i Much of this effort has an instrumental value in terms of Republican Party politics. Since the Tea Party emerged on the national scene, its members have made great efforts to maintain the public appearance of being a movement without leaders, without a defined ideology, and without history. The Tea Party has tapped into fear and anger over potential shifts in political economy to form a grassroots movement following in the historical traditions of the anti-New Deal American Liberty League, Joseph McCarthy and the witch hunts, Robert Welch and the John Birch Society, and Barry Goldwater and the right-wing Republicans of the early Cold War.
STEEP EXTREME RACE BELIEVE TRIAL
It sounded an alarm with deep resonance in conservative politics in America, and especially with the far right that has been locked in a trial of strength for the control of the Republican Party since the 1940s. Santelli's scream also provides clues as to the historical context of the Tea Party. At a time of declining retirement portfolios, rising health care costs, and fears about the viability of Social Security and Medicare, the administration's efforts to extend a health safety net to the forty million Americans without protection appeared as a bitter betrayal of those who already had such protections. The ensuing debates about health care reform poured gasoline on the fire. Although such aid was never forthcoming, the mere suggestion provoked a storm of opposition. As home values tumbled in 20, the federal government contemplated coming to the aid of distressed homeowners, including African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities historically excluded from the web of federal support. Since the Second World War, mainly white homeowners-beneficiaries of federal subsidies for mortgages and suburban development-had counted on rising home values to anchor their economic security.
In the midst of the most severe financial and economic crisis in over seventy years, the Tea Party has been able to tap deep veins of resentment and anger over potential shifts in the post-World War II political economy. The Tea Party movement burst onto the national stage on Tax Day 2009. ACORN, with the aid of its liberal supporters in Congress, had brought the American economy to its knees.
Fox News proceeded to explain what had happened: The Association ofCommunity Organizationsfor Reform Now (ACORN) had conned the American taxpayers into subsidizing mortgages for people that Santelli defined as "losers," that is, mainly new homeowners that managed their money badly and did not deserve to own a home in the first place. But what pushed Santelli over the edge was word that the Obama administration might provide mortgage relief to distressed homeowners. In the months leading up to this episode, presidents Bush and Obama had provided hundreds of billions of dollars under the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the Bank of America, Citibank, and other giants of American finance. On February 19, 2009, Rick Santelli, an entertainer and financial commentator on CNBC cable news unleashed his now famous scream against the Obama administration's economic policies. A Conservative Response to a Crisis of Political Economy
0 kommentar(er)
