Phil Russo, Original Tea Party Member: The Movement Is Dead, Killed By Right's 'Racism, Hypocrisy'

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. The first public Tea Party complaint was about helping people facing foreclosure

Not about 'bank bailouts'. They let the bank bailouts happen without a murmur. This was about hating the 'losers' who were their neighbors.

A Televised Birth of a Movement

CNBC's Rick Santelli is widely credited with launching the grassroots movement. While standing on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on February 19, 2009, he unleashed what can only be called a rant against the Obama Administration's proposal to help homeowners facing foreclosure refinance their mortgages.

"Do we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages?" he asked. "This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills?" He went on to suggest that he would organize a Chicago Tea Party in July, where capitalists would dump "some derivative securities into Lake Michigan." The video of his tirade became a YouTube hit, and thus the movement was born. Within weeks, Tea Party protests were sprouting up all over the country. The Tea Party name, a clear reference to the American colonists' dumping of tea into Boston Harbor to protest taxes imposed by King George, stands as an acronym as well: Taxed Enough Already.

http://www.infoplease.com/us/government/tea-party-history.html