Tea Party vs Cable Companies

There is often a 3 dollar fee from your bank + 3 dollars by the bank owning the ATM. Plus, there might be a monthly account fee, or a fee if your account dips below a certain 'minimum' at any time during the month. Plus, American banks do not pay interest unless you have like three thousand or five thousand dollars in your account, and then it's only like 1% or 1 and 1/2 percent. And notice the spread between this and the interest credit card companies charge you (all my info is a couple of years old).
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American banks pay INTREST?:eek::eek::eek: Swedish banks stoped that on several types off accounts years ago and i got 10 buck worth of intrest in a high intrest account were i had around 3000 dollar worth of kronor.

In Sweden you can use your card in every ATM machine nowdays since it is a joint venture.
 
The Tea Party isn't a populist movement, it's an astroturf movement. It's been designed to capture and enlist a lot of popular disaffection. But it does what it's told, and follows what the owners want. It lasts exactly as long as someone is writing its cheques.

As long as you believe OWS was the same thing.
 
That type of situation and potential development is one thing which makes it interesting.

Yeah, you see this in small ways IOTL, where certain strains of progressivism and libertarianism are like ships passing in the night. They almost talk about the desirability of certain similar things, but use vastly different talking points. Like when the Cato Institute talks about urban policy; it's almost where Think Progress is, but juuuuuuuust off.:p



Unrelated, banking in Europe was odd. I appreciated the no ATM fees and the lack of jerking me around about what I was going to do with my money, but then I remember trying to get a check the one time I needed it and it felt like I'd ask them to provide me with parchment and quill. I know it's exaggerated in my mind, but I feel like they opened this dusty old book of cashier-type checks and made me write it out in front of them and provide ID and all sorts of hoops to jump through.
 
The Tea Party isn't a populist movement, it's an astroturf movement. It's been designed to capture and enlist a lot of popular disaffection. But it does what it's told, and follows what the owners want. It lasts exactly as long as someone is writing its cheques.

The tea party doesn't really exist any more. When it did, it was grass roots. It also had lots of enemies, including in other grass roots, who came up with the kind of propaganda that you are citing here.

Attacking their authenticity is one of the oldest ploys for delegitimizing one's enemies in the American political handbook.
 
Yeah, you see this in small ways IOTL, where certain strains of progressivism and libertarianism are like ships passing in the night. They almost talk about the desirability of certain similar things, but use vastly different talking points. Like when the Cato Institute talks about urban policy; it's almost where Think Progress is, but juuuuuuuust off.:p
I remember hearing Bernie Sanders about 10 years ago talk about media consolidation, and he said there was considerable common ground between progressives and Main Street conservatives (not so much with Wall Street conservatives, he pointed out). So, this is one possibility, that the Tea Party could have developed more in this direction.

And maybe a combo of two or three views, although perhaps not completely unique, something pretty new and refreshing in current American politics. Just maybe.
 
The tea party doesn't really exist any more. When it did, it was grass roots. It also had lots of enemies, including in other grass roots, who came up with the kind of propaganda that you are citing here.

Attacking their authenticity is one of the oldest ploys for delegitimizing one's enemies in the American political handbook.

Folks I knew in the early Tea Party movement had little in common with the later people claiming the name. One of them dropped his association precisely because of the later joins and self proclaimed leaders. The people who stood for election as Tea Party candidates set speed records for selling their politician souls after election.
 
Given how much money the Tea Party groups get from Comcast and AT&T to pass muni broadband bans, this is ASB.
 
For a while in Houston, the Astros baseball team and Rockets basketball team were only available on Comcast. That is, you had to have this rather than AT&T U-verse. And Comcast wasn't even available in all regions.

Now, I think the standard libertarian position is that monopolies only exist when the government artificially . . . . . Which isn't always the case, but all the same, might make for an interesting strain of activism and add to the political conversation.
 
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Mark E. said:
It is free if you have an account at the bank that operates the machine. Otherwise, there is a fee.

Then you've got it better than we do in Canada. Here, there's a fee every time.:eek: And a (much) higher fee for non-same-bank ATMs.:eek::eek: The big banks are making a killing on it.:mad:
 
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