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The Tea Party is Back! 3/25/2012 8:33:53 AM
Tea Partiers speak against the health care act.
In order to turn on my DVD player, I have to turn the selector to Channel 3, which is either C-Span or a local news channel. Anyway, before my movie started playing I was forced to listen to several Tea Party speeches either in Washington D.C., protesting the pending Supreme Court case involving the new Health Care Act or in St. Cloud, Minnesota, where Tea Partiers are harassing Al Franken staffers at his senate office.
The first guy was upset about the provision giving parents the right to claim their adult children up to age 26 on their health insurance. As we all know, those of us who are successful were never such pantywaists as to burden our parents after the age of 18 (wink). He was worried about the American entrepreneurial spirit. He also claimed that three out of ten young adult potential workers were still living with their parents. He didn’t bother to give a comparison with, say, 1970. I think he made it up, and since he was preaching to the choir, nobody called him on it. An easy response to this argument would be that when you’re in your twenties you think you’re going to live forever. “I don’t need no stinking health insurance,” you tell yourself. Except that you do, and these kids wind up going to the ER if they get sick or injured and guess who pays for that. Mr. Tea Partier, along with the rest of us. That is if the big mouth actually has a job, which I doubt.
The second guy got up there and read his speech without looking up once. Apparently he never took a speech class, or he was scared to death of his fellow sheep. The speech sounded like his mother wrote it for him and that she copied it from one she found on the Cato Institute internet site. It was all about freedom. Whoever named these people The Tea Party didn’t know a thing about Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty. The Boston Tea Party was a response to taxation without representation; the colonists knew they had to pay for military protection from marauding Indians, but they didn’t want to pay for it without somebody like Ben Franklin sticking up for them in London. Another reason they dumped that tea was because England was forcing them to buy it from the East India Company, a monopoly. If you know anything about American History, one of the causes of the American Revolution was England’s mercantilism policy. Colonists would send them raw materials, and Americans would buy the finished goods from England. Our budding textile manufacturers and iron mongers were really steamed. We all know that far-right conservatives (which is what Tea Partiers really are) haven’t got a problem with monopolies, or conglomerates for that matter. Workers should be grateful they have a job. Paul Ryan a representative from Wisconsin has his staff read Ayn Rand, who argued essentially the same thing. Her fictional employers went on strike to show the upstarts what life would be like if they weren’t around. Since the 2010 elections we’ve been seeing state after state pass “Right to work for a minimum wage or less legislation.” When I started teaching most of my male peers with families had to work a part-time job during the summer. One of them belonged to the National Guard. That didn’t stop the school board from requiring them to earn grad credits to renew their licenses. Because of the union, I got a four thousand dollar increase in my salary when I got my Master’s Degree. I also have a nice pension and I had health care until I retired. Since I retired early, I would’ve had to buy my own, which I never did of course. Luckily I made it to 65 without serious health problems. These days more and more employees are cutting health care and pensions for their workers. Eventually there will be blowback and union membership will increase. Right wing conservatives have as much foresight as Helen Keller, no offense to blind people.
Employers are also claiming that they can’t hire back the workers they laid off because they’re no longer qualified or that the workers they retained are more productive, becoming more efficient. Only nobody asks the poor devils who stayed if they’re stressed out from doing the work of three. One would think that corporate heads would think twice before laying people off. These are your customers after all. When you lay people off your competition sees you doing it and follows suit and it’s recession time again in America. Every ten years or so we have one of those, thanks to the capitalists. I’ve heard a lot about Greece and Italy and France and Spain with economic problems caused by socialism, but we never seem to hear anything about Scandinavia. Then there’s China, whose economy is rolling along with like an eight percent increase in GNP. Aren’t they a socialist country, and don’t they have a two trillion dollar reserve thanks mostly to American capitalists?
We've seen what can happen when hidebound idealogues form a caucus in Congress. Over fifty Tea Party Congressmen were elected to the house in 2010. Michelle Bachmann is the self-described leader. She and her fellow throwbacks were ready to shut down the government when they didn't get their way on the national debt. Again, conservatives showed a lack of ability to see the consequences of their actions. If America reneged on its debts, Wall Street would crash. Wall Street reacts when the GNP goes down in China. Those of you whose IRAs took a dive during the mortgage bubble know what would have happened. These reactionaries are always ready to blow up the world and to hell with the result. See their global warming stance. Wait until it's too late to do anything.
We should have a decision by June about the new health care act. Some are saying it will be 5-4 against. If the ruling that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as the rest of us is any indication, that’s what will happen, but law school professors are saying 6-3 in favor if the judges forget about ideology and confine themselves to constitutional law. I read an article that said Scalia would rule in favor. Somehow I doubt that. He's never ruled in favor of anything remotely liberal.
When election time roles around, do yourself a favor, don't vote against yourselves this time. Run these faux Tea Partiers out of town. They're all up for reelection.
