Article: Impure Tea Party Absurdity

There is an amazing thing about grassroots organization; it could lead to populist change. The grassroots is the place where you find fresh ideas brimming from personal experiences. It’s how women obtained the right to vote, how segregation ended, and how the Vietnam war ended. More often than not, grassroots organizations have been the forerunner of social change in the United States.

This notion has been tarnished by some recent rash actions. The so called “tea parties” that took place on April 15 were far from the principles present in the Boston Tea Party in 1773. The Boston Tea Party was a rejection of the massive corporate tax cut the British government created for the British East India Company, the largest corporation in the world at that time. The colonists – knowing that the BEIC would put them out of business – revolted against the tax by dumping the tea into Boston Harbor. The tea parties of 2009, on the other hand, were gross misrepresentations of this historic event.

Although the organizers of these “tea parties” claim that it was in the spirit of the original tea party, there were many discrepancies that would say otherwise. For one, these events were virtually sponsored by the biggest corporate news spin machine of them all, Fox News. In the week leading up to the “protests,” Fox News would run on-screen prompts revealing locations of the protests as “Fox News Channel Tax Day Tea Parties.” Although this “news” network claimed they had no sponsorship of the event, they continuously claimed ownership of the events with these on-screen prompts.

Another large discrepancy between the two events is the organizers of the events. The Boston Tea Party was carried out by angered colonial merchants. The new tea party was organized and funded by the right-wing think tank Freedomworks whose founder is far-right conservative Dick Armey. Freedomworks gets their funds from the likes of Steve Forbes and ExxonMobil who has contributed up to a quarter million dollars a year.

This, “representation of the people,” seems to me like less of a true grassroots movement and more like a corporate puppet scheme involving hundreds of thousands of US citizens. I can understand one supporting the principle of these protests – lower taxes – but I urge people to understand where something is coming from before they jump on board. If this were a true movement for the lowering of taxes on families, it would include an increase in corporate tax to make up for the loss of tax revenues from the family tax cuts.

This movement was truly absurd. It was advertised as a “populist” uprising of people who reject tax hikes while in reality it was an orchestrated scheme by right-wing businessmen and politicians to smear the Obama administration. So as many donned the phrase, “Don’t tread on me,” in reference to the American fight against their colonial ruler, the power elite push their corporate agenda with Americans as their pawns.

As Jane Hamsher puts it, “Before any media covering these events accept the idea that this was just a grass roots outpouring of populist sentiment, they ought to take a look behind the curtain -- where Dick Armey is laughing and counting his cash.”

-mike