Tea Party Carjacking

A lot of comparisons are being made between the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements. Both started from a sense of outrage over the bailout of the bankers who caused the collapse, while the rest of the country is sinking into a mire.

The right says that Occupy Wall Street is just a bunch of fruit cakes. But the Tea Party started out pretty much the same way. Instead of camping in the parks, though, they brought semi-automatic weapons to town hall meetings, or screamed bloody hell about keeping the government's grubby hands off Social Security and Medicare, which they appeared to not realize were government programs in the first place.

But the Tea Party was quickly carjacked by Fox News and the Republican Party, and people like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, the Koch brothers and Clarence Thomas' wife. Fox News even falsified coverage to make Tea Party rallies seem larger than they actually were. Now the Tea Party is mouthing the Republican Party line of less regulation on Wall Street. They blame Barney Frank for somehow forcing banks to lend money to people who couldn't make the payments.

But what really happened was this: loan officers were paid by the head to get suckers into adjustable rate mortgages that started out affordable, but soon were beyond the ability of the borrowers to pay. These weren't just poor black folks. Everyone and their cousin bought houses they couldn't really afford, or bought multiple dwellings as "investments" that they would flip, or took out home equity loans to cash in on their real estate, which in the bubble mentality group-think would always skyrocket in value. In the tight market that ensued, speculators drove prices way up, forcing everyone to take out larger loans for overvalued properties. The guys who wrote the loans took their money and ran, dumping the loans on someone else.

Wall Street took those bad loans, intentionally making false assumptions about the borrowers' ability to repay, and then hid their poor quality by bundling them with good loans into giant packages of investment securities called CDOs. The rating agencies knowingly rubberstamped these as being AAA rated, because they were being paid by the banks to do so.

Then some of those investment banks created hedge funds that bet against the very same faulty securities that they had helped create. When doubt began to spread about these CDOs the whole house of cards began to collapse. Lehman Brothers was allowed to go bankrupt and that caused a real panic, resulting in the bailout and the mess we're in.

It's now at the point where even normally responsible people who are completely capable of repaying loans are just letting them go into default because they owe far more than the property is currently worth, because its value was driven into the stratosphere by speculators and overall economic conditions have deteriorated. Wall Street immorality is now business as usual for the rest of the country.

Under the Bush administration the regulation of Wall Street fell into disrepair and disuse, becoming a muddy, rutted road without any adult supervision. As the bankers' giant limousines race down Wall Street, they soak the average guy with the mud from the bailout and the increased "fees" they charge us just to get our money out of the bank. All the while the bankers sit in those limousines sipping champagne with their girlfriends who are all dolled up with jewelry from Tiffany's, paid for by giant bonuses that come out of our hides.

The Tea Party is now the tail wagging the dog of the Republican Party. But they've forgotten what got them mad in the first place, and have let nonsense like Obama's birth certificate and national health care distract them from the real problem: Wall Street greed and incompetence. Now they're demanding that even the meager regulatory improvements of Dodd-Frank that were made in the wake of the bailout be abolished and Wall Street be free to do it all over again.

But the Occupy Wall Street crowd is still mad at the bankers sneering at them from behind their tinted limousine windows.


Who are the real fruit cakes?