And you claim someone who earns $60,000 per year is upper middle class? I’m sure they will be thrilled to learn that. Are you assuming that person lives alone? That if they have a spouse, that spouse works and earns as much? That he doesn’t have children? That real estate prices are relatively low? Maybe that person is a Registered Nurse, for whom the 2010 average salary is over $67k according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I’m proving you wrong with facts. You only throw out your own personal and uninformed wishes.

You don’t even know when the movement started. You are disparaging people as whiny and upper middle class based on what? A Gallup poll from April 5, 2010 showed that 45% of Tea Partiers have an income of less than $50,000. And 55% were above $50,000 (unfortunately it didn’t break it down more). I don’t know where you draw the line on “upper middle class” but it is a reasonable assumption that most in that  poll earned less than $200k (Obama’s special number).

I draw the line at about $50,000 a year.

My dates are not wrong, yours are:
http://thebostonteaparty2007.blogspot.com/

If the Tea Party had a message that was not “Keep the government out of Medicare” then you guys failed to get it across to the public. Sorry. You can always try again.

If  such activities are prohibited then outsiders would have no grounds to complain that its membership is comprised only of  self-servers. Thus it’s in their own interest to ensure that outsiders don’t have this perception of them by prohibiting such stock dealing entirely. Pussyfooting about with ‘blind trusts’ simply won’t do that job.

But – as facetedjewel has pointed out – outsiders don’t actually seem to care that much and probably even expect this kind of behaviour.

Whaddya gonna do, eh? Tsch.

And here is your assumption of its start:
“I’m willing to believe it was a bunch of whiny upper middle class tax dodgers in 2007…”

You don’t even know when the movement started. You are disparaging people as whiny and upper middle class based on what? A Gallup poll from April 5, 2010 showed that 45% of Tea Partiers have an income of less than $50,000. And 55% were above $50,000 (unfortunately it didn’t break it down more). I don’t know where you draw the line on “upper middle class” but it is a reasonable assumption that most in that  poll earned less than $200k (Obama’s special number). Gallup’s conclusion based on all the various demographics polled: “Tea Party supporters skew right politically; but demographically, they are generally representative of the public at large.”

That’s my eyewitness account. That’s Gallup’s polling results. You throw out erroneous dates and your own personal fantasies of what the Tea Party is.

Imagine you’re on the Titantic and you notice that several members of congress are jumping into lifeboats yet the ship is moving along fine; but then…. “See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya!”

I’m perfectly willing to believe that an original, pure, somewhat-less-than-reasonable Tea Party was co opted to become the party of anti-intellectual animus it seems to be today but if you want me to believe it was “never” about God, guns, and dog-whistle racism then you have a long row to hoe.  It became about those things for the same reason that the Republican party did: you mistook noble savages for useful idiots.

Unfortunately they conflate cash with ‘free speech’.  Good luck though, maybe get some centrist conservatives to reconsider.

I think there’s a big difference between a plutocrat and a conservative. Many conservatives are concerned about the entanglement of government and financial interests. The folks at Hoover seem to be interested in it.

The early days of the Tea Party were concerned with bailouts without accountability. Then they got undermined by the plutocrats and it became more about God and guns, and getting rid of scary black people in the White House.

http://www.salon.com/2006/06/23/hastert_parkway/

They can invest via a blind trust through a third party stock broker.

I’m pretty sure that I remember the Clintons doing a blind trust.  Likewise Dianne Feinstein.

This deserves a great big, “HUH?” The 60 Minutes piece addresses one aspect of the systemic nature of the corruption. If it is legal to invest in corporations that you have the power to regulate or not regulate, politicians are going to do it to their advantage.

“And as Ryan Grim points out, one of the worst recent offenders of insider-y trading in Congress is Eric Cantor, but 60 minutes is working on a softball piece for Cantor as part of his push to rehabilitate his image, and so he’s left out.”

Like HuffPo, you claim that the “”investigation”" is “totally the missing the point”…except if there is a Republican we can really pin blame on.

“If it’s on TV, the first question you should ask yourself is, Who paid for this advertisement?”

People complain about the effects of Citizens United, but how much money was effectively directly transferre­d to Pelosi as a result of the VISA IPO? And we do not even know exactly how much money she made from that!

If we see an advertisement on TV and if corporations donate to candidates…it’s out in the open. We don’t have to like it, but it’s open. Direct contributions are limited and we can hold politicians’ feet to the fire if we think they are improperly influenced. If a corporation releases an ad, a book, a movie, a billboard – it’s out in the public domain and subject to battle of ideas protected by the First Amendment.

A direct transfer of  money via a VISA IPO? Priceless.

We have just witnessed the IMF and banksters choosing the prime ministers of Greece and Italy, just as the banksters have given us the “choice” of Obama of Wall Street, or Romney of Wall Street, while the Mittster obscenely claims the Chinese “have stolen American jobs” when it was the talking obscenity, Mitt Romney who offshored American jobs to China.

Only a most violent revolution will ever change anything in Amerika.

Unfortunately they conflate cash with ‘free speech’.  Good luck though, maybe get some centrist conservatives to reconsider.

Also:  http://occupydc.org/

/waits for pig to fly out

Here’s an interesting idea: Get elected to congress and all your money goes into a blind trust. Double blind, really, as it should be the case that the planners themselves should not know which members of Congress hold which account. 

I’ll bring this up with some folks after tomorrow’s GA.

You can’t 100% prevent it, but you can prohibit it.  In fields like finance and corporate law where folks are routinely exposed to non-public information it’s pretty well accepted that you can’t trade on it.  Between insider trading and fiduciary duty laws, employer policies and professional ethics guidelines, it’s not so easy for an investment banker or corporate lawyer to trade on the non-public information that comes across their desks every day without getting fired, disbarred or even jailed.  Congress should be under similar obligations.