Redefining the Status Quo

Kentucky ought to be quite familiar with the Grand Old Tea Party (GOTP). After all, we elected a very prominent member, Rand Paul, to the US Senate in 2010. He won over more traditional candidates twice, even though he espoused viewpoints that ought to have made him very unpopular in this state.

There was his insistence that the federal government was just too large and spent far more money than it should. Kentucky voters bought this, hook, line and sinker, even though the state was the beneficiary of the largess from that “bloated” federal government many times. Without help from the federal government, for instance, downtown Pikeville might look a lot more familiar to the old timers, as a lot of the cut-through was financed by the feds when they were flush with money in the sixties and seventies. And this is but the tip of the iceberg.

The GOTP was purported to be concerned about individual rights, but the individuals it seemed most concerned with were corporations. They were intent, for instance, on seeing that the Bush tax cuts for the significantly well-off would not lapse. And when the GOTP faithful showed up at any town meetings meant to discuss the Obama healthcare proposal, they let it be known they wanted no interference in the insurance market or in the healthcare profession whatsoever.

And all during the media frenzy that accompanied the GOTP phase of the 2010 elections, it was maintained that this was a grassroots movement, even though its organization and funding could be traced back to corporate interests as epitomized by Koch Brothers Industries, whose money helped elect, among others, Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker and a majority for the GOTP in that state’s legislature.

But if anyone would have you to believe the GOTP, whose self-proclaimed grassroots designation is widely known, would welcome a newer grassroots movement, the one that has become known as Invade Wall Street, they would be wrong. In fact, a lot of the GOTP members of Congress, for instance, have been quite disrespectful when making statements about the Invade Wall Street movement.

Eric Cantor, Rep., VA, still a darling of the Grand Old Tea Party and the author of the plan to drastically cut the federal budget, including a plan to eliminate Medicare, isn’t at all happy with Invade Wall Street. Cantor called the movement “growing mobs…intent on…pitting Americans against Americans”.

Other stalwarts of the GOTP have called the Invade Wall Street group hippies who are out to get a little notoriety, and nothing more. One conservative commentator on an MSNBC disdainfully told the Invade Wall Street group to “get a job!” And a Fox News commentator said she knew what they needed, then delivered her punch line with a sneer-“A shower!”

Perhaps it’s a matter of perspective: To working people, whose income is shrinking, Invade Wall Street is more important than it is to CEO’s whose incomes are growing exponentially. To the young people who are leaving college with far more debt than job prospects, this movement means more than it does to corporations that outsource jobs.

It’s a matter of how you define what’s acceptable as the status quo, and for the 99 per center’s protesting the largely untaxed status of the one per centers, the status quo needs to be redefined