The Real Tea Party Story

I've commented on this previously, especially in the article pertaining to Rick Snyder's endorsement of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) agenda. This is scary stuff folks, and the goals of the ALEC and the Koch brothers is very apparent. Their primary goals are to privatize the U.S. government, destroy unions and turn workers into serfs. In the process, their goals increase the power and wealth of the richest two percent and undermine the working class.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/11603/publicopoly_exposed/

"As Kate Zernike noted in our October 2010 cover story, 'Tea Party Confidential,' Armey and the group's president Matt Kibbe wrote an op-ed article in 2007 proposing the Boston Tea Party as a model for putting grassroots pressure on a central government. She writes, 'Presaging Tea Party tactics in the summer of 2009, they described how Samuel Adams packed town hall meetings with his supporters to drown out Tory voices and used each new British policy or tax as 'an excuse to rally new recruits to the cause of American independence.' They wrote, 'Adams was the first American to recognize that 'it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather, an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.'

"Beginning in 2009, FreedomWorks was instrumental in creating the faux-populist Tea Party. The mainstream media uncritically hyped the scores of Tea Party tax day protests orchestrated by FreedomWorks and the National Taxpayers Union (another Koch-funded ALEC group headed by former ALEC executive director Duane Parde), thus helping enable unprecedented Republican legislative majorities in states across the nation.

"Case study: Arizona

"Documents released following a public records request to the office of then-Arizona Senate President Bob Burns (R-Peoria) indicate that in 2009 and 2010, Arizona ALEC lawmakers requested more than $60,000 in reimbursement for travel, lodging and registration fees from ALEC’s scholarship fund for their time at ALEC functions—including the December 2009 event at which State Senator Russell Pearce (R-Mesa) submitted his draft of SB 1070 for approval as a piece of ALEC model legislation, the law known as 'breathing while Brown' to its critics. (See 'Corporate Con Game: How the private prison industry helped shape Arizona’s anti-immigrant law,' In These Times, July 2010.)"

Thus, the tea party movement isn't, as it claims, a grassroots movement but, rather, a political movement financed by some of the wealthiest conservative Americans and corporate America. The fact that the corporate media, and in that definition I include ALL cable news programming, has promoted the false grassroots claim is disturbing but not surprising.

Never forget the Koch brothers, the ALEC, FreedomWorks, the tea party movement and the extreme conservatives they support promote the irrational idea that government -- local, state and federal -- should and can be operated like a business. There's no way any government can be operated as a business unless, of course, governmental organizations are privatized. As Michael Parenti so eloquently states it, "Conservatives insist that government should be 'run more like a business. 'One might wonder how that could be possible, since government does not market goods and services for the purpose of capital accumulation.'"

In reality, the goal of corporate thugs like the Koch Brothers, parliamentary whores like John Boehner and extremist governors like Rick Snyder and Scott Walker is to make a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy and only for the wealthy.