Tea Partiers seem to have lost their focus
To the editor:
With regard to the Tea Parties, I'm glad that people are at least finally beginning to take an interest in their own governance. After decades of indefensible apathy, it's a start. Despite the consistent misrepresentations of the mainstream media, however, the Tea Parties did not originate in 2008 as a response to banker bailouts or the election of a so-called "socialist" president. The movement was born in 2007 to organize independent protests against taxation without representation. Only in the last year or so has it been hijacked by corporate PACs and "anti-big government" Republican hypocrites. Having fallen under the spell of these manipulative forces, the Tea Parties have already lost sight of their real enemy.
While there's been no essential change in my positions, I, too, was guilty of some flawed semantics when railing against big government in my blog. It wasn't because I thought there was anything inherently wrong with government, but because our current system of ever-expanding government is a creation and wholly-owned subsidiary of big corporations, most of which are transnational and have no interest in what's good for America. Lately, though, I've been coming to the surprising realization that, while the Feds are definitely "big," they cannot be correctly defined as "government." I'm reaching the rather ironic conclusion that I'm not so much opposed to big government as I am to the fact that Americans have no real government at all.
