Thursday, October 21, 2010

Tea Parties, Politics and Food


Daniel Hannan, a British Conservative member of the European Parliament has Tea Party envy. In an op-ed piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal last week he expressed deep anguish about how the parliamentary political systems prevalent in Europe, that are often fragmented at times by the number of minority parties, couldn’t possibly launch a Tea Party. He likes the one growing in our country that, if you get your news from other Newscorp companies, opposes all forms of government. Why the WSJ had to look so far abroad to find a loon that had something positive to say about what Newscorp has turned into a laughing stock by continuously misleading it’s customers is unclear unless it is that third party verification was all that was missing to convince someone that was still undecided about what the Tea Party really stood for. Actually, at this point, that is becoming less and less clear as the people claiming that banner have such widely varying views that the only common ground they universally seem to have is be unemployed opportunists and devoid of any knowledge whatsoever about any policy complexities on one hand and history on the other that explains what has been tried and what the results are likely to be based on government action or inaction.

What confuses me about the TEA Party isn’t their goals-a more sensible government or to create a wealthy country that isn’t falling behind the rest of the world in wages and employment. I have yet to hear them take on one issue, however, that change things in a meaningful way. As a suggestion of a particular policy to start with I would like to suggest that they take on the government’s intervention in the food supply. Halt all direct to farm subsidies for commodities for instance. Granted no one from the Midwestern states could be elected on a platform like that because the economy of that region is dependent on tax funded corporate welfare that has been driving people off of their family farms and politicians are dependent on large money donations from those corporate entities they created because regular folks couldn’t be counted to vote as often as needed to keep our ruling parties in power.

I haven’t heard one speech by a politician this campaign cycle that addresses the corruption that has turned our capital in Washington D. C. into a cesspool that permeates and trickles all the way down to the local level. Opening that discussion would invite a lot of finger pointing that would end up being pointed back at the person who started it so people are afraid to talk about anything that real. Unfortunately, we have seen all too often that the people that cry out loudest are often the worst offenders so there isn’t a lot of trust or much love of people who claim that they are going to reform things. The last President that tried that, Jimmy Carter, got his head handed to him on a platter. The President that followed claiming to champion such things, Ronald Reagan, was merely a puppet for people that said one thing while doing the exact opposite, not even bothering whether it was legal or not, drug running, exchanging arms and money to terrorist states for hostages, assassinating political opponents, implementing the largest tax increase in history up to that time, and just saying no to drugs while becoming the largest importer of hard drugs into this country to raise money for illegal covert operations. When all of this information became public the opposition party barely made any attempt at all to prosecute because these activities had such broad acceptance at the highest levels of government that instead of collecting evidence about the criminal activity they were busy destroying it to make sure they never got caught. Yet this is the party that will probably be voted back into office as the majority party this fall.

As we go into the next election cycle happy with the mythological baggage we have collected over the last few decades hardly anybody will bother themselves to become educated about even one problem that we have as a nation because our basic needs have all been satisfied. Even the poorest American has access to transportation, cheap food (not good food), and more entertainment available in more ways than ever. Even though the country is headed for decades of very hard times that will be made worse by a lack of leadership, planning, and management we can’t possibly be bothered much by that because our bodies and minds are full.

The enormous cost of our health care system, our financial commitments to the elderly that will most certainly be broken, & the debt we are leaving our children are things that won’t be forgotten as long as there are people around to curse the day we ever walked the earth.