Significance of Tea Party movement, part 2
The Tea Party movement has attracted attention of late because of its number of followers and the coverage afforded to it by cable news stations. However, the actions encouraged by the movement do not correspond with the flowing rhetoric that invokes the memories of our patriot forefathers.
Ideally, the Tea Party protesters would be properly educated and organized into effective actions, such as civil disobedience, in light of the outrageously undemocratic bailout of the failing financial institutions. Unsurprisingly, these are the very same banks that backed President Barack Obama during his campaign. Instead, the answers given at Tea Party rallies, and from right-wing mouthpieces such as Glenn Beck, do nothing to alleviate the crisis by hiding the real culprits.
The problem, insists Beck and more or less every right-wing talk show host I’ve listened to, lies with the liberals in charge of the corporations and media who actively work to take your hard-earned money away to frivolously spend on immigrants, a doomed health care bill, ungrateful minorities, gays, and “socialist” policy. Unsurprisingly, apparently anything is suspect to the omnipotent Beck except the enormously disproportionate “defense” budget along with drastic reductions to social spending which has the odd consequence of lowering the standard of living for a majority of Americans.
Again this remains unsurprising, given that former-NBC proprietor General Electric was winning lucrative government contracts for jet engines while producing media content, though not as brazenly right-wing as the modern Fox News. I only single out Fox because of its overt preference for extreme right-wing opinions. CNN, MSNBC, ABC and CBS all have a history of similarly consistent distortions of the news, especially when demonizing unions, and labor in general, for perfectly good capitalist reasons.
In brief, the Tea Party movement only underscores the desperate need in this country for a more powerful organizing structure, like the unions of old, which would work for the benefit of the disposed themselves. No corporate-sponsored movement could ever satisfy the public demand for justice, seeing as they (the corporations) are in fact the problem. As for myself, I see the current spite directed at the Obama administration as a way of displacing frustration caused by the inherently unfair state-capitalist system with the usual “big government” rhetoric, though I do not expect Beck to call for a check in Pentagon funding or complain too hard against Bush-era tax cuts that benefit the wealthy.
Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Apr 23 2010. Filed under Opinion.
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