TB, Republicans and conservatives used to be associated with sound money management and prudent investing, a cautious foreign policy and a reluctance to precipitous change. Maybe they were a little stuffy and old-fashioned and slow to pick up on a good thing, but they were the guys you wanted to keep your nest-egg safe at the corner S&L; the ones whose sons you trusted to lead yours into combat. You might not agree with them, but you could believe them. And even if they were wrong, they wouldn't deliberately lie to you.

But not any more. They've become ruthless predators and soulless parasites who will sell out their neighbors and their country for a quick buck. Look at the current Wall Street mess and tell me it ain't so. Look at how the most conservative administration in history was hijacked by them for their own personal aggrandizement and profit. And look at the unholy alliances they have formed with the religious right, the bigots, and the mob.

Sometime in the early sixties they morphed from a class of people with a controversial but sincere vision for their community to a cabal of selfish opportunists with an infinite contempt for those who were not just like them. They call themselves entrepreneurs, but none of them actually meets a payroll or invests a dime of his own money; they work in institutes, the media, as hired managers and executives of great collectives, as professional staff and consultants, and they job-hop with ease between the public and private sectors. Some are even Democrats. They are the apparatchiks of the corporate welfare state. They are the eye of the beast. Ask Techy, he knows this instinctively, even if he isn't able to articulate it very clearly.

They no longer make and sell things and employ people, they deal with financial abstractions. They print money with usury and financial instruments and interest rates instead of ink and presses, and to them everything is marketing, marketing, marketing. They will sell weapons to both sides in a conflict and they are the first to step in line to help spend the taxes they tell you they hate so much. These people have taken over your party, and they will eat you alive just as soon as you are no longer useful to them, as they have so many of their followers in the middle class.

Join us. We know you are not like them. With your help, and with people like you, we can still take our country back.