Back in early 2009, Mark Ames and Yasha Levine exposed the true “astroturf” nature of the Tea Party movement. Rick Santelli, a minor CNBC correspondent, made a silly speech on the network demanding that a Chicago Tea Party take place to protest actions by the Obama administration.

Within hours, scores of websites and organizations appeared out of nowhere expressing solidarity with Santelli’s reactionary message. Of course, the true supporters of Tea Party ideals planned all of this out long before Santelli made his “spontaneous” declaration.

The real driving force of the Tea Party is a handful of rich Americans whose names rarely appear in contemporary political debate because they’ve covered their tracks very well.

The greatest source of funding and organization is the Koch family, the controllers of the second-largest privately held company in the U.S. Essentially, the billionaires of the Koch family organized a right-wing, big-business putsch against the Obama administration and veiled it as a populist reaction.

To a certain degree, they have succeeded. Now the woefully inexperienced puppets they’ve put forth legitimately stand a chance in the coming election.

Ames recently made an appearance on Dylan Ratigan’s show on MSNBC to comment further on the Tea Party, likening its strategies to that of slave-owning plantation owners in the South prior to the Civil War.

The plantation owners’ strategy was to convince the slaves that behaving in the owners’ best interest was, in fact, behaving in the slaves’ best interest. This typically was accomplished by appealing to some outside enemy.

The pro-big business, anti-health care policies pursued by the Tea Party are the last thing the disenfranchised masses that support them possibly could want.

I won’t go so far as to state that such interest-projecting behavior is unique to right-wing movements, but it is perhaps at its most vile within them.

The utter ineptitude and the lackey nature of candidates put forth by the Tea Party movement is best illustrated by Christine O’Donnell, the Republican/Tea Party nominee for the Delaware senatorial seat vacated by Vice President Joe Biden.

On Oct. 19, she appeared in a debate held at Widener University School of Law, at which her lack of knowledge about government, and the Constitution in particular, was put on display.

When asked a question about her opinion on several amendments to the Constitution, specifically the 14th, 15th and 16th, and whether she would seek to repeal them as many Tea Partiers have claimed they want to, O’Donnell only had cursory knowledge of the 14th and blanked on the latter two.

When her opponent Chris Coons made a point that the First Amendment bars the teaching of creationism in public schools, O’Donnell quizzically asked, with a smug smile to the audience, where in the amendment the separation of church and state was located — as if the gathered crowd of lawyers and law students would agree with her.

Instead, they were rightfully aghast at someone who would fly in the face of clearly established law so openly. Idiotic remarks like that and disregard for the Constitution are some of the key contradictions and problems for the movement that claims to be restoring the ancient regime of the founders.

The time has come for the people of the U.S. to make a decision. They can decide to continue to subordinate their interests to those who claim to be acting on their behalf, or they can see through all the B.S. and lies and try to change American government for the better.

Putting people like O’Donnell into power with her naïveté, inexperience and total lack of knowledge about government will have dire consequences.

Matt Korovesis is a State News guest columnist. Reach him at koroves1@msu.edu.