Tea Party Motives: A Return to Plutocracy

http://www.finnwcontini.com

I'll be completely honest — considering the corruption of both major political parties, the idea of a third party returning to Constitutional values sounds like a pretty good idea.

The Tea Party claims it wishes to do that: To return America to what our Founding Fathers envisioned with a strict adherence to an original interpretation of the United States Constitution.

But if one looks closely, one will see the Tea Party's true motives: A return to a plutocracy, which is defined as a society where the super rich are in control and dictate policy to those who are in the middle and lower classes.

Sound familiar? It should. In states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Maine, Florida, New Jersey and others where Tea Party governors currently sit, unions, working families and the middle class are waking up to find their rights have been stripped away. The wealthiest among us have been given enormous tax breaks, while the working class must surrender its pensions to pay for them.

Those funding the Tea Party are the same who founded it: Billionaires like the Koch Brothers, who desire to pay no personal income or business taxes, who wish to remove employment protections for the average worker, and who hope to destroy unions by portraying them as socialist.

Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News, and Roger Ailes, who runs Fox News, have provided the Tea Party a round-the-clock platform to spread its disinformation to the public. Since the midterm elections of 2010, Fox News has been broadcasting that if millionaires and billionaires have to pay their fair share of taxes, America’s economy will collapse. Tea Partiers in Congress are willing to allow our country to default on its debt so billionaires don’t have to pay a dime more in taxes.

The Tea Party is not about returning us to the ways of our Constitution — it is an all-out effort to hijack democracy and remove basic, fundamental rights for the vast majority of Americans, to turn average citizens into slaves for the rich and powerful who believe they own this country for the simple reason that they possess more money than the rest of us.

If one were to look at history, one would discover why America was founded in the first place: Our ancestors escaped the plutocracy in England to establish a new country where its citizens have equal rights.

The Tea Party wants to take away the rights of all but the wealthiest, and that’s exactly what they’re doing in Tea Party-controlled states.

We can save ourselves if we wish, because each American still has the right to vote. For the 50% of Americans who do not vote because they believe it does not count, I implore them to vote in the next election and every election thereafter, to keep those who wish to enslave us from doing so.

If any Tea Party member reads this and has something useful to add, please feel free to do so. But hate, profanity and threats are not appropriate responses.

Intolerant conservatives and the Tea Party are given the figurative beating of their lives in Taking Conservatives Behind the Woodshed: The Right Has Never Been So Wrong, now on Amazon, or on Barnes & Noble for its Nook device.

A Different Kind Of Ordinary

http://www.finnwcontini.com

Sometimes ordinary people do extraordinary things. Gandhi challenged us to peaceful resistance and freedom; John F. Kennedy challenged us to land on the Moon; Cleveland Amory challenged us to promote animal rights. At some point, an ordinary person emerges as an extraordinary leader, to move us forward, to better our species, to challenge humanity to accomplish something.

I am a beneficiary of such a challenge from an executive at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle.

While I was working there on a dead-end temporary assignment in late 1997, Jed Selter walked up to me at a copy machine and said, "You can do better."

I thought he was talking about the copying task. I was wrong; he had just issued me a challenge.

He could tell from the way I carried myself that I was extremely depressed and dissatisfied with the direction of my life.

Jed invited me to a seminar he and his friend Gil Tumey created for other Boeing personnel, called IPPE: The Institute of Personal and Professional Effectiveness.

Along with roughly 300 Boeing employees, we talked about where we were, where we wanted to be, and more importantly, how to get there. Jed wrote a book called The Journey that conveys his personal story, explains why he helps others, and concludes with a poem I wrote for him.

Jed took me under his wing and asked me about my career aspirations. I told him I have always had a natural talent for writing and wished to become an author.

I was working on my first book at the time, a parody of John Gray's Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. My book was called Women May Be from Venus, But Men are Really from Uranus, and written under the pen name Katherine Black.

Jed read the first draft and said, "You can do better."

He was right. Instead of listening to everyone's opinions about how the book should be written, I wrote what comes natural to me: parody and satire that offers a different perspective.

I have since written many other books, which I am publishing as eBooks to reach a wider audience. While relationship parody is fun, I prefer political satire, and my latest book, Taking Conservatives Behind the Woodshed: The Right Has Never Been So Wrong, exemplifies my writing style at its best, though I have also written nonfiction about Microsoft's corporate duplicity and internal secrets.

But that's not where this story ends. Jed's random act of kindness that changed my life should be paid forward.

In order to leave this world a better place than I found it, I must positively change the lives of others. Using Jed's IPPE template, I seek young adults who were just like me in 1997: Going nowhere fast and dissatisfied with life, but believing each has something special to offer this world.

I befriend those people, teach them what Jed taught me, and after just a few months my new friends have gone from hopeless and pessimistic, to hopeful and optimistic.

"You can do better" was not a criticism, but rather a challenge.

My style is a little different from Jed's, but the outcome is the same: Just as Gandhi, JFK and Cleveland Amory inspired us to change, I strive to be a different kind of ordinary.