Time for a counterrevolution

I came across a web pop-up that proclaimed that teabagger Rand Paul wished to tell me something that Barack Obama did not wish me to know about the federal deficit. Frankly, there was plenty that he wished that I didn’t know about him. Considering his numerous bizarre statements that reveal a curious kind of naïvete, one suspects that his election to the U.S. Senate was based solely on the “reputation” of his father Ron Paul, and the fact that voters simply decided to send a goofball to gum-up the works further than it already was, just because they could.

Teabagger Paul was the candidate who thought that the BP oil spill was just an “accident,” and that it was “un-American” to criticize the company. Teabagger Paul was the candidate who derided the 1964 Civil Rights Act, saying on MSNBC "I don't want to be associated with those people (presumably black), but I also don't want to limit their speech in any way in the sense that we tolerate boorish and uncivilized behavior because that’s one of the things freedom requires is that we allow people to be boorish and uncivilized, but that doesn't mean we approve of it." In another venue, teabagger Paul managed to get his tongue tied-up in knots, saying “I’m not for profiling people on the color of their skin, or on their religion, but I would take into account where they’ve been traveling and perhaps, you might have to indirectly take into account whether or not they’ve been going to radical political speeches by religious leaders…But if someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that’s really an offense that we should be going after — they should be deported or put in prison.”

Teabagger Paul isn’t quite as inflexible on his views as might seem at first blush. I have to admit that I had no idea that the capital of Kentucky is a city called Frankfart (it’s a joke, get it?), but at any rate this is where last year Rand gave a speech at a pro-gun rally with a crowd of mostly militia types from an outfit called the Ohio Valley Freedom Fighters. The group’s political “manifesto” includes the following thoughts:

“The treasonous left wing socialist politicians, and their lapdogs in the press, have gotten a wedgie here recently in their underpants over the tea parties. And a little broken glass (wink, wink). I sure hope they’re out there today. If they read history, they should know and fear what came after those events over 200 years ago. This latest forced health care bill, which is really about people control, the same thing as gun control, is the modern day equivalent of the 1765 standback, its only more disastrous to our freedom living way of life, etc…

History it seems is ready to repeat itself. After a long and costly civil war that is eminent, and sure to be forced upon us, we are taking note of those who are responsible for the treason, and they will be held accountable. I advise the press to start getting it right from this moment on, and stop aiding and abetting un-American activities. Like the Tories of old, the worst shall be hung, most will be exiled, and I’m a contractor so I have a little bit of tar and feathers for those who are only partially guilty.

In closing, let me implore you to keep the torch of freedom burning bright, god bless the republic, death to the New World Order. We shall prevail.”

The only people who seem to be advocating violent overthrow, death and destruction these days are the people teabagger Paul hangs out with. Anyways, in a former life teabagger Paul was a doctor. Back in 1998, somebody quoted as saying that Medicare doesn’t work because it doesn’t have “sufficient price fluctuations.” Maybe it should be left to him to explain what he means, although I doubt he’d want us to know. Teabagger Paul has criticized private health insurers in past; does that mean he favors a tax-finance single-payer system?

“We need to get insurance of out of the way and let the consumer interact with their doctor the way they did basically before World War II.” Oh, far out. Rand, like his contemporaries Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, is proof that our education system is failing our students, particularly in even rudimentary civics teaching. The fact is that “accident” insurance was first offered in the mid 19th century, and eventually evolved into “pre-paid” health plans and then into the current insurance system. Is he saying that everyone, regardless of income status, has to haggle a price, or not receive “service” if the doctor isn’t satisfied? Teabagger Paul skirts the issue by offering another “plan”: "I believe in making every American eligible for a Health Savings Account (HSA), and removing the requirement that individuals must obtain a high-deductible insurance policy before opening an HSA." Oh geez, thanks. I guess that means if you get sick, you’ll have just enough money to pay for the visit where you are told you have a serious illness; now you can go home and wait for the reaper to show-up.

Teabagger Paul: "I believe that the primary Constitutional function of the federal government is national defense, bar none." Remember when the House Republicans made everyone read a portion of the Constitution? The preamble states the following: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” The fact is that the preamble means exactly what it says, and national defense has only a token presence in the Constitution, and the founding fathers didn’t envision the country being continuously entangled in foreign conflicts—particularly the “preemptive” variety.

And Sen. Rand is the current “darling” of the Tea Party Movement.

I recall when self-proclaimed “number one” progressive commentator Thom initially believed that the “vigor” of the Tea Party “movement” could be harnessed into some kind of “populist” movement that would encompass an overall philosophy of “the people” against the powerful elites and corporations who were abusing them. Some of us who were never fooled for one minute by the true nature of the Tea Party tried to dissuade Thom from this belief; these people were in fact the frontline battalion of the extreme right. Before I was booted off his website for being too uppity, I commented how he was like a particularly NFL quarterback who soldiered on despite getting continuously battered and bruised behind a porous offensive line, taking hits for the “team.” Thom thinks the teabaggers are on his “team,” but he took sack after sack from a certain John O’Hara, who claimed to represent the true nature of the Tea Party “movement.” O’Hara disabused Thom of all of his romantic notions about teabaggers—that they were playing on the same “team” with the same idea of how to win the “game.” Teabaggers are not “populists.” Teabaggers are against health care reform. Teabaggers are not against CEOs and Wall Street hooligans making millions and billions of dollars. Teabaggers are against government spending to create jobs. Teabaggers think that tax cuts are the answer for everything. Thom, I said, wasn’t going to “win” with these guys, let alone go to the Super Bowl (unless he paid for the tickets).

Some of us on the “left” saw right through the Tea Party from the very beginning. I think Thom was taken in by their anti-immigrant rhetoric, since he himself frequently scapegoated undocumented workers for the problems of “workers” in general, and to be fair he wasn’t alone in this among so-called progressives and “populists.” This scapegoating along racial lines, is, of course, more symptomatic of the right, so once we went one step beyond that it was a simple evaluation to make. Long before the BBC exposed the Tea Party “movement” as the creation and puppet of powerful right-wing political and corporate interests such as the Koch Brothers, the fact that the Tea Party chose from the very beginning to identify itself with the Republican Party rather than as a legitimate “third party,” indicated that its ideology was not a “grassroots” movement, but an attempt to give a new rhetorical “legitimacy” to extremists within party who thought they were being marginalized by the party regulars. The fact that it “emerged” almost as soon as Barack Obama took office, and proceeded to oppose his programs without offering any counter policies suggested their actions were based on reflexive assumptions based on a large extent racial stereotypes; the fact that they frequently accused Obama of being a “racist” and used racially-insensitive caricatures suggested that saw in Obama an “us” against “the others” dynamic.

To disguise the racial aspect of the anti-Obama campaign, the forces of reaction, such as the Koch Brothers and Dick Armey, set-up front groups that supplied the teabaggers with various slogans and propaganda lines. Unlike left-wing radicals, it was never exactly clear what the Tea Party was for, although they made it abundantly clear that they were against “big” government, regulation and tax increases; it is much easier to be “against” something than it is to be “for” something, because to be “for” something means that you actually have to have a plan to do something constructive to help the common people rather than grovel before corporations and the wealthy. That is why we see that the teabaggers in Congress have yet to offer a single job creation bill (or anything else, for that matter, save impotent votes on laws passed in the previous Congress). Why? Because that means real governing, and the teabagger philosophy is to govern as little as possible and let the corporations run the country. Even Reagan didn’t go that far; people forget that his tax cuts were but a fraction of the Bush cuts, and even he realized that with the country in recession his massive military building program had to be paid for, so he agreed to various backdoor avenues of revenue increases.

Thus the Tea Party movement should be seen either as the extremist wing of the Republican Party, or fringe-right fanatics that were given a catchy name and given far more press and credibility than they deserved (for ratings, of course). We know what to expect from Fox News and CNBC, but outside a few commentators on MSNBC no one has had the mettle to stand-up to a teabagger and say to hell with your racial paranoia and your insane insistence on gutting both the federal budget and taxes in a down economy where corporation and the wealthy are simply holding on to their money instead of creating jobs: What is it that you plan to do to create jobs given this reality? What is your jobs plan, and don’t give me your cheap slogans. OK, you just gave me a cheap slogan; you don’t mind expanding on that “idea,” do you? How can the American people trust you with bringing the country out of its current distresses largely due to the policies you are now advocating, simply because you want the other party to fail? You’ve just given me more cheap, meaningless slogans. Businesses are sitting on $1.93 trillion in cash reserves—why do they need more tax cuts to create jobs? In this age of increasing wealth disparity, what is your “plan” to maintain a civil society, besides jailing everyone (presumably anyone who isn’t 100 percent white American) who can’t find a job? Well, we’ll have to end this conversation because you have not given me a single sensible answer.

There is a website called Tea Party Patriots, and its “mission” statement rather succinctly reveals its lack of governing acumen: “The impetus for the Tea Party movement is excessive government spending and taxation. Our mission is to attract, educate, organize, and mobilize our fellow citizens to secure public policy consistent with our three core values of Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government and Free Markets.” Even Thom can’t ignore that. It declares that “This is no longer about Democrats or Republicans. This is about the future of America. The current crop of politicians have ZERO credibility when it comes to promising to cut spending. Their political careers are more important than their service to their country and those they represent.” Tough talk, but because there is no actual detailed policy discussion, it is simply more empty sloganeering. The Tea Party is so lacking in substance itself that it has to borrow ideas from the so-called libertarian Cato Institute, whose theories on budget cutting includes wholesale slaughter of education, health care and infrastructure—foolish considering that the states have already been drastically cutting their own budgets in these areas, to the detriment of the long-term health of the national (of course we could also consider the possibility that this is more evidence that the Tea Party is not a “grassroots” movement, but a facade).

When the teabaggers have to think for themselves, they come-up empty: A link to their “detailed plan to reduce the deficit by 2017 without raising taxes” leads to a webpage that contains nothing more than a banner with the words “Strong America Now: No deficit, no new taxes.” That’s it??? You want to read something even more amusing? How about this:

“Tea Party Patriots, Inc. ("TPP") is a non-partisan, non-profit social welfare organization dedicated to furthering the common good and general welfare of the people of the United States.”

This statement drips with bloody irony and mendacity. Either through ignorance and deliberate deception it does “profit” one group over the other in a partisan manner—the wealthiest Americans over the considerably less well-off. “No new taxes,” of course, means no tax increases on the rich, which apparently includes extending yet again the Bush tax cuts, and not closing tax loopholes and breaks. “Free markets” naturally means a return to Bush-era corporate irresponsibility and financial bubbles, and “fiscal responsibility” and “limited government” means gutting or eliminating social safety net programs. Its claim that it is a “social welfare” organization interested in the “common good” of all people is beyond easy incomprehension; we can only deduce that by “welfare” they mean “prosperity” for the chosen few as opposed necessity for the many. The fact that they wish to gut any and all programs that aid in the opportunity and wellbeing of a major chunk of the public only draws a feeling of disgust. The fact that these teabaggers have only become interested in “fiscal responsibility” during the Obama administration—when the fiscal policies of the previous administration are almost wholly to blame to the current budget and revenue morass went “unnoticed”—indeed is more evidence that gives the lie to their claim of non-partisanship. Furthermore, the teabaggers’ insistence on a “constitutionally limited government” betrays a nostalgia to a darker time, back to the days of the antebellum South when everyone knew their “place.” Only this time, the masters are in the corporate boardrooms, the politicians are the overseers. “Poor whites” still act like poor whites, their racial animosities preventing them from analyzing the truth.

“Free markets” has always been the mantra of the right, so given the fact the Tea Party is on the extreme right, it shouldn’t be a surprise that they are all for it. It matters not what we saw as the result of unfettered free-marketeering in the past decade: A net loss of 3 million manufacturing jobs during the Bush administration after three decades of stability (if not growth), while financial freebooters sought to make millions not by making things, but by gambling with money that was not theirs or did not exist, particularly in derivatives. When the bubble burst, there was no foundation to rebuild on. And this is what the Tea Party wants us to rest the future of the country on. In their desire to cut grants for higher education, the Tea Party shows us that they don’t even believe in the American People, except those who have lots of money.

The Tea Party, in effect, doesn’t have a vision for the future. Its desire to do away with the Department of Education demonstrates that it doesn’t want to invest in people; a recent story in the Seattle Times noted that there are thousands of high-paying jobs in the state going wanting because not enough “native” citizens are educated in the technical fields required; but a man from India that I know told me that his brother—a recent immigrant—was hired by Boeing for an engineering position almost as soon as he made the inquiry. Washington state has always ranked near the bottom in the country in its financial support for education, and still continues to make dramatic cuts in education spending; the University of Washington doesn’t even try to hide the fact that it actively seeks foreign students rather than native residents because of the higher tuition fees that they are required to pay.

The Tea Party would also do away with Social Security and Medicare. Think about it: The Tea Party believes that doing away with these programs with lead to more tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, who will allegedly use that money to create jobs. One problem is that outside the Warren Buffetts of the world, the wealthy and people who run corporations do not have the national interest in mind, let alone the common person. Surprisingly, Donald Trump—who derided Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget cutting plan as “stupid”—recently admitted to George Stephanopoulos that he thought that the super rich who did not want to pay higher taxes were not “patriotic.” These people are not saying “We need to create more jobs because too many people in this country are suffering.” They are saying “How can we maximize profit?” Do we need to cut more jobs?” The federal government is in fact the largest employer in the country, and has been the most reliable; the smaller government that the Tea Party yearns for will only send even more people onto the street—to an even smaller social safety net, if there still is one.