Dear Tea Party:
I heard you've been studying the Constitution. That's great! The Left loves the Constitution. We have some common ground there. In fact, liberals have been talking a lot about the Constitution for the last ten years. (You might want to check out a short book by Naomi Wolf called "The End of America: Letters to a Young Patriot," published in 2006.)
I can tell you that the Left is feeling frustrated these days, just like you. Believe it or not, we're not well-represented in Washington. We wanted a green energy policy but that has largely been ignored. We wanted a public health insurance option but that was completely excluded from the health care debate. We wanted secret detentions to stop but they haven't. We wanted out of Iraq and Afghanistan but Obama's digging in deeper. We wanted the people who caused the Great Recession to be brought to accountability but they're still being coddled. We wanted to take back government from corporate control but that hasn't happened. They're just not listening to us liberals in Washington!
I know many of you are hurting from the financial collapse. You've lost your homes, your jobs and your businesses. Many liberals have suffered the same, and we want to do something about it. You are not happy with the way Washington is operating, and neither are we. We feel your pain.
We have so much in common – where we differ is on the facts. But that's good news, too, because the facts can be ascertained if we just put some effort into finding them. You know what? We should work together. Rarely have so many outsiders had so much motivation to effect change.
But before we can work together, we have to settle four major areas of difference:
- Get your facts straight on recent history. You need to come to terms with the reality of what occurred during the years 2001 – 2008.
Who did you vote for in 2004? If you voted for Bush, you voted for war, debt, torture, big government meddling in private lives, and an unleashing of "shock and awe" on the Constitution. Many were understandably fooled into thinking Bush was a moderate in 2000, but by 2004, it should have been obvious to anyone paying attention what Bush was really up to. This was no secret.
Where were you when the Bush administration was wiretapping American citizens? Where were you when our military pulled an innocent Afghan taxi driver out of his cab, threw him in a dungeon and tortured him to death? Where were you when President Bush lied us into a $3 trillion war which didn't make our country any safer? Some of us liberals spoke out, but you just called us "surrender monkeys."
Where were you when the Bush administration tripled the national debt? Where were you when the national energy policy was handed over to Exxon? Where were you when scientific reports were doctored and honest judges were fired for political reasons? Some of us liberals spoke out, but you just called us "enviro-nazis" and "the loony left."
You helped elect an actual tyrant – twice – and many of you even defended him to the very end of his last term. And now that we have a moderate, rational president who tries to listen to all sides, you spring into righteous outrage and yell "tyrant." This is insane! Is it possible that since you had a job while our country was creeping toward dictatorship, you just didn't care?
- Acknowledge the corporate control of Washington. Once you get your facts straight on recent history, the next thing you need to do is to see clearly who calls the shots in Washington.
Way back in 2001, Robert Reich proclaimed "Business is in complete control of the machinery of government," and gave a long list of instances in which legislation that very year was designed to help large corporations. Today, it's even worse. Energy corporations write the energy legislation, financial corporations write the finance legislation, insurance corporations write the health insurance legislation. And if any of them break the law, they have an army of lawyers who can get them off the hook (as Exxon did after the Valdez spill).
Most disturbing of all, the Supreme Court has just opened the door to unlimited corporate money in elections. Corporate power just keeps growing, and the few voices from the Left who point this out are continually drowned out by the very loud voices from the Right saying that government is too big. The fact is, neither Congress, nor the president, nor any government agency has been able to effectively stand up to corporate power, and the Tea Party Movement would only reinforce the status quo.
And how about those two political parties? They're really both the same, right? Wrong. One is 100% controlled by corporate interests; the other is 50% controlled by corporate interests. That is not an ideal choice, but it is a choice nevertheless. One party is salvageable, the other is not.
- Learn to trust the experts again. Yes, there really are people in this world who spend their lives studying boring things like science, history, and city planning. None of them are perfect, but they sincerely care about discovering the facts and finding real solutions to real problems. There are well-established processes for keeping them honest, like peer review. One scientist's ego is kept in check by all the other scientists' egos. It's really a form of competition. You like competition, right?
Here's an example: thousands of scientists say climate change is occurring, is probably caused by human actions, and the latest studies show that it will result in sea level rising by 20 feet this century. (See this link to read a report by Newsweek's excellent science writer Sharon Begley.) Those scientists know more about science than you and I combined. Moreover, it's a pretty serious future they're talking about. Hundreds of millions of people who live near the coasts of the world will lose their homes and livelihoods before the end of this century because of climate change. You know what it feels like to lose your home and livelihood, don't you, living now in the Great Recession?
- Keep your guns at home, locked up. You're going to have change your attitude about guns. They're fine for hunting and recreation, but they're not all that useful any more for defending liberty. In 1776 they were used to defeat a monarchy. Monarchy is now dead and gone. Our $1 trillion-a-year military establishment didn't protect us from 9/11, so I don't think your rifle is going to add much fire power to that. A rifle can not protect the Constitution. Our powers of reason, compassion, cooperation and innovation CAN.
So, what could a Tea Partier and a liberal agree on? Let's start with government spending. I know you want less. How concerned are you about a massive defense establishment which spends $1 trillion of your tax money every year in peacetime – i.e., not counting the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan – and maintains over 700 military bases all over the world? What would the founding fathers say about that? And that $1 trillion-a-year defense establishment didn't even prevent the 9/11 attack, which cost a mere half million to pull off. In other words, the money is a massive waste. The libertarian Cato Institute recommends cutting the defense budget in half . Guess what? We liberals agree!
And there's probably a lot more we could agree on.
As Jim Hightower recently wrote, "the true political spectrum in our society does not range from right to left, but from top to bottom." Let's put aside the labels of left and right for a bit and figure out how to wrest power from the tiny minority who have manipulated the law, politics and the media to become obscenely wealthy. Join the reality-based community. We need your energy. Get your facts straight, get your attitude right, and then let's work together to bring back government of the people, by the people and for the people.
Very Sincerely,
Robert Wilks