Written by James and Jean Anton   

The Tea Party. Don’t ridicule it. Understand its causes.
That’s the theme of Noam Chomsky’s article, Outrage, Misguided in the newsmagazine IN THESE TIMES (and Republished by RSN).

Times are bad, he says.
The rich have gotten richer while middle class incomes have stagnated or declined. Unemployment is stuck at around ten percent, and the government seems unable to do anything about it. Banks, too big to fail, that received billions of taxpayer dollars are making more money than ever, and paying out huge bonuses.
Tea Baggers are only expressing their anger, he says.
Chomsky goes on to quote a Rasmussen poll that shows the majority of Americans view the Tea-Party movement favorably.

The problem is that the Tea-Party movement wasn’t really created as a result of the recession of 2008 or by unemployment or even by the nefarious bailout. The Tea Party’s happy that the rich are getting richer. It most assuredly is not a spontaneous uprising of dissatisfied folks who are unfairly being ridiculed.
When Chomsky says we should not ridicule the Tea Party, but pay attention to its grievances, he is ignoring the elephant in the room.

The Tea Party is first and foremost a mob.
It is a fake grassroots movement funded by secretive, greedy billionaires.
It is funded by the fourth and fifth richest men in America, Charles and David Koch, and Rupert Murdoch (who is 38th richest). They have their shills of course (Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and Glenn Beck are on Murdoch’s payroll). These mouthpieces pretend to be ordinary folk, but they are the ringleaders of the Tea-Party mob. They hand out free bus tickets and cute hats. They wind up Tea Bag mobs, and then send them out to stage loud, angry, fake protests.

The Koch brothers created the Tea Party movement to “Take Back America.” But even their shills don’t explain what they mean. The goal of the Tea-Party movement is plutocracy. Plutocracy: government of, by, and for the wealthy. It is not about “taking back America,” it’s about Taking America For All It’s Got.

To win over the mob, they like to play the race card.

Sometimes the appeal to racism is subtle.
Take Back America? Where did it go? How did it get lost? From whom are they taking it back? The answer to that question is easy. They want to take the presidency from Obama, who happens to be black, and give it to “a real American.”

There’s also the not-so-subtle racism.
Tea-Party protesters called Black Georgia Democratic Congressman John Lewis, “nigger.” Another Black Democratic Congressman from Missouri, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, was spat upon. Newt Gingrich, accused Obama of “Kenyon behavior.” Which is to not say that he called Obama a nigger, but he might as well have.

Then there Glenn Beck: ''This president I think has exposed himself over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.''

The Tea Party mob is like the KKK mob, but with different hats.

They also like to play tough.
Tea-Party favorite, Sharon Angle said in a radio interview in 2010: "You know if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second-Amendment remedies, and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.”
Tea-Party leader Gingrich refers to the Tea-Party movement as “the militant wing of the Republican Party.”

Militant? You betcha!
Sarah Palin asks New Yorkers to "refute the Ground Zero mosque plan" if Moslems go ahead with their plan to build a “Ground-Zero Mosque because it “stabs in the heart.” Tea Bag “folks” are not shocked when one of their own stomps on the head of a woman at a Rand Paul rally.

Chomsky talks about “Tea-Party shenanigans.” Shenanigans is an odd choice to describe a violent, racist, deluded mob. Would he have called brown-shirt Nazi racism and violence shenanigans?

The Tea Party did not grow out of the daunting problems that America faces. The Tea Party is the product of a media controlled by a tiny cadre of Plutocrats. It is a destructive, dangerous, deluded mob owned and manipulated by billionaires who are up to no good.
It is fundamentally anti-democratic.

With due respect, Mr. Chomsky, there’s an elephant in the room and you don’t see it.
The Tea Party does not need our sympathy.
It needs to be shown for what it is.

by James and Jean Anton
www.endendlesswars.org