The Truth about the Tea Party

            The great disadvantage of an incumbent today is that facts are available. President Obama has a very public record of his presidency; Romney does not. In a nation that embraces facts only when they are convenient, the candidate with the most reality attached is at a distinct disadvantage.  The most glaring reality available today is an 8.3% unemployment rate. It is the albatross that weighs Obama down.

            Never mind the fact the Tea Party was created as soon as Obama arrived in the White House. Made to look like a grass roots movement, it was funded and orchestrated from the beginning by the likes of David Koch, an American oil baron, who, among others, was not about to let a pragmatic black man run the show. Even though Obama inherited the worst economic mess since the 1930’s, the very people who created the mess would quickly use the artificially inseminated grass roots trick called the Tea Party to make sure Obama’s solutions would not work. By installing Tea Party candidates in the House by 2010, the blockade was successfully erected. No further Keynesian solutions would be allowed. The “market” would be restored as mover and shaker and this uppity community organizer out of the wrong side of Chicago would be thwarted and neutered.

            What the Tea Party has been taught to fear more than anything is a powerful government. If government could actually succeed in reversing all the damage done by bubble and bust laissez-faire capitalism on the loose, the high stakes games played by the fast and loose players on Wall Street and the corporate big guys like Koch would be curtailed. They no longer would be able to generate bubbles as large and profitable as they once had.

            Meanwhile, thanks to voices such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News brainwashers, the lowly soldiers of the Tea Party are convinced that their self-interests are the same as the Wall Street gamers and corporate giants and that government is the problem. The truth is corporations such as Wal-Mart and Target have had a much greater negative impact on small businesses throughout the country than government ever could.  And yet the small businessman has been taught to see big business as a big brother rather than his destroyer. Unlike the unemployment statistic, there is no comparable index that measures the job or small business loss through Big Box economic oligarchy.

            The dimming myth of the American Dream is kept alive by the same trick that gets statistically impaired people to buy lottery tickets. You, too, can be a winner. All you have to do is play. Target and Wal-Mart are simply the current winners. Your turn is just around the corner. With hard work and a little luck, your business can become another Home Depot. The only thing that stands in your way is…government. That’s like blaming the referee for your winless or mediocre season.

            Let’s call Big Box stores Big Boxers. In the sport of boxing there are weight classes. The heavyweights do not box the bantamweights. In capitalism it’s a free-for-all where all weight classes are in the same arena, small businesses and large. The only hope for the small business is that a heavyweight does not come to town and pummel the lightweight with prices and variety it cannot possibly match.

            The American Dream was once most broadly alive during the Eisenhower administration when taxes on the rich were about 90%. Employment was high, home ownership was on the rise, and the difference between the wages of the average worker and the CEO were about what they are in Japan today: CEOs made twenty times what the average worker made.  Today,  a president, who is labeled a socialist by today’s extreme right (the Tea Party folks), is actually right of Eisenhower in relative conservatism. But the American public has been sitting in the ever increasingly conservative cauldron for the last three decades like the frog in the proverbial pot of boiling water and failing to notice that their American Dream is dying a slow death.

            It is time to wake up, America, to the truth. Stop being true believers shaped by Wall Street and big business. They are pursuing their self-interests, not yours. And their self-interests have become all-powerful. Your only hope is a more powerful referee, not the absence of one.