Extremist tea partiers want to overturn 17th amendment so rich white men can rule america

The idea of curtailing the federal government is essentially the idea of curtailing the federal government so it can't use tax money to help poor folks who they mistakenly see as being almost only black and latinos, asians and other groups who aren't "real Americans" as they like to call themselves. They see such help as hurting themselves somehow.

 

Hard work is required, but at best is only partly correct. A great bit of the initial hard organizing work was done by paid experienced conservative activists paid by the Kochs and a few other billionaires. Then Fox News and the right wing media publicized them like crazy till the other media picked up on their first rather inconsequential actions.

Several hundred million dollars in seed money with near complete sync with a large media empire should not be discounted-- especially at the beginning.

It is much more difficult for actual movements dependent on only volunteers with at best intermittent access to the mainstream media that plays the both sides are at fault pseudo fairness game.

 

Dude, are you serious? Occupy Wall Street was grassroots. It didn't have big money supporting it.

The Tea Party was funded by the koch brothers and tobacco companies. They have been having rallies for over a decade. When you have money paying for rallies and organizers to get out the word and get people involved, it's going to make a difference.

It's like saying Obama gets great turnout by relying on grass roots efforts. That's simply not true. He has to pay a ton of money for get out the vote efforts.

Grassroots means it happened organically. Tea Party was an orchestrated construct. Doesn't matter what they talk about.

 

My understanding is that the tea party was born of a facebook status update back in 2009. One of those "Obama is a mooslim, repost this or you are GUTLESS" type posts.

 

You may want it to it to mean that, but it doesn't. Grassroots has nothing to do with money. It has to do with building from the ground up - thus the term "grass roots". And the tea party is the definition of that - all the energy and power of the party comes at the local level, regardless of who funds it or orchestrates it. The same cannot really be said of other political groups in the US.

As for the money issue, for all the talk about the money behind them, it is not remotely close to the money behind the Dems or traditional GOP. Money is not what has made the tea party what it is.

 

Yes, because it was the career politicians who screwed everything up over the last two weeks, and not the young, new radicals who don't know what the **** they're doing.

Oh wait.

 

It took over 200 years to ratify it, now they want to get rid of it? God have mercy.

 

^ Actually I was thinking of another amendment...still this is ridiculous.

 

I'd say it is a mixture of astroturf and grassroots.

 

Money certainly helps but money doesn't mean anything unless people participate, and I am not just talking about rallies. The real work is done in attending district and state caucuses. That is where delegates and the platform are decided on. That is where the Tea Party has had a biggest effect.

The problem was Occupy was that was pretty much all they did. They didn't actually try to get candidates elected or change party platforms.

 

Nice snark. What do you think of upending the 17th?

 

I think there's merits to the argument in favor of repeal ( in contrast to people here who view this as just "evil racist Tea Party antics lol"), but no, I don't support repealing it. It's already been tried, and the results were generally not for the better.

 

Occupy didn't have the backing and the kind of money it takes to influence local gov't in a scaled way.

It takes more than money, it takes a f-lode of money. When you can pay people to go around their local communities and recruit and put signs up constantly, and then pay fox news to drum up noise - yeah you can start a movement.

I remember the first Tea Party rallies and events and caucuses. They were laughingly empty.

Tea Party was purely created from a lot of money and a lot of Fox News and other paid bloggers and such. It was manufactured as a response to MoveOn.org

 

Tea party logic: FREEDOM! But we don't want you to elect your officials

 

You are making assumptions of what I believe. Some of them wrong.

I do see the tea party somewhat as a 3rd party, but they do not stand by themselves and operate as part of the Republicans party under Republicans leadership, otherwise they do not have much of any power at the national level.

Perhaps it's a bad example, but my "3rd party" reference was an example of why I think power shouldn't be concentrated to a few as related to the 17th amendment. I haven't thought much about parliamentary system in the U.S to hold an opinion on that.

 

WaPo piece on topic:

 

Actually it doesn't take that much money to show up at precinct caucuses. By law major political parties have to have them and they are open to the public. The problem with Occupy was that they were too busy trying to camp out rather than go to their precinct caucuses.

 

Exactly. The big difference between OWS and the Tea Party is that OWS never attempted to drive change through the electoral system - they just protested, often with no particular agenda or specific goals. The Tea Party also had no specific agenda or goals at first, but they did try to get people elected. The crazier, the better was the only real requirement.