i dont really think your particular political viewpoint is problematic, cimmaron, for what it's worth.
and i don't often lay out where i come from here politically. i like direct democratic council forms in general. i used to think alot about social revolution. now i don't know what that could mean, really.
i think the koch brothers are dangerous not only for their ultra-reactionary corporate oligarchy political views but also because they're in a position to buy access to media-space and are willing to hide behind less--um---repellent viewpoints in order to construct networks. i think their views should be more widely known. i think there should be way way more transparency than there is in the funding process. at the moment, the central obstacle to transparency is coming from the organized right, and that for purely instrumental purposes. they've been able to use the united citizens decision to run a 3-card monty routine organizationally and have latched onto the tea party as an astroturf front. given that they can buy their way onto commercial media outlets and have free commercial time passed off as news at fox, they've been able to concoct the illusion that there is somehow a "new right" in motion. but that's really all about the same old assholes repositioning themselves so they don't have to take responsibility for their own records.
the koch brothers are a big part of funding that shell game.
i think they should be exposed at every turn, held to account. ideally, they should be stopped. but that's just because i don't think corporate oligarchy just an opinion, man.
maybe you do.
or it's like this:
Quote:
N.A.A.C.P. Examines Race in the Tea Party Movement
By KATE ZERNIKE
The nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization declared in a report released Wednesday that the Tea Party was “permeated with concerns about race,” an assessment that is likely to reignite a feud between the two groups.
The report by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People argues that Tea Party groups “have given platform to anti-Semites, racists and bigots,” and have attracted white nationalists looking for recruits.
“The Tea Party movement has unleashed a still inchoate political movement who are in their numerical majority, angry middle-class white people who believe their country, their nation, has been taken from them,” argues the report, called Tea Party Nationalism.
Written by Leonard Ziskind, who has written extensively on white nationalism, the report looks at what it calls six nationwide Tea Party networks at the core of the movement. It says that leaders of all but one — FreedomWorks, a libertarian group in Washington headed by Dick Armey, a former House majority leader – have raised questions about President Obama’s birth certificate or have ties to white supremacist groups.
Most of the groups the report focuses on are better described as social media networks that predate the Tea Party movement but have become popular among Tea Party activists, among others. The core of the movement remains local Tea Party and 9/12 groups, which are harder to analyze because of their diffuse nature; the report explicitly notes that it did not make an effort to examine these groups.
And a foreword from the N.A.A.C.P.’s president, Benjamin Todd Jealous, notes that the vast majority of Tea Party supporters “are sincere, principled people of good will.”
But the N.A.A.C.P. also points to signs at Tea Party rallies with explicitly racist or racially charged language. It notes that several black congressmen accused Tea Party supporters of shouting racial epithets at them in March, during a rally against health care legislation on Capitol Hill. And Mr. Jealous called on Tea Party leaders to repudiate this kind of racism, as well as ties to white supremacist groups and “birthers” within the ranks of the movement.
The N.A.A.C.P. passed a similar resolution seeking such a repudiation at its convention in July. Tea Party leaders reacted angrily, saying that there was no proof that the incidents outside the Capitol had occurred. And they have long said that they do not harbor racists.
Still, the N.A.A.C.P. report notes that slowly, Tea Party leaders have expelled leaders accused of making racist remarks – a move it calls “welcome first steps.”
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http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2...er=rss&emc=rss
you can't deny that the tea party has given a platform for racists, and that it's public manifestations are shot through with racist sentiments---from the birthers on to the very basic animating illusion that "our country's been taken from us."
but maybe you're alright with a political movement that is so very very easily used by racists and anti-semites on the one hand, and is being itself used by old-school republican political operatives on the other to hide from their own record.
maybe you think racism is just another opinion, man.
i don't.
o yeah...here's a link to the naacp report. i suggest you read it before you start bitching about the organization that released it.
http://www.teapartynationalism.com/i...=29&Itemid=102
it's very interesting.
if you're sympathetic to the tea party, you should be concerned about this stuff.
you don't have to approve and it's pointless to go down the road of saying "but the tea party isn't that" because we all know that the tea party isn't exactly anything. so it's the sum of parts and these are parts and if you don't like them it's probably better to agitate to get rid of the lunatics from within the tea party than it is to complain about people who point them out.
but that's just my opinion, man.