I want to thank the Tea Party for reviving the American labor movement

[Bjorn Against]

I have been quite critical of the Tea Party in the past, but I must give credit where credit is due and tonight the Tea Party deserves our thanks. I never thought I would say it but the Tea Party has changed America for the better, they have awoken the working class and put us on a path to a better future.

Over the past several months we have seen a movement that was awoken by the Tea Party become a force that will likely change America forever, Occupy Wall Street was brought to life by the Tea Party and they deserve credit for helping to create an America in which the rich not only have to pay their fair share but they also will have to respect the rights of labor unions to organize their work places.

The Tea Party may not have intended for this to happen, but they are directly responsible for the rise of a new labor movement. While the labor movement has been around since long before any of us were even born I think most people would agree that unions had been considerably weakened over the past few decades, outsourcing and anti-union legislation had taken a considerable toll on organized labor which destroyed many unions and left others on life support.

The Tea Party intended to come along and destroy unions once and for all, but instead of destroying them they created a new labor movement that was born in Wisconsin but soon spread across the nation. The citizen uprising in Wisconsin happened because the Tea Party Governor decided to show how much contempt he had for the working people of America. If the Tea Party had not pushed such extremism those hundreds of thousands of people who paid visit to the Capitol in Madison would not have been there.

I was lucky enough to get to travel to Madison six times to protest the Tea Party agenda and I will never forget the energy that was in the streets to combat Tea Party extremism. The first time I was there the Teabaggers tried to hold a counter demonstration, but when there were only about a thousand of them against tens of thousands of labor supporters they felt so outnumbered that they did not even try to counter us the next few weeks.

Once the people in Wisconsin started to fight back the movement quickly spread to states like Ohio and Indiana. It was around this time that the numbers of people attending Tea Party rallies dropped very rapidly. When the Tea Party first began they were able to get thousands at rallies all across America, the last few rallies they put on were barely attended and now they are not even bothering to try to rally anyone. The Tea Party started out as an astro-turf label, but now it is hard to even call them astro-turf. The tea party used to hold huge rallies but now they can't get anyone to attend them so they are now known almost exclusively for the members of Congress they back. The group that prided itself on undermining public employees is now talked about almost entirely in the context of the public employees it sends to Congress.

The Tea Party has nearly completely become an inside the beltway organization, and their agenda has angered the American people so badly that people are finally starting to rise up and demand the change that should have been demanded ages ago.

The movement that the Tea Party started in Wisconsin has now inspired not just Occupy Wall Street, but also Occupy Boston, Occupy Seattle, Occupy Minnesota, name any large city in the US and it probably has a solidarity event either in progress or being planned. These are not just rallies, these are round the clock events that require commitment far beyond anything the Tea Party was ever able to get their people to give.

Thank you Tea Party, thank you for awakening our nation to the danger posed by the corporate agenda. It is because of you that I am feeling hope for a nation which once again values the well being of its people over the greed of its corporate interests. If it were not for your extremism we would not have thousands of people sleeping out on Wall Street and across the nation tonight. If it were not for your overreach the American people would not have noticed the slow chipping away of our rights, but when you decided that chipping away was not enough and you decided to bring out the sledgehammer people woke up and are now demanding change. The Tea Party has awoken a sleeping giant, and we are now at a defining moment in American history. America is about to move to the left and it was the Tea Party that showed many people why we need to move to the left, I give them my deepest gratitude.