Corporate Infusion: What the Tea Party’s Really Serving America

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.pfaw.org/media-center/publications/corporate-infusion-what-the-tea-party-s-really-serving-america

If this Tea Party’s dumping anything, it’s the U.S. Constitution

By Jamie Raskin, Senior Fellow, People For the American Way

“The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason.” --Thomas Paine

Table of Contents

* Introduction
* The Un-Populists
* Return of the “Corporation Senators”: Revoking the Seventeenth Amendment and Popular Election of U.S. Senators
* Attacking the 16th Amendment, the Income Tax, and Progressive Monetary Policy
* Constitutionalists Fighting the Fourteenth Amendment
* Weak Tea: Libertarianism Without Liberty
* True Heirs to the Boston Tea Party or Impostors?
* The Tea Party’s Fight Against Health Care Reform and Federal Power: What Will the Courts Do?
* A Contest for American Ideals

Introduction

What are the politics of the Tea Party movement, which has been hailed since the 2010 elections as the most important new force in American public life? Because the Tea Party is not a unified national organization but an umbrella for hundreds of local groups with divergent tendencies and beliefs, it is not easy to identify a single coherent program. Yet the movement strikes similar themes across America and has been commonly described for its vehement anti-tax and anti-regulatory positions as “populist,” “constitutionalist,” and “libertarian.”

As we shall see, each of these labels falls short in dramatic ways. The Tea Party rejects the structural democratic reforms advanced by the Populist movement of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century; it seeks to strip from our Constitution the key progressive amendments that prior generations of Americans added to expand democracy, social justice and equality; it hopes to undermine through legislation, conservative judicial activism and direct repeal important parts of the Fourteenth Amendment and the civil rights legislation enacted under it; and while it uses the language of freedom for all American citizens, the principal “freedom” that the Tea Party actually defends is that of giant corporations to escape public regulation.

The Tea Party movement arose in March 2009 shortly after the American people repudiated eight years of misrule by President George W. Bush, a big-government conservative and close ally of corporate America who came to power through an unprecedented outburst of judicial activism by a politically sympathetic Supreme Court. The Bush administration charged two multi-trillion dollar wars to the national credit card, while sabotaging our ability to pay the bill by repeatedly reducing taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Although it inherited a budget surplus from the Clinton era, the Bush administration presided over the worst deficits in American history, systematically undermined the American middle class, and brought the nation a staggering economic collapse based on deregulation and complicity with corporate corruption.

MUCH more at the link --