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Signs from the “Tea Parties”

22:28 Fri 24 Apr 2009
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I support not bailing out the banks, and I’d love to see more transparency around the Federal Reserve, but I still think the recent “Tea Party protests” are primarily astroturf campaigns, are hypocritical insofar as their participants mostly don’t seem to have protested massive spending under the last eight years of Republican government, and are primarily an attempt to generate “right-wing” publicity.

I say “right-wing” in quotation marks because in fact a pretty large chunk of the population, regardless of political affiliation, is against how the financial crisis is being handled—as well they should be, given that the interests of the financiers are being placed rather far above those of the little people. Not surprising, but clearly the population at large should object.

The political establishment, meaning both parties and much of the media, have little interest in challenging Wall Street, and instead are trying to pin blame on each other. Stirring up whatever diffuse outrage they can, and muddying the waters, seems to be what the right are really engaged in at the moment (the Democrats seem content to dismiss the charges as ludicrous and to keep kowtowing to the banks—with Republican complicity).

This does lead to some weird results, such as a Fox Business Network anchor railing against fascism on air, defining fascism as “big business and government getting into bed together”—granted it’s ridiculous of him to suggest that this is new with the Obama administration, but nonetheless it’s a definition many left-wingers would be comfortable with, and not many would expect to see it assailed on Fox.

Of course, many of the protesters bring their own brand of “right-wing” to the party, and are completely sucked in to attacking Obama personally and indulging in racist sloganeering, not to mention hilariously continuing to accuse Obama of being “socialist” as he proceeds with approaches first laid out by his predecessor.

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