In Wake of JP Morgan Chase Debacle, Where is the Tea Party Again?

The fine folks at JP Morgan Chase continued to make unchecked bets (the same kind that A.I.G. made and got burned) and lost big: $2 Billion in the last 6 weeks.  A few of those folks have since lost their jobs.  But not the man who lobbied the hardest against regulations that would prevent Chase from making those bets – no, he still has his job.  The shareholders are doing what they’re supposed to be doing: asking tough questions.  Will Dimon keep his job?  Sure – crony capitalism rewards failures at the top.

What I want to know is where are the massive rallies by the Tea Party calling for Dimon to be fired and regulations to be imposed on gamblers masquerading as bankers?

The answer is easy: there aren’t any and there won’t be any.  The Tea Party was co-opted by the same folks who perpetrated the worst activities that led up to the Great Recession and our continued economic malaise.  No substantive changes were made in the way Chase or other banks do business – save the tens of Trillions of dollars they got for free from the Federal Reserve.

The co-opting included distracting the populists in the Tea Party with the supposedly scarier threat of a Black Man in the White House.

Meanwhile, speculators were allowed to run up the cost of oil and gasoline, which acts as a choke collar on the American economy, and other right-wing economic theories were imposed across Europe, which has led to what is likely to be another recession:

[h/t Bonddad]

The combination of high oil/gas prices, US corporations sitting on Trillions of dollars in cash (not hiring), and European economic weakness will not help the US economy.  Will our “recovery” be over soon; will we follow Europe into weaker and weaker economic conditions?  Don’t ask the Tea Party, they don’t truly care.

What America Will Look Like With Tea Party “Governance”

The most concrete example of what Republican Tea Party “Governance” would look like: Don’t pay your fee, your house burns to the ground.

According to Republican Teabaggers, America should be an “everybody for themselves” country.  Well, this is what happens.

Progressives on the other hand, believe that people should work together as communities.

What it boils down to, of course, is the rich will set themselves further apart from the vast majority of Americans.  Do you think their homes would be allowed to burn, whether they paid a $75 fee or not?  There are two Americas – one for the have everythings and one for the rest of us.

Tea Party Continues To Show It Doesn’t Truly Care About Government Waste

Or more importantly, climate change.

I read a piece over at Climate Progress entitled, “Ohio Tea Party survey to candidates: “The regulation of Carbon Dioxide in our atmosphere should be left to God and not government and I oppose all measures of Cap and Trade as well as the teaching of global warming theory in our schools.”

It was somewhat unsurprising to read that Ohio Teabaggers are sending out emails to candidates’ campaigns asking that they respond to 15 questions so the Teabaggers can judge their worthiness of support.  All of them are batty to one degree or another.  One of the questions reads:

2. The regulation of Carbon Dioxide in our atmosphere should be left to God and not government and I oppose all measures of Cap and Trade as well as the teaching of global warming theory in our schools.

and asks for “respondents to give one of the following answers: A = Agree; D = Disagree; U = Undecided; A* = Pro-life with exceptions of Rape or Incest, * = Added comments; NR = No Response”.

This question fails on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin or end.  “God” isn’t emitting carbon dioxide into the Earth’s climate system at levels unseen for millenia, people are.  Therefore, citing “God” as the responsible authority to regulate atmospheric CO2 is silly.  Opposing teaching of global warming in schools because they think it’s “only a theory” is similarly absurd.  Why don’t they also demand that gravity be withheld from school curricula, since it’s also “only a theory”.

Tea Partiers Are Mostly Wealthy, White, Ultra-Conservative Men

It’s a little surprising to me why so much attention is being given to the extremist Tea Party.  What’s so shocking about a bunch of older, white rich men being angry at the rest of the country?  They’ve demonstrated for the better part of 30 years that they love to cast themselves as the victims of our society – so nothing they’re saying today is novel, let alone grounded in reality.

Be that as it may, more and more corporate media outlets are running polls to try to crack the nearly impenetrable nut that the Tea Party supposedly represents.  In politics, it’s always good to have numbers to back up arguments.  It won’t make the fringe right-wing any more accountable for their own actions, but the rest of America at least gets a chance to see who they really are.

A majority of Tea Party folks don’t actually seem to be so terribly upset about taxes, which commenters commonly cite as their raison d’etre.  They have said so themselves – they think they’re being taxed fairly.  They have a skewed view of the job President Obama is doing, especially as it relates to the federal deficit and the health insurance mess that was the result of a wasted year of “debate”.

Their deficit concerns are incredibly laughable.  And I think they actually demonstrate what they’re really concerned about.  Before I get to that, I would like to point out that no media polling has yet asked a very important question: if the deficit is really so troubling to you, where were you in the years 2001-2008, when the federal deficit exploded?  President Obama has added a little to the national deficit, it’s true.  I say a little because the last president added many times what this President has or will.  Angry, old, rich white men weren’t screaming about revolts and revolutions last decade.

Why?  Because the president looked like them; because he was one of them.  When the Tea Partiers are threatening to commit violence and cheering domestic terrorists in 2009 and 2010, it is in no small part due to the fact that they don’t like operating in a society that takes care of everybody.  The Tea Partiers loved the historic transfer of wealth that the Cons gave to rich white people.  They’re angry because some of that wealth might find its way back to the people who gave it up in the last 10 years.  Tea Partiers are greedy and selfish.  A majority of them are racist, evidenced by a growing number of poll results, given by the Tea Partiers themselves.

These extremists have made up their own twisted version of history and are trying to force it onto the rest of the country.  Terrorists and their supporters should not be given credence by our media.  That wouldn’t happen if the corporate media didn’t cater primarily to them.

55% of Tea Partiers Are Women

13% of voters say they identify as being part of the so-called Tea Party.

55% of them are women, which is somewhat surprising.

74% of them are Republicans, which is not surprising at all.

88% of them are white, which is not surprising either.

Left unpolled is what the Tea Party stands for.  They’re anti lots of things, we know that already.  But what are they for?  What solutions are they pursuing?

Corporate Media Fails To Cover Real American Outrage

The corporate media fell over themselves producing wall-to-wall coverage of anything Tea Party related starting last August.  Despite being able to only gather a few hundred people at any single gathering, despite the supposed grass-roots outrage over the health legislation in Congress, the corporate media couldn’t cover the story enough.  They had no platform, only mindless rage directed at any number of targets supplied by their behind-the-scenes corporate organizers.

What happens when thousands of real grass-roots activists gather, in Washington D.C. no less, to protest against health insurance lobbyists and executives?  Next to no corporate media coverage.  Even a supposed paragon of liberal media like MSNBC has no front-page articles this afternoon about today’s rally.

The anger from those fed up with our broken health care system is real; it is pervasive.  At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if this rally, or any other rally like it, goes uncovered by the corporate media.  True grass-roots activists will continue to demand change and take action when and where it is needed.  The system will be changed.  We will change it.

Given the resounding lack of corporate media coverage, I haven’t been able to answer the first question that came to mind when I saw the article: how diverse was this crowd?  Was it more diverse than the near-absolute all-white folks showing up for Tea Party gatherings?  I’m willing to bet it was.