Thursday, October 17, 2013

The Blame Game and the Anti Tea Party

For anyone who has regularly read me, it should be clear over time that I am neither a Democrat or a Republican. I sympathize with both the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement in many ways; but, agree with neither. My Bachelor's is in Political Science with multiple national honors for the same. I don't like Ayn Rand, I agree that people should not be held back and she be evaluated on their merits while maintaining that we have a responsibility to one another. I believe the terms liberal and conservative are nonsense because nobody uses them correctly. Most people associate them with particular positions on specific issues, in fact a liberal is for changing how things are and a conservative is for keeping things as they are, that is what the words mean. Using that definition, the correct one, a liberal would be against abortion being legal and a conservative would be for keeping it legal.

For the past few weeks there has been an argument in congress over whether or not they would fund the government enough to meet it's promised obligations. Theoretically, major parts of the federal government were "shutdown". While this has been blamed on the Republicans, the real culprit, we are now told it is the Tea Party Republicans. That seems to please the Democrats and the Republicans because the Tea Party Republicans were being set up to take the blame all along.

What we have been watching is the Republican party use the help of the Democratic party to purge themselves of people who want to reform their party. What neither party wants is a popular political uprising where their party actually takes a position contrary to the interests of their friends and backers. While the Occupy Movement was beaten into submission, or at least for the moment, the Tea Party was quickly and easily co-opted. They sought to work within the system and were effortlessly destroyed by their party. The biggest mistake the Tea Party made was in not joining with the Occupy Movement and working on what they had in common, ending the Federal Reserve, ending the wars and forcing Wall Street and the banks to abide by the law.

Now, here is an interesting fact. It is legal for members of congress to trade in stocks even if they are voting on a matter that may effect the stock market. Consider this, the stock market has risen the last two days even though the funding bill was only passed to day, it went right to the wire. The smart money should have seen the market go down due to the uncertainty. Wouldn't it be interesting to know how many options were placed by congress people betting that the bill would go through in time and that the market would go up? Oh, and what it their reason for messing up the smooth running of government, their hatred of Obamacare.

This is all fairly simple. Less than 20% of the people support the people in congress, yet, the vast majority were re-elected. Historically what we should have seen was the rise of a new party based on the biggest issues; but, instead the real issues were ignored over less meaningful issues.