Thom Hartmann: The Tea Party - A front group for Banksters & Billionaires

[thomhartmann]

In the fall of 1773 - a group of revolutionaries dressed up like Indians - boarded a ship belonging to the East India Tea Company - and dumped over a million dollars worth of tea over the rail and into Boston Harbor. It was later called the Boston Tea Party - the first act in a drama that eventually led to the Revolutionary War - and the birth of the United States of America. What most people don't know about the Boston Tea Party is why exactly it happened - what the colonists were actually protesting against. It wasn't just against the King, or taxation without representation, or a fight for freedom. It was a protest against corporate control over the North American economy. It came after the British Parliament - who were mostly shareholders in the British East India Company - gave the largest corporate tax break in the history of the world to the world's then-largest corporation, the East India Company - so it could pull a Wal-Mart and put out of business all the local tea sellers up and down the east coast of the colonies. Enraged by that blatant example of crony capitalism - the Tea Act of 1773 - the colonists put feathers on their heads and dumped the tea overboard - and the rest is history. Our nation has a history of - and in fact was founded on - rebelling against corporate monopolies and rage about corporations getting huge tax breaks from Parliament.

Which brings us to today - when tens of thousands of Americans across the nation have taken to the streets to once again protest against too much corporate power and corporate corruption of our government. They're protesting against massive tax breaks for job outsourcers, tax subsidies for insanely profitable oil corporations, and bailouts for Wall Street banksters. And in the irony of all ironies - it just so happens that the most corrupt of our politicians today - the most in-the-bag for the big corporations - are calling themselves Tea Partiers. A lot of the discontent of today was sewn three years ago. Wall Street got bailed out - and the rest of us were stuck with the worst recession since the Great Depression while banksters were cutting fat bonus checks to each other. Americans knew they got screwed. And the banksters, CEOs, and corporate politicians knew that Americans knew they got screwed. So they tapped into that anger to defend themselves.

Billionaires like the Koch brothers and multimillionaires like Dick Armey and Paul Ryan started whipping up that anger and fear across America. Amazingly, the corporate billionaires redirected the fear and rage Americans felt about the Great Bush Crash and the Great Bush Bank Bailout against progressive politicians - against labor unions - and against community organizers. They said that we're not in trouble because of corporate greed, but because working people's salaries - cops and teachers - were too high. And with a convoy of tour buses, high-profile speakers like Sarah Palin, and the help of a cable news network funded by an eccentric billionaire and run by a guy who used to work for Richard Nixon - Fox so-called News - these fat-cats created the Tea Party as we know it today. Millions of Americans were duped into voting against their best interests - into voting for politicians who now are pushing for even more tax breaks for corporations and the Romney super-rich, and want to roll back consumer protections, and destroy laws that would prevent Wall Street from crashing our economy again.

And now we know it for a fact. Despite running on platforms against the bank bailout - the ten Tea Party Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee today are happily taking big bucks from those very same bailed out banks they screamed about when they were running for office in 2010. Looking at campaign finance disclosure records, these Tea Party Republican Congressmen have taken serious six-figure money from PACs connected to big banks like JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs. And those bribes - excuse me, campaign contributions - or, as the bankers would call them, "investments," appear to be working just as the banksters hoped. Tea Party Republicans on the Committee are doing their best to kill key Wall Street reforms and block the Volcker Firewall, which will prevent banks from gambling with your money. As the Republican Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee - Spencer Bachus - admitted in a rare - and perhaps accidental - moment of candor, “the regulators are there to serve the banks.” Just like the wealthy members of the British Parliament were there in 1773 to serve the British East India Company.

So the Tea Party today is what the billionaires who funded and encouraged it hoped it would become - a front group for banksters, oil companies, and billionaire oligarchs. And Americans are figuring it out, which is why generally people aren't showing up for lobbyist-funded Tea Party rallies like they did in 2009. Today - instead - young people are in the streets - alongside working people. And like the REAL revolutionaries who dumped tea into Boston Harbor more than 230 years ago - the targets of today's demonstrations are corporate power and the oligarchs who are corrupting our Congress. The Occupy Movement didn't need fancy buses or Fox so-called News to rally people today.

Unions didn't need secret billionaire funders to get Americans fired up today. All it took was the devastation of the American working class by thirty years of trickle-down deregulate-the-banks Reaganomics and the insane trade policies that went along with it. The first stage of unrest that we saw a few years ago - the tri-corner hats, the xenophobic signs, and the fancy bus tours and huge sound stages - proved to be nothing more than a sham - a ruse promoted by the very same oligarchs who'd screwed us over to begin with. But the next stage in America's protest movement - the one started by the Occupy Movement last year and carried forward today in the streets of more than 100 cities across America - and countless other cities across the world - is the real deal. It's our best hope for recovering the sort of economy and government that made the United States the most prosperous nation in the world. And to give life back to a middle class that's been hammered for the past 30 years by Reagan's billionaire oligarchs and their toady Tea Party politicians. So let's keep it up - and party like its 1773.

The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann on RT TV & FSTV "live" 9pm and 11pm check www.thomhartmann.com/tv for local listings

[gateley]

1. I don't think the Baggers care -- feed on their fears and they don't care where the

money is coming from. They just don't see how easily they're being manipulated.

[108vcd]

2. agree

completely agree

[gateley]

3. Welcome to DU, 108vcd!