Tea Party Populism Is Dead. The GOP Is Back in Bed With Wall Street.

[applegrove]

Tea Party Populism Is Dead. The GOP Is Back in Bed With Wall Street.

By Alec MacGillis at the New Republic

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120065/midterms-are-exploding-myths-anti-wall-street-tea-party-republicans

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Now, the game may finally be up for good. Republican candidates are still doing their best to co-opt lingering Tea Party fervor, even as the party has done its best to quash conservative primary challengers in Senate races in Kentucky, Mississippi, and elsewhere. But the lines of allegiance are clearer than ever. First came reports earlier this month that Wall Street was spending heavily on behalf of Republican Senate candidates with the very specific aim of keeping Sherrod Brown, the gravel-voiced Ohio Democrat, from assuming the chairmanship of the Senate Banking Committee, as he might just do if the Democrats retain the majority. In past elections, The Washington Post reported, "securities and investment firms have hedged their bets by donating roughly the same amount to both parties. But this time Wall Street has handed Republicans nearly two-thirds of the $115 million it has contributed to 2014 campaigns..."

Wall Street’s heavy investment to keep Brown from taking the gavel is striking given that Brown is not exactly William Jennings Bryan or Huey Long, notes Dennis Kelleher, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who now runs a pro-financial reform organization called Better Markets. But even though Brown is not a firebreathing populist, he’s considered unacceptable by the banks. “Wall Street doesn’t like anybody who doesn’t agree with them almost all of the time, or someone who is smart enough and stand-alone to question them,” says Kelleher. “If you’re not viewed as one of the boys who’s going to go along with them, they’re not going to like you.” And the money to stop Brown and the anonymous pot shots against him are coming from a specific sector of the financial industry, notes Kelleher. “When you see complaints, it’s almost always coming from the handful of too-big-to-fail banks,” he said. “The big regional banks, the community banks aren’t criticizing Sherrod Brown… When you get to the core people who are complaining, it’s the handful of too-big-to-fail banks.”

The irony, adds Kelleher, is that breaking up these banks, as Brown and others suggest, would make the country’s financial system more robust. “If instead of having a bank with $2.5 trillion under management, you have three banks with $800 billion, is the country really worse off? You’d have greater competition and greater diversity of products,” he said. “Even if it stayed a $2.5 trillion bank and was regulated in such a way that the bank is not a threat to the country, the country would be better off. But the bank executives and their bonuses would not be better off, and that’s why you have the anonymous vilification of Sherrod Brown.”

And it’s not just the banks who are making preferences clear with their campaign giving. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is more tilted toward Republicans than ever, with only five Democrats among its 280 endorsements. (If one needs any further proof of the corporate absorption of the Tea Party, consider that the Chamber is running ads against Kay Hagan in North Carolina that feature Rand Paul, the great Tea Party hero of 2010.) Business PACs have also pushed their giving toward Republicans in close Senate races this year, the Wall Street Journal reported this week: "Political-action committees created by businesses had given 61% of their donations in those races to Democrats this election cycle through June. That reversed in the closing months of the campaign, with only 42% going to Democrats and 58% to Republicans in the July-to-September quarter..."



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[Populist_Prole]

1. K&R. Teabagger party WAS/IS always Wall St

The initial ( ostensibly ) non-partisan, faux populist "take our country back" TP was co-opted almost immediately by evangelical racist wingnuts. Corporatism was always the engine room of the baggers.

Being nothing more than a renaming of the far-right of the GOP; those people weren't exactly hostile to Wall St from the get-go.

[maced666]

2. They were and are Wallstreet.

Disguised as middle Americans. Plants at rallies.
It was always about Wall Street.

[BuelahWitch]

4. Yep, Astroturf all the way n/t

[GoCubsGo]

3. They never got out of bed with Wall St.

They were just having an affair with a bunch of dummies who are too blind to see who their one true love really is. They're still stringing those dopes along, sadly.

[Bluenorthwest]

5. Ted Cruz's wife works for Goldman Sachs.

They are the Street.

[True Blue Door]

6. Tea Party BEGAN as insurance industry astroturf against Obamacare.

If it ever had any genuinely populist strains, they were all of the white supremacist / survivalist militia / Neo-Nazi variety.

[Kingofalldems]

7. They were never out.

[Teamster Jeff]

8. And we are stuck with the fake Republicans. Triangulating down the toilet

[LWolf]

9. Wall Street's gonna need a bigger bed.

With all of the neo-liberal Dems already there.