"There Is No Such Thing as the Tea Party; There Is Only a Collection of Billionaires"

[applegrove]

There Is No Such Thing as the Tea Party; There Is Only a Collection of Billionaires

By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program (at TruthOut)

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/19199-there-is-no-such-thing-as-the-tea-party-there-is-only-a-collection-of-billionaires

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The Tea Party's astroturf roots should have been obvious to anyone paying attention to their rallies. Back in 2009, for example, Americans for Prosperity, the pet-project of the oil-rich Koch Brothers, actually bussed Tea Party "activists" around the country to protest President Obama's proposed healthcare law.

Margaret Thatcher, the UK's conservative prime minister from 1979 to 1990 once said that "There is no such thing as society, there is only a collection of individuals."
A similar thing can be said about the Tea Party: there is no such thing as the Tea Party, only a collection of individual billionaires and their front groups.

And in January of 2010, five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court handed that collection of individual billionaires a big gift with their decision in the Citizens United case. Their decision declared money as speech and stripped the government of many of its powers to restrict corporate electioneering. The Supreme Court essentially gave the billionaires behind the Tea Party the power to hire their own army of politicians to wreak havoc in Congress, politicians who said they fought for "liberty," but were really working in the interests of the corporate billionaire class.

That's why the number of actual Tea Party "activists" has declined so quickly from the heady days of 2010. Now that the Kochs and their allies and can buy their own lawmakers, they don't really need any more of those spunky "activists" dressed in tri-corner hats or people to harass liberal politicians like they did back in 2009 and 2010. They can now count on people like Pete Sessions and Ted Cruz to do their bidding on Capitol Hill. Both received ample campaign donations from groups like the Club for Growth and Koch Industries.


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[JohnnyRingo]

1. I call them "Barstool Republicans".

I can understand where the author links the Tea Party directly to billionaires, but I think Barstool Republicans fit their legions of foot soldiers well.

They're the ones who get off work after a hard day of toiling just to make ends meet at the end of the month, and start talking like they're Steve Effin Forbes. They carp about high taxes on investments, minimum wage raises, and how the welfare class is sucking the very blood from their cholesterol laden veins. Unlike their billionaire mentors, they have no reason to vote GOP.

Barstool Republicans want to end social safety nets when they themselves are two paychecks away from living on food stamps.