Fake Teabaggers Are Anti-Spend, Anti-Government: Real Populists Want to Stop Banks from Plundering America

By Mark Ames and Yasha Levine and Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet. Posted April 15, 2009.

But what reeked of AstroTurfing on the Internet also reeked on the street, when protests hit over 30 cities across the country on Feb. 27.

In Santa Monica, Calif., the crowd was no bigger than the kind that mills around taco trucks at lunch hour. Other locations reported the same pathetic tally. In Cobb County, Ga., which should have been teeming with outraged freedom-loving, small-government activists, turnout was only marginally better.

It was clear that this grassroots movement was meant as a TV-only event. In the following days, as our article generated controversy about who really backed the Tea Party, FreedomWorks came clean and admitted to staging the whole thing. Santelli, the movement's own larger-than-life hero, published a lawyer-crafted statement on CNBC's site renouncing his role in the rebellion and throwing himself at the feet of Obama.

It was a crushing and humiliating blow to see the movement's leader buckle so quickly, as if Adams had rushed to King George's palace, three-pointed-hat in hand, and threw himself at the monarch's mercy. To add to the humiliation, Santelli's appearance on the Daily Show was canceled, and his employer, CNBC, soon became the laughingstock of the American network TV world.

The Tea Party movement looked like it was dead in the water. But what seemed to be another failed FreedomWorks project came back one month later with a vengeance.

FreedomWorks is now running the show completely out in the open, coordinating a vast and confusing army of Web sites, selling Tea Party merchandise (with proceeds going straight into FreedomWorks' coffers) and tapping Republican celebrities for speaker slots. Fox News will provide around-the-clock, coast-to-coast coverage of today's Tea Party event. (The network's newest star, Glenn Beck, will hold a $500-a-plate fundraiser for the cause before zooming over to a tea party scheduled to take place at the Alamo in San Antonio.) Last week, Newt Gingrich, former Georgia congressman and Speaker of the House, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced they'll keynote tea parties of their own in Texas and New York.

The Tea Parties have gone large — and they've gone populist. Today's Tea Parties are sure to dwarf the duds of February. Somehow, a movement that was exposed as a fraud has persevered and morphed into something that is channeling and redirecting legitimate concerns about Obama's handling of the financial crisis.

To understand what the Tea Parties are really about, timeline is everything. The Tea Parties were never about the little guy's fight against big government or Wall Street. FreedomWorks did not uncork Santelli while the government was bailing out the banks. The FreedomWorks machine was idle while Citibank and GE pocketed their billions. (The latter, incidentally, is a big donor to FreedomWorks). Freedomworks kicked off its anti-tax, anti-spending movement only when the government announced it would give money to regular Americans to help avoid a wave of housing foreclosures.

How did the right-wing get people behind its absurd and unpopular economic platform of tax cuts, deregulation, status-quo health care, slashed entitlements and leaving homeowners to the wolves?

Enter the AIG-bonus scandal and a steady trickle of news about the mismanagement of the bailout billions and the corrupt backroom cronyism that has guided the whole process, from the Henry Paulson era straight into the Larry Summers/Tim Geithner era. These developments, all under liberal Democratic governance, enraged a lot of people and muddied the waters of outrage — and policy.

The AIG-bonus scandal put a handle on the irresponsible government policies that the Tea Party movement was supposedly rallying against. What could be more irresponsible than allowing financial executives that got America into this mess to walk away with multi-million dollar bonuses lifted from taxpayer money? The same people who cost millions of Americans their jobs and homes were taking what was left of the kitty to ensure that they could maintain their mansions-and-yachts lifestyles.

The Right twisted the issue by getting people to focus their rage on the government exclusively, forgetting the banker (who, in the conservative mind, is being overtaxed). The problem is the Left has been subdued, to put it mildly, in channeling rage at the bankers, in part because Obama's economic team in many ways is the bankers.

The Left should have been there to claim this genuine outrage from the very beginning. But it was late to the game. Until a new initiative called A New Way Forward began picking up steam a few weeks ago, a lot of people outraged by Obama's economic policies had only one place to go: their local FreedomWorks Tea Party.

See more stories tagged with: obama, conservatives, taxes, tea bag

Mark Ames and Yasha Levine are editors of eXiledonline.com. Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist.

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