There's a simple word-replacement that turns Tea Party rhetoric into Progressive rhetoric: Do a search-and-replace that changes "government" to "corporations".
[from The Weekly Sift]
Did you ever watch one of those football blooper reels, where guys run for touchdowns in the wrong direction? Sometimes they look really good doing it: fast, agile, determined. None of their teammates can catch up and turn them around.
This last year or two I've been feeling that way about the Tea Party -- not the corporate lobbyists who run the organizations or the billionaires who fund them, but the rank-and-file types who wave signs and bring their babies to rallies. A few are the stereotypic gun-toting racists, but a lot of others are low-to-middle-class folks who have figured a few things out:
Honest, hard-working Americans are seeing their opportunities dry up.
The country is dominated by a small self-serving elite.
Our democracy is threatened.
The public is told a lot of lies.
People need to stand up and make their voices heard.
If we stand together, we're not as helpless as we seem.
I could go on, but you get the idea. They're on to something. The country needs people like this carrying the ball, if only they weren't running the wrong way.
How they should turn around is pretty easy to describe. Tea Partiers think:
The threat to our way of life comes from government, and the solution is to shrink government while freeing corporations from government control.
Just flip government and corporations in that sentence:
The threat to our way of life comes from corporations, and the solution is to shrink corporations while freeing government from corporate control.
Perfect. Now you can explain things like too-big-to-fail banks gambling trillions on the unregulated credit-default-swap market, sinking the economy, and then getting the taxpayers to cover their losses.
And more: Did the USDA put salmonella in our meat? No, meat-packing corporations did. And they've got enough lawyer-and-lobbyist power to keep the USDA regulators at bay. Did the EPA dump raw oil into the Gulf of Mexico? No, BP did. They cut corners on safety and no regulator was in a position to stop them. Did the government kill the 29 miners at Upper Big Bend coal mine? No, Massey Energy did, and had enough clout to keep the mine going even after inspectors had found more than 500 safety violations.
By getting the government/corporation thing backwards, the Tea Party has channeled populist anger into the idea that corporations need even more power. Get those mean bureaucrats off the back of poor, beleaguered Goldmann Sachs. If we just let the Koch brothers' paper plants dump more phosphorous into Wisconsin's rivers, the economy will be fine. Let's kill off the unions, and then the corporations that own the mines and the factories will treat working people with more respect. Let corporate money flow freely into political campaigns, and then the voice of ordinary Americans will really be heard in Washington.
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