or the elderly or the sick have no ability to function. They only care if their Super-rich masters are happy.
But it doesn’t end there…not by a long shot. In addition to food safety, stooge Mica voted against mine safety, conveniently forgetting the miners who died as a result of owner carelessness. He voted against job creation by voting against the small business lending legislation, against safety standards for drilling rigs in the Gulf and against any adjustments…naturally…in tax rates to help alleviate the drastic revenue shortage we have had for the last 30 years.
Mica is scum, as are all the Tea Baggers. How do we know, if the above listed record of his votes against his fellow citizens, veterans, the disabled, the poor and the elderly don’t tell the story? He voted against every bill that would end discrimination against gays and women. In other words, his hatred of those who happen to be born different from him…homosexual or feminine…knows no bounds.
And finally, he voted against regulations on tobacco, the greatest cause of cancer deaths in the world, killing over 500,000 people each year in this country alone.
This is the face of the Tea Party, who would like you to think that they only care about the future of the country.
In reality, the only thing the Right Wing Tea Party members care about is their own future and only as far ahead as their next election. The Right Wing, the Tea Party, the Neocons, the Fascists—whatever you want to call the greedy, impersonal, un-American Republican Party, it has become the essence of everything that has gone terribly wrong with the American political system.
