Occupiers Primer Chapter 3: The Tea Party Vs. The Occupy Movement
The Tea Party Vs. The Occupy Movement
The Tea Parties are a movement which are Astro-turfed; that is underwritten by:
wealthy individuals such as The Koch Bros of whom Americans for Prosperity is a subsidy; Conservative political lobbyists such as Dick Armey and his own group Freedomworks;
and by private industries such as the Oil and Insurance lobby.
These individuals and organizations paid off all of the licenses and fees and all of the the appropriate public officials which insured that they would not be interfered with by the the police or other law enforcement organization - despite the fact that they often openly carried weapons and advocated the assassination of elected officials (" The Tree of Liberty Must Periodically be Watered with the Blood of Patriots and Tyrants," "We Came Unarmed THIS Time") and lynched some politicians in effigy
Despite the fact that ANY threat to a president is ILLEGAL (unless you are a member of a Tea Party) http://federalcriminaldefense.puckettfaraj.com/2011/10/threatening-the-president-is-a-federal-crime/ Tea Party members have turned up at Presidential town halls, openly carrying weapons and signs and were unmolested by law enforcement. Further, they have celebrated an act of domestic terrorism - the Murrah Federal Bombing perpetrated by a man, Timothy McVeigh, who wore a T-shirt with the slogan about the Tree of Liberty when he was arrested. The 15th Anniversary of the bombing was celebrated as 2nd Amendment Day in Tea Party rallies all over the nation.
Tea Party rallies are done much like concerts, complete with concessions, facilities, T-shirts and memorabilia, and paid speakers like Sarah Palin and Herman Cain.
In addition to the fetishization of the 2nd Amendment and the need for a periodic bloodbath, and the demonization of unions and public spending, Tea Parties and their members all advocate for tax cuts and the deregulation of industries to which the underwriters of that Tea Party rally belong to or have a controlling interest.
Despite a popularity that is around 20% positive in the general public http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/opinion/crashing-the-tea-party.html?_r=3, below that of Muslim and Atheists, they have an out sized voice in their representation among elected officials and in the Congress and Senate. While the phrase Tea Party always brings to images of crowds of everyday Americans shouting patriotic slogans and waving signs of Obama made to look like Hitler and the Joker, and Gadsden Flag ("don't tread on me",) these people are in fact only props in political theater.
The power lies not with the people who are waving the flags and brandishing the weapons at presidential town halls. The power of the Tea Partiers is in the hands of the people who pay off enough public officials to be able to make threats against the president an exercise in the freedom of speech. The ones who book the speakers, the under-writers, the Kochs, Dick Armey, the Oil and Insurance lobbies among others. The interests and the lobbyists who represent them have control of the politicians and the tea partiers themselves (in language Hitler is purported to have used - "useful idiots" with little knowledge of politics, economics or history beyond tricorn hats) are superfluous.
From The Infantile Style in American Politics http://www.salon.com/2011/12/05/the_infantile_style_in_american_politics/singleton/
Take the Tea Party, the flagship of modern right-wing “thought.” In his withering portrait of the Tea Party, Matt Taibbi reveals it to be utterly self-contradictory and self-serving, driven by resentment and anger against undeserving welfare loafers and illegal immigrants. An elderly couple who rage against the federal government turn out to be a government employee and a Medicare recipient whose motorized scooter was paid for by Uncle Sam.
Taibbi concludes:
The only thing holding it together is free-floating anger, a sense of dispossession and an outraged feeling of betrayal — the same memes that Hofstadter traced throughout American history.
Adorno’s portrait of the repressed, father-fixated, emotionally rigid authoritarian personality also offers an uncannily accurate take on the contemporary American right wing. Although his study was flawed by an overly schematic Freudian framework and methodological issues, its findings have been confirmed by some subsequent studies. And even if Adorno’s psychological portrait does not apply to all right-wingers – the mainstreaming of extreme right-wing thought means that for some of its adherents, hating the government has simply become a day job – it captures the right’s belief system with remarkable precision.
Seen in light of Hofstadter and Adorno’s work, the infantile behavior of the Republican Party makes perfect sense. Ironically, that behavior has everything to do with those “family values” the right purports to celebrate.
It’s all about impulse control. Like a wailing baby, the GOP base has none, and it has elevated its inability to deal with reality — with compromise and government and taxes and mediation and moral ambiguity and the need for reasonable authority — into a bizarre travesty it characterizes as “freedom.” As Hofstadter demonstrates, this “paranoid strain” runs throughout American history, but it was only with the rise of Ronald Reagan, who was in fact not the right-wing ideologue the GOP claims he was, that its disciples began taking over the party.
Far-right American politics has become a theater of projection. To win the nomination, the candidates must exactly mimic the impulses, idée fixes and biases of the faithful. Sarah Palin’s bizarre rise only makes sense in this light. The same logic drove Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell’s infamous “I’m you” ad. O’Donnell became a laughingstock, but if she hadn’t prefaced “I’m you” with possibly the worst opening line in political history, “I’m not a witch,” she might have had the last laugh.
The GOP has given its hardcore supporters exactly the presidential candidates they asked for: empty vessels into which the party faithful can pour their anger and resentment. And such candidates, by definition, will not possess any real knowledge of the world, of the political process, of the messy, fallen world we live in. If they do possess such knowledge, they must conceal that fact. Anyone who has actually had to work with opponents and make compromises to get things done — in short, a practical politician — will inevitably fail to live up to the rigid fundamentalism, religious, economic and moral, of the Tea Party. This is why Romney, who is a practical politician and is deeply mistrusted by the GOP faithful for that very reason, must pretend to be stupider and more intolerant than he is.
They are sock puppets used for political theater. And in the name of those sock puppets, Tea Party Republicans accede to the wishes of their corporate backers over the interests and desires of the majority, overwhelming majority, of Americans. Killing the Jobs Acts presented by the president; slashing services and educational funding; EPA deregulation; stalling Financial and Investment reform and regulations like Glass/Steagal that would prevent another Wall Street Meltdown; or permit investigation into the fraud and abuse Wall Street - emboldening future bad actors because, shucks, there's a buck to be made. Even if it destroys the economy of the United States, making a fortune in such a fashion is still a triumph for Capitalism and who could possibly be against that?!
The power lies not with the people who are waving the flags and brandishing the weapons at presidential town halls. The power of the Tea Partiers is in the hands of the people who pay off enough public officials to be able to make threats against the president an exercise in the freedom of speech. The ones who book the speakers, the under-writers, the Kochs, Dick Armey, the Oil and Insurance lobbies among others. The interests and the lobbyists who represent them have control of the politicians and the tea partiers themselves (in language Hitler is purported to have used - "useful idiots" with little knowledge of politics, economics or history beyond tricorn hats) are superfluous.
From The Infantile Style in American Politics http://www.salon.com/2011/12/05/the_infantile_style_in_american_politics/singleton/
Take the Tea Party, the flagship of modern right-wing “thought.” In his withering portrait of the Tea Party, Matt Taibbi reveals it to be utterly self-contradictory and self-serving, driven by resentment and anger against undeserving welfare loafers and illegal immigrants. An elderly couple who rage against the federal government turn out to be a government employee and a Medicare recipient whose motorized scooter was paid for by Uncle Sam.
Taibbi concludes:
“After lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry’s medals and Barack Obama’s Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them.”Taibbi points out that the movement utterly lacks a coherent ideology. “Beneath the surface,” he notes, “the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing.”
The only thing holding it together is free-floating anger, a sense of dispossession and an outraged feeling of betrayal — the same memes that Hofstadter traced throughout American history.
Adorno’s portrait of the repressed, father-fixated, emotionally rigid authoritarian personality also offers an uncannily accurate take on the contemporary American right wing. Although his study was flawed by an overly schematic Freudian framework and methodological issues, its findings have been confirmed by some subsequent studies. And even if Adorno’s psychological portrait does not apply to all right-wingers – the mainstreaming of extreme right-wing thought means that for some of its adherents, hating the government has simply become a day job – it captures the right’s belief system with remarkable precision.
Seen in light of Hofstadter and Adorno’s work, the infantile behavior of the Republican Party makes perfect sense. Ironically, that behavior has everything to do with those “family values” the right purports to celebrate.
It’s all about impulse control. Like a wailing baby, the GOP base has none, and it has elevated its inability to deal with reality — with compromise and government and taxes and mediation and moral ambiguity and the need for reasonable authority — into a bizarre travesty it characterizes as “freedom.” As Hofstadter demonstrates, this “paranoid strain” runs throughout American history, but it was only with the rise of Ronald Reagan, who was in fact not the right-wing ideologue the GOP claims he was, that its disciples began taking over the party.
Far-right American politics has become a theater of projection. To win the nomination, the candidates must exactly mimic the impulses, idée fixes and biases of the faithful. Sarah Palin’s bizarre rise only makes sense in this light. The same logic drove Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell’s infamous “I’m you” ad. O’Donnell became a laughingstock, but if she hadn’t prefaced “I’m you” with possibly the worst opening line in political history, “I’m not a witch,” she might have had the last laugh.
The GOP has given its hardcore supporters exactly the presidential candidates they asked for: empty vessels into which the party faithful can pour their anger and resentment. And such candidates, by definition, will not possess any real knowledge of the world, of the political process, of the messy, fallen world we live in. If they do possess such knowledge, they must conceal that fact. Anyone who has actually had to work with opponents and make compromises to get things done — in short, a practical politician — will inevitably fail to live up to the rigid fundamentalism, religious, economic and moral, of the Tea Party. This is why Romney, who is a practical politician and is deeply mistrusted by the GOP faithful for that very reason, must pretend to be stupider and more intolerant than he is.
They are sock puppets used for political theater. And in the name of those sock puppets, Tea Party Republicans accede to the wishes of their corporate backers over the interests and desires of the majority, overwhelming majority, of Americans. Killing the Jobs Acts presented by the president; slashing services and educational funding; EPA deregulation; stalling Financial and Investment reform and regulations like Glass/Steagal that would prevent another Wall Street Meltdown; or permit investigation into the fraud and abuse Wall Street - emboldening future bad actors because, shucks, there's a buck to be made. Even if it destroys the economy of the United States, making a fortune in such a fashion is still a triumph for Capitalism and who could possibly be against that?!
The fact about the Tea Party Republicans is this, they would rather receive money and support and pay lip service to the very same people who advocate assassinating them than to give up the bribes and operate with transparency for the benefit of all Americans. Just not enough money to be made in it evidently.
The Occupy Movement, in contrast, is a true grass roots movement. And like true grass roots, it is unruly. Messy. And contrary to what ratfucking
| [1. | ratfucking | |
1. In politics, the use of "dirty tricks" to discredit one's opponent(s). This often takes the form of false or semi-false accusations spread through underhanded means. The term was coined in the 1960s by Hunter S. Thompson and Bob Woodward. The art of ratfucking was brought into the public eye by Karl Rove. Among his ratfucking accomplishments are the 2000 GOP South Carolina primary and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.]
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The fact is that if they the same financial and legal backing that the Tea Party rallies enjoyed from their patrons - Occupiers could eat human flesh on open air spits and the police and authorities would leave them in peace. But they have no backers. Because they do not buy off the right officials, they are subject to police harassment and violence. They make shift in anarchic communities of tents and improvised shelters. Facilities are not provided for, there are no concession stands. This is not a rally, these are occupations. Speakers are not brought in and paid 10s of thousands of dollars to speak to the Faithful. The Occupiers speak for themselves and advocate on behalf of not a single company or a single industry, but for everyone who have been shut out of the political process. They haven't come to renew the Tree of Liberty with the blood of tyrants, but to put their own bodies on the line instead. As it now stands, our nation is undeserving of the sacrifices they make.
Latest development: Many Occupy locations have been cleared by law enforcement. As a result, many Occupiers are making a virtue out of necessity and are Occupying the yards if not homes that have been foreclosed upon in protest to the illegality and unfairness of the system (sub prime lending and housing crisis, robo-signing foreclosure mills.) Hopefully more news will come.
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