Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Revisiting The Teabaggers

Commentary By Ron Beasley



This was predictable, a tea party civil war.  While the tea party movement may have some anti-government bigots they are upset about many of the same things as we progressives.  In a post this morning I wrote:

This is just another indication that the US is no longer a Democracy but a Corporatocracy
It may appear that the Democrats and the Republicans are singing
different songs but they are all marching to the same drummer.  That
drummer will be found on Wall Street not Main Street.





This is what really upsets a majority of the teabagers - and what the original Boston Tea Party was all about, the government taking the side of corporate oligarchs. Of course most of them may not realize it but this is what they are really upset about.



Watchdog excoriates execution of TARP
A Treasury Department watchdog is warning that
a key $700 billion bailout program has damaged the government's
credibility, won't earn taxpayers all their money back and has done
little to change a culture of recklessness on Wall Street.

"The American people's belief that the funds
went into a black hole, or that there was a transfer of wealth from
taxpayers to Wall Street, is one of the worst outcomes of this program,
and that is the reputational damage to the government," said Neil
Barofsky, special inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief
Program (TARP), in an interview.

As I said below:

So the only thing the Bush and Obama administrations fixed was the bottom line of the large institutions that were bailed out.

They see business as usual on Wall Street as they suffer.  We like the teabaggers are furious, as we all should be.  The corporatists of the Republican party have used the fears and frustrations of the teabaggers but it may well turn out to be blowback for the Corporatacracy.  We may in reality have more in common with the teabaggers than either of us realize.  The teabaggers are uninformed and misinformed but in many cases we are unhappy about the same thing but neither one of us realize it.



3 comments:

  1. I couldn't help but think of this Onion article from the first post-9/11 issue.
    I haven't had a problem with the raw emotion but it has always needed better focus.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have no idea what the html I did there...
    Here's the link:
    http://www.theonion.com/content/node/34153

    ReplyDelete
  3. Fixed it Earl, you had a little html error, an "s" where there should have been an "a".

    ReplyDelete