Tea Bagging

The tea-bag revolt of a few weeks ago had me thinking of Chester A. Riley [look him up if you are too young].  “What a revoltin’ development this is,” Riley used to say in one of the most iconic phrases created on radio and the early years of television.  I wish I knew what it was that the tea-bag movement was a protest against.  Revolutionaries carried out the original Boston Tea Party to protest a tax on tea but how that event related to this one I have no idea.  

For the last eight years I’ve waited for angry citizens to take to the streets to protest the proto-fascist Bush government which, with the connivance first of a Republican and then a Democratic Congress, gutted the Constitution by removing the right of Habeas Corpus; made a mockery of the First, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments; rolled over the concepts of the right to privacy; violated the rights of due process; appropriated more than $1 trillion to fight an immoral and illegal preemptive war; allowed unregulated banks and Wall Street oligarchs to bring the country to its knees; put millions of people around the world out of work; caused millions to lose their homes to foreclosure.  But masses of people certainly did not do that then nor did the tea-bag protesters do that now.  

What a revoltin’ development this is. 

No, what they protested, I guess, was taxes.  The protestors carried signs that said,  “Give me liberty, not debt,” “No more spending,” and “Taxation is Piracy.”  The “official” website for the movement “attacked the government for ‘spending trillions of borrowed dollars, leaving a debt our great-grandchildren will be paying.’”  

Excuse me?  While I have been a critic of President Obama’s financial stimulus plan because, as Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has pointed out, the plan does not spend enough nor on the right things, I’m astonished that the tea-baggers could possibly be protesting their own rescue.  Where do they think the current tax cut for 95 percent of people came from?  Bush? Do these people think the ruling oligarchy is going to end the new depression?  They can’t.  Wall Street and the major banks are broke, busted, kaput.  Where were these people for the last eight years when the Bush administration ran up the nation’s largest deficit in history in pursuit of empire?  

I know where they were: I can answer my own question.  They fell in line with Bush.  They supported his policies.  Remember when the Iraq war had 85 percent approval ratings?  I do; many of us were in that 15 percent minority.  We were out on the streets.  It was us at whom those middle fingers were raised.  Now those middle-finger waving war supporters are loosely throwing around concepts - - fascist, socialist, Communist that they are unable to define, understand or differentiate among - - hoping that some name, any name, will stick to Obama.  Unbelievably, some of these people are also calling for Obama’s impeachment something they never called for in the previous eight years, as commentator Walter Brasch recently pointed out. 

Ironically, the idea for the Tea Party originated with CNBC commentator Rick Santelli and was promoted by the likes of Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly Glenn Beck and “dozens of other conservative talking mouths who are among the” richest   1 percent in the country.  It is that ruling class who are the real target of tax increases that Obama may institute next year.  “May” being the operative word.  I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Nice.  The richest 1 percent stir up the pitchfork crowd to save their own bank accounts.  As Chester A. Riley said, “What a revoltin’ development this is.”