Tea Party or Me Party?

Today, in our local paper, an editorial was posted lamenting the defeat of a moderate Republican from our city council and the election of a Tea Party member.

The election was extremely close, and a recount was necessary to determine the winner.

In my memory, our city council positions have not been partisan.  Since the advent of the Tea Party, this has dramatically changed.  Now, the Tea Party has taken dead aim at public employees, and run candidates expressly committed to "reform" local government.

Their agenda of "reform" is not hard to discern.

First they oppose all unions of any kind; especially public employee unions.  Second they oppose all public employee pensions.  Third, they seek to privatize as much of the local government as possible; usually with hidden benefactors who stand to profit.  Fourth, they seek to reduce public worker workforces with no consideration of damage to public safety, service; etc.

You get the drift.  Radical anti-government, and anti-democracy forces are at work here.

It reminds me of fascist efforts in Italy and Germany in the 1930s.  The National Socialists began at the local level, literally taking over local and provincial governments on their way to national dominance.

The same thing is going on with the Tea Party.  There is an obvious effort to subvert local city councils, and state legislatures to work their radical will.  They promise reform, but only destroy and in many cases, corrupt the political process.  Many times, the reforms are covers for corruption; manipulating the democratic process to monetarily benefit cronies or  other hidden benefactors.

For example, one of our local tea party city councilmen, was given an all expense trip to Washington D.C., to lobby for a shopping mall, paid for by the developer of the shopping mall!  Amazingly, he saw nothing wrong with this; eventually paying for the trip himself, but never understanding the conflict of interest.

Since the Tea Party brags of its concentration on the Me not the We, such corrupt practices are seen as part of the "free market" approach.  Eventually, this deteriorates into corruption, since no public interest is defined, protected, or appreciated.

The damage is profound.  Everywhere the Tea Party has been ascending, public services, public education, and public safety have suffered.

The problem with ideological fanaticism, it is usually makes for very bad government.

For years, our city was one of the best managed in Northern California.   Now, we have an ideological city council, swinging to the hard right, and our streets have more pot holes, our police department is shrinking, our fire department is shrinking, and our local government is struggling.  And in the background sits the inevitable corruption, just waiting for an opening made possible by fanatical belief that private is better than public.

Public services, governed by democratically elected councils,  were established because of the inevitable corruption that private services bring.  It was done for good reasons!  The Tea Party wants us to go back to the era of private fire departments and police departments paid for by mob bosses.

In the "Old West", usually the local saloon hired the sheriff, who enforced the "Law" to aid the saloon.  We stopped that privatization for good reason.

The Tea Party or the me party; nevertheless, it all works out to bad government for all of us.