The Tea Party movement threatens to be a very big presence in the coming mid-term elections. The people at the rallies are true believers. They come at their own expense and wave homemade signs. Some slogans are really very clever. What you may not know is the gatherings are heavily sponsored by major corporate donors.
There is a lot of money spent on advertising. This does not mean those corporations started it, but they sure do like it. I am sure they do have a lot to say about what is addressed, the main concerns raised, but I do not think we can say they control it. Rather, they are taking advantage of something that is quite real as a grass roots movement for their own ends. However, the movement has been compromised and so it will deteriorate over time.
Back when the radical progressives wedged open the representation of their viewpoints in the Democratic Party, the same sort of compromising occurred in their circles. The only difference in their case was that the money came from typical liberal sources — foundations, limousine liberals, news organizations, and so on. Today, virtually every cause that clings to the progressive-socialist-communist axis is funded that way, though a few corporations have been more open about it.
The whole methodology of political activism revolves around long studied organization, heavy investment by someone (or something) with a big bank account, and carefully planned, attention-getting activities intended to sell the message. There is not a single voice given any notice in the political arena that is not funded by deep pockets. Those who are without such funding are simply not heard. They do not get any press coverage and only the most obscure blogs heed them. The various groups of ditto heads of whatever stripe do not echo their talking points.
Those who get the press are professional liars. All of them. That is, in one sense or another, they are struggling to steer money and power back to some thing that is most certainly going to hurt us. Most of “we the people” have no idea just how badly we are being hurt until way late in the game.
The truth is so very much simpler. You can offer it all day long, but you will find precious few takers. At the same time, truth that is heard — really heard — requires no funding and pushing to be accepted. Our biggest problem is getting it heard. In this world of vast resources buying earth-shattering noise to drown out truth, and doing it for so very long, most people cannot recognize truth.
The sad part is it matters. You see, the truth is written into the very cosmos. The lies are like an attack on reality. Reality has this strange tendency to hit back. Yes, it takes a long time as humans measure such things. And frankly there is no PR team to clarify things, so most folks won’t recognize just why their world is coming apart. But truth will not be denied.
Lies are very expensive, indeed.
Ed Hurst is Associate Editor of Open for Business.
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Re: The Tea Party is Compromised (And So is Everyone Else)
The poor tea party conservatives; they just don’t get it. They currently occupy what had been a vacuum of political power, but they have no leaders who genuinely share in their cause of small government and fiscal constraint. And evidently they’re not aware of the history of their own party.
A battle for the heart and soul of the GOP took place in the 1990s, as then reported by true conservative Pat Buchanan, and the conservative wing subsequently lost to a statist movement (who go by Irving Kristol’s nonsensical term “neo-conservatism”, whose vile agenda has virtually driven this great nation into the ground by squandering taxpayers’ money to finance their grand imperialistic foreign policy schemes).
The tea party movement started with libertarian disciples of Ron Paul in 2007 (Bush years). Conservative masses were drawn by libertarian demands for “fiscal sanity”. But where tea party libertarians have a like-minded leader in Ron Paul, tea party conservatives sadly have only sham statist leaders, such as Sarah Palin, who advocate reckless international policies that run counter to America’s interests, such as attacking Iran and expanding NATO. Palin, moreover, supported Bush’s $700 billion bailout package for the financial mammoths.
There were 13 candidates in the 2008 GOP presidential primary: one libertarian, twelve statists, and zero conservatives.
How to tell a statist? Foreign policy and big business. Economically, they favor a strong central government and big spending, despite their assertions to the contrary, just as liberals. But where liberals favor welfare, statists favor warfare. Where liberals are tax and spend, statists are borrow and spend. As Ron Paul says, you CANNOT separate economic policy from foreign policy. Both liberals and statists are interventionist in foreign policy - real liberals will go to war to fight injustice; statists will go to war to expand the empire, to (keep) open markets for trans-national corporations, and to help depose any regime that dares criticize our government. This doesn’t help the American people; it bankrupts us while an elite of the chosen few, such as TNCs and national defense contractors, get rich. Moreover, it’s just downright immoral. This is not conservatism. And finally, statists spend our tax money to transform our great economic system of entrepreneurialism and small enterprise into a concentrated cesspool of crony capitalism and corporatism.
The secretive statists are not your friends, my frustrated conservative tea party friends. If your political candidates are not prepared to bring home the troops, close bases (e.g., in Korea), cut the enormous defense budget, reclaim our country from the military industrial complex, and refuse to spill the blood of America’s sons and daughters to do Israel’s dirty work for her, then they’re taking you for a “statist” ride, not a “conservative” one, and nothing will change if your candidates are elected. Our debt will continue to soar. Get “real” conservative leaders – and use foreign policy as the litmus test.