To the Tea-Party Patriots

                          
A Berkeley Professor says Hello!

And you from the rural states

who object to the Wall Street bailouts

and flood my inbox with complaints

about private banks under cover

of the so-called Federal Reserve

being given the right to create money

which they then lend to the government

at interest

I recall a long friendly conversation

about restoring American values

with people much like you

at a Birch Society table surrounded

by exhibits of pickled tomatoes

and blossoms made from old nylons and copper wire   Scott War Conspiracy 37

at the Nevada County Fair

where each year on Constitution Day

to the music of the Ophir Prison Marching Kazoo Band

they reenact with authentic uniforms

and noisy puffs of cannon smoke

Civil War battles       

Your placards call for LIMITED GOVERNMENT

which could not be more timely –

there is a bill in Congress                                                                           S.3804

to censor the Internet

that will probably pass                                                         Gillmor Salon 9/28/10

Here is a common agenda

for freedom-loving Americans

let us all preserve the First Amendment

so you can keep the Second

or TWO PARTIES SAME RESULT

exactly my frustration

when it comes to our twin afflictions

of Wall Street dominance and Asian wars

so like you I invoke

Madison in the Federalist Papers

against the accumulation of all power

in the same hands                                                      Madison Federalist Papers

 

I have just read The Ruling Class

carefully designed to be your handbook

by Angelo Codevilla

guest of the Mother Lode Tea Party

and late of the Hoover Institution

the brains trust for the millionaires

who meet each summer in the Bohemian Grove

It is published by The American Spectator

published by billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife

It attacks The Ruling Class

blaming them as do you and I

for  the collusion of both parties

in financing the bailout of Goldman Sachs                                     Codevilla 31

the apparently endless series of wars

in which our Ruling Class has embroiled America                           Codevilla 23

and it defends as would you and I

the right of families to home schooling                                      Codevilla 60-61

and of localities to control their schools                                         Codevilla 71

but whereas for me the rulers

are those top-level millionaires

who have paid for both political parties

while seeing their own incomes

rise almost fivefold in thirty years                                   Scott Road to 9/11 2-3

for Codevilla the Ruling Class

consists not of the wealthy

but of those bureaucrats

who would tax them

and indeed of all those with

as David Frum puts it

more education than money                                                                       Frum

                                                           

who oppress the Country Class

Americans like yourselves

who think it is just

to spend the money they earn

to satisfy their private desires                                                           Codevilla 34

It seems that I

because I believe in evolution                                                         Codevilla 49

am part of the Ruling Class

along with trade unions

and those who believe in global warming                                     Codevilla 24

while the Country Class

includes not just you

but corporations and banks

forced by politicians to make loans for houses                               Codevilla 31

and even Fox News                                                                          Codevilla 59

(owned by the mogul Rupert Murdoch

whose personal wealth in 2007

was estimated at over $340 million)                                Encyclopedia of World Biography

Attributing to progressives

a ridiculous and hateful ideology

(such people cannot believe

that a Christian might be

their intellectual and moral equal)                                                  Codevilla 22

Codevilla seeks to deflect your anger

on to people like me

which is perhaps what we should expect

from a fellow of the Hoover Institution

and the Claremont Institute

funded by the usual

millionaires’ foundations

like that of Sarah Scaife

You are out in the streets

as members of what are billed

as spontaneous tea parties

but are you aware

that an Internet domain name

ChicagoTeaParty.com

was registered in August 2008                                        Ames and Levine Exposing

long before the convening

of any of your grass-roots events?

As for your being grass roots
do you know that you were organized

under umbrellas called Samspheres

by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation                                       Phillips

which meticulously hid                                                      Ames and Levine Exposing

its links to the ultra-rich

Koch brothers                                                                   Mayer Covert Operations

worth a combined $32 billion

as owners of the largest

private oil company in America                                      Ames and Levine Tea Party

with good reason

to dislike government scrutiny

For which Keith Olbermann on MSNBC

has called you an Astroturf party                                    MSNBC August 25,2010

the way Glenn Beck on Fox News

has sneered at America’s progressives

both ignoring the real pain

we all share at our loss of freedom

and our politics gone awry

Why does the Tea Party invite

a speaker like Ken Timmerman

to attack Big Government

at the same time he advocates

a US blockade of Iran                                                                 Bovard Tea Party

           

or John Yoo who denounces

the supersized executive

while still defending his memos

on enhanced interrogation

(or what most would call torture)

which even the Bush Administration

in the end found incorrect

or highly questionable                                               Newsweek, February 18, 2010

All this makes you the heirs

of the Moral Majority

a movement designed by six men

(one of whom was launched

with money from Sun Myung Moon)          Scott American War Machine 266n19

and funded by the Coors family

which raised a fuss about abortion

in order to split the democratic vote

elect Reagan

and thus maintain the global US system

of 761 military bases

at the cost of the budget deficit

you are now so worried about

You want what all of us should want

a more limited government

will you then help force Congress

to do what the law requires  — namely

review the state of emergency

we have had since 9/11

which has restricted habeas corpus

suspended the Posse Comitatus Acts

introduced permanent military surveillance

and provided for warrantless detention?

From Barney Frank, on the left,

to Ron Paul, on the right

there is a growing belief

that unrestrained military spending

is a danger to the budget                                                                           Green

 

In a land of barren ridges

while I was writing this

a small detachment of US troops

took fire from all four directions

on their way back from a village

whose radioed request for help

in digging a canal

turned out to have been only

a set-up for an ambush                                            CBS 60 Minutes Sept. 26 2010

in a land where we are not welcome

while General Petraeus has said

tacitly correcting his Commander-in-Chief

This is the kind of fight we’re in

for the rest of our lives

and probably our kids’ lives                                             Woodward Obama’s Wars

So while it is right to declare

that America is in crisis

and in need of a people’s politics

let us not be guided

by those who are profiting from

our loss of freedoms

and wars our country cannot afford

above all as we turn

to America’s most urgent priority

the defense of the constitution

let us be certain

as Confucius advised millennia ago

to call things

by their right names

Peter Dale Scott’s latest book of poems, Mosaic Orpheus, appeared in 2009 from McGill-Queen’s University Press. It can be ordered from Amazon.com. His other chief poetry books are the three volumes of his trilogy Seculum: Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror (1989), Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (1992), and Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000. In addition he has published Crossing Borders: Selected Shorter Poems (1994), published in Canada as Murmur of the Stars. In November 2002 he was awarded the Lannan Poetry Award.  

Poetry and other websites are encouraged to repost this poem (with attribution to www.GlobalResearch.ca).

                                   
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rick Ames and Yasha Levine, “Exposing The Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC’s Rick Santelli Sucking Koch, The Exiled, February 27, 2009,
http://exiledonline.com/exposing-the-familiar-rightwing-pr-machine-is-cnbcs-rick-santelli-sucking-koch/

Rick Ames and Yasha Levine, “Tea Party Flacks Are Drill, Baby, Drill Messengers Too,” Alternet, June 11, 2010, http://www.alternet.org/world/147124/tea_party_flacks_are_drill,_baby,_drill_messengers_too/

Jim Bovard, “Tea Party: Pro-Torture, Pro-War, Pro-Freedom?” Christian Science Monitor, April 23, 2010

Angelo Codevilla, The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do about It, An American Spectator Book (New York: Beaufort Books, 2010)

David Frum, “How the Elites Became Tea Party Enemy #1,” FrumForum, September 19, 2010,
http://www.frumforum.com/how-the-elites-became-tea-party-enemy-1

Dan Gillmor, “Hollywood wants to censor the Internet, and Congress is on board,” Salon, September 28, 2010, http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/09/28/worldwide_authority_for_american_copyright_cops

Joshua Green, “Cut the Military Budget,” Atlantic, June 2010,
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/06/cut-the-military-budget/58282/

Jane Mayer, “Covert Operations,” New Yorker, August 30, 2010

Kate Phillips, “The Sam Adams Project,” New York Times Caucus Blog,
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/19/the-sam-adams-project/

Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010)

Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)

Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation, 2008)

Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010)