Pointer’s Weekly

If people could be counted on to vote in their own best interests, there would be no Tea Party movement, for if the economic agenda embraced by Tea Partiers — a vastly pro-corporation, government-killing plan — Tea Partiers would find themselves among the people most hurt by it.

To hear Tea Party activists tell it, they seek to save future generations from the crushing demands of big government. Yet the agenda they advocate, dictated by the big-money players behind the muscular interest groups that keep the movement growing, will likely render the Tea Partiers themselves the economically squeezed subjects of a corporate state, one in which the elderly will be left to scrounge for crumbs, small businesses will be crushed by lack of capital, and their own ground-level online organizing supplanted by the networks built by giant, corporate-funded astroturf groups.

As George Lakoff and Drew Westen remind us, people don’t vote on the facts: they vote on emotion, according to Westen, and their notion of morality, according to Lakoff. The resentment of Tea Partiers toward liberals, East Coast elites, the poor and people who don’t look like them has been effectively marshaled in service of a “free market” ideology cleverly packaged as “freedom.” Never mind that free markets are anything but free for ordinary people. The packaging strikes the necessary emotional and moral chords: Free markets = freedom = liberty = endowed by the Creator, as written in the Declaration of Independence by the founders. It’s the perfect exploitation of the worldview of conservative middle-class white people — all in the service of enriching the super-rich at the expense of their unwitting, patriotic ground troops.

Casting themselves as an organic uprising in opposition to a federal government they see as the greatest threat to their freedom, Tea Party supporters conveniently look past the likely consequences of the no-holds-barred, anti-regulatory aims of Rupert Murdoch and David Koch, the billionaires whose dollars grease the skids on which the Tea Party movement rides. Murdoch leads News Corporation, the parent company of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, the movement’s evangelists. Koch is a principal in Koch Industries, the second largest privately held corporation in the U.S., and heir to its fortunes.
The billionaires give the activists lots of entertainment to distract them from this reality, especially in the form of sideshows, such as Glenn Beck’s travesty at the Lincoln Memorial, designed to fan the flames of racial resentment while making Tea Partiers feel holy about it. At other times, the demonization or infantilization of the nation’s first black president serves up the same charge of adrenaline to the fearful, angry throngs who seek to blame their troubles on anyone other than the corporatist manipulators in whom they’ve placed their trust.

How else to explain the embrace of the billionaires’ agenda by the middle-aged, middle-class folks of the Tea Party movement — the very ones likely to find themselves screwed by it? Here we examine five positions advanced by Tea Party leaders, and what they would mean for Tea Party supporters.

1. Ending Social Security. Rep. Michele Bachmann, doyenne of the congressional Tea Party Caucus, has outlined a plan for an abrupt phase-out of Social Security. Speaking before an audience of Tea Party supporters at the RightOnline conference convened in July, Bachmann referred to Social Security and Medicare as “welfare” that had seen its day. The event was convened in Las Vegas by the Americans For Prosperity Foundation, whose board is chaired by David Koch. There, more than 1,000 Tea Partiers — the majority of whom are over the age of 45 — sat in rapt silence as Bachmann outlined a plan to end Social Security for all those who will be under the age of 65 at the time her potential dream Congress enacts the legislation.

The growth of the federal debt and deficit require a drastic cutback in federal spending, Bachmann said. “Spending comes first, so we have to cut it first,” she explained, speaking of her plan to devastate Social Security. “And in my opinion, it’ll take us about a long weekend to get that done, and then we’ll be fine.”

For those between the ages of 55 and 65 at the time Bachmann’s Kill Social Security Plan hypothetically passes into law, there would be a means-tested program for “those who truly need it — the truly disadvantaged, those who truly can’t go forward.” For everybody else, there would be unspecified “alternatives and adjustments.” Those under the age of 55 would apparently be squat out of luck, regardless of how truly disadvantaged they are. From the assembled Tea Partiers, not a discouraging word was heard, even as Bachmann outlined a plan to essentially rob them of the money they’ve been putting into the system all their lives.

According to a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in April, 46 percent of Tea Party supporters fall into the 45-64 age group. (Untouched by the Bachmann plan would be the 29 percent of Tea Party supporters the poll cited as being over the age of 64.) The same survey revealed that among 47 percent of self-identified Tea Party supporters, either they or a member of their household was receiving Social Security retirement benefits. When asked whether the outlay for programs such as Social Security and Medicare are worth the taxpayer expense, 62 percent said they were.
What to do with all those freed-up dollars? Why not give them back to the corporations and wealthy individuals who bankroll the Tea Party movement? Segueing out of her nuking of the social safety net for the nation’s elderly — and stealing the payroll taxes of all those Americans who paid into Social Security over the course of their lifetimes but would never see a dime of their contributions come back to them under her plan — Bachmann launched into a pitch for a corporatist agenda that began with her call for a roll-back of the corporate tax from its current 34 percent to 9 percent, which, according to Bachmann, would make it “one of the lowest in the industrialized world.”
Actually, make that possibly the lowest in the world (excluding the handful of mostly broken nations that have none), never mind “industrialized.” I mean, even Kazakhstan and Burkina Faso have higher corporate tax rates than 9 percent. And India, where all the good jobs are said to be going? Try 43 percent.
Bachmann also called for zeroing out the estate tax — even for the very wealthiest Americans — and repeal of the Sarbanes-Oxley law, a bill passed in the wake of the Enron scandal that sets standards for corporate accountability. What would that mean for Americans under the age of 64 whose retirement savings would be entirely invested in the private sector after the demolishing of Social Security? That the same kinds of accounting tricks and corruption that destroyed the retirement savings of thousands in the Enron caper would become standard operating procedure. Sorry, Tea Partiers — you’re screwed.

2. Ending Medicare: See No. #1, Ending Social Security. “Within seven [years], Medicare is dead, bankrupt, broke — broke,” Bachmann told the Tea Partiers. Her solution? End it for everybody but “the truly needy and the truly disabled.” (I shudder to think what constitutes “truly needy” in the Bachmann moral universe.) Her solution? You can buy your own health insurance policy on the private market with pre-tax dollars. Sure, you’re 70 years old: How much do you think an insurance company is going to charge you for your coverage? Pre-taxed or not, you’re going to need a whole lotta dollars to make that one work for you.

But Bachmann’s fans likely found comfort in her sunny optimism. “It is possible for every American to be able to retire a millionaire,” Bachmann told the Tea Partiers. “It’s entirely possible to do that if you plan early and you put away money — and there are alternatives that we can put forward.” Just what those “alternatives” might be were left to the audience’s imagination.

3. Opposition to Internet Freedom (aka Net Neutrality). Earlier this month, news media, ranging from mainstream to righty to lefty, breathlessly reported that leaders of 35 “Tea Party” groups signed a letter to the the Federal Communications Commission in opposition to any efforts made by the FCC to “regulate the Internet.” At issue is Internet freedom and potential regulations that could prevent Internet providers from saddling small-time Web sites unable to pay for an added jolt of Web juice with slower loading speeds for their sites than, say, big-money players like Google. (This is the crux of the issue in the Google-Verizon deal.) Now, Tea Party supporters fancy themselves to be rugged individualists, dedicated to the preservation of individual freedoms. But it wasn’t until the big-money groups that bankroll the national organizing of the Tea Party movement began garnering opposition to Internet freedom that you began to see any of those quaint, homely signs carried at Tea Party rallies dedicated to the subject.

Tea Party activists pride themselves on their movement’s apparent leaderless state, reveling in the homegrown, local character of ground-level Tea Party groups, which often organize on hastily organized listservs and homemade local Web sites. But should they succeed in halting the FCC’s net neutrality plan, they may find themselves with no decent option for Web-based organizing other than the big networking sites built by the national money groups that form the Tea Party Inc. uberstructure. So much for self-agency.

And what of those “35 Tea Party groups” whose leaders signed that letter to the FCC? Well, 24 of those entities are either part of or affiliated with Americans For Prosperity. Among the signatories was AFP president Tim Phillips, as well as the directors of 22 state chapters of Americans For Prosperity — each counted as a separate “Tea Party group.” In addition, the signature of AFP policy director Phil Kerpen (who is also a columnist for Murdoch’s FoxNation) appears with the affiliation, “director, NoInternetTakeover.com.” Also present was Linda Hansen, who leads the Wisconsin Prosperity Network and is the author of a “worker education” program that is a project of the Americans For Prosperity Foundation, and promoted by John Fund and Stephen Moore of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.

Others signatories aren’t leaders of Tea Party groups at all, but heads of the old corporatist, anti-government groups such as Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and David Keene of the American Conservative Union. There are even a couple of stalwarts of the old New Right: Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum and Morton Blackwell of the Leadership Institute.

Bottom line for Tea Partiers: deviate from the AFP/Ayn Rand line on any issue, and you could see your little homemade Web site begin to load verrrry slowwwly.

4. De-Funding Public Education. While it’s common knowledge that Tea Partiers hate all things government (except their personal Social Security checks and Medicare reimbursements), they hold a special contempt for public school teachers. This stems from a number of causes, but mostly from the fact that teachers are unionized government workers who have authority over one’s children for a good chunk of the day. The very fact of their unionization implies a different value system from that of the Tea Partiers, who fear that value system having an influence on their children. Teachers tend to be more liberal than the general population. And to the worker wed to the private enterprise system, a teacher’s deal can look pretty sweet by comparison: It generally comes with a pension, tenure and the prospect of early retirement.

That’s why even candidates like Sharron Angle, the GOP/Tea Party contender for Nevada’s U.S. Senate seat, can call for the elimination of the Department of Education and still be taken seriously by the Tea Party faithful. And that’s why calling the federal jobs bill passed last month a “teacher bailout” was an effective means of summoning Tea Party opposition to the bill that provided $26 billion in aid to cash-strapped states to maintain all manner of services and programs, including money to prevent some 300,000 teacher lay-offs.

For the billionaires of Tea Party Inc., gutting public education is just another way to grab more marbles for themselves by marginalizing unions and shrinking the overall size of government — not to mention the convenience of having a gullible and uneducated population to snooker down the road. They have little need for an educated workforce in the U.S., since they’ll offshore whatever jobs they can.

Yet, according to the New York Times/CBS News poll, 65 percent of Tea Party supporters with children under the age of 18 have those children enrolled in public schools. And although parents of school-age children account for only 20 percent of Tea Party supporters, it’s safe to assume that a sizable number of the older people who comprise the bulk of the Tea Party have grandchildren in public schools. The education those children receive will clearly suffer if schools are forced to lay off significant numbers of teachers but, for Tea Partiers, that fact pales beside the prospect of sticking it to the teachers they’ve been taught to resent. Better to short-change one’s own kids than to keep one more teacher employed, despite all the rhetoric about the Tea Party movement being the guardian of the legacy owed to those yet unborn.

5. Opposition to Wall Street Reform and Financial Reform. Perhaps the most confounding aspect of the Tea Party agenda is its opposition to reform of Wall Street and banks. Even as Tea Party leaders and activists rail against the bailouts of U.S. automakers, and the minimal assistance offered homeowners with underwater mortgages, Tea Party leaders and those who follow them voice hostility toward any and all measures that would demand increased accountability from purveyors of financial instruments or the credit-card industry, like those contained in the financial reform bill passed by Congress in July (a bill that liberal critics regard as rather toothless).

In her speech to Tea Party supporters at the RightOnline conference, Michele Bachmann described the recently passed financial reform bill as nothing more than a punitive measure against Wall Street, when the real culprit in the nation’s financial woes was the Housing and Community Redevelopment Act passed in 1977. Another particular object of scorn by the Tea Party set is the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection created by the bill.

Financial reforms such as those signed into law by President Barack Obama last month are designed to benefit the middle class, where 50 percent of Tea Party supporters locate themselves, according the the New York Times/CBS poll. The reforms are expected to be especially good for small businesses, whose fortunes Tea Partiers often claim to care most about.

Failure of Logic, Rule of Emotion

So, how do they do it, those unscrupulous billionaires? How do they get everyday Americans to embrace an agenda that runs counter to their own interests? Their mouthpieces — people like Bachmann and Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck — couch it all in the language of heroic patriotism, with the Tea Partiers cast as patriots at war with people set to defile the founders’ dream of America. Do that, and a billionaire will find himself the general of an army of ground troops ready to do battle in his service, despite his unwillingness to share the spoils of his war on everyday Americans.

In her speech to the Tea Party faithful in Nevada, Michele Bachmann neither began nor ended her speech with her plan to rob the Tea Partiers (and the rest of us) of their Social Security. She began with a sustained attack on the nation’s first black president (who was portrayed as immature, greedy, incompetent and corrupt). Her plan was explained just before she wrapped up the speech, which she ended with the truly poignant patriotic story of the sinking of an Army transport ship, the Dorchester, in World War II. Bachmann recounted how four Navy chaplains went down with the ship after giving their life jackets to younger soldiers. She made a point of citing the last names of two of them: Washington and Goode.

In Bachmann’s telling, the brave chaplains gave up the lifeline that was rightfully theirs in order to save the younger generation. Kind of like giving up your Social Security to save your country for your grandchildren — except that your sacrifice is more likely to line the pockets of a billionaire than save your grandson from a life of debt, a possibility you just don’t consider.

Perhaps this is the message: If you humbly obey, you don’t need to think.

President Barack Obama dismissed a recent poll showing that a third of Americans don’t know he’s a Christian — and blamed an online campaign of misinformation by his conservative enemies for perpetuating the myth that he’s a Muslim.
Obama, speaking with NBC “Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams on Sunday afternoon, was equally dismissive of conservative talk show host Glenn Beck — saying he didn’t watch the Fox host’s Saturday rally in Washington but wasn’t surprised that Beck was able to “stir up” people during uncertain economic times.
Williams, sitting under a tent in a rain-soaked New Orleans, where the first family commemorated the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, asked Obama why so many people were uncertain about something so fundamental as his faith. “I can’t spend all of my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead,” quipped Obama, who took a deep breath to gather his thoughts when asked if the poll reflected his inability to communicate with voters. “The facts are the facts. We went through some of this during the campaign — there is a mechanism, a network of misinformation that in a new media era can get churned out there constantly,” said a visibly annoyed Obama, referring to “birthers,” who have waged a guerrilla campaign questioning either the existence or the validity of his Hawaiian birth certificate. “I will always put my money on the American people, and I’m not going to be worried too much about what rumors are floating around there.”
A stunning 18 percent of Americans identify Obama as Muslim, according to a Pew poll released earlier this month. Only a third identify Obama, who speaks passionately about his faith in his autobiography, as Christian.
Obama, who just returned from a long vacation on Martha’s Vineyard said he didn’t watch Beck’s massive rally at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday, adding that he was focused on the long term, not on the “Nightly News.”
“It’s not surprising that someone like a Mr. Beck is able to stir up a certain portion of the American people. … That’s been true throughout our history,” he said.
Obama doubled down on his support for a mosque and community center planned for a site two blocks north of ground zero in lower Manhattan — and denied reports that he tried to back away from backing the controversial project.
“I didn’t walk it back it all,” he said. “I was very specific with my team. … The core value and principle that every American is treated the same doesn’t change. … At a White House Ramadan celebration, I had Muslim Americans who had been in uniform fighting in Iraq. … How can you say to them that their religious faith is less worthy of respect? … That’s something that I feel very strongly about.” He added, “I respect the feelings on the other side.”
The president, a harsh critic of the Bush administration’s sluggish response to Katrina, bristled when asked if the BP Gulf oil spill was his administration’s Katrina — because of a failure to act quickly enough. “It’s just not accurate,” he told Williams. “The only thing in common with the Katrina response was oil spill Incident Commander Adm. Thad Allen. …We had immediately deployed thousands of vessels, tens of thousands of people.”
The spill has wreaked less havoc on the Gulf Coast “because of the sturdiness and steadiness” of his administration’s response, Obama added.

By Paul Krugman

The last time a Democrat sat in the White House, he faced a nonstop witch hunt by his political opponents. Prominent figures on the right accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of everything from drug smuggling to murder. And once Republicans took control of Congress, they subjected the Clinton administration to unrelenting harassment — at one point taking 140 hours of sworn testimony over accusations that the White House had misused its Christmas card list.
Now it’s happening again — except that this time it’s even worse. Let’s turn the floor over to Rush Limbaugh: “Imam Hussein Obama,” he recently declared, is “probably the best anti-American president we’ve ever had.”
To get a sense of how much it matters when people like Mr. Limbaugh talk like this, bear in mind that he’s an utterly mainstream figure within the Republican Party; bear in mind, too, that unless something changes the political dynamics, Republicans will soon control at least one house of Congress. This is going to be very, very ugly.
So where is this rage coming from? Why is it flourishing? What will it do to America?
Anyone who remembered the 1990s could have predicted something like the current political craziness. What we learned from the Clinton years is that a significant number of Americans just don’t consider government by liberals — even very moderate liberals — legitimate. Mr. Obama’s election would have enraged those people even if he were white. Of course, the fact that he isn’t, and has an alien-sounding name, adds to the rage.
By the way, I’m not talking about the rage of the excluded and the dispossessed: Tea Partiers are relatively affluent, and nobody is angrier these days than the very, very rich. Wall Street has turned on Mr. Obama with a vengeance: last month Steve Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman of the Blackstone Group, the private equity giant, compared proposals to end tax loopholes for hedge fund managers with the Nazi invasion of Poland.
And powerful forces are promoting and exploiting this rage. Jane Mayer’s new article in The New Yorker about the superrich Koch brothers and their war against Mr. Obama has generated much-justified attention, but as Ms. Mayer herself points out, only the scale of their effort is new: billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife waged a similar war against Bill Clinton.
Meanwhile, the right-wing media are replaying their greatest hits. In the 1990s, Mr. Limbaugh used innuendo to feed anti-Clinton mythology, notably the insinuation that Hillary Clinton was complicit in the death of Vince Foster. Now, as we’ve just seen, he’s doing his best to insinuate that Mr. Obama is a Muslim. Again, though, there’s an extra level of craziness this time around: Mr. Limbaugh is the same as he always was, but now seems tame compared with Glenn Beck.
And where, in all of this, are the responsible Republicans, leaders who will stand up and say that some partisans are going too far? Nowhere to be found.
To take a prime example: the hysteria over the proposed Islamic center in lower Manhattan almost makes one long for the days when former President George W. Bush tried to soothe religious hatred, declaring Islam a religion of peace. There were good reasons for his position: there are a billion Muslims in the world, and America can’t afford to make all of them its enemies.
But here’s the thing: Mr. Bush is still around, as are many of his former officials. Where are the statements, from the former president or those in his inner circle, preaching tolerance and denouncing anti-Islam hysteria? On this issue, as on many others, the G.O.P. establishment is offering a nearly uniform profile in cowardice.
So what will happen if, as expected, Republicans win control of the House? We already know part of the answer: Politico reports that they’re gearing up for a repeat performance of the 1990s, with a “wave of committee investigations” — several of them over supposed scandals that we already know are completely phony. We can expect the G.O.P. to play chicken over the federal budget, too; I’d put even odds on a 1995-type government shutdown sometime over the next couple of years.
It will be an ugly scene, and it will be dangerous, too. The 1990s were a time of peace and prosperity; this is a time of neither. In particular, we’re still suffering the after-effects of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, and we can’t afford to have a federal government paralyzed by an opposition with no interest in helping the president govern. But that’s what we’re likely to get.
If I were President Obama, I’d be doing all I could to head off this prospect, offering some major new initiatives on the economic front in particular, if only to shake up the political dynamic. But my guess is that the president will continue to play it safe, all the way into catastrophe.

Transcript:
>>> if all goes according to plan and the blackboard operations, it will rival this nation’s seminal moments, the flag raising at iwo jima, the flag planting on the moon. had those events included port-o-johns and other opportunities. beck calls this the wost case scenario here.
>> but imagine that somewhere on the edge of the crowd, the black panthers start to march in, okay? imagine, because there’s going to be video cameras everywhere, everywhere. the worst case scenario is that there is an infiltrator in there who is coordinating and they’re like, oh, you bunch of “n” words, whatever. the black panthers start brawling. that’s the worst case scenario, right? this audience isn’t going to do that.
>> presumably after the audience gives any possible perps the care bear stare –
>> you’re going to see the spirit of god unleashed unlike you have probably ever seen it before. at least in a public function.
>> and then god will do magic tricks. for further crowd pumping one can check out prebeckoning field trips. glen admiring the architecture. what’s that, a roof? and the resting place of president woodrow wilson. he hates that guy. sorry. scroll down a little further and you’ll stumble on to a neutrw ralo promo. beck’s owner would like a word with you.
>> are you here looking for free clips and everything? there’s nothing free in life, my friend. well, except for the following clip, brought to you by goldline. 866-go 866-gold-line. thank you, goldline.
>>> every great achievement in human history has started with one person, one crazy idea. when confronted by the oppression of fear and conventional wisdom, the bravest always chart a new course to a new world. the american experiment. men guided by their own reason. anything is possible. through failures and success.
>> the top half of abraham lincoln’s face brought to you by goldline.
>>> the becker head army getting reinforcement from dick army. “the new york times” saying corporately funded tea activists are learning how to run phone banks. what’s that called, community something, community organizing? “rules for radicals” by saul alinsky. they will be joined by the koch family. they you offered an online rebuttal which talked about their donations to the tea party. the koch family and their foundations have been publicly devoted to making the world a better place. one group who claims not to be on the bus, the republican national committee, communications director doug hyde, telling the washington post, i’ve got to be honest with you. i don’t know about any glen beck. joining me now, somebody who does, eric byrnes. how can somebody at the rnc say with a straight face they don’t know anything? they claimed little or no knowledge of the event. is everybody going to be out of town this weekend of.
>> look, we know about it. michael steele’s done nothing but rave about glen beck for months. the rnc and the republican party’s brand has been so badly damaged by 20 years of failed policy, george bush, the reign of terror of by tom delay, they don’t want to get in the way of the tea party successful branding of itself. it’s really what this entire rally is all about. theis effort by glen beck to rebrand the conservative movement and wrap themselves in the flag and of course the honor of american soldiers. let’s remember — one thing that’s not talked about very often, the republican party’s approval ratings are half that of the democrats. we all know that the democrats are struggling right now.
>> time magazine has reported that beck’s charity, the special operations warrior operation required speakers at the event to sign an agreement to not talk politics. sarah palin is going to be speaking. how does that work? i you mean, if she doesn’t say only the words republican or democrat, does that qualify as nonpolitics?
>> maybe in glen beck’s book it will. i find it hard to believe one of the leading presidential hopefuls is not going to talk politics. you mentioned americans for prosperity, freedom works will be registering voters and teaching people how to do geotv. the national rifle association will be there. if by chance glen beck is true to his word, there’s no politics and it’s all just about this charity that helps take care of the children of veterans who have lost their lives, then min that’s glen beck turning over a leaf. that would be wonderful. i’m not going to hold my breath.
>> are we expecting him to see part the reflecting pool?
>> i think he thinks he may be parting the reflecting pool. he’s talked about chaneling the holy spirit. he’s built up expectations. it speaks to the fact so much of this is about glen beck really elevating himself and his delusions of grandeur about who he is. not only has he tried to co-opt martin luther king’s legacy but tried to present himself as a george washington and abraham lincoln for the modern day.
>> lastly, dick army using saul alinsky as a textbook. this would be funny if they hadn’t tried to turn saul alinsky into every evil known to man.
>> it’s really not funny. glen beck is dangerous and speaks to the fundamental dishonesty, not of this rally and its real intent but of what glen beck does every day. they vilify alinsky but use those tactics to train their operatives. he claims the legacy of martin luther king for himself. a middle-aged white man who’s a multimillionaire but trashes everything king ever believed in.
>> eric byrnes, if we don’t talk to you again before the rapture, thanks a lot. it’s been nice knowing.
>> i should tell you, we have identified the “he” beck hopes will be talking through him. we’ve turned him as the spies say. we will have him wired as he gives those skreecret messages. obviously we can’t reveal this until after the speech happens. we will bring it to you on monday. set the vcr right now.