Robert Reich, a former Secretary of Labor under President Clinton and now a popular commentator, has taken the U.S. business community to task for not showing appropriate alarm over the rise of the Tea Party. While CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have been vocal in their criticism of the Obama administration, Reich decries the “deafening silence” regarding the clear and present danger presented by Tea Party-backed candidates who appear poised for election to Congress.
Sounding the klaxon on behalf of the business community in the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal today, the left-of-center Berkeley public policy professor warns that Tea Partiers are targeting “the central institutions of American government.” Sixty percent of Tea Party adherents, he frets, want to overhaul or abolish the Federal Reserve Bank (as opposed to a mere 45% of the general population who would do so). Tea Partiers would not only cut taxes but abolish the Internal Revenue Service. They still rail against the Wall Street bail-outs. And one Tea Party supporter denounced GE as an “opportunistic parasite” for taking federal subsidies for clean energy.
