The tea party movement initiated by Ron Paul's followers a couple of years ago has now officially been co-opted by "anti-big government" anti-Obama populists who complain of unemployment, the mortgage crisis, runaway government spending and taxes.
The only problem is that just about all these symptoms originate with the same disease--and it isn't big government, or even Obama's "socialist agenda."
As Moyers and Winship point out, while the tea parties are subsidized and led by corporate lobbyists and their political emissaries like Sara Palin, Steve King, and Michelle Bachman,
The banking industry and corporate America are fighting against proposed financial reform with all the money and influence at their disposal, attempting to preserve a system that would enable them to ransack the country once again.
Tea parties criticize the bailouts and the deficits,
but overlook the big banks that engineered them and the
business roundtable and chamber of commerce that promoted the insane supply-side economics and global "free" trade policies that shipped 10s of millions of American jobs overseas and bankrupted the government with unfunded tax cuts for the rich and wars fought on credit cards.
It's a shame progressives can't join the tea parties so we can fight together against our real enemies: the corporate chiefs and their mega-capitalist corporations that have bought elections,and corrupted and weakened Congress so they can swallow up our economy and incapacitate our middle class.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/041710a.html