The more I read about the Tea Party, the more it becomes vividly clear that this is nothing more than a Great Tea Purge of Republican moderates and independent thinkers. This process was already underway for years. It began when Ralph Reed was hired by Pat Robertson to form The Christian Coalition. Reed took the huge mailing list compiled from Robertson's quixotic run for President in 1988 and transformed it into a movement.
Having placed basically every blue-nosed busybody in a database, Reed set out to hijack the Republican Party. He had a stealth strategy of taking over school boards, local GOP committees and city councils under the radar. Once this was accomplished, his largely clandestine movement came out of the closet and stole Congress. Unfortunately, Washington has never been the same again, with collegiality in shambles and extremism replacing reasonable debate. In short, Reed and Robertson soiled our nation to fulfill their sinister goal of turning America into a theocracy.
The Christian Coalition ran out of steam; however, this new Tea Bag movement has picked up where they left off. Phillip Glass is using his National Precinct Alliance to hijack the GOP by signing up Tea Baggers to run the party. In the process, they are running out moderates and finishing the job that the Christian Coalition's Reed set out to do.
So, what is the Tea Party (Purge)?
It is a brilliant coup by Big Business to co-opt the American government, by using dim-witted fundamentalists and under-educated, under-employed rural folks to carry their water. Look at the issues:
1) Climate Change: Irresponsible members of Big Business do not want to pay to stop the damage corporations have done to our planet. They want to continue polluting and exploiting our natural resources. The best way to do this is to trick people, by flooding the Internet with fake science, into believing climate change is not man made. The next step is to turn the government into a bogeyman, so "the people" will reduce its power to regulate corporate excess and corruption.
The end result will be dirtier water, filthier air, sicker families and dwindling natural resources. Of course, the powerful and wealthy CEO's won't notice. While your children choke on the dust and grit, they will be yachting off to the few remaining private islands that are not despoiled by greed and pollution.
2) Taxes: One of the most irresponsible parts of this "movement" is that Americans should not have to pay their fair share of taxes. This whole idea that you can get something for nothing is a mirage and the poor families who scream and act the fool at Tea Bag protests are the ones who will be left without basic services if this radical agenda becomes enacted.
Here is a dirty little secret. Developing countries are only "Third World" for the desperately poor (i.e. the majority). The sliver of wealthy people in these nations often live like kings. They have privatized services and are pampered in every imaginable way. They frequently jet off to beautiful flats in Paris, New York and London, while "the people" suffer in anonymity back home. While living in such luxury, these elites have little incentive to make life better for the impoverished masses.
By significantly eroding or eliminating the tax base, the majority of Americans would lose government services - from clean water to garbage pick-up, to affordable education to job training, to pathogen-free meat to reliable transportation (such as train service). The CEO's would save a fortune on taxes, while using private companies to pay for services no longer available to average Americans.
They win. You lose.
Meanwhile, when people become angry over the situation, these titans will spend millions of dollars on propaganda to blame the deterioration of America on liberal morals and government incompetence - even as they starve the government of the resources it needs to effectively do its job.
What a scam.
The hard truth is, these avaricious conservatives and their Tea Party tools are going to turn America into a Third World nation, where there is a huge gulf between rich and poor. Look around - it is already happening.
Wake up Tea Baggers. You are dupes who are forfeiting your family's future and don't even realize it.
3) Health Care: CEO's and their families will always receive top-notch health care and cutting edge medicine. But, increasingly, they see little incentive for workers and average Americans to get the same benefits and level of care. By crushing labor unions and buying off politicians, thanks to our Supreme Court, they can easily replace sick workers with younger, healthier models.
The CEO's have used this gullible Tea Bag crowd to convince a majority of people that the government is inefficient and should stay out of health-care. I guess these "real Americans" are content having potential treatments for their children rejected by faceless insurance company bureaucrats sitting in sterile cubicles with the job of protecting a corporation's bottom line.
Do these tools realize how they have been tricked by hucksters like former Congressman Dick Armey (R-TX) - who now runs FreedomWorks, an umbrella for Tea Party groups? Armey is a corporate shill who is robbing your family of its future. However, too many people think he is on their side because he wears cowboy boots and uses quaint, folksy sayings.
Catch a clue - Armey cares nothing about your freedom. Armey is a con artist - an actor - posing as a good ole' boy outsider, when he is the ultimate insider. Yet, countless Americans keep falling for his phony snake charmer act.
4) Illegal Immigration & Gays: The corporate titans realize that if they ran on a platform of, "We manipulate the system to steal your money and you go broke", they would not do so well in elections. So, they have developed the cat-with-a-laser technique.
When I want to distract Critter, my cat, I shine a laser on the wall and he runs to attack it. He never actually catches the gosh-darn-red-light, but he always feels like he's getting close. More important, he expends a lot of energy - and then takes a multi-hour slumber.
Tea Baggers - you are the cat and the issues of immigration and gay rights are the laser. You are being distracted, busied on a circular obstacle course and ultimately being put to sleep - even as you feel you are accomplishing something.
I have news for you.
You are never going to stop people from crossing the border, as long as there are better economic opportunities in America. You are never going to stop gay people from dating and mating. No matter how high you build that wall, or how many Proposition H8 measures you spend millions of dollars to enact. You are essentially wasting your time and money. You will eliminate gay people and immigrants, right after you accomplish winning that great war against marijuana or electing pure Christian politicians who won't cheat on their spouses.
It ain't going to happen, so the sooner you drop the expensive fantasy, the sooner we can all move on to real issues that will actually improve the lives of our families.
Of course, by adopting extreme anti-government, anti-regulatory economic policies, we will ruin the economy for all but the robber-barons. With few decent-paying blue-collar jobs left in America, hard-working Mexican immigrants will just stay at home. And, those loudmouths at the Tea Party rallies will have no choice but to fill their threadbare shoes - picking tomatoes and mowing laws.
Sadly, these folks will be happy performing such labor-intensive, menial tasks, because - a bad job is better than no job. And, the joke is, the radical politicians they helped elect to destroy America's economy will make these dupes feel important by feeding them propaganda about opportunity, freedom and hard work.
"If you just scrub that toilet a little bit harder, you'll be an entrepreneur in the opportunity-based society and one day smoke cigars on the country club golf course with Rush Limbaugh," I can hear the hired PR guns say.
5) Guns & Prayer: Most of the CEO's don't really care about these social issues. However, they realize that guns and fundamentalist prayer helps newly disempowered people cope with feelings of low self esteem and helplessness.You see, if the misery is God's Plan, and not the result of selfish and destructive economic plans by greedy CEO's and politicians, the pain is easier to swallow.
As the unemployment rate soars indefinitely, crime is likely to rise. Guns make some people feel safe in uncertain and tumultuous times. Furthermore, no matter how much the crime-rate increases, the CEO's and bankers are safe because they can live in a bubble, hiring private security firms for protection.
Appealing to a higher power gives the powerless a false sense of security. They feel like God is looking out for them and opportunity is just around the corner - even if those potential jobs are permanently shipped overseas and the earnings placed in offshore tax shelters.
Most important, Religion is a free distraction, which makes it a really good investment for those who are trying to hijack our financial system for personal gain. (Well, it's not completely free, there is a slush fund called the "Faith Based Initiative" where money can be funneled to preachers who cooperate and regurgitate the party line.)
The Tea Party crowd must realize that it is being used and exploited by large financial interests. It is time "the people" wake up and grow up, before they permanently drive this country into a destitution ditch. Ronald Reagan started the ruinous process with his failed economic policies and George W. Bush nearly completed the task. Democrats unwilling to speak up, or who also benefited from the Wall Street/Washington gravy-train, bear some personal responsibility as well.
But, let's begin with a whiff of honesty - there is not a genuine Tea Party. These people did not spontaneously spring up out of dust. What we are really witnessing is the Great Tea Purge - where social conservatives have camouflaged and branded themselves as a new entity in an effort to instill extremist orthodoxy on the GOP by driving out all moderates.