MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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Crashing the bus: why we should watch the Tea Party
By Donal on Sat, 07/30/2011 - 10:09pm |
Postcarbon political activists need to keep an eye on the Tea Party. Or rather, we need to keep both eyes on them, each eye looking for different things.
From the traditional liberal perspective out of which most Postcarbon, End of Growthers have emerged, and whose values concerning civil rights, equality, and inclusiveness we generally share, the Tea Party’s intolerant politics of myth and fear represent the early stirrings of a movement that could, under the right conditions—conditions which many of us are in fact predicting—be the stirrings of some sort of ultra right-nationalist, state-capitalism, waving the flag of libertarian freedom while ruling a market-based civil society with an invisible iron fist.
The prevailing economic myth of the Tea Party is that any government concerned to provide services of security of an economic or social nature—a welfare state, in short--is the primary obstacle to wide-spread prosperity. Its secondary myth is that taxation in general is enabling behavior for the out-of-control federal government and, moreover, that taxing the wealthy will stifle “the job creators.” This sort of economic nonsense dovetails conveniently with a belligerent, though somewhat isolationist, foreign policy and a barely veiled racialized or ethnic hatred directed towards those who are mis-perceived as the primary beneficiaries of government programs. Here we see the legacy of the “welfare queen” imagery that Reagan used to begin dismantling the social safety-net, as well as a general refusal on the part of most Americans, let alone Tea Party members, to examine a basic pie chart or some simple economic-demographic statistics about where our money goes, who has the most of it, and how things are generally divided up amongst us all.
URL:
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-07-30/crashing-bus-why-we-should-watch-tea-party
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