Right now the Tea Partiers are mostly inchoate with a right-wing slant. Sooner or later they will probably find a leader and a voice. If the left doesn’t get involved in this process now, then the result could be scary right wing, zenophobic, racist (and heavily armed.)

But it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s my point. Their anger is based on real grievances, and those are shared by many on the left. Washington DC is indeed unresponsive, mired in corruption, while the banksters continue to siphon off billions. That’s the core of the problem.

Liberals and progressives need to stop defending Obama and DC, hoping he’ll somehow come to his senses and do the right thing. Good luck with that. The far left, which successfully organized massive Iraq antiwar protests, is comatose now during this crisis of capitalism they say they’ve waited for decades to happen. Most curious indeed. But they are no help now.

If the left doesn’t want Tea Partiers to end up going scary right-wing, then they need to get involved, get off the sidelines, and stop defending the status quo. Get involved in shaping the dialogue or suffer the consequences for not doing so. That’s my primary point.

Yes, some of the Tea Party movement is ugly. Yes, some of the Tea Party movement is race-based. Yes, some of the Tea Party movement is being bankrolled by conservative political groups — and all of it promoted by Fox News. But focusing only on those elements obscures the fact that some of what’s fueling the movement is based on a completely legitimate anger directed at Washington and the political establishment of both parties.

Think of the Tea Party movement as a boil alerting us to the infection lurking under the skin of the body politic.

Precisely. And they aren’t all nutcases either. Not even hardly.

A Tea Partier responding to my comment on Global Guerrillas about how there is common ground between left and right.

Tea Party United said…

Let’s brainstorm: what would a left-right alliance look like?

*The Goals:

Democracy as George Washington wanted it: End the party system. End the “culture war”.

End bailouts, have bailouts payed back. Do some Teddy Roosevelt style trust-busting – if a corporation is too big to fail, it’s a monopoly.

YES!

National Jury: a new branch of government, made up of randomly chosen citizens.

Develop all alternatives to imported oil.

Foreign policy as the Founding Fathers intended it: trade with all, alliances with none. End state-building projects and end missions and bases that exist to serve alliances, rather than direct defense (Ie, let Japanese taxpayers pay for Japan’s defense). Use Nuclear and Chemical weapons on Al Qaeda. If an enemy isn’t worth nuking, he isn’t worth fighting.

Oopsie, jumped the shark here, didn’t he? BTW, does anyone even know where al Qaeda is? Didn’t think so. Then, there are those pesky ethics questions that arise when you mass-slaughter non-combatants.

Hire Israelis to run security. They seem to know what they’re doing.

Improve civil liberties, government transparency, get rid of voting machines, increase turnout with vote-by mail, holiday on election day etc.

Cut taxes for the middle class. Pay for it by taxing the financial industry.

What else can left and right agree on?

*The tactics:

Vote out incumbents. Vote in primaries for politicians who follow our rules: no mention of irrelevant scandals, no talking about culture war issues, no changes to legislation on culture war issues. No donations from corporations, not being caught alive with lobbyists.

Boycott partisan media.

Boycott a short, easily remembered list of corporations. Mostly media and donors to the status quo.

Call-in-sick days in corporations that donate to politicians.

Protests/pickets at high-price fundraisers, banks, lobbying firms

Form local juries to debate local issues and pass (non-binding, at the moment) legislation.

Form/join local markets, militias, and local currency systems.

Skill sharing: Right teaches military skills, left teaches misc. (civil disobedience, scientific method etc.)

Works for me. Coalitions mean you you don’t have to agree on everything, just on some things. Imagine what could be accomplished by a mass coalition of left and right working together. Why, that would be the worst fear of both DC and the banksters.

Look, the only think Obama has done consistently, without fail, and fought unceasingly for, is to give Wall Street whatever it wants. That’s a primary reason why people are angry. Not just on the right, either.

And now it’s going to get even better to be a bank.

Why?

Because the first part of the Fed’s exit plan will reportedly be to increase the amount of interest the Fed pays on “excess reserves.”

Carbon Day Automotive plans to roll them out nationwide. Users can access all info, like billing and locations, off mobile devices.

Undersecretary for management at the State Department, Patrick F. Kennedy, told Congress that the State Department wanted to keep crotch bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab out of the U.S., but that intelligence agencies insisted that Abdulmutallab be let into the country.

Supposedly it was because blocking him would have blown a larger investigation. But wait, it appears al Qaeda had been penetrated at high levels years ago by the US and we could have killed bin Laden and didn’t. Plus, what’s up with all the shadowy ties between terrorists and CIA, etc.? This and much more, copiously documented at Zero Hedge.

But really folks, ZH is just bat-shit crazy with conspiracy theories coming out the gazoo, isn’t it? It’s like saying Lee Harvey Oswald defected to the USSR, married the niece of a secret police colonel, said boo hoo, I want to come back home, and was allowed to, no questions asked and could wander around freely.

Oh wait, that happened, didn’t it….

(Except, bwa ha ha, maybe the Lee Harvey Oswald who came back wasn’t the one who left. Now that’s a conspiracy theory.

Frankly folks, I haven’t a clue what to believe any more. Our government and politicians routinely lie to us. More than a few climate change scientists have been caught in evasions serious enough that it has badly damaged the credibility of global warming in general. Our financial system has been shown to be more corrupt, venal, and compromised than even hardcore Marxists dared believe, even as it now wobbles scarily above the precipice.

“Fall mountains, Just don’t fall on me.” Thanks, Jimi. We need to build something new. Really.)

Any serious survey of the Obama administration’s accomplishments and setbacks over the last year has to conclude that the administration is deeply in the red.

If current trends continue, this once mesmerizing Camelot-ish operation will be be seen in the history books as the presidential administration that — to distort slightly and inversely paraphrase Churchill — never have so many talented people managed to achieve so little with so much.

The problem, Clemons says, drawing on a FT article on the same topic, is that Obama has surrounded himself by an inner circle of just four, who are combative, not interested in policy, and who focus primarily on campaigning and power. This is at least as bad as Nixon was. Rahm Emmanuel in particular delights in being an asshole and alienating people. And Obama wonders why health care hasn’t passed?

And please, let’s have none of the rogue staffers excuse. Obama hired them. He knowns what they’re doing and clearly agrees with it. So, let’s be clear. The “core Chicago team” includes Obama too.

Clemons concludes:

Take action to fix the dysfunction of your office.

Otherwise, the Obama brand will be totally bust in the very near term.

Via AmericaBlog, who notes

And before any goes off on anonymous sources, Steve knows more power people in this town [DC] than anyone I know. If he’s writing this, it’s because he’s had 100 different people confirm to him that it’s true.

“There are … 13 bills that I know of in our Legislature that address our state’s sovereign right to make decisions in our own state, … and to say to the federal government, ‘What part of shall not infringe do they not understand?‘ ” [says a state legislator in Utah.]

DJ has more on his blog about this growing movement, which includes states in all regions, not just the West.