Letter to the Hagerstown Herald-Mail: Tea Party, Think again.

Dear Editor,

With regard to the Tea Parties, I'm glad that people are at least finally beginning to take an interest in their own governance. After decades of indefensible apathy, it's a start. Despite the consistent misrepresentations of the mainstream media, however, the Tea Parties did not originate in 2008 as a response to banker bailouts or the election of a so-called "socialist" president. The movement was born in 2007 to organize independent protests against taxation without representation. Only in the last year or so has it been hijacked by corporate PACs and "anti-Big Government" Republican hypocrites. Having fallen under the spell of these manipulative forces, the Tea Parties have already lost sight of their real enemy.

While there's been no essential change in my positions, I too was guilty of some flawed semantics when railing against Big Government in my blog. It wasn't because I thought there was anything inherently wrong with government, but because our current system of ever-expanding government is a creation and wholly-owned subsidiary of Big Corporations, most of which are transnational and have no interest in what's good for America. Lately, though, I've been coming to the surprising realization that, while the Feds are definitely "Big," they cannot be correctly defined as "Government." I'm reaching the rather ironic conclusion that I'm not so much opposed to Big Government as I am to the fact that Americans have no real government at all.

In an age in which drug addicts spend half their lives behind bars, but Wall Street CEOs get away with grand larceny and presidents get away with treason and murder, how can it be said that we live under any kind of government, big or small? Americans are not living in an era of Big Government, but rather in an era of orchestrated anarchism in which our corporate-owned "leaders" ignore the Constitution whenever it's convenient, and only enforce our laws against those who have no effective means of defending themselves. I wouldn't want to discourage Tea Partiers from voicing their opinions, but I do hope that they will 1.) return to their independent roots and 2.) wake up to who the real enemy is--not the puppets in the White House and Congress, but rather the global bankers and war industry executives who pull their strings.

Regan Straley
http://libyahill.blogspot.com/