Tea Party Focuses on Wrong Target

 Capitalism is the word, of the neocons, have you heard?

 By Henry A. Giroux

Tea Party candidates express anger over government programs, but say nothing about a government that provides tax breaks for the rich, allows politicians to be bought off by powerful lobbyists, contracts out government functions to private industries and guts almost every major public sphere necessary for sustaining an increasingly faltering democracy.

Tea Party members are outraged, but their anger is really directed at the New Deal, the social state and all those others whom they believe do not qualify as "real" Americans.

At the same time the American public is awash in a craven and vacuous media machine that routinely tells us that people are angry, but offers no analysis capable of treating such anger as symptomatic of an economic system that creates massive inequalities, rewards the ultra rich and powerful and punishes everybody else.

liberal pundits argue that the rich and powerful are indifferent to poor people and, of course, he is right, but only partly so. In actuality, it is much worse.

Today's young people and others caught in webs of poverty and despair face not only the indifference of the rich and powerful, but also the scorn of the very people charged with preserving, protecting and defending their rights.

We now live in a country in which the government allows entire populations and groups to be perceived and treated as disposable, reduced to fodder for the neoliberal waste management industries created by a market-driven society in which gross inequalities and massive human suffering are its most obvious byproducts.