The corporations have created a monster.

That monster is a group of ideologues who have wormed their way into Congress - and now have the power to take down our entire economy and condemn all of us to a second Great Depression.

Make no mistake about it - we have an established Third Party in Congress today for the first time in over 100 years - the Tea Party zombies.

It’s a third party based in political naïveté - irresponsible idealism - and corrupted morality.

It’s a third party that thinks compromise is a bad word - that thinks if they yell and threaten enough they can get the Democratically-controlled Senate and White House to bend to their will.

It’s a party that thinks it’s on a mission to crash the economy - thus setting the stage to drastically remake America and trash the New Deal-economics that have created the last century’s prosperity - and replace it with a libertarian free-market that has defined the last century of, for example, Somalia.

It’s a third party that believes in Ayn Rand morality - that the poor - the sick - the elderly should be condemned to death - that the social safety net - one of the greatest accomplishments of modern man - is evil.

You know when John Boehner had to pull his debt-limit plan off the floor? One of the main reasons? It’s because the Tea Party went nuts over Pell Grants.

As in - no-way-no-how will they support a bill that helps students go to college.

We can no longer believe that the Tea Party is controlled by Republicans - the Tea Party is on its own now - running roughshod through Congress as we've witnessed in this debt-limit debate - and even John Boehner knows this himself by now.

And what Republicans and the rest of us need to ask ourselves today is… how did this happen?

How did a constitutional democracy allow a group of destructive ideologues to take power in Congress and drag our country into economic ruin?

What happened?

Well, Citizens United happened.

As I discuss in Chapter 11 of my book - Unequal Protection - The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in January of 2010 fundamentally changed American politics. It laid the groundwork for the Tea Party crazies to come to power.

The Roberts court reversed a century of electoral law that kept corporations from meddling in our politics - that kept democracy in the hands of the people - and instead they handed over our democracy to the highest bidder - to trust-fund millionaires, to hedge-fund billionaires and transnational corporations.

Under the assumption that corporations are real people just like you and me - 5 right-wingers on this High Court ruled that corporations also have free speech rights like you and me - and thus can tap into their corporate war chests and spend unlimited amounts of money distorting our elections.

And once that ruling came down from Chief Justice Roberts - corporations wasted no time at all picking which candidates they would throw their millions behind to unseat Democrats around the country - and once and for all try to put an end to the things they hate like health care reform - Wall Street reform - energy reform.

To once and for all turn America into a corporatocracy.

The tea Party folks, the big billionaires behind them, purposefully picked low-I.Q. politicians who had no experience in governance - who have no sense of the constitution or American history - and who have no understanding of basic economics.

Why? Because they’d be the easiest to mold - they’d be the easiest to convince that the corporate ideology is the right ideology.

And after hefty campaign checks - high-powered political junkets - and re-education camps in 5-star hotels and resorts - these Tea Party politicians bought what their corporate overlords were selling - they became true believers.

After all - billionaires MUST know what they're talking about! - how else did they get all that money?

What Citizens United did is allow corporations to make an investment in American politics.

And as you'd expect - these billionaires invested wisely - creating an army of gullible Tea Party soldiers who came to Capitol Hill at the beginning of the year on a mission to protect corporate interests at all costs - even if it meant crashing the economy.

Protect subsidies for billionaire oil corporations - protect tax loopholes for billionaire jet owners - protect loopholes that let billionaire transnational corporations ship American jobs overseas.

And do not compromise - no matter what the other side says - no matter what the economists say - and most importantly, no matter what the America people say.

Ironically, that even means ignoring the grassroots American people who once called themselves Tea Partiers.

Not only are the Tea Party numbers dwindling around the country - but the overwhelming majority of self-described Tea Partiers are opposed to the corporate agenda that's on the march in Washington today.

What's left? Just the zombies in suits in Congress we call the Tea Party Caucus.

We have a Third Party today in America created not by the people - but by money.

In his dissent against the majority ruling in Citizens United - Justice Stevens predicted exactly what we see unfolding today - he wrote:

"Corporate 'domination' of electioneering can generate the impression that corporations dominate our democracy. [C]itizens... may lose faith in their capacity... to influence public policy. A government captured by corporate interests, they may come to believe, will be neither responsive to their needs nor willing to give their views a fair hearing."

This week - the switchboards on Capitol Hill went down after the President encouraged Americans to call their Members of Congress and push for a debt-limit deal.

And yet - the corporate Tea Party didn't listen - they pushed ahead with their agenda to crash the economy - slash government spending - lay off people - bring it all down.

It's not a coincidence that the most dysfunctional, destructive, and unresponsive Congress in the history of this nation - is THIS Congress - the FIRST Congress elected after the Supreme Court's Citizens United Decision.

Even if this Third Party of destruction does not succeed in crashing the economy this time around - and the debt ceiling is raised - the damage has already been done - the American people have lost faith - and the rest of the world thinks we've lost the ability to govern ourselves.

I can only hope this means we're close to a tipping point.

That this debt-limit debate is what wakes up America to the 30-year assault on the middle class by corporations and the billionaires they create.

Corporations that grew impatient with the slow-moving Republican establishment and - thanks to Citizens United - decided to throw their weight - and money - behind the radicalized Tea Party - hell bent on bringing a painful transformation to America RIGHT NOW.

This is happening RIGHT NOW - and if we don't get out there and get active and fight back - they will destroy our nation.

It's time to strip corporations of their personhood - and make sure they'll never again be able to run dozens of Manchurian candidates who have no idea what it means to be a statesman or stateswoman.

That's The Big Picture.