The financial ties between Big Oil and the Tea Party have, by now, been well documented. (See here and here, and watch David Koch basically admit as much here.) That doesn’t mean that the two entities are ideologically united. While the oil companies would like to pretend they stand for basic freedoms and libertarian ethics, in fact they embody much of the corporate control of Washington that the Tea Party, at the grassroots level, fights against.
On the ground, the Tea Party activists get it. Check out this video of real grassroots Tea Party activists speaking out against oil subsidies.
It’s unclear whether the activists knew that, just last month, every single “libertarian” Congressmember voted to extend $4 billion-per-year worth of subsidies to oil companies. Lee Fang sums up the Tea Party/Big Oil paradox perfectly:
The real Boston Tea Party, as Thom Hartmann has explained, was a revolt against the East India Company corporation and its oligarchical control over the American colonies. The GOP leadership has hoped that oil company-funded groups, like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, can fool current Tea Partiers and other Americans into supporting more giveaways to big oil companies. But when you actually talk to rank and file members, they too are disgusted with the GOP’s loyalty to massively profitable oil companies.
I’ll say it again and again. There is nothing at all conservative or libertarian about huge oil subsidies (or huge nuclear subsidies, for that matter). Thankfully, it seems that the real grassroots boots on the ground in the Tea Party movement understand exactly that.
