posted July 05, 2009 06:05 PM         

It is simply this: a rapidly growing number of Americans are fed up. That’s it. Nothing more, and nothing less.

We’re fed up with politicians whose only answer to our problems is to try to spend our way out of them. We’re fed up with corporate fat cats who fly in individual private jets to collect billions of our dollars in bailout money. We’re fed up with this notion that we have to give up our privacy and our freedoms to feel secure.

We have had it up to here with politicians and corporations trying to run every aspect of our lives for their benefit. All we ever wanted was to run our own lives for the benefit of ourselves and our families.

We’re not just fed up. We’ve woken up. We realized that the politicians have stopped spending our money and started spending our children’s money, our grandchildren’s money, and probably even our great-grandchildren’s money. Every parent wants their child to have it better than they did. You politicians should realize that once we got wise to this, we wouldn’t like it one bit.

We’ve even gone to the trouble to find out what the Federal Reserve is. Honestly, we never paid it much mind before. But with the bailout, and then the stimulus, and now with more so-called stimulus in the works, we had to find out how you could possibly spend all this money that doesn’t really exist. And now that we’ve looked into this Federal Reserve system, we don’t like what we see at all.

We call it as we see it. This is looting, plain and simple. The politicians are handing our money and the money of future generations to their already ultra-rich corporate donor friends. And for what? Because they ran their businesses into the ground while taking nine figure bonuses and hosting lavish media-driven Super Bowl parties, all while becoming “too big to fail.”

Let them fail. Let us do our business with responsible companies who understand how to run a business instead. If the bankers demand that we keep our checkbooks balanced and positive every month, then we feel it’s only fair they hold themselves to the same standard.

Now that I’ve told you who we are, let me tell you about what this Tea Party movement is not.

We are not Republican, and we are not conservative. Sure, many individuals in the Tea Party movement are, but many of us are Democrats and many of us are liberals too. Many of us belong to third parties or none at all. And frankly, quite a large number of us reject all those labels. We’ve started to realize that labels like “liberal” and “conservative” don’t describe any reality we live in and are only used in the media to keep us fighting with each other.

Of course a lot of Republican politicians and pundits think this Tea Party movement is a parade they can get in front of. If you think that, you have another thing coming. We see what the Republican and Democratic parties have done together these last several years, and that’s exactly why we are having Tea Parties today.

If you are a politician of either party, then we’re pretty much done listening to you. Sure, you are welcome to join us, just like any American. But don’t think we’re going to fall for your false promises again. The same Republican politicians talked a big game in 1994, and we all remember how that turned out.

We are not “anti-Obama.” In fact, Barrack Obama seems like a very nice man, and generally we wish him well. Our concerns are much larger than who the President happens to be right now. It’s the whole system that’s broken. We felt this way when George Bush was President and we’d be holding Tea Parties today if he was still on the job.

We are not just against taxes. What we’re really against is being told taxes have to be raised so the politicians can spend even more of our money. It’s the spending that’s the problem, even more than the taxes. We live within our means and we expect you to do the same. Politicians talk about cutting services to the people, but they never talk about cutting all the corporate welfare out of their budgets. That upsets us more than the amount of taxes we have to pay – although it is true we aren’t exactly happy about that either.

We are not part of your silly television news wars. Sure, we appreciate the coverage and we are always happy to speak with the representatives of any media, any time. But the mainstream media lost us a long time ago. You stopped reporting the news and so we had to go elsewhere to get it.

FOX News, CNN, MSNBC, you guys go right ahead and try to use us to score points off of each other. Meanwhile, if you are looking for us, you’ll be able to find us on Facebook and Twitter.

We are not anti-American radicals. We are, for the most part, pretty normal people. We are holding these Tea Parties because we love America, or at least what America is supposed to be.

We always believed that America is the greatest country in the world because we are free. That’s what we were taught in school, after all.

We love America because here you can live your own life as you see fit, just as long as you let others do the same. We love it because you can get a job or start a business and provide for your family without much in the way of corrupt government interference. We love it because here you can say what you want, believe what you want, and live the way you want, without someone with a badge and a gun looking over your shoulder all the time.

We love America because you can become an American simply by wanting to be free and wanting to provide a better life for yourself and those around you. We love America because thousands of our men and women have fought and died for over two hundred years to preserve our freedoms and our way of life.

We’re really not that complicated. It is a mistake to read too much of some prepackaged political agenda into these Tea Parties. We simply believe in the American Dream and have finally had enough of the politicians and corporate special interests who have caused our country to stray so far away from it.

Our demands to the politicians are very simple and make perfect sense to us.

Stop making the rich even richer while putting our children in debt while telling us it’s necessary to save the economy.

Stop taxing us to death and then saying you have to raise taxes even more because you failed so miserably at the things you taxed us for in the first place.

Stop spying on us and stop intruding on our fundamental rights. Give us back habeas corpus and stop even thinking secret tribunals and prisons have any place in America.

Open up the system and let the average citizen participate in how this government is run. Stop putting up barriers to getting on the ballot just so you can stay in office forever and stop keeping any of what you are doing secret from us.

Read the bills that you pass and have some kind of idea of what you are doing to us before you do it.

And while you’re at it, go back and read the Constitution again. We did, and when we did we realized we’d much rather have that system of government than what we have now.

It is time for the current crop of failed politicians to get out of the way and let the people run this country again, the way it was originally intended.

ReTeaParty.com and Free & Equal will be coordinating a nationwide protest on July 4, 2009.

On the anniversary of our independence, together, we will be asking Americans across the country to stand up and re-declare their independence from political favoritism and partisan politics. On July 4th, 2009, we will be re-declaring our independence by registering as Independent, Non-Partisan, Unaffiliated, or into a party that is more representative of our independent political tendencies. The American people understand our inalienable rights: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. On July 4th, let’s re-declare them!

posted July 07, 2009 12:16 PM         

at some point i think the average citizen has to refuse to participate in the usury game - which may well be at the bottom of the collapse of this country. we are so in debt to the money lenders we are at their disposal so to speak. same old game...make borrowing easy then hike the price so no one can pay. sick.

though i take david icke with a large pinch of salt he has a point that the US is owned by the same people as europe and all other countries. i haven't gotten close up to any of these tea parties yet and so i also take them with a pinch of salt...another point david icke has made is that every time things get to "boiling" point chaos is wrought and again - the very rich make a killing! and one wonders why conspiracy theories abound?