Here is a reply to Ralph Nader’s “Ten Questions for Tea Partiers” as published in the January 14 issue of The Pasadena Weekly. http://www.pasadenaweekly.com/cms/story/detail/letters/9664/
I don’t know if I qualify as a Tea Partier but I have attended their meetings and am sympathetic with their fiscal platform. Readers should not construe this as an official response by the Tea Party or even the personal views of a member of the Tea Party.
Tea Party members are economically rational. They are not a bunch of “wingnuts,” a term slanderously pegged to them by the editor of another local newspaper. As pointed out by Nader they tend to be middle age or older, married, better educated and wealthier than average, and mostly concerned with federal spending and deficits. What Nader fails to realize is that they are the demographic wave of the future because the dependent elderly are growing from 16% of the population in 1975 to 32% by 2030.
Contrary to Nader’s stereotype, Tea Partiers are people close to retirement age who fear economic bubbles and inflation will dilute their pensions and savings. Tea Partiers fear there will be no health care or only Canadian-style bureaucratic health care available to them. That is why the national health care debate in the summer of 2009 galvanized the Tea Party movement.
The Tea Partiers fear that subprime loans were a way for debtors to rob creditors of their investments was proven to be true by the financial panic of 2008. Subprime loans were a wealth transfer from creditors and investors to consumers but were not reported as such by the media. Such wealth transfers had to be stopped and in late 2008 Wall Street, not government, put an end to it as reported in former FDIC Chairman William Isaac’s book “Senseless Panic: How Washington Failed America” (2010).
The historical precursor to the financial panic of 2008 was the Panic of 1893. And the historical precursor to the Tea Party was the “Gold Standard Movement” which opposed the “Free Silver” movement around the same period of time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Silver
The Free Silver movement cut across political boundaries and included the short-lived “Silver Republican Party” and the “Populist Party” which combined with the Democratic Party. The leader of the “Free Silver” movement was liberal Democrat William Jennings Bryan who was opposed to eastern big banking interests. William McKinley and the “Goldbugs,” who wanted “sound money,” opposed the Free Silver movement.
In the late 1800’s populist organizations favored money inflation that enabled debtors, farmers, laborers, and industrial workers to pay their debts off with cheaper dollars. Creditors, banks, landlords, and investors suffered from inflation.
Similarly, the financial panic of 2008 and the delayed takeover of the House by Tea Partiers reflect a revolt by creditors to stop wealth transfers and looming inflation from over-stimulating the economy or re-inflating economic bubbles (green power).
The Tea Party has a geographic dimension as well. As the Red and Blue political maps indicate they are Middle Americans who realize that they may end up paying for the pensions and health care of the big welfare coastal states. This is why California is the exception to the Tea Party trend.
The Tea Partiers are not the unwitting stooges of greedy and sinister corporate interests as Nader makes them out. They are political amateurs and outsiders who are sometimes so unsophisticated and eccentric that the political Left ridicules them. The Tea Party is not the taking over of government by the lunatic fringe. They are those in the middle class who are not captured by the government or corporations. They are the Baby Boomers and they are here to stay.
Now that Nader’s disparaging stereotype and historical illiteracy about the Tea Party has been clarified let me succinctly reply to his ten questions.
1. Nader asks how can the Tea Party be against Big Government and not press for reductions in military spending which comprises over half of the Federal budget? It is a straw man argument to put words into their mouth that they are not opposed to military waste, fraud and abuse. Factcheck.org states that military spending is 19.4%. If Ron Paul is a spokesperson for the Tea Party, he is against military overspending – http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/27/a_tea_party_foreign_policy
2. Nader erroneously accuses the Tea Party of not condemning mega billions of dollars of “corporate welfare bailouts, subsidies, handouts and giveaways.” It is widely known that the Tea Party is opposed to the reckless Stimulus Program, bailouts, Fannie and Freddie Mae sub-prime loan giveaways, and other handouts. See here – http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/tea-2/
3. Nader again throws a canard at the Tea Party asking: “how can they want to preserve national sovereignty and not reject trade agreements under NAFTA and GATT?” There is no documentation that I can find for this accusation. http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/tea-2/
4. Nader asks why the Tea Party doesn’t support a bigger and faster crackdown on the “corporate financial crime wave.” Duh, that is why the Tea Party was elected: to stop the “stealing of taxpayers” dollars and investors nest eggs by Nader’s “consumer” class.
5. The accusation by Nader that the Tea Party is against privacy and for the Patriot Act is unfounded. Eighteen Tea Party states are challenging Obamacare and one of the grounds is the privacy issue – http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304198004575171743533402022.html?KEYWORDS=mccaughey
6. According to Nader the Tea Party is against regulation of medical malpractice, is for unsafe drugs, defective motor vehicles, and not opposed to contaminated food from Mexico. I imagine the Tea Party is for abusing your mother, against apple pie as “toxic,” and is against kissing babies for health reasons too. When was the last time Nader hit his wife (a conclusionary question)?
7. Nader says the Tea Party calls for freedom but tolerates hidden and arbitrary credit ratings and scores and one-sided contracts. As stated above, Nader favors the plunder of the “consumer” class against “creditors,” so it is no surprise he falsely accuses the Tea Party of his own malfeasance. Now that the Tea Party is in power they are reportedly looking into collusion between government and banks that resulted in lending abuses – http://www.examiner.com/bipartisan-in-los-angeles/tea-party?render=print
8. Again, Nader asks how the Tea Party can be for clean government and “still accept the two party dictatorship” and the harassment of third parties. Nader has amnesia. He fails to remember that the votes he won in Florida in 2000 vastly exceeded Bush’s winning margin versus Al Gore for the Presidency. That is why a two-party system is best. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader
9. Nader says it is inconsistent for the Tea Party to want a return to Constitutional limited government but still supports wars not declared by Congress. The Iraq War was approved by the U.S. Congress under H.J. Resolution 114 of the 107th Congress, 2nd Session, on October 11, 2002, at 12:50 am – http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=hj107-114
The most unscrupulous accusation of Nader’s is that the Tea Party supports eminent domain. It is widely known Tea Partiers are some of the most outspoken opponents of eminent domain abuses, despite the yellow journalism that Tea Party gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino would use eminent domain to stop a mosque in New York. One person’s summary of the Tea Party platform indicates the Tea Party is opposed to abuses of eminent domain – http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/tea-2/
10. Nader says it is inconsistent to want less taxation and lower deficits but not stop corporations from their fair share of taxes and letting trillions of dollars of Wall Street speculation go without a sales tax. According to Business Week, the Tea Party has condemned corporate tax dodging –
Summary
Ralph Nader’s questions, or false accusations, to the Tea Party are self-righteous and are historically ignorant of the new Tea Party’s place in U.S. history. Nader’s facts are wrong, his logic is flawed and misleading, and his underlying philosophy is an ersatz form of Marxism.
The Tea Party is an economically rational movement by the middle aged middle class to protect their retirement resources against the predations of consumerist social policies.
Nader’s “consumerism” is a thinly disguised form of Marxism that believes that all profit is extracted from “consumers” (proletariat workers). It is no surprise that Nader’s letter is printed in the Leftist Pasadena Weekly.
Like Marx, Nader demonizes corporations and the Tea Party (the Bourgeouise) in the same stroke of his pen. He fails to realize that one of the differences of the economic system of the U.S. and the former Soviet Union was that they had no corporations that were separate from government. Neither did the Soviet Union have a layer of civil society between governmental and corporate systems and the hordes of consumers, which the Tea Party reflects.
Nader charges that the Tea Party cannot produce a “consumer” society, an ironic charge considering that the excesses of a consumer society are what got them elected.