A Mad Tea Party

There are good reasons why the tea partyers are mad; however, their solutions are equally mad.

The movement is being joined by independents, republicans, and democrats who have come to believe their government has failed them and that neither political party is doing anything to fix it. This is true; however, all of us are being manipulated by the big corporations and the wealthy elite, who use their corporate-owned, mainstream media to mislead the people into acting against their own interests.

The corporations and wealthy elite have been highly successful in using their money to seize control of the government and the media to spread their lies, most recently in the debate about health care.

When the March Hare tells Alice in Wonderland that she should “say what you mean,” she replied, “I do, at least – at least I mean what I say – that’s the same thing you know.” To which the Hatter replied: “Not the same the same thing a bit! Why, you might as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see!’” The March Hare added, “You might as well just say that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like!’” The Dormouse said, “You might just as well say, that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe!” The Hatter concluded, “it is the same thing with you.”

And so it was for the workers, the middle class and small business owners of the United States, who became convinced by a litany of repeated lies that the democrats were trying to impose socialized health care with one hand and were trying to destroy Medicare with the other.

The Republicans successfully tricked the Democrats into passing a Republican health care plan that primarily benefitted the health care, pharmaceutical and insurance industries, over the clever “opposition” of the Republicans. The losers were the American people who suffer from the worst health care provided by any industrialized nation, while paying the greatest cost.

The next targets are social security and all other social welfare programs, including unemployment insurance, and free public education. The burden of taxation has already been shifted to workers, the middle class and small business owners, and now the people are being convinced that they cannot afford the very programs that most benefit themselves. Sheer madness!

The people have every right to be angry; however, they had better wake up, smell the tea, and recognize that they are being played for fools, before it is too late.

The future of democracy and the last few remaining freedoms hang in the balance.

William John Cox is a retired supervising prosecutor for the State Bar of California. As a police officer he wrote the Policy Manual of the Los Angeles Police Department and the Role of the Police in America for a national advisory commission. Acting as a public interest, pro bono lawyer, he filed a class action lawsuit in 1979 on behalf of every citizen of the United States petitioning the Supreme Court to order the other two branches of the federal government to conduct a National Policy Referendum; he investigated and successfully sued a group of radical right-wing organizations in 1981 that denied the Holocaust; and he arranged in 1991 for publication of the suppressed Dead Sea Scrolls. His 2004 book, You’re Not Stupid! Get the Truth: A Brief on the Bush Presidency is reviewed at http://www.yourenotstupid.com, and he is currently working on a fact-based fictional political philosophy. His writings are collected at http://www.thevoters.org, and he can be contacted at u2cox@msn.com.

The cartoon is by Helen Werner Cox - (c) 2010, with permission