Every Time the Left Sins God Sends Another Working-Class American to the Tea Party

The Left in the US must blame itself for its weakness and inability to draw in lager numbers of working-class Americans into its fold. Walter Benjamin wrote that, "behind every fascism is a failed revolution." The growing popularity of the Tea Party movement in the US is the resulting failure of Leftists to address righteous popular anger over corrupt politics. I think there are several reasons for this.

Many Leftists articulate American working-class needs by using overly intellectual rhetoric. The Left does not need to dumb down information, just break it down. Many Leftists use other countries' revolutionaries and revolutions as symbols of liberation and outright ignore American equivalents. What about heroes of struggle such as Thomas Paine,John Brown, and Mary Harris "Mother" Jones? What about celebrating movements such as the BOSTON TEA PARTY? What is so amusing about the right-wing using the Boston Tea party, as a symbol of their movement, is that its very history undermines much of their political positions. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 sabotaged commerce, destroyed private property, and broke the rule of law, for the greater moral value of actual justice, opposed to legal injustice. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 fits more into the tradition of progressives than so-called conservatives. On a more extreme level,one could argue that the Boston Tea Party has more similarities with the Earth Liberation Front than it does with the Republican Party or the twenty-first century Tea Party.

I argue that the Tea Party is not truly conservative anyway. Two of the most popular politicians in the Tea Party movement are Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. Both are women. Women being involved in politics and having the right to vote is not a conservative value, if "conservative" means going back to the proverbial good ol' days. The Founding Fathers, limited in their wisdom, would have told them to stay home, make babies, and cook for their husbands. It was liberal women and radical women that fought the law to get the right for women to become active members of politics. Liberals and leftists are accused of breaking with tradition: for picking and choosing ethics opportunistically. That is exactly what the right-wing does. When there was prayer in public schools there was legalized racial segregation and children working in sweat-shops: most right-wingers do not openly claim to want all of those things, hence they are not truly conservative, they are right-wing liberals.

A large portion of the Tea Party's constituency rightly are disgusted with the bank bailouts that Bush started and Obama continued. Somehow the Tea Party has convinced working Americans that this is socialism. Big finance manipulates the government to save capitalism at the American public's expense and this is socialism? No my fellow Americans, this is the natural outgrowth of Capitalism. The saddest naivety is the belief that big business is a better alternative to big government. The world is not marching into global one-world-order-socialism, it is crashing into disaster neo-liberal capitalism. Why is Republican Congressman Ron Paul viewed as a fringe politician and not fully endorsed by the financial sector? Because he has faith in the "free-market." Big capitalists do not want a free-market, they want Government to intervene on their behalf: in favor of capitalists and against the working-class or any other obstacle. Big business favors its international agenda at the expense of America or any other country, NAFTA is a good example. These are some of the points the Left in America should be exposing to the public at large. This great country is falling apart, is being ripped apart, and the actual creators of this destruction need to be stopped.

I picked two music videos. One is an official Tea Party Video and the other appears to be an average American musician. The lyrics in their songs demonstrate much of what this blog discussed.

The US, Iran, and Democracy

In 1776 Thomas Paine wrote a revolutionary tract titled "Common Sense." He hoped to arouse rebellion of American colonists against the British. The tract's thesis is essentially that a democratic-republic is far superior to a monarchy. He wrote, "The king is not to be trusted without being looked after , in other words, that a thirst for absolute power is that natural disease of monarchy." Ironically in 1953 the US, collaborating with the British that Americans once fought to be independent of,overthrew democracy in Iran. The US government replaced the Iranian government with a tyrannical monarchy.

The long term repercussions of US involvement in Iran arguably resulted in the anti-American Islamic Revolution of 1979. This short film produced during the George W. Bush presidency argues that a bombing campaign/war with Iran in the future may also produce undesirable results in the future. Presently US President Obama and Israel continue to articulate the possibility of such an aggressive scenario.