What is a political tea party?

What do Tea Party supporters think of the financial industry?

• I heard a political analyst (can't remember who exactly, but I'll update this when it comes to me) say that Tea Party voters don't necessarily favor the Republican party over the Democratic party. Instead, Tea Party voters believe there has been a systemic degradation of American values/policies in recent decades, the fault of which lies in some wicked, corrupt manifestation in both parties. To me, it seems like one of the main things that has stayed consistent over the last few decades, regardless of the administration, has been the radical deregulation of the financial sector (under Greenspan particularly.) Considering Ted Cruz' wife holds a kush job with Goldman Sachs, I'm just wondering if Tea Party voters generally favor the financial industry or not.

• Answer:

  It depends on which "Tea Party" you're referring to. The original Tea Party, starting with Rick Santelli's opposition to the bank bailouts and Karl Denninger suggesting that citizens mail a tea bag to any congressman voting for more bailouts, think that the financial industry is one of the greatest scams of all time. Personal note:  I'm with Santelli and Denninger on that. Here's Santelli on the bailout: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Denninger: On January 20, 2009, the day of President Obama's first inauguration, he published a blog post calling on readers to mail tea bags to the White House and Congress on February 1, echoing a suggestion by a commenter on one of his earlier blog posts. However, Denninger later expressed concern with the Tea Party movement, stating in an October 20, 2010 blog post that Republicans had hijacked the movement and perverted its original goals to the standard Republican concerns of "guns, gays and God." Edit:  he opened up a post that I will now link to: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2137825 So long as we have an inauguration drawing this sort of crowd and not a protest about our government blowing $700 billion of our dollars so thatThe Pigmen of Wall Street can continue to rob our nation blind, then saddle us with the bill when their bets go bad, we will see no solution. I cannot take credit for the idea floated on the forum, but I do like it. It is time for We The People to send a strong message to Washington DC - no more. No more loading our children and grandchildren with debt. No more bailing out speculators and bankers who made bets they knew were unsafe at the time. No more bailing out people who came to Congress to demand the removal of leverage limits, got what they asked for, then blew themselves up with the very leverage they demanded to be able to use. No more. Therefore, on February 1st, which is more than enough time for Barack Obama to be seated in his chair in the West Wing, I am recommending an act of peaceful, lawful and yetunmistakableprotest. That is, to mail President Obama one teabag. Nothing dangerous, nothing illegal - just one teabag. Send one to your Congressman and one to each Senator. Later, when the weather is a bit warmer and fountains are running water (rather than frozen!) this sort of protest can be repeated with LOOSE tea in select cities. But for now, let's start with the symbolism, to be repeated each and every time our government votes or intends to do something similarly stupid - which I presume will include Obama's "stimulus" package. If we all mail our teabags on February 1st, it will send a strong message to Washington. Include a copy of this Ticker, another Ticker related to the many bailouts (pick one!) or write your own letter condemning the fraud and abuse in our banking and financial system - with the teabag being your symbolic refusal to quietly pay for it. Pass it around the blogs and email lists - its a bag of tea folks, and the obvious parallel to the Boston Tea Party of old should be instantly obvious to everyone who receives it. Denninger's blog, http://market-ticker.org/ still posts a lot of commentary on the corruption of the financial system.  More recently he has had a lot of documentation on something he refers to as Foreclosuregate, which is a scandal involving mortgage-backed securities -- REMIC law requires that all documents transferred into a trust (such as an MBS) before a specific deadline, and almost none of the mortgages in any MBS were transferred into the security before the deadline, and many were never transferred in at all, thus the chain of ownership of the mortgage is broken and the foreclosing entity has no right to foreclose.  In an answer to a previous question, I heavily reference Denninger's work on this topic:  Denninger as well as many other "original" Tea Party libertarians supported the Occupy Wall Street movement until it was hijacked by what is frequently referred to as the "Free $#!+ Army." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you're referring to the modern Tea Party, then there's not so much opposition to the banking system.  They don't view it as corrupt.  Here's one of their flagship websites:  http://americanthinker.com/ Going through the posts all the way back to 2007, there are a few that mention bailouts as evil, but virtually none documenting the corruption of the financial system and many in support of a less regulated financial system.  They blame the collapse on additional government regulations, not on any degree of industry corruption. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In short:  The original Tea Party consists of libertarian-minded folks who realize the corruption and collusion of government and "too big to fail" industries, and are almost as likely to have been Democrats in 2007 as they were to be Republicans.  The original Tea Party wants to see it all ripped up and restored back to the status of the financial industry in the 1980's prior to deregulation.  They believe that both parties are fully culpable in the corruption and both need to be 100% turned over. The new Tea Party consists of purist conservatives who believe the corruption lies solely in government, and the solution is to take over the Republican Party.