When the super-rich feel threatened, they foment grass-roots uprising on their behalf. Here's why it always works
BY ISAAC WILLIAM MARTIN - SATURDAY, SEP 7, 2013 09:00 AM PDT
In November of 2010 teabaggers had a wave election. 8 million Americans voted for republican congressional candidates claiming to be teabaggers.
Teabagger MC David Koch likened the electoral success of the tea party to the American Revolution. “It’s probably the best grassroots uprising since 1776 in my opinion,” he said.
He’s lying
Many of the tactics used were tried and tested by the rich throughout history. Proposals like a “balanced budget” was touted. It meant limits on taxes effecting mostly the rich and no different than in the 1970’s.
Steve King the idiot of Iowa wanted to repeal the 16th amendment Ron Paul introduces the Liberty Amendment , precisely as Willis Stone drafted it in 1956. This cutting of top income tax rates and other regressive moves continues to this day.
Massive money pouring into politics has increased polarization and created what Bill Maher and others have called “the republican bubble” where facts no longer exist.
The influx of money into politics following the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 50 (2010), is said to have given an edge to ultraconservative candidates whose policy proposals flatter the pocketbook interests of the very richest Americans.
..but that played only a part of the "rich peoples movement"
The tea party is fake and has been a fake front for the “rich peoples movement” whose agenda and tactics has been around for a long while in varying forms
Rich people movements are not new
When the Texas tax clubs under the leadership of J. A. Arnold mobilized for tax cuts in the top brackets, they were not expressing the demands of suburban consumers in a postindustrial economy; they were advocating for the interests of rural bankers in a predominantly agrarian economy.
When Edward Rumely and Vivien Kellems first began to commit civil disobedience in protest against the federal income tax, television had not yet brought images of the Civil Rights movement into the homes of millions of Americans. For much of the twentieth century, these movements relied on tactics that were decidedly old-fashioned even for their times.
In the 1940s, Rumely used direct mail techniques to bypass existing civic associations and recruit directly, because that was the model that he had learned in the Progressive Party.
In the 1950s, Kellems organized through women’s clubs, argued on the basis of constitutional rights, and attempted to inspire imitators through civil disobedience, because those were the techniques she had learned from the fight for woman suffrage. In the 1960s,
Willis Stone recruited supporters for the Liberty Amendment through fraternal organizations and veterans’ organizations, because those were the organizations in which he had acquired his own civic education after the First World War.
The tactics of all of these activists hearkened to the early decades of the twentieth century because these social movement entrepreneurs acquired their skills and organizing experience in social movement organizations of that era.
And this, the 16th Amendment argument from the right:
Many activists in rich people’s movements know that their movements have deeper roots in the early twentieth century. In particular, they have often portrayed their movements as reactions to the so-called revolution of 1913. The ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, according to these activists, was a turning point in the history of the United States. It marked the end of limited government and the beginning of a new era of expanding federal power. If any great social change of the twentieth century paved the way for rich people’s movements, according to this story, it was not economic growth or the development of the postindustrial economy or the development of new communications technologies, but the growth of the federal budget; and that development, the story goes, was set in motion by the Sixteenth Amendment.
So the republicans use the 16th amendment “expansion of Federal government” as cover for their real goal. Paying no taxes ("those are for the little people" - including teabaggers):
This activist story also gets the causal dynamics wrong. It is true that rich people’s movements would not have emerged in the absence of federal taxes on income and wealth. But such movements are not inevitable just because the Constitution authorizes progressive taxes. They did not emerge in direct response to the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment. To contemporaries, there was no “revolution of 1913.” It was not until after World War I that the dramatic consequences of the new federal income tax became clear. Nor did these movements grow in lock-step with the long-term expansion of the federal budget.
The article continues to describe in detail the 1%ers techniques of capturing the almost affluent or the "permanently just about to be affluent" is more like it, into protecting those most wealthy.
Many people like these campaigned for tax cuts in the top brackets because they believed they were also protecting their own economic security
And the rich use tactics of fear and radical demands designed to pull the moderates farther to the right.
Rich people’s movements in the twentieth century made extreme demands that made moderate groups appear comparatively reasonable. Sometimes they also used tactics that threatened public order—for example, by calling on businesses to disobey the Internal Revenue Service, or plausibly threatening to call a constitutional convention that could throw American politics into turmoil—and thereby permitted moderate conservatives to sell their own preferred policies as ways to co-opt an unruly movement and restore order.
Skipping to the end:
Rich people’s movements have a permanent place in the American political bestiary. As long as one of our great political parties is programmatically allied with the radical rich, it is safe to predict that rich people’s movements will continue to influence public policy in ways that preserve—and perhaps even increase—the extremes of inequality in America.
It’s a good read and covers a lot of very necessary ground imo - I didn't even come close to doing it justice, so hopefully another Kossack with the skills can cover this topic the way it deserves – turn this issue into a wedge sharp enough that separates the 1%ers from the people they would corral as permanently as they separate the same people from a chance at wealth
P.S. Let's make sure that the "rich persons movement" doesn't work ever - not in 2014 - not ever