Tea Party movement trying to take over GOP
The Tea Party movement ignited a year ago, fueled by anti-establishment anger. Now, Tea Party activists are trying to take over the establishment, ground up.Judging by the volume of emails I get from their Houston affiliate, they are very active and they are serious about taking over the infrastructure of the Republican Party. They have certainly energized voters who are unhappy with the Democrats and that is clearly a good thing for the GOP and the country. The stimulus and the bailouts first got their attention and the health care bill made them even angrier. The GOP would be wise to seize these issues and ride them to victory.Across the country, they are signing up to be Republican precinct leaders, a position so low-level that it often remains vacant, but which comes with the ability to vote for the party executives who endorse candidates, approve platforms and decide where the party spends money.
A new group called the National Precinct Alliance says it has a coordinator in nearly every state to recruit Tea Party activists to fill the positions and has already swelled the number of like-minded members in Republican Party committees in Arizona and Nevada. Its mantra is this: Take the precinct, take the state, take the party — and force it to nominate conservatives rather than people they see as liberals in Republican clothing.
Here, in a perennial battleground district outside Philadelphia, Tea Party activists are trying to strip the local committee of its influence in choosing the Republican nominee to run against Representative Patrick J. Murphy, a Democrat who won the seat in 2006 by about 1,500 votes.
After the local party said it would stick to its custom of endorsing a candidate rather than holding an open primary, Tea Party groups decided to hold their own candidate forum where people could cast a ballot. If the party does not yield, the groups say they will host a debate, too.
“We kind of changed the rules,” said Anastasia Przybylski, one of the organizers.
The Tea Party movement, named after the tax revolt in 1773, might be better described as a diverse, rambunctious and Internet-connected network of groups, powered by grass-roots anxiety about the economy, bailouts and increasing government involvement in health care. At one extreme are militia members who have shown up at meetings wearing guns and suggesting that institutions like the Federal Reserve be eliminated. At the other are those like Ms. Przybylski, who describes herself as “just a stay-at-home mom” who became agitated about the federal stimulus package.
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I think they should also focus on the tax issue the way Scott Brown has in the Massachusetts senate race where he aggregated the health care taxes, energy taxes and the allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire into a $2 trillion tax increase next year. Democrats are also vulnerable on national security where Obama is already talking about withdrawing troops from Afghanistan before many of the new troops are deployed.
The same people who thought that Ronald Reagan was so great? Reagan who started the run up to the largest deficits in US history turning the US from the world's biggest creditor to its biggest debtor, alternately slashing/raising taxes more than any president before him, enlarging civilian government & massively enlarged the military. Responsible for the Iran-Contra affair, the most serious constitutional scandal since Watergate (lied about it), resulting in a greater number of senior officials being indicted, forced to resign or accused of illegal or unethical conduct than any administration in the 20th century. Financially & fiscally followed by what happened under Bush 1, remember S&L and Neal Bush?
ReplyDeleteUnder Clinton both deficits & national debt were reined in somewhat. There was a portent of what was to come with the Capital Management Fund Fiasco in 1998 losing $4.6 billion. As then the most prominent example of what the wonders of overleveraging can do. Even if the strategy is devised by Nobel Laureates! The Federal Reserve Bank NY, then run by Alan Greenspan, organised a $3.625 billion bail-out by the major creditors in order to avoid a “wider collapse in the financial markets” Despite which the fund folded in 2000.
Then along comes Bush 2, The Faux Texan, who beat even the Gipper in establishing new levels of deficit and national debt. Not to forget The Three Trillion Dollar War, the only conflict since the War of Independence to be fought on credit.
Now those fiscally risible Republicans controlled Congress from 1994 until 2006. It was Bush's SEC regulator, Chris Cox, who reduced the "net capital" requirements for investment banks in 2004. This decision, pushed for Hank Paulsen, then CEO of Goldman Sachs, was to allow five firms to legally violate existing net capital rules that in the past 30 years had limited broker dealers debt-to-net capital ratio to 12-to-1. Instead, the 2004 exemption, only given to these five firms, allowed them to leverage up to 30, even 40 to 1!
Who were the five that received this special exemption?
Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch & Morgan Stanley. The result? Three of the five broker dealers went to the wall!
An allegation made by Lee Pickard, a former SEC official, is that this rule change in 2004 led to the failure of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers & Merrill Lynch.
"The SEC allowed five firms, the three that have collapsed plus Goldman Sachs & Morgan Stanley, to more than double the leverage they were allowed to keep on their balance sheets & remove discounts that had been applied to the assets they had been required to keep to protect them from defaults."
The failure of these firms was to be the start of the GFC, which one of my astute sons says is the Global Financial Chicken, as in coming home to roost. My own take is the WST, Wall Street Tsunami. where the wave of toxic debt sweeps down Wall Street, out over the world's financial markets. When the waters recede leaving behind the stinking mess that was "The Free Market." Where even the Swiss lost money!
This then requiring, it could be said compelling, governments all around the world, of all sorts of political persuasions to step in to right their economic ships after the damage sustained from the WST