Quote:
Originally Posted by KevinW
The tea party is reported, rightly or wrongly in the UK as a right wing fringe movement gathering momentum to the embarressment of the republican party, who fear that association with them will loose them seats in waivering marginal states. dont really know if this is correct or not.
i also didnt understand David's comment on socialism and serfdom.
im probably ignorant of US sentiment, but i also dont understand the socialism connection.
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I wrote an answer to this which I haven't published yet...might as well here.
I read Reich's WSJ Opinion that business leaders should fear the Tea Party and wrote a response--as both a Tea Party Organizer and a businessman.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...086257706.html
Free Market Business Has Nothing to Fear From the Tea Party
It is both sad and unfortunate that Robert Reich, as noted in his 29 October 2010 opinion in the Wall Street Journal, thinks the Tea Party ideals are "extreme or fringe," and that "Business leaders should be standing up to this dangerous idiocy..." Wanting to balance our nation’s checkbook is not "extreme, fringe, or idiocy." As a business owner who organized Utah's first Tea Party (with the express purpose of unseating Senator Bennett), I can firmly state free-market business has nothing to fear from the Tea Party.
I wish all Americans could see what I have seen. Perhaps we would then all understand the true suffering unleashed by ill-advised TARP, bailouts, and stimulus packages. Tea Party people understand "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result." I have seen with my own eyes the long-trodden "Road to Serfdom" in the ashes of companies across this world who were anointed "too big to fail."
In early 1995 I started to build my own American dream when I landed in an enormous aircraft factory in Poland which produced three MiG's a day at the height of the Cold War. The factory had been in a tailspin after 1990 when the Soviet Union had cancelled all their military contracts. By the time I arrived, the situation at PZL Mielec was grim. Day after day I walked past somber lathe and mill operators who stood motionless behind a thousand silent machines--waiting for someone, anyone, to give them work. The lights were off because Poland's defense industries could no longer afford to keep them on.
Slowly, the fear of uncertainty enveloped the city. As time passed, I watched the tail spin of PZL Mielec, a company "too big to fail," slide into an ever-constricting death spiral. I was there the day the guards abandoned their posts. I was there the day some 20,000 men and women, who had endured a lifetime in Poland under the odious chains of socialist rule, lost their jobs and were turned out in the cold. I was there the day the life of Poland's crown jewel of Socialist State, "The People's Aircraft Company," was snuffed out in a fiery crash. I was there the day the once thunderous skies over the “People's Aircraft Factory” were stilled.
The Polish bailouts were bankrupt. The government failed to keep their promises to their very own people. Socialism was defeated--but tragically, so were the workers. Soon, and endless stream of displaced men lined up at the door of our newly formed factory to beg for work. I saw the fear in their eyes and the smoldering wreckages of families who wondered how to survive. Their lives were cheated by those who governed in egalitarian tyranny.
Later, the US Department of Energy asked my brother and I to travel to Snezhinsk, Russia to work with Minatom and Russia's top nuclear weapons engineers. Snezhinsk is the "closed city" where Russia developed their first atomic bomb. People who went in--never came back out. Gary Powers (the U2 pilot) was shot down trying to take pictures of the city we walked through. The US government was afraid Russian weapons engineers would sell their secrets to Iran or to other undesirables because they had no work, no money, no life. The DOE asked us if we could convert those engineers to a free-market economy (as we had done in the old MiG factory in Poland) to prevent a world-wide catastrophe.
Over the course of a few years I worked with those engineers. There were many times we were able to wander off just to talk--away from the interpreter (who was undoubtedly KGB). Polish is quite similar to Russian so I was able to roughly communicate. Sadly, all they spoke of was getting their children OUT--out to America, the land where dreams come true. At night, I watched those brilliant men surrender their lives to the nightmare of vodka. After falling unconscious, the women carried them home. Yes, the women. The women swept the streets. The women operated the lathes and mills. The women worked on the streets with pick axes and shovels. The women stood in the indescribable Siberian cold and sold trinkets to support their families. The women paid "protection" money to the police who constantly harassed them. The women paid the price.
The Tea Party people are mad because President Bush opened Pandora's box and threw our economy into an ocean of debt with the passage of TARP. Now politicians deceive us saying the cement shoes of over 17% real unemployment--of their own making--are really life preservers. Their claims that each new program is generating "savings" are somewhere between delusions and lies. You can no more save the free market by abandoning free market principles than Chamberlain could have saved Europe by abandoning the Czechoslovakian people to Hitler’s National Socialists. I wonder, was TARP “Prosperity for our time?”
Obama famously told "Joe the Plumber" that he just wanted to "spread the wealth around." Tragically, Obama is repeating a mistake played out time and again throughout human history. For untold thousands of years, kings and rulers looted their subjects. Then, the productive hid their greatest wealth--their mind--from the asphyxiating greed of those in power, thus, impoverishing all and creating a stagnate world of despair. Poverty can not be banished by mortgaging debt or by changing workers into beggars. I have seen the disease of wealth destruction--masquerading as wealth redistribution--it inevitably metastasizes into trickle-down despair.
Trickle down despair is a sword with two edges--it cuts rich as well as poor. Undeniably, poverty breeds despair. I have lived and walked among those who suffered. But confiscating wealth from the rich drives producers into economic exile and countries into bankruptcy. As Margret Thatcher said, invariably, other people's money runs out--leaving the poor to pay the price of infernal socialist designs. During the election, Obama proclaimed, "At a moment like this, the last thing we can afford is four more years of the tired, worn-out, old theory that...prosperity trickles down..." Ironically, the “tired, worn-out, old theory” of trickle-down-economics is actually quite new. It was born when 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence and then defended it with their blood. They boldly proclaimed to the world they were free to produce, free to pursue their own happiness, and free from the confiscation of their wealth by looters and tyrants. Those men took the first hammer blows to the foundations of the real tired, worn-out, old theory, that power and wealth should be taken from the desperate many and given to the privileged few. As Ayn Rand said, “So long as wealth was made by conquest, there was little to conquer."
I have lived and worked in the depths of socialist hell. As a businessman, that's why I started the Tea Parties here in Utah. I have helped to organize 17 more since then. According to Sam Adams Alliance research, 47% of the people in the Tea Party are, like myself, newly engaged citizens in the political process. We are a force that will not go away. We are engaged. We are educating ourselves. We are learning the process. Mr. Reich, we invite you to come to our next Tea Party and find out who we really are and what we stand for. There you will meet some of the kindest, most patriotic people in our country. Who knows, you just might find some life-long friends; I know I have.
In December of 2008 I vowed to do everything in my power to remove Senator Bennett from office. With the help of countless people across the state of Utah, we succeeded in that goal in May of 2010. On Tuesday, the Tea Party removed many of those in congress whose fingerprints stain foul legislation. In 2012 the Tea Party will remove President Obama from office. Only those supporting socialist policies, Republican and Democrat alike, have anything to fear from the Tea Party.
David Kirkham, President
Kirkham Motorsports
Utah Tea Party Organizer