Thom Hartmann: How Corporations Created the Tea Party ZombiesUnit

The corporations created a monster. That monster is a group of ideologues who've wormed their way into Congress - and now have the power to take down our entire economy and condemn all of us to a second Great Depression. Make no mistake about it - we have an established Third Party in Congress today for the first time in over 100 years - the Tea Party zombies. It's a third party based in political naivete - irresponsible idealism - and corrupted morality. It's a third party that thinks compromise is a bad word - that thinks if they yell and threaten enough they can get the Democratically-controlled Senate and White House to bend to their will. It's a party that thinks it's on a mission to crash the economy - thus setting the stage to drastically remake America and trash the New Deal-economics that have created the last century's prosperity - and replace it with a libertarian free-market that has defined the last century of, for example, Somalia. It's a third party that believes in morality - that the poor - the sick - and the elderly should be condemned to death - that the socially safety net - one of the greatest accomplishments of modern man - is evil. Do you know why John Boehner had to pull his debt-limit plan off the floor? It's because the Tea Party went nuts over Pell Grants. As in-no-way-no-how will they support a bill that helps students go to college. We can no longer believe that the Tea Party is controlled by Republicans - the Tea Party is on its own now - running roughshod through Congress as we've witnessed in this debt-limit debate - even John Boehner knows this himself by now. And what Republicans and the rest of us need to be asking ourselves today is...how did this happen? How did our constitutional democracy allow a group of destructive ideologues to take power in Congress and drag our country into economic ruin? What - happened? Tune in.