The Tea Party Convention is in full swing here in Nashville, and I've been getting regular updates from friends and attendees. Last night, Tennessee progressives met for an "Anything But Tea!" party, and the local Drinking Liberally chapter was also buzzing with discussions about the Tea Party.
But perhaps the most important message to the gathering of wingnuts came from Fabian Bedne, an immigrant from Argentina to Nashville who is intimately familiar with the dictatorships of Latin America. That's because, as the Tea Party Convention tries to claim that Obama is a marxist, that he is threatening to take our guns and our freedom, and that he is trying to silence Evangelical Christians and other critics (Glenn Beck, etc.), they have tried desperately to portray themselves as victims of oppression.
I've been given permission from Fabian to reprint his essay in full.
Some people have been saying that we live in one. As somebody that spent many years of his life scared to death of living under one, I figure I'll share some of my memories.
So what does it mean to live in a totalitarian country?
It is to be very afraid of the police, because we have seen them arresting and beating up people randomly, for no other reason than they can.
It is to see the military treating you like the enemy all the time; i.e. by wantonly pointing their guns at you for no reason.
It is because you know that every paper, radio station or TV station is now controlled by the regime and only prints propaganda.
It is to be afraid of the teachers in your school because they carry guns and work for the regime, and because the principal was replaced by a regime guy who is not interested in education.
It is carrying an ID with your picture and fingerprint at all times, and losing it puts you into a panic when you see a policeman because no ID means immediate arrest.
It is to see people being picked up in the middle of the city, and put roughly in an unmarked car while screaming at the top of their lungs that they are being kidnapped. It is to be paralyzed by fear, unable to help, knowing that person will never be seen again.
It is the clergy, that while working to help their fellow man is disappeared by the regime, and shows up dead on an unmarked grave.
It is shady corporations using the regime to get rid of workers who advocate better working conditions, universities getting rid of opposition professors and students, and people targeting the neighbors they dislike.
It is families broken apart by people fleeing the country to a safer place, or by forced disappearance and the people that stay behind waiting for the missing loved ones.
It is a system that empowers the regime to govern with total impunity, unafraid of consequences.
All over the world there are people that live under totalitarian regimes. People are being kidnapped, tortured and killed. Kids are being removed from their families and raised by the regime.
Every day, extremist ideologues try to portray our democracy as a dictatorship, and this is something very frightening to a lot of people. But the fact that they can do that, that they can make this sort of claim is the ultimate proof that we don't live in one. If we did live in, let's say, Cuba - or the Argentina of my youth - they will be afraid of ending up like the hundreds of journalists who died or were tortured for speaking truth to power all over the world.
To describe our democracy as a totalitarian regime insults the lives and memories of people that live under this and other terrible conditions. It insults them, it insults us.
I share this because today, one of the plenary speakers for the Tea Party Convention is Ana Puig. She is currently (as I write this) presenting on the topic: "Correlations between the current Administration and Marxist Dictators of Latin America". And I agree with Fabian wholeheartedly - for someone to draw correlations between the Obama administration and Latin American dictators is both disturbing and insulting. We cannot continue to sit idly by and laugh or ridicule the teabaggers. They are a well-funded, active, engaged, passionate, and mobilized group. And what's more, their attacks on President Obama are undermining America's ability to move forward from the Bush administration and its real abuses of power.
Last week Friday, we saw President Obama scold Marsha Blackburn for her attacks on the Democrats' healthcare reform plan, noting that her tone makes it almost impossible to negotiate because she treats the centrist proposals of President Obama as "some kind of Bolshevik plot." (In Tennessee, Blackburn is a running joke among Democrats and a folk hero among Republicans.) And just yesterday, she voted against PAYGO for budget negotiations - supporting continued deficit spending because she believes that running up a 13 trillion dollar debt is less of a concern than raising taxes on the wealthiest 1% of Americans. The problem we're facing here in Tennessee is that a small group of well-funded Republicans are literally buying elected officials. In an FEC filing earlier this week, we found that Blackburn has banked over $500,000 compared to less than $20,000 for her Democratic challenger, Greg Rabidoux.
It's not "Marxist" to recognize that monied special interests and corporate lobbyists are influencing too much of our policy-making and undermining progress in America. It's not Marxist to recognize the simple fact that America spends 16% of its GDP on healthcare, while the next highest percentage for any industrialized nation is just over 11%. It's not Marxist to recognize that this status quo is unacceptable and unsustainable. And one thing has become clear in this process - the supporters of the status quo stand to profit handsomely from the failure of comprehensive healthcare reform. With $2.4 trillion spent annually in healthcare in the U.S., and roughly a third of that being spent wastefully (assuming we could cut from 16% to around 10% of GDP and match the other industrialized nations in terms of GDP percentages), that means that we've got about $800 billion of excess spending. Someone is profiting from that $800 billion, and they don't want to let it go.
If Republicans are serious about eliminating wasteful government spending and helping to restore our economy, create jobs, and help families, then they ought to join Democrats in supporting serious cost controls on our healthcare system - controls that can only be generated through government regulation or the competition of a public insurance option that is accessible to every American.
Update: Thanks for the recommendations - please keep them coming. It's really a testament to Fabian, and a way to honor the memory of the desaparecidos in Argentina. Fabian writes:
It was hard to revisit the memories, but I felt it necessary. I am happy that in the USA people go through life without having to experience what I did. It means we have done a good job here.
Unfortunately this people can't appreciate what they have, they have been spoiled by our democracy, ironic isn't it?
Update 2: A story from last night's opening speaker, Tom Tancredo, is getting quite a bit of buzz on this blog and others. Speaking of oppression... Tancredo claims that the reason Obama won is because we don't have literacy tests for people to vote. I kid you not. BarbinMD has a front page diary with more discussion.