The future of this Democracy is no longer a Republican-Democrat thing. It rests in the results of a dogfight for the steering wheel of the GOP’s 1966 Thunderbird as it hurtles headlong towards what seems like the political cliffs.
The recent spats between neocon New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Tea Party senator Rand Paul over the last couple of weeks are the side-show. The much bigger showdown is coming as we roll towards the 2014 mid-term elections is in the shift of the corporate titans to where the real power lies:
With the puppeteers behind the Tea Party.
There is a method to the seeming madness of gridlock and obstructionism: The elimination of pro-government Neocons.
The Republican Party is two parties.
The socially moderate fiscal conservative of old is dead. Left are the two extremist remnants of the Reagan Revolution, the Neocons and the Libertarian-operated Tea Party.
Both represent a small fraction of the American voting public. The key financial and political connections to the wealth and power of the 1% makes Republican voices and party spats far more important than the will of independents and Democrats. Millions of moderate fiscal conservatives who are either independent, or ride reluctantly in their wake, are largely voiceless.
Important distinctions:
- Neocons believe in limited government.
- The Libertarian’s Tea Party believe in “little or no“ government.
Months before it started leaking out of the mainstream media, t2P told you about this very Uncivil War being waged between these factions.
Neocons
The Neocons have been corporatists. Generally well educated, they are financial elites or wannabe financial elites. They channel big government to benefit American multinational companies and the American military-industrial complex, in the belief that projection of “American Power” allows American companies to dominate the globe.
Neocons push for government spending that aids the corporatocracy, and gives American business control of geopolitics that brings advantage to those interests.
Job off-shoring, in all but technological and military industries, and the subservience of a world that “feeds” the American corporate machine are primary directives. They believe in funding roads and infrastructure and schools that benefit that interest as well. They may approach funding, or oversight in radically different ways from Democrats, but they share common goals in a wide variety of areas.
The Tea Party
When we hear “Tea Party” we’ve been conditioned to think of the oddball Ron Paul “Paulies,” your garden-variety self-sustaining selfish selfists, confused college conservatives, and the oafish boots and tea-hat-wearing illiterate-sign-toting colorful side of the party.
The brains of the outfit, though, are the Bircher Libertarians. They are serious. They are smart. They are scary.
The John Birch party, the most racially and socially extreme of Libertarians. Their funders’ history includes some of the darkest aspects of American politics, including the exploitation of factory workers at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution that gave rise to unions, and the even the most extreme eugenics laws of the 1920s in America, where women were forcibly sterilized if they wanted public assistance to reduce populations of the poor.
The 1% of the 1% is generational wealth from the early Industrial Age: The Dead Billionaires Club (DBC) and it’s junior league of über-rich, the Club for Growth.
They include a cast of characters becoming more and more well known to the American public as the villains behind the blackmail and gridlock that is paralyzing America: The Koch Brothers, the DeVos (Amway), the Coors, the Mellon-Scaifes and more.
The Tea Party is the creation of these Libertarian usurpers of the Republican Party. They moved into the Party with the Reagan Revolution after their last drubbing as an independent party, following Charles Koch’s failed VP run in the old Libertarian Party in 1980.
They realized that power is only granted to the two major parties in America, no matter how much money you throw at an independent. So they began a hostile takeover of the GOP more than 35 years ago by weaving together a whole network of think-tanks, college recruiting groups. Men and women, sought out and groomed for a generation or more, often culled from religious colleges, occasionally the military.
They are highly dogmatic. They preach the Horatio Alger myth of self-improvement and self-reliance, even though their funders almost universally are silver-spoon trust-funders whose self-improvement came at the end of a Trust and/or a Last Will. Tea Party libertarians are bred to a pathological hatred of a government which merely gets in the way of the individuals in charge of the corporatocracy freely exploiting lesser individuals who work and live in the United States, which is, to their thinking, a normal order of the world.
While they are often educated, backgrounds in highly dogmatic, opinionated, extremist religious upbringing by the most radically severe sects of Christianity often make Tea Party adherents are so hyper-channeled to specific issues that they are often not only woefully ignorant of world-views beyond their own, but extremely intolerant of other points of view. They are used to following strong charismatic leaders.
In The Rubber Stamp President we even showcased Norquist’s hubris when he suggested that a President be no more than a person who signs whatever legislation that ALEC, the American Legislation Exchange Council which channels corporate social policy needs of the funders into legislation, lobs into a White House Rose Garden for signature and fanfare.
Their politicians are, as Aaron Sorkin’s HBO show “The Newsroom” has dubbed them, the American Taliban.
They’re the Snickers Bar in the gas tank of a United States of America allegedly run by and for all of the ‘People.’ Monkey-wrenches dropped into the gears of government to remove both its social fairness component and its ability to regulate industry.
The American Taliban’s elected officials, whom we’ve dubbed ‘teahadis‘ engage in a ‘stripper’ act:
- Strip moderates and neocon conservatives from the Republican Party;
- Strip big corporate regulation;
- Strip minorities of their voting rights;
- Strip civil and social justice laws;
- Strip upward mobility for America’s lower and middle class;
- Strip unions and any collective bargaining from workers;
- Strip health-care cost cutting measures to keep the suppliers of the American medical systems earning super-premiums;
- Pull America back to the pre-New Deal status quo that favors the white and wealthy even more.
- Pile on the moral and social code of that ever-shrinking 1% white power structure that is wholly out of step with the populace whom they want to control at all costs.
Far worse than felled buildings in New York City, the teahadis’ long-term destruction of government from within is a terrorist attack to short-circuit the U.S. Constitution to the benefit of top-down control by a wealthy few.
Political architect Grover Norquist oversees the teahadis for his DBC funders. We’ve told you about the Libertarian plan to dismantle the government from the inside, to “drown it in the bathtub,” as Norquist famously quipped.
Much of the agenda that they move in state and federal governmental bodies is written for them by Norquist’s ALEC, a “canned” legislation group that has gone past lobbying congress to just writing laws for which corporates are willing to pay.
That raw power has wooed even large corporations that were solidly neocon backers to the one-stop-shopping, rubber stamp camp of Grover Norquist. Common Cause has a complete list, but they include household names famous and infamous:
- AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon
- Bank of America
- Big Pharma: Bayer, AstraZenica, Merck, etc.
- BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, etc.
- Georgia-Pacific (Koch Bros.)
- Microsoft
- Reynolds American
- State Farm
- UPS
- VISA
The teahadi minority in Congress and state houses break government with intent. They are the source of gridlock to the purpose of shrinking government and preventing the people’s business from being done.
When the teahadis tanked U.S. government credit worthiness, it proved to be profitable for the 1% betting that they would by investing to capitalize on it. Even leaders of Congress placed bets against America.
They backstopthe illegal manipulation of oil prices called “Contango,” a Koch creation, to the benefit of a powerful minority of the generationally wealthy and a few big Wall Street firms that play along reaping billions of dollars. They advocate state law that oppresses women, minorities, and people of different lifestyle or belief.
What of the agenda of the other 99% of the country? Both Republican parties, Neocon and Tea, tend to ignore public polling data, as polls don’t address their real constituents: The funders.
The End Game in all of American Politics is Control of the ’White Football’.
There is a large body of the American body politic of white, heavily religious, extremely fearful, lower-to-middle socioeconomic people. They have been, for generations, manipulated by both Democrats and Republicans.
Once known as Christian Democrats (CD), largely of the South and Midwest, the white football made the Democratic Party, from the Civil War to the New Deal, the intolerant, xenophobic, openly racist party that it was.
CDs shifted slowly over to the GOP from FDR’s New Deal days, accelerated their departure to the GOP during the Civil Rights era, then its most extreme elements migrated into the Republican camp with Ronald Reagan and the rise of the Neocons in the 1980s, as pulpits politicized under the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and others.
The neocons under Reagan ran the white football. Today the Bircher Libertarians and their Tea Party have possession.
Wall Street’s destruction of the economy and the housing collapse were gasoline on white middle and lower class fear. That fear was thrown into overdrive with the candidacy and then presidency of Barack Obama. Birtherism and the continued fear-fest over “Obamacare” are both designed to manipulate the White Football.
The GOP Continues to Radicalize
Polls of the Republican Party now more clearly demonstrate how Norquist’s strategy is paying dividends.
The Pew Research Center released a study showing that 67% of Republican or Republican-leaning voters see a need for the GOP to make major structural change to avoid losing presidential elections, but the same 67% see Teahadi intransigence, stonewalling, as a good thing, with 35% of that group thinking that more is needed [3].
More troubling is that 54% of those Pew respondents think that the party should move in an even more conservative direction [3].
Party Purity Purge
As we’ve seen, establishing the hard-Right bona fides that get aspiring politicos through the gauntlet of Tea Party crazies in the primary has been a killer in Presidential politics. Positions so extreme could not let even wiggly Willard “Mitt” Romney bend and torque his way out of them in 2012. It has some backlash in senatorial, congressional, and state-house contests as well.
Teahadi darlings like Florida’s Marco Rubio find themselves in the cross-hairs of their own base. He took a more moderate stand on immigration which will sell well in his re-election bid with Hispanics in Florida, but not with teahadist hard-cores.
Wyoming’s senator Mike Enzi supported the Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA), that lets states tax Internet sales.
“They keep sticking their finger in the eyes of the guys who got them elected,” said Ralph King, a co-founder of the Cleveland Tea Party Patriots. “A lot of people are feeling betrayed.” [4]
If politicians run afoul of Tea Party dogma, the funders turn the dogs on them, or abandon them. It’s Open Season on neocons and fallen teahadis alike as the Club for Growth (CFG) and others look to bag a few of what they term Republicans in Name Only (RINO) by running far-right teahadis against non-believers, and stack the GOP party solidly in their favor.
CFG picked off Sen. Dick Lugar in the last election. Now they and other 1% funders have their sites set on even bigger game: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
McConnell, who was straight neocon, has found, like Speaker of the House John Boehner, that he must be the face of the obstructionism, or face the wrath of the Libertarian funders stoking the ultra-Right rabble in Kentucky who will run him out of office on a rail.
“A PPP survey in December [2012] found that McConnell was the most unpopular senator in the nation; he earned a 37 percent approval rating, with a strong 55 percent majority of registered voters in Kentucky saying they disapproved of his job performance… That same PPP poll found that while 46 percent of GOP primary voters supported McConnell in a hypothetical primary, 32 percent said they would prefer someone more conservative. Another 22 percent were undecided. A Courier-Journal poll earlier in the year showed Republicans being similarly tepid, with just 34 percent saying they would support McConnell against any challenger, versus 53 percent who said they would first need to see who else ran.” [7]
Teahadi Matt Bevin is launching a campaign against the previously untouchable incumbent. While he may not succeed, the United Kentucky Tea Party, a coalition of these largely Astro-turf grass-roots groups that takes marching orders from the funders, endorsed Bevin.
In North Carolina last month, governor Pat McCrory broke a 2012 gubernatorial campaign pledge to veto any bills that would involve women’s reproductive and health rights. He also signed a draconian anti-voter bill into law to get himself right with the Far Right.
Triangulation
The Libertarian-lords are like the BORG from Star Trek. They learn from mistakes, and win systematically not over a campaign cycle, but, with wealth and patience, over generations.
- The Libertarians have the deepest and most well-funded web of “think tanks” and astro-turf grass-roots groups.
- Knowing that Fox News’ malleable morals still lean towards the neocon camp, the Koch Brothers are moving to take over major newspapers to mold the electorate better.[8]
- Kentucky McConnell challenger Bevin’s pick was based on a new calculus that includes a lot of vetting to avoid foot-in-mouth candidates like Indiana’s Richard Mourdock, who implode campaigns because they can’t mask their Teahadi agenda well enough, or their ignorance and/or insensitivity to the needs of the general electorate whom they allegedly serve. [1]
Flies in the Teapot
Recruiting the malleable who can actually win elections and still have that ‘common man’ appeal can be tough.
Tennessee Republican incumbent senator and former governor Lamar Alexender, with degrees from Vanderbilt and NYU Law, is the highbrow kind of politician which the know-nothing hoi polloi of the Tea Party are conditioned to seek and destroy.
He’ll be challenged by Brenda Lenard, a teahadi candidate.
According to InvestigativeCheck, Lenard was convicted of writing bad checks. She had her felony knocked down to a misdemeanor, paid a $250 fine and was sentenced to 12 months probation as part of a plea agreement. [5]
The Daily Caller also notes that she “filed for bankruptcy protection four times from 2003 to 2005, so many times that a federal judge rebuked her for attempting to abuse the system, calling her fourt round an “abusive filing” intended “to improperly hinder and delay creditors.” [6]
Score one for the neocons.
Maine teahadi Scott D’Amboise is trying to replace the retiring moderate Olympia Snowe.
He has attacked Snowe for lacking fiscal responsibility, yet he was forced into involuntary Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2003 with $100,000 of debt, a cocktail of credit cards, doctor bills, hospital bills and a mortgage.
According to The Washington Guardian, an online newspaper, most of the candidates with questionable financial records ironically preach the Republican gospel of fiscal conservatism.
Social Conservatives in Fiscal Sheep’s Clothing
Most Teahadis aren’t true fiscal conservatives. The fiscal legislation that they pass is generally all geared to serve the interests of the DBC and the corporate club that join ALEC.
All have fine pedigrees in Libertarian social conservatism, though. Lenard holds a bachelor’s degree in biblical education and leadership from Beulah Heights Bible University. Incumbent teahadis too: Governor Bob McDonnell is the product of Catholic High School, Notre Dame, and then a degree from the Christian Broadcasting Network University.
Teahadi candidates peddle common-man backgrounds to suggest to a certain subset of core GOP voters that they aren’t part of the intelligentsia, against which the grass-roots whack-jobs and kooks of the Tea Party openly rebel.
In many cases, lower and middle income voters who have been ground up by Wall Street banks during the housing bubble, or forced into bankruptcy by their medical bills may self-identify more with candidates who are not part of the elites, and ‘like them.’
They peddle the lie that they are just average Joes. The common man. It doesn’t take much, though, to follow the money back up the feeding chain to their 1% funders.
Follow the Funders
The Tea Party is not an overnight phenomenon. It’s the result of more than decades of patient planning. The SCOTUS’ Citizens United decision emboldened and accelerated the American Taliban’s ascendency. That Justices Scalia and Kennedy have been attendees of Koch Brothers’ planning retreats should be duly noted.
The mainstream media focuses on the performers in the political arena. They want you to pay attention to that side show.
Americans concerned about the viability of their democracy might want, instead to focus on the money people pulling the strings.
Mid-term elections are where most Americans stay home, and the Tea Party has its greatest success. Read the linked articles. Learn more about the funders. Expose them to your friends and neighbors. Vote in mid-terms.
Stopping them will be the only way to avert the Libertarian 1% from co-opting and controlling the government of the United States of America.
My shiny two.
