MUSKEGON, Mich. – The Muskegon Tea Party has scheduled a rally near here for April 15. It is important to take a look at them and their Republican cohorts to see what they are up to and what they really want.
First, of course, in worshipful homage to the rich, there was the tax cut for the wealthy, $1.8 billion from Michigan’s new Republican leadership and more than $700 billion from the newly tea party-led U.S. House of Representatives in Washington.
Where will these cuts be made? Planned Parenthood, a program that provides cancer screening and birth control for poor women will be eliminated. The WIC program (Women, Infants and Children) is also slated for elimination. Head Start, the primary day care for poor families that provides a safe learning environment for children will also be removed if the tea party/Republican plans are implemented. School breakfast and lunch programs have always been targets and continue to be so, but now with, the dubious ethics of the tea party, these programs poor children are further threatened. It should be noted, for your consideration, that while most of the right is staunchly anti-abortion they often show little or no concern for poor children.
Massive cuts to the Medicare and Medicaid programs are also a goal of the Republicans. Health care in general has been an area of ongoing lies, deception and misrepresentation by them and some blue dog Democrats. The “they want to kill grandmother” and limit access to health care and doctors argument pushed by the right, against what they call “Obamacare,” is, in reality, more applicable to the health insurance industry.
Obama has already made too many concessions to insurance companies, though with a couple of good checks ensuring more access to health care than there was before. The tea party Republicans seem to want to strip away any positive changes Obama made and go all for the insurance industry.
The tea party/Republicans have also declared war on unions and collective bargaining, the minimum wage and the middle class in general.
All their efforts are geared to help giant corporations, oil companies, eliminating food safety regulations and environmental regulations and safeguards for public health.
Other areas of concern are cuts in the Pell Grant, which makes it possible for poor and middle class kids to go to college. Also one of the right’s perennial scapegoats continues to be immigrants, their attitude and stance xenophobic and racist
As a man of the left, I would like to mention that we do have a saying that pertains to much of this: “people before profits.” It appears the Republican Party and its tea party arm would say, “profits before people.”
Image: Messay Shoakena // CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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