Time‘s Michael Crowley deserves some credit for saying this about the Tea Party movement, in his piece about how they largely won the debt standoff:
The Tea Party movement has proved not only that people can have their own facts but also that they can use them to vast tactical advantage, crashing through the taboos of political convention and changing the game along the way.
But in explaining the political origins of the movement, he writes:
It is an article of faith in Tea Party circles that Washington and Wall Street are in bed together, colluding for power and profit at the expense of the little guy.
We’ve seen this before; that is, attempts to brand the Tea Party movement–which is in no small part bankrolled by wealthy corporate interests– as anti-corporate populism. He writes:
Indeed, for some Tea Party activists, the summer of 2011 has been all too reminiscent of the fall of 2008, when the movement truly took root. After the financial world crashed, Washington insisted that a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street banks was necessary to avert a depression. To the Tea Party, however, this was yet another scare tactic to justify transferring taxpayer money to the bankers who helped cause the mess in the first place.
There are probably some Tea Party activists who opposed the TARP bailout, but it’s a stretch to suggest this is where the movement “took root.” Glenn Beck, as much as an intellectual godfather to the movement as there is, supported the bailout, only to later recant and wish he hadn’t.
The Tea Party movement was really energized by a rant from CNBC host Rick Santelli—the one where he called for a Tea Party based on some class resentment directed at people in expensive homes who were all getting bailed out while hard-earning stockbrokers were making their payments. Or something like that–read this piece from CJR to get a sense of what Santelli was upset about, which was a modest mortgage modification program directed at people who were, in Santell’s words, “losers.” His call for Tea Party protests led to, well, actual Tea Party protests.
This happened in February 2009,months after the TARP bailout. Very little of his rant was based on bashing Wall Street–it would have been rather remarkable for an anti-Wall Street movement to be birthed on CNBC, a network whose target audience is people who trade stocks. And, of course, the movement began to really find political success during the health care debate–when it was mostly concerned with portraying Obama’s plan as some sort of Communist killing machine.
Crowley adds:
In Tea Party doctrine, both major parties are complicit with an elite Washington–New York establishment that lies to the public to cover for policies that enrich the wealthy and strengthen the powerful.
If this were really what was motivating Tea Party activists, you’d see more evidence to that effect–and it’d be more ideologically diverse than it is. The truth is that there are such activist mobilizations–US Uncut, the One Nation march on Washington–but they’re hardly given the media platform granted to the Tea Party.
lest we forget, once fauxnews saw the reaction to santelli’s rant they went all in…promoting the “movement” non-stop…. and since the teabaggers actively support “policies that enrich the wealthy and strengthen the powerful,” i wonder who crowly has been watching.
Crowley and the corpress portray the TPers as biting the hand that feeds them, but that would make their sugar mummies and daddies masochists.
And all the available intel points to sadism as their fetish, doesn’t it?
The Tea Party “movement” was never more than a Big-Money-financed astroturf project, aimed, in part, at rebranding disaffected reactionaries. Without Fox News, a lot of money being spent by their sponsors, and a complicit press that has adopted “Tea Party” as the phrase to describe this element, they don’t exist at all (when the Washington Post carried out a massive nationwide canvas of teabagger groups, they found a scattered series of groups with no real membership, no real money, and most of them were creations of the big astroturf orgs). They’re not anti-Wall Street in the slightest–some of the biggest financiers of their favored candidates, in fact, are Wall Street fronts (see the Club For Growth).
The “Tea Party,” in my opinion, is a radical group whose run away anger has removed all reason and knowledge. The house/senate members they voted in will do more damage in the end then what they already had in office.
Who’s behind this group; billionaires and millionaires like the Koch brothers who want their control and tax status quos to stay the same…Wake up folks, they only want more control and you’re giving it to them! That is not a good thing…