The Tea Partiers are right.

I don’t mean they’re right about facts. Mostly they lack the foggiest notion about the real world, any familiarity with how the system works, and even the most elementary acquaintance with rational thought. Most of their ‘leaders’ are mean-spirited, barely-literate creeps.

But they’re right in one critical respect. They are getting hosed and they know it.

Although the Tea Party phenomenon is principally supported by corporate money, most of its adherents are much lower on the cultural, political, social, and economic food chains. They are drinking Miller Lite and Bud and Coors, not the refined grape derivatives of the Napa Valley. They are sitting in the bleachers, and they know these are not the best seats in the house.

They are getting the scraps. And, for a number of reasons, they believe that even these scraps are in jeopardy because the ‘politically correct’ ‘liberals’ want to tax them to pay for services for ‘illegals’ and welfare for the ‘lazy’. The internet is awash in racist ‘humor’.

The left, meanwhile, is blowing it. Instead of joining them in their outrage, the left is trying to explain to them why they are wrong. And the Tea Partiers are tired of intellectuals who think they’re not smart enough to understand anything.

It may be that the hot stories being tossed around the web and on Fox News and other corporate outlets are wildy distorted or even entirely fictitious, but that is irrelevant. It does no good whatever to explain things. As many have pointed out, it is plainly false that Iraq or Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the attack on the World Trade Center nine years ago, yet huge numbers of Americans believe it. Why? Because that was the story the government told us, because the mainstream media sold it to us, and because it plays to people’s fears.

It’s pointless for the left to argue about this sort of thing because the facts do not actually matter to people who hold uninformed opinions. They hold these opinions irrespective of facts. They hold them because they’re angry and afraid and looking for someone to blame, and it’s easier to blame easier targets.

We can wish it was different. We can wish that Americans really understood about free elections and free speech, and freedom of the press, and about the Fourth Amendment, too, but that doesn’t make it so. The relentless eviceration of public education has seen to it that the young reach adulthood unburdened by the responsibilities of a free people.

So, what, if anything, can be done?

For starters, how about if what remains of the left goes hard after the actual causes of the economic collapse in America? In order to do this, we have to discard the fantasy that the President will be of any use. He is fond of ‘turning the page’, which is to say ignoring the major crimes of his predecessors and the banks. His Secretary of the Treasury, by any reasonable standard, should have been indicted; as the banks’ man at the New York federal reserve, he had principal responsibility for oversight. Either he blew it or he colluded. Nor should we hope for anything from Congress. While posing for the cameras, a lot of these guys have gotten enormous ‘loans’ from the major banks. Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate leader, alone picked up a million bucks. It’s both parties, it’s an incredible amount of cash, and there is zero chance that we’ll get any help here.

That is discouraging but not debilitating. Yesterday, it was disclosed that executive compensation in the banking industry reached record levels this year. The thieves not only excaped prison –– thusfar –– they’re richer than ever.

Two percent of the American people own ninety-five percent of its wealth. Once in this country those who earned in the highest tax bracket paid 90% in taxes. That is not a misprint. 90%. They still lived pretty well. Today, they pay less taxes than you do. Everything is deductible. They wrote the tax laws.

There are a few people in Congress with integrity and spines, but too few to carry real power. Most politicians are, let’s face it, insecure, chickenshit, and on the make. This is something the Tea Party guys are taking advantage of and there’s no reason to leave it entirely to them. We need to assemble a popular force strong enough to scare them into doing the right thing.

I propose the formation of The American Birthday Party.

The American Birthday Party will consist of people who believe in the Constitution and want to see it honored, who support the right of all people to a living wage, decent housing, universal medical care, and free public education through college. This is not as ‘radical’ as the corporate media might suggest –– it was proposed sixty-five years ago by the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as a ‘Second Bill of Rights.’

The American Birthday Party will organize in towns and cities, communities, and regions. It will demand an end to the vast hayride of corporate looting. It will demand criminal investigations. It will demand also an end to wars which enrich corporations over the bodies of American men and women –– and of the innocent people under our bombs tonight. No more billions for Afghani warlords, drug producers, and arms purveyors; spend the money at home on jobs and food and the well being of the American people.

The American Birthday Party will pull the rug out from under politicians of both major parties who take bribes from the banks and the other corporations who warp public policy. I propose that they be ‘outed’ relentlessly on every dollar of dirty money they pocket. The American Birthday Party will shame them, humiliate them, and run them out of town.

The American Birthday Party will not run candidates for national office. It will endorse or not endorse, work for or against, support or go after Democrats and Republicans. It will grow from the ground up, so its roots will be strong. Maybe it will resemble some party in American history, the Farmer-Labor Party, for example, or maybe it will be the modern equivalent of the old California Democratic Council, which kept a lot of pols attentive to their responsibilities in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties. Who knows? It will grow because, like the Tea Party, it will recognize that people are angry, justifiably angry, but it will grow better because it will be telling the truth.

Personally, I don’t know why the President we believed would stand up for us is not doing so. But maybe he is listening to his financial advisers, the same people who created the disaster in the first place. Maybe he is listening to his military advisers, the same people who have been wrong about Iraq and Afghanistan from the beginning. It does not matter. He’s not doing it. We’re going to have to.