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 for poor children are further threatened. It should be noted 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 the "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, although with a couple of good checks he ensured 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 out for the insurance industry.
The Tea Party/Republicans have also declared war on unions, collective bargaining, the minimum wage and the middle class in general.
All their efforts are geared to help giant corporations, oil
companies, and to eliminate food safety regulations, 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; and their attitude and stance is even more 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 are saying -- "Profits before People."
