To All The “Angry” Tea Partiers by Ed Ciaccio

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by Ed Ciaccio
Dandelion Salad
Featured Writer
April 22, 2010

by Helen Cox, used with permission

(adapted from a forwarded email and expanded)

To all the “angry” Tea Partiers:

Did you get angry when the Supreme Court “Conservative” Five stopped a legal recount and appointed a President?

Did you get angry when Cheney allowed energy company officials to dictate energy policy while excluding any environmentalists from that meeting?

Did you get angry when Bush’s generals let Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora?

Did you get angry when a covert CIA operative was outed because her husband did his job and exposed Bush’s lies about yellowcake uranium?

Did you get angry when the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and the John Warner Defense Bill were passed and our Constitutional rights were shredded?

Did you get angry when Bush illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us?

Did you get angry when it was revealed that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice all lied us into the illegal, unnecessary war on Iraq?

Did you get angry when Bush spent over 800 billion dollars (and counting) on the illegal, unnecessary Iraq war?

Did you get angry when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq?

Did you get angry as tens thousands of Americans and nearly one million Iraqis were killed or maimed in Bush’s illegal, unnecessary war?

Did you get angry when it was revealed U.S. soldiers and the CIA were torturing people, including in former KGB prisons?

Did you get angry when Bush admitted the U.S. government was illegally wiretapping Americans?

Did you get angry when it was revealed that Bush ignored many warnings of the 9/11 terrorism?

Did you get angry when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed Military Hospital while you claimed you “supported our troops”?

Did you get angry when Bush let New Orleans drown?

Did you get angry when mostly white people were helped in New Orleans?

Did you get when it was revealed Bush ignored warnings about Hurricane Katrina and the levees?

Did you get angry when Bush gave a 900 billion tax break to the rich?

Did you get angry when Bush turned Clinton’s budget surplus into a gigantic budget deficit?

Did you get angry when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark, and our debt hit the thirteen trillion dollar mark?

Did you get angry when Exxon earned more in profits than any company ever, but paid zero U.S. taxes?

Did you get angry when, using reconciliation, a trillion dollars of our tax dollars were redirected to insurance companies for Medicare Advantage which cost over 20 percent more for basically the same services that Medicare provides?

You finally got angry when Obama decided that people in America deserved to see a doctor if they are sick, but you got angry at Obama, not the insurance corporations and drug companies that wrote Obama’s bill. If Obama were white, would you hate him so much?

Illegal wars, killing Americans and Iraqi and Afghani women and children, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich and corporations (your vaunted but imaginary “free market”) richer, are all okay with you.

But an African-American President taking the first very flawed, very insufficient step to getting health care for all of us?

Hell, no! That’s “socialism”! you say, as you continue to depend on Social Security and Medicare.

Socialism for corporations and the rich doesn’t make you angry. Only “socialism” by Democrats is “un-American” to you.

And you ignore the inconvenient truths that Democrats are as corporate-corrupted as Republicans, that corporations are responsible for most of our problems, that corporations are anti-democracy, and that corporations are now running the United States and much of the rest of the world.

Only “liberals” are your sworn enemies.

Are you aware that liberals and progressives fought to get us all: vacations, the 40-hour workweek, weekends off, the minimum wage, worker safety laws, child labor laws, the right to vote for women, environmental protections, food inspections, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, to name just some of the social improvements which are hallmarks of a civilized society?

Are you aware that your “movement” was started by former Republican, now corporate lobbyist extraordinaire Dick Armey, and is being heavily funded by the extremist petroleum billionaire Koch brothers, who also fund climate change denial and whose father co-founded the extremist John Birch Society in 1958?

Are you aware that the Republican Party is using you to get back in power so it can resume doing its job of redistributing the wealth of poor and working class Americans to the rich even better and faster and more effectively than the Democrats have done?

Do you realize that, once Republicans are back in power, they will ignore you until they need you again for the next election?

Will you ever wake up to the fact that the U.S. government is not much more than a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporations which are non-democratic by design and whose only purpose is to increase profits, regardless of how many people suffer or die, and how much our only planet is despoiled?

Will you ever wake up to the fact that the Corporate-Militarist United States needs your children as well as your taxes to fight its endless wars of aggression so it can maintain its global Empire of bases on every continent which keep its corporate/rich class in power no matter how many lives of your children as well as foreigners it takes, and how much of the planet is polluted and destroyed?

Will you (and too many liberals and progressives) ever realize that we are in this together, that democracy is impossible in an Empire, and that our only chance to stop all the inhumane insanity is to unite against the Corporate-Militarist United States Empire and its Ministry of Propaganda (Corporate Media) and work non-violently to remove all its Corporate Tools from office in the White House, Congress, state and local governments, and the courts?

[Note to clarify:

Actually the original tea partiers were the Ron Paul supporters, who in fact did protest against Bush-Cheney and still do protest against the wars, the bailouts, etc.  Unfortunately their organization got co-opted by the Republicans.

See: The Liberty Coalition: Introduction This group is not a party but stands with 3rd Party candidates and others who subscribe to their 4 points.]

see

Bill Maher Becomes a Teabagger

Ralph Nader Rips Obama, Praises Ron Paul + Why Aren’t Corporate Crimes Prosecuted?

A Mad Tea Party by William John Cox + cartoon by Helen Cox

Chris Hedges to Poverty Scholars: US Government Lacks Legitimacy (must-see)

Noam Chomsky: Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error

Tea Party on Dandelion Salad