A Huge Win for the Tea Party

From Nick Carey at Reuters:

The outcome is the latest evidence of a growing partisan climate in American politics that values confrontation over compromise and has led to gridlock in Washington.

It also suggests that some voters will support a politician who seeks to balance the government budget by cutting spending and reducing pensions and benefits for government workers rather than raising taxes…

“This is a huge win for the Tea Party,” said Matt Batzel, Wisconsin state director of national conservative group American Majority Action, which worked with local activists. “Time after time they have answered the call to defend Scott Walker,” he said of the group that seeks deep cuts in U.S. government spending.

Here in Greensboro, our city council spent most of last night’s session discussing ways to finance a new performance art center. Ironically, at the same time, Wisconsin voters were putting down a recall effort for their Tea Party governor. Recently, NC voters enacted a referendum against same-sex marriage and you can bet at the next opportunity, the Republican-led legislature, with newly elected governor, Pat McCrory, will begin to enact similar cost-cutting measures here.

With last night’s victory the writing is on the wall: the left is not sufficiently motivated to stave off unhinged attacks from the right on public jobs and pensions. Unions don’t have a presence here, but teachers, firemen, police officers, minorities and the poor surely do, and they appear to be squarely in the cross hairs of the contagion about to sweep this nation, known as austerity.

Never mind that austerity has never worked and only serves to increase suffering, with the final outcome of destabilizing governments. However, like the frog in the pot, we continue to sit quietly as the Tea Party inevitably turns up the heat. We may already be beyond the point where doing something about it will make a difference. In one or two more elections, the Tea Party will have captured nearly every elected office and they may already have control of the military. Therefore, it is a foregone conclusion that the next wave of political action to assail us will be fascism.

Unbelievably, the current president has abridged our civil rights to such an extent that illegal domestic surveillance, arrest, detention, torture, prosecution and assassination are becoming commonplace and will play right into the hands of the rising Christofascists, enabling the final unthinkable outcome of totalitarianism.

And to think it all began with envy of our neighbors’ public jobs and pensions.