Two Worlds Apart

There are really two Americas, one for the grifter class, and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land, the world of small business and wage-earning employees, the government is something to be avoided, an overwhelming, all-powerful entity whose attentions usually presage some kind of financial setback, if not complete ruin. In the grifter world, however, government is a slavish lapdog that the financial companies...use as a tool for making money.

The grifter class depends on these two positions getting confused in the minds of everybody else. They want the average American to believe that what the government is to him, it is also to JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs.
~ from Chapter 1 of Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi ~

Of course, the Tea Party (as Taibbi illustrates), plays into this dynamic perfectly. Their call for "limited government" and "no tax increases" is precisely in the best interests of the corporatists at JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, not their own.