No, the Tea Party Is Never Going to Join Up With Anti-Corporate Liberals

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This really can’t be said often enough:

I’m afraid we need to call B.S. on this idea of Elizabeth Warren (or any other “populist”) becoming a pied piper to the Tea Folk, pulling them across the barricades to support The Good Fight against “crony capitalism.” Yes, many “constitutional conservatives” opposecorporate bailouts. But they also typically support eliminating not just subsidies but regulation of big banks and other corporations.

That’s from Ed Kilgore, and he’s responding to the suggestion that the real divide in American politics isn’t between left and right, it’s between pro-corporate and anti-corporate. Spare me. Sure, the tea partiers opposed TARP and were hazily in favor of just letting all the banks collapse in 2008, but that was little more than a fleeting morsel of emotional outrage. As Kilgore says, tea partiers may say they oppose corporate power, but when it comes time to vote, they can be counted on to support the folks who oppose any and all regulations that might actually rein in the power of corporations generally and Wall Street in particular.

But every once in a while they’ll get themselves exercised over some trivial issue of “crony capitalism” like reauthorizing the Export-Import bank, and suddenly pundits will rediscover the supposedly populist right. Give it a rest, folks. The tea partiers will no sooner find common cause with Elizabeth Warren than they will with Mother Jones. In reality, they couldn’t care less about ExIm or the swaps pushout or any of the other shiny objects that right-wing fundraisers occasionally find useful for replenishing their coffers. On the economic side of things, what they care about are low taxes and slashing welfare. On the social side of things, they care about abortion, guns, gays, and the moral decay of everyone else. The rest is just fluff.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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