In their zeal to live free from outside interference, the Tea Parties are shooting at the wrong target.
They would be right to be angry with an oil industry poisoning their water, an auto industry polluting their air, and agribusiness providing unsafe food.
Instead they are attacking the government, the only entity that can protect their water, their atmosphere, their food.
So begins an op-ed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch by Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, and James Gerstenzang, the campaign’s editorial director. Here’s more:
Powerful corporate interests are taking advantage of Tea Party anger for their own self-interest. They are funneling vast sums to fuel and steer an anti-government campaign that would gut the rules protecting people from dangerous products and the environment from poisonous emissions.
What if they succeed? Just consider the menu at their tea party: Scrambled eggs with salmonella, a cup of arsenic-laced tea, and orange juice with a dash of cryptosporidium in the ice cubes. And if you are driving to the party in your SUV, watch out that it doesn’t roll over.
The Tea Partiers issue dire warnings of the threat posed by government — but their movement ignores the threat from corporate America: pollution, dangerous products, and banking practices that brought us the worst economic crash since the Great Depression.
Sharron Angle, the Republican Senate candidate in Nevada, proposed removing government-ordered fluoride from drinking water. But is she expressing similar concern about toxic chemicals corporate polluters put in her tea?
Glenn Beck has whined about government money sending SUVs to the scrap yard thanks to the “cash for clunkers” program. Would he prefer that the clunkers remain on the road?
The critics of government should refocus their energy: They should challenge the corporate interests that produced trucks posing rollover risks, rather than challenge a government that protects us from rollovers.
We need a government that tells automakers to not ignore new energy-efficiency technology and to produce safe SUVs that do all they do now but pollute less, cut our addiction to oil, and save money at the pump.
Why are the Tea Partiers hostile to government but friendly to big business?
Maybe it has something to do with where much of the Tea Party money comes from, including major oil interests. The owners of Koch Industries, sitting on multibillion-dollar oil fortunes, have provided what Politico.com says may total millions of dollars in as-yet-undisclosed contributions to Tea Party-affiliated groups. Koch Industries is a major player in oil refining and transportation.
The Environmental Protection Agency assessed Koch Industries a record civil fine — $30 million — in 2000 for “egregious violations of the Clean Water Act”: more than 300 oil spills from its pipelines and oil facilities. No wonder Koch’s agenda does not mesh with that of the EPA.
Chemicals in the drinking water? If government doesn’t protect us, who will?
Bacteria in the food supply? How would we even know about salmonella in our eggs if there were no government cop on the beat?
If we tie the hands of what Tea Party activist and Oklahoma State Sen. Randy Brogdon calls the “tyrannical federal government,” who benefits?
The winners will be those with an excessive zeal for profit and “freedom” from proper constraints: automakers who want to make vehicles that are unsafe and pollute too much, the bankers and Wall Streeters who brought us the housing and financial crisis, and polluters who would relieve themselves — or their factories’ poisons — into the public’s air, land, and water.
Corporate America doesn’t protect Americans; doing away with the government watchdogs that do would make sure no one protects us. The losers would be children, public health — all of us, including the Tea Partiers themselves.
We’d have Wall Street monitored by a shut-eyed Securities and Exchange Commission, look-the-other-way cops running the Environmental Protection Agency, and a Food and Drug Administration passing on filthy food and dangerous drugs to the kitchen table and our medicine cabinets.
We’d be better off dumping tea like that in the harbor. Fortunately, the government won’t let us.
Related Posts:
- Why the victory of the Tea Party extremists (backed by Big Oil) over the slightly less extreme GOP establishment (also backed by Big Oil) is good for progressives, but bad for climate and clean energy
- Tea Party leader: “Some people say I’m extreme, but they said the John Birch Society was extreme, too.”
- Tea Party defends climate pollution as the Lord’s will
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Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Since the latest issue of ES&T informs us that government accounts for 10% of CO2 emissions, cutting government in half would outstrip the extant benefits of of solar and wind combined.
Is it time for climate hawks to flock to the great Green Tea Party ?
The Astroturf Party:
The Real Tea Party
— By Kevin Drum| Mon Oct. 25, 2010 10:52 AM PDT
The Washington Post, after a massive effort to contact every tea party group in the nation, says their activism has probably been overrated:
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/10/real-tea-party
Russel: Actually, you seem to have it backwards. If government is ~40% of GDP and only accounts for 10% of emissions, *growing* government would reduce emissions, because clearly the private-sector is even worse, dollar for dollar.
Mad Hatters, the Tea Party.
I posted something similar on my blog yesterday.
Yes, the goals of the Tea Party do not reflect the self-interest of the majority of the members, IMO.
The whole thing is one big con game, IMO.
What about the apparent collusion between major financial groups, oil corporations, banks, and hedge funds to apparently artificially jack up oil prices during the Bush Administration? According to Matt Tabini of the Rolling Stone Magazine, quoting from official statistics, an average barrel of oil under some periods during the Bush administration was traded 27 times, jacking up the price each time. The end result was gasoline prices close to or even greater than four dollars per gallon, in many areas of the country.
Was that a tax?
Call it the Plutocratic Greed Gasoline Tax, if you like.
These Tea Party people must just love being ripped off.
Chad: Read ES&T and weep-
Hertwich and Peters study spans 73 nations and assigns government the fourth largest share of greenhouse emissions overall. The stats come from last week’s Nature, the article itself is ES&T , 20, 8414-6420
BP Caught Funding Tea Party Climate Change Deniers
==================================================
A report released on Monday, October 25, reveals that BP and several other big European polluters are funding the election campaigns of Tea Party favorites and climate change deniers http://digg.com/news/politics/bp_caught_funding_tea_party_climate_change_deniers
That’s ES&T 20 6414-20
You can’t expect logic and reason when you refer to the thinking and believe system of the Tea Party. When you mention Koch Industries or the brothers the tea-party hears Coke Industries. Get it?
@NYTimeskrugman Right-wing oligarchy subverts war on climate change with debt reduction propaganda. http://nyti.ms/dzWoFV
Earthrace: Invest heavily in human capital. Reinvent built environment as net-zero. Innovate for rapid detox of natural capital.
Who is the Tea Party “shooting at”?
I saw some Tea Partiers on the DC Metro the weekend of their last rally in DC.
One of them wore a T-shirt which had printed on the front, “Let’s play cowboys and liberals” … and on the back, with an image of the crosshairs of a rifle sight, “Guess who has the guns”.
If a brown-skinned Middle Eastern-looking person had been wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Osama Bin Laden and the slogan about shooting Jews, it would likely have caused some uproar on the Metro. But as long as it was a white guy with a T-shirt about shooting “liberals”, it was fine.
The Tea Party is “shooting at” whoever Fox News and Rush Limbaugh tell them to “shoot at”.
Other than the instructions they receive from the “right wing” media, which vary depending on which corporate-sponsored propaganda is being pushed out on any given day, there is little content to their so-called “politics” other than hatred of “liberals”.
Joe et al,
George Monbiot has just done a sizeable and interesting piece on the Tea-Party & its funders in the UK’s Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/25/tea-party-koch-brothers
Worth a read!
Cheers – John
re:
@NYTimeskrugman Right-wing oligarchy subverts war on climate change with debt reduction propaganda. http://nyti.ms/dzWoFV
Typically, the public sector debt rises sharply through times of crisis. This has been particularly noticeable dramatically to fund the war effort. Between 1939 and 1944, US military spending rose from 2 per cent of national income to 54 percent of national income as its peak in 1944. This extraordinary mobilization of national resources for war is of interest in its own right as an illustration of the possibilities for mobilizing economic activity in times of crisis. But it was only achieved by increasing the national debt. The US debt rose from around 40 percent of GDP to over 100 percent of GDP in the space of half a decade.
– Tim Jackson, “Prosperity without Growth,” (“Economics for a Finite Planet”) 2010