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Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Boomer with Attitude / News Of taxes, 'Tea Parties,' & corporate rip-offs
Posted By John Grooms on Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 11:36 AM
The Great Conservative Freakout of 2009 continues. This afternoon in Marshall Park, a crowd of people will gather and take part in a "Tea Party" to protest "out of control government spending." At least that's how it started.
By now, with Fox News' full-tilt promotion of the Tea Parties, the whole thing has morphed into a general national anti-Obama cause, marked by seriously paranoid overtones, increasingly unhinged rhetoric, "Obama=Hitler" comparisons, anti-immigrant yelps, and pro-gun grunting. Needless to say, Rep. Sue Myrick will be there. The so-called "movement" is being promoted as a genuine grassroots phenomenon when, as several media sources have reported, it's not grassroots, it's AstroTurf. The principal organizers, fundraisers, advisers and coordinators of the Tea Parties are heavily staffed and well-funded, lobbyist-run right-wing think tanks, Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works, the latter of which is run by former GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey. To find out more about how this whole supposedly spontaneous "movement" is organized and funded, read this article.
We have a lot of problems in America that would be well served by real grassroots protests — and many people who don't know what else to do, and who mean well, will attend the Tea Parties. But the right-wing mantra they'll hear — that our main problem is government spending, and not corporate rip-offs — isn't just delusional, it's being funded and driven by lobbyists for the corporations who've been screwing us all to begin with. Meanwhile, America loses up to $100 billion a year in tax revenue to offshore tax havens, including $2.7 billion lost by North Carolina, but that won't be mentioned at the Tea Party since that bit of info doesn't fit into the right's "government is the problem" trance chant.
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