Everybody knows that the worst thing in the world is misinformation about the science of COVID. And misinformation should be firmly suppressed. Because people will die.
So I got a bit of a surprise reading a piece by Melissa Mackenzie on Donald Trump and the Tea Party. Trump is generating the same kind of energy as the Tea Party, she writes. And Mackenzie was there for the Tea Party: "I covered the Tea Party for years all across the country... Tea Party rallies are where I met and covered Andrew Breitbart, Sarah Palin, and many other notables."
What was the Tea Party?
Tea Partiers basically divided along two lines: There were the small government types who wanted to be left alone. This faction was made up of small business owners. Women started the Tea Party organizations on behalf of the businesses they and their husbands ran. They protested taxes and big bailouts of banks. They thought the bailouts were grossly unfair since small businesses weren’t rescued. They wanted no rescues. They wanted fewer taxes and regulations.
The second part of the Tea Party was folks who hated the big bank bailouts because they felt that if the government was going to help anyone, it should be the individual. These are the populists. They felt Social Security was a right. They often believed in socialized medicine. They were many times socially liberal.
I want back and checked my blog posts in 2009 to 2010 when the Tea Party was in the ascendant. First of all, the movement was organic. Second, there certainly were a lot of women organizers. Third, Tea Partiers were definitely against reform of Social Security and Medicare.
But you may have notions that the Tea Party was racist and funded by the Koch Brothers. Interestingly, I didn't mention race or Koch until well into 2010, when Tea Partiers were accused of shouting racist epithets at John Lewis as he and other black congressmen walked to the Capitol for a key vote on Obamacare. Later on I mentioned the Koch brothers. So you can see that "someone" was injecting race and Koch into the political square. Then there was the accusation of "astroturf" that I wrote about first in June 2009. Actually, it's likely that by June 2009 the Koch brothers had got involved.
Who do you think is doing the misinformation on the Tea Party origins? I wonder.
On the other hand, I'd say, the Tea Partiers were misinformed on the bailouts for bankers. Sorry kids; it's the science. The central bank is the lender of last resort and we really can't allow a cascade of banks to go broke. And we know why: 1929. In a biography of Andrew Mellon, David Cannadine write that:
In 1929, there had been 659 bank suspensions, a figure easily within the normal range for the decade, and through October 1930, there were a similar number of collapses. But in the last sixty days of the year, 600 banks closed their doors, beginning with Louisville's National Bank of Kentucky, and culminating in New York, where the Bank of the United States closed its doors o December 11.
Hmm. let's check the St. Louis Fed. It has the following table.
| Year | Bank Suspensions |
| 1928 | 498 |
| 1929 | 659 |
| 1930 | 1,350 |
| 1931 | 2,293 |
| 1932 | 1,453 |
| 1933 | 4,000 |
| 1934 | 57 |
Dear God. I had no idea how bad it got. Notice 1933: I call that a suspiciously round number.
Whaddya want? Stop bank bailouts or lose all your savings? By the way, one of the reasons for the bank failures was that people were allowed to borrow up to 90 percent of stock purchases on margin. In the 1930s they changed the rules so that you could only borrow 50 percent of a stock's purchase value.
But then they created Fannie Mae so that people could borrow lots of money on houses.
Let's look at bank failures in the 2000s, with data from FDIC so we can compare the Great Depression with the Great Recession.
| Year | Bank Failures |
| 2007 | 3 |
| 2008 | 25 |
| 2009 | 140 |
| 2010 | 157 |
| 2011 | 94 |
| 2012 | 51 |
| 2013 | 24 |
But, of course, the depositors in the Great Recession were covered by FDIC. And I presume that failing banks were usually picked by another bank in a nice cuddly deal with the regulators.
Only one problem: silly little Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke let Lehman Brothers fail in September 2008 because he whined that he didn't have the legal authority to bail 'em out. Ben, oh Ben.
So whaddya want? Banks bailed out or lose your savings? Plus, of course, in the 2000s, in accordance with government policy, people could borrow up to 100 percent of the value of a home. And the government was particularly interested in the number of loans granted to people of color: got that you racists?
But here's my point. What is the truth about the Tea Party, and about the issues that Tea Partiers rallied to protest? What's information and what's misinformation?
Yes, it was monstrous that the government bailed out the banks and not mom-and-pop businesses. Only, the government really needs to bail out failing banks otherwise the credit system collapses. So the Tea Partiers didn't really understand what was going down.
It is monstrous that the government encouraged low-down mortgages. But if it does then it must, it absolutely must, bail out failing banks.
But where are the social media searching for misinformation on the Great Recession and on government subsidies for mortgages?
And where, dear media and social media, are you on the constantly changing party line from government on COVID science versus COVID misinformation? Do you have timelines on your fact-checking sites to keep track of all that? Or is it all too hard? Because math.
See, the way I look at government and banks and government and pandemics is that in both cases government makes gigantic mistakes that it tries to cover up.
And the problem with that is that when things go wrong the truth never gets out. Because it is too painful for the ruling class to admit to.
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