A Plea To My Conservative Republican Friends
Please stop buying into the Tea Party politics.
Please stop believing the Tea Party is going to save the country.
Please stop voting for Tea Party-identified candidates.
The Tea Party is not on your side. The Tea Party doesn't want to help you better yourself. The Tea Party isn't a grassroots organization existing to make sure middle class people have to pay the smallest amount of taxes possible The Tea Party is an organization the Koch Brothers started hatching years ago. This isn't just something that spontaneously came about in 2009 due to the election of Obama. This is a carefully orchestrated movement by very powerful people that was meant to keep you outraged and ignorant. The Tea Party is not your friend. ALEC is not your friend. The Cato Institute is not your friend. These organizations don't exist to advance you or to help you live the American dream. They exist to keep you in your place.
The Tea Party puppet masters are not job creators. They aren't stimulating the economy in any way. They don't want to create jobs. They want to hire as few workers as possible, for the least amount of pay and the fewest benefits they can legally get away with.
Did you read The Grapes of Wrath in high school? Remember how the prosperous California farms sent five thousand flyers into Oklahoma to fill three hundred fruit picking jobs? They knew with the enormous flood of desperate "Okies" coming into the area they could use the job scarcity to pay those workers next to nothing and get their orchards picked in record time.
The Koch Brothers and their ilk are no different. They also are using job scarcity as a way to milk heavy volumes of work from few workers for little pay. As workers receive less money and fewer benefits, they will end up needing government assistance to feed their families. Wealthy billionaires don't want to pay their workers' food and healthcare, so they are passing their savings on to you. You will pay the tax burden of keeping low-paid workers subsidized and those Tea Party puppet masters will tell you its the Democrats' fault and tell you to hate the "takers".
But the Tea Party supports my moral values! No. It doesn't. They don't care at all about your moral values. They simply put your moral values in the party platform, because it brings you to the voting booth and wins elections at the local level. How many of your Tea Party candidates have actually enacted moral legislation on a national level? I'd say that number is pretty close to zero. These politicians know on a national level they won't be re-elected if they try to enact legislation that supports a religious agenda. The Tea Party cares about being elected, and then in about protecting the interests of its donors. Your moral values mean nothing to them once they're in office. Keep your moral values. Cherish them and understand that they are your own and no one can take them from you. Just realize that your politicians aren't going to do anything about the rights or existence of gay people even if they know their constituents are against them. That's not what keeps them in office.
But the Tea Party is the only party that will advocate for my gun rights! Wrong again. You have the NRA. You have moderate Republicans. You have gun-owning Democrats. There are plenty of groups standing up for gun rights in the country. In fact, Tea Party donors probably care less about your gun rights than many other groups. If I were one of the Tea Party founders, I would be terrified of the masses having guns because I wouldn't want them to have the means to rise up against me should they ever be on to my scheme. The Tea Party leaders don't want you able to rebel against them in any way. They do not want you informed (so now only a handful of large corporations own the major news media outlets). They do not want you educated (why do you think they are constantly advocating to defund public schools). They certainly do not want you armed.
I'm not saying you and I have to see eye to eye on everything politically. I know you think I'm wrong about everything. I know you think I'm a socialist and my liberal ideas are UnAmerican and that if I had my way I'd destroy the country. We don't have to agree on any political topic. I'm only asking you to think long and hard before you vote for a candidate who says he's a member of the Tea Party. When you vote for a Tea Party candidate, you are not voting for the little guy, Mr. Average American. You are not voting for lower taxes for the middle class. You are not voting for small government. You are ultimately not even voting against giving "handouts" to the undeserving.
What you are voting for when you vote Tea Party is the extension of political power for the country's largest corporations. You are voting for their success and their wealth, which is never, ever going to "trickle down" to you. Your are handing over government power, which is an extension of your power and the power of the American people, over to a small oligarchy. Is that what you want democracy to be about?
I know quoting Bernie Sanders will not give me any cred with you, but here is his take on what's happening with the government shutdown and why reasonable Republicans won't cave
What's happening now, as I understand it, is when moderate Republicans are saying that, or thinking about standing up to Boehner, the extreme right wing is coming around saying you do that, let me tell you what's going to happen. We have the Koch brothers behind us. We have hundreds of millions of dollars behind us, and if you dare to support a Continuing Resolution, a clean CR. We're gonna primary you. We have unbelievable sums of money to defeat you.
So what you are looking at now is what Citizens United is all about. And that is giving a handful of billionaires, the Koch brothers and others, incredible power to tell members of Congress what they can and can not do, very dangerous.
If there is a primary in your district in 2014 and you see the incumbent is being challenged by a Tea Party-backed candidate, I beg you, go to the polls and vote. Please don't let the challenger win. When you let a Tea Partier win, you take just a little bit more power away from yourself. Don't let that happen. Let's please stop the Tea Party before it's too late. We are the United States of America - not the United States of Koch. The country needs you, it needs democracy, far more than it needs The Tea Party.
Please stop believing the Tea Party is going to save the country.
Please stop voting for Tea Party-identified candidates.
The Tea Party is not on your side. The Tea Party doesn't want to help you better yourself. The Tea Party isn't a grassroots organization existing to make sure middle class people have to pay the smallest amount of taxes possible The Tea Party is an organization the Koch Brothers started hatching years ago. This isn't just something that spontaneously came about in 2009 due to the election of Obama. This is a carefully orchestrated movement by very powerful people that was meant to keep you outraged and ignorant. The Tea Party is not your friend. ALEC is not your friend. The Cato Institute is not your friend. These organizations don't exist to advance you or to help you live the American dream. They exist to keep you in your place.
The Tea Party puppet masters are not job creators. They aren't stimulating the economy in any way. They don't want to create jobs. They want to hire as few workers as possible, for the least amount of pay and the fewest benefits they can legally get away with.
Did you read The Grapes of Wrath in high school? Remember how the prosperous California farms sent five thousand flyers into Oklahoma to fill three hundred fruit picking jobs? They knew with the enormous flood of desperate "Okies" coming into the area they could use the job scarcity to pay those workers next to nothing and get their orchards picked in record time.
The Koch Brothers and their ilk are no different. They also are using job scarcity as a way to milk heavy volumes of work from few workers for little pay. As workers receive less money and fewer benefits, they will end up needing government assistance to feed their families. Wealthy billionaires don't want to pay their workers' food and healthcare, so they are passing their savings on to you. You will pay the tax burden of keeping low-paid workers subsidized and those Tea Party puppet masters will tell you its the Democrats' fault and tell you to hate the "takers".
But the Tea Party supports my moral values! No. It doesn't. They don't care at all about your moral values. They simply put your moral values in the party platform, because it brings you to the voting booth and wins elections at the local level. How many of your Tea Party candidates have actually enacted moral legislation on a national level? I'd say that number is pretty close to zero. These politicians know on a national level they won't be re-elected if they try to enact legislation that supports a religious agenda. The Tea Party cares about being elected, and then in about protecting the interests of its donors. Your moral values mean nothing to them once they're in office. Keep your moral values. Cherish them and understand that they are your own and no one can take them from you. Just realize that your politicians aren't going to do anything about the rights or existence of gay people even if they know their constituents are against them. That's not what keeps them in office.
But the Tea Party is the only party that will advocate for my gun rights! Wrong again. You have the NRA. You have moderate Republicans. You have gun-owning Democrats. There are plenty of groups standing up for gun rights in the country. In fact, Tea Party donors probably care less about your gun rights than many other groups. If I were one of the Tea Party founders, I would be terrified of the masses having guns because I wouldn't want them to have the means to rise up against me should they ever be on to my scheme. The Tea Party leaders don't want you able to rebel against them in any way. They do not want you informed (so now only a handful of large corporations own the major news media outlets). They do not want you educated (why do you think they are constantly advocating to defund public schools). They certainly do not want you armed.
I'm not saying you and I have to see eye to eye on everything politically. I know you think I'm wrong about everything. I know you think I'm a socialist and my liberal ideas are UnAmerican and that if I had my way I'd destroy the country. We don't have to agree on any political topic. I'm only asking you to think long and hard before you vote for a candidate who says he's a member of the Tea Party. When you vote for a Tea Party candidate, you are not voting for the little guy, Mr. Average American. You are not voting for lower taxes for the middle class. You are not voting for small government. You are ultimately not even voting against giving "handouts" to the undeserving.
What you are voting for when you vote Tea Party is the extension of political power for the country's largest corporations. You are voting for their success and their wealth, which is never, ever going to "trickle down" to you. Your are handing over government power, which is an extension of your power and the power of the American people, over to a small oligarchy. Is that what you want democracy to be about?
I know quoting Bernie Sanders will not give me any cred with you, but here is his take on what's happening with the government shutdown and why reasonable Republicans won't cave
What's happening now, as I understand it, is when moderate Republicans are saying that, or thinking about standing up to Boehner, the extreme right wing is coming around saying you do that, let me tell you what's going to happen. We have the Koch brothers behind us. We have hundreds of millions of dollars behind us, and if you dare to support a Continuing Resolution, a clean CR. We're gonna primary you. We have unbelievable sums of money to defeat you.
So what you are looking at now is what Citizens United is all about. And that is giving a handful of billionaires, the Koch brothers and others, incredible power to tell members of Congress what they can and can not do, very dangerous.
If there is a primary in your district in 2014 and you see the incumbent is being challenged by a Tea Party-backed candidate, I beg you, go to the polls and vote. Please don't let the challenger win. When you let a Tea Partier win, you take just a little bit more power away from yourself. Don't let that happen. Let's please stop the Tea Party before it's too late. We are the United States of America - not the United States of Koch. The country needs you, it needs democracy, far more than it needs The Tea Party.
Comments
Post a Comment