“Tea Party my ass. This was nothing other than the Republican Party stealing the anger of a population that was fed up with the Republican Party’s own theft of their tax money at gunpoint to bail out the robbers of Wall Street and fraudulently redirecting it back toward electing the very people who stole all the ****ing money!”
Denninger, along with fellow bloggers at Market Ticker Graham Makohoniuk and Stephanie Jasky, promoted the idea in January 2009 of protesting the $800 billion stimulus and the $700 billion bailout by mailing a tea bag to Congress. Denninger also suggested holding a “tea party” protest at President Obama’s inauguration.
This was the actual launch of the Tea Party. Today, Denninger says bitterly he ought to sue for defamation anyone using “Tea Party” because the movement has been highjacked, its purpose so deformed it is now “a joke.”
His letter to the Tea Party is quoted extensively here
What he writes is what many progressive bloggers, including me, have been saying, and what we never expected to hear from an actual original Tea Partyer. A sample:
“The Tea Party was initiated as a political protest against the unlawful and in fact unconstitutional usurpation of power from the Congress and The People in the form of extortion-led bailouts of enterprises that had engaged in acts that I, and many others, believe were at least civilly actionable and in many cases crossed the line into criminal activity.
This indictment is not limited to the nation’s large banks, although it certainly starts there.“The corruption of our economic and monetary systems runs the gamut from Fannie and Freddie through their ties to Congress (including literal sexual encounters in some cases), banking interests selling trash securities to everyone from pension funds on down, judges who don’t judge but rather protect monied interests on Wall Street, The Federal Reserve intentionally debasing our currency and monetizing government debt, government spending that is running 40% above revenues and much more….
Yet today we hear literally nothing about these issues among the so-called “Tea Party” candidates and their backers. Sarah Palin has not said one word about locking up the banksters that brought up on the housing bubble and economic collapse. Not one word about Bernanke’s out-of-control Fed and the arguably unlawful monetization of Fannie and Freddie paper, not to mention the monetization of the Federal Debt.”
The honest populist anger has been co-opted by Big Money and corporate power, and turned against government itself. As any student of politics knows (whether he admits it or not), the only effective protection the average citizen has against exploitation by the Big Money elite is a strong government expressing the common good, regulating and controlling the otherwise unaccountable Big Money. Denninger now admits that the real grassroots members of the Tea Party have been bamboozled.
What the Wall Street-corporate oligarchy is about to achieve, and what we are about to see in the November elections of 2010, is the return to power of the very same political party which had a major responsibility for enabling that oligarchy to rape the American middle class and destroy our economy… all in the name of (bogus) reform. It is all laid out in this interview with Dylan Ratigan on MSNBC:
From the first glimmerings of the populist revolt, even before the Town Meetings from hell during August of 2009, but especially then, I have said that the populism was a naturally Democratic constituency and a thoroughly Democratic issue—- why was it not taken over by the Democratic Party, rather than by the party of Big Business, the GOP? Timid Democrats were afraid to grab the nettle of anger, perhaps, much less lead a protest on Wall Street or in front of Goldman Sachs or at the plush estates of financiers in, say, the Hamptons (ha). So, the opportunity was recognized by Dick Armey and the corporotists, the furious mobs were infiltrated, and the anger was turned away from the corportists and against the Democrats. Now we reap the whirlwind.
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