Time magazine posts an excerpt from Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP – which I guess I’ll have to add to my stack next to Dark Money.
Charles and David Koch—who, if their individual fortunes were combined in one place, would quite possibly represent the wealthiest person on earth—have almost certainly spent or raised more than a billion dollars to successfully bend one of the two national parties in America to their will. The long rise of the Tea Party movement was orchestrated, well funded, and deliberate. Its aim was to break Washington. And it has nearly succeeded, as America saw in the debt-ceiling debacle of 2011, prompted by the Republican Party’s demand that the president negotiate over deficit reduction in exchange for an increase in the maximum amount of money the US Treasury is allowed to borrow. There are no mistakes or accidents in the Tea Party movement. Its leadership has made certain of that.
One of my first assignments as a consultant for CSE was to join the CSE leadership on a New York fund-raising trip to meet with a huge corporate partner with vast experience in building real political muscle who could help CSE reach beyond Koch oil money for their new grassroots efforts. We visited Philip Morris’ headquarters in New York.
We were met by several of Philip Morris’s state-based government affairs experts, all of whom had significant experience in building coalitions with an eye toward blocking regulations they didn’t like at the state level. The concept that CSE put on the conference table, which was quickly taken up by the Philip Morris staff, was a bit shocking to me. They proposed an unholy alliance—Philip Morris money commingled with Koch money to create anti-tax front groups in a handful of states that would battle any tax that moved. It would make no difference what kind of tax—the front groups could battle cigarette excise taxes in the Northeast and refined-oil fees at the coasts. Any tax, for any purpose, was bad—and these front groups would tackle them all, with Philip Morris and the Kochs behind them.
It made good business sense—and good political sense as well. You could relabel just about anything as a tax, and heaven knows the American public hates taxes. This, at its core, was the beginning of the American Tea Party revolt against the power of the government to pay for its programs. They could recruit average citizens from a variety of ideological groups to their cause. They would work side by side with corporate-directed workers and employees, providing real boots on the ground when enough activists weren’t readily available. And no one would be the wiser—or even care— that these “grassroots” anti-tax groups would be jointly created and funded by the largest private oil company and the largest cigarette company in the world.
Is this a trend?
Now they tell us the Republican Party is to blame? That the Obama years haven’t been gummed up by Both Sides Are To Blame obstruction?
The truth is, anyone with clear vision recognized a long time ago that the GOP has transformed itself since 2009 into an increasingly radical political party, one built on complete and total obstruction. It’s a party designed to make governing difficult, if not impossible, and one that plotted seven years ago to shred decades of Beltway protocol and oppose every inch of Obama’s two terms. (“If he was for it, we had to be against it,” former Republican Ohio Sen. George Voinovich once explained.)
And for some of us, it didn’t take Donald Trump’s careening campaign to confirm the destructive state of the GOP. But if it’s the Trump circus that finally opens some pundits’ eyes, so be it.
Recently, Dan Balz, the senior political writer for the Washington Post, seemed to do just that while surveying the unfolding GOP wreckage as the party splinters over Trump’s rise. Balz specifically noted that four years ago political scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein examined the breakdown in American politics and zeroed in their blame squarely on Republicans.
“They were ahead of others in describing the underlying causes of polarization as asymmetrical, with the Republican Party — in particular its most hard-line faction — as deserving of far more of the blame for the breakdown in governing,” Balz acknowledged.
“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional,” Mann and Ornstein wrote in The Washington Post in 2012. “In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.”
They continued:
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
Tough stuff.
And what was the Beltway media’s response when Ornstein and Mann squarely blamed Republicans during an election year for purposefully making governing impossible? Media elites suddenly lost Mann and Ornstein’s number, as the duo’s television appearances and calls for quotes quickly dried up. So did much of the media’s interest in Mann and Ornstein’s prescient book.
For more back story on this, I’m pasting in here a post from a few years ago describing exactly the unholy alliance between tobacco, big oil, and big ignorance.
The anti-science movement is rooted in the decades old realization among conservative corporate and political entities, that the findings of science were not always compatible with the economic interests of the wealthy and powerful. (read this post first for background. If you still have 17 minutes, the video above is worth your time)
The publication of an exhaustive investigation into the origins of a tobacco funded anti-science movement got headlines last week, as clear lines can now be drawn between corporate pirates like David Koch, the Tobacco barons, and “grassroots” movements like the Tea Party, all of which are prominent in the climate denial movement. (for example, we have at least one prominent Tea Party member who regularly posts his climate denialist views in comment threads here)
The study, which appears on Feb. 8 in the journal Tobacco Control, shows that rhetoric and imagery evoking the 1773 Boston Tea Party were used by tobacco industry representatives as early as the 1980s as part of an industry-created “smokers’ rights’’ public relations campaign opposing increased cigarette taxes and other anti-smoking initiatives.
From previously secret tobacco industry documents available at the UCSF Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, IRS filings and other publicly available documents, the study authors traced a decades-long chain of personal, corporate and financial relationships between tobacco companies, tobacco industry lobbying and public relations firms and nonprofit organizations associated with the Tea Party.
A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.
Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry’s role in driving climate disruption.
The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health, traces the roots of the Tea Party’s anti-tax movement back to the early 1980s when tobacco companies began to invest in third party groups to fight excise taxes on cigarettes, as well as health studies finding a link between cancer and secondhand cigarette smoke.
Published in the peer-reviewed academic journal, Tobacco Control, the study titled, ‘To quarterback behind the scenes, third party efforts’: the tobacco industry and the Tea Party, is not just an historical account of activities in a bygone era. As senior author, Stanton Glantz, a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) professor of medicine, writes:
“Nonprofit organizations associated with the Tea Party have longstanding ties to tobacco companies, and continue to advocate on behalf of the tobacco industry’s anti-tax, anti-regulation agenda.”
The two main organizations identified in the UCSF Quarterback study are Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks. Both groups are now “supporting the tobacco companies’ political agenda by mobilizing local Tea Party opposition to tobacco taxes and smoke-free laws.” Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity were once a single organization called Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). CSE was founded in 1984 by the infamous Koch Brothers, David and Charles Koch, and received over $5.3 million from tobacco companies, mainly Philip Morris, between 1991 and 2004.
In 1990, Tim Hyde, RJR Tobacco’s head of national field operations, in an eerily similar description of the Tea Party today, explained why groups like CSE were important to the tobacco industry’s fight against government regulation. Hyde wrote:
“… coalition building should proceed along two tracks: a) a grassroots organizational and largely local track,; b) and a national, intellectual track within the DC-New York corridor. Ultimately, we are talking about a “movement,” a national effort to change the way people think about government’s (and big business) role in our lives. Any such effort requires an intellectual foundation – a set of theoretical and ideological arguments on its behalf.”
The common public understanding of the origins of the Tea Party is that it is a popular grassroots uprising that began with anti-tax protests in 2009.
However, the Quarterback study reveals that in 2002, the Kochs and tobacco-backed CSE designed and made public the first Tea Party Movement website under the web address www.usteaparty.com. Here’s a screenshot of the archived U.S. Tea Party site, as it appeared online on Sept. 13, 2002:
In the 1980s, the study found, the tobacco industry launched a PR campaign focused around the idea that cigarette taxes, public health studies and other anti-smoking initiatives infringed on “smokers’ rights.” Anything that curtailed industry profits would be recast as an infringement on smokers by an intrusive government. Sound familiar?
In 1993, an ad executive working for Phillip Morris proposed that the Coalition Against Regressive Taxation form a new campaign that, 20 years later, sounds a lot like what we know today: “Grounded in the theme of ‘The New American Tax Revolution’ or ‘The New Boston Tea Party,’ the campaign should take the form of citizens representing the widest constituency base mobilized with signage and other attention-drawing accoutrements such as lapel buttons, handouts, petitions and even costumes.”
News of the study has touched a nerve on the right wing blogosphere, and prompted an outraged harrumph from Fox News:
The charge that the Tea Party is a tool of broader corporate interests is one often leveled by Democratic critics. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi was fond of calling the movement “astroturf” in the run-up to the 2010 mid-term elections where Tea Partiers helped Republicans take control of the House.
The research at the University of California-San Francisco echoes the claim, while weaving in an attractive narrative for Tea Party critics — that the Tea Party is continuing the agenda of the tobacco industry.
Tea Party leaders, though, roundly rejected the findings. They argued that the groups the study focused on do not compose the entirety of the movement, and that the tobacco issue is a relatively minor aspect of the present-day small-government agenda.
And they complained that a study that arguably targeted administration critics was funded by taxpayers.
“It’s an example of the frivolous spending inside the government … that has landed us $17 trillion in debt,” said Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin.
So it’s delightful to find this paragraph in the study,
…the conservative media, including Fox News and the network of conservative talk radio hosts and bloggers, provided a unified forum to amplify these messages. The tobacco industry has played a part in building this network, both by working with Roger Ailes (who subsequently became Fox News CEO) and funding the National Journalism Center which ‘train[s] budding journalists in free market political and economic principles.’
The statement is backed by copious footnotes and links to original tobacco industry documents from the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library – internal memos released as part of the settlement of lawsuits against the tobacco industry. (click images for pdf of originals):
The video at top of this page is a 17 minute lecture from study author Amanda Fallin, which very clearly draws the major outlines of the study.
Poignantly, Fallin concludes by noting that “people who support the Tea Party favor smoke free laws at virtually the same rate as people who were opposed to the Tea Party.” So at the grassroots level, legitimate feelings of patriotism, national pride, concerns about big government and the economy, have been co-opted and bent, with low information voters attending Glenn Beck rallies, reading from a script prepared for them decades ago, serving a corporate agenda of which they have absolutely no knowledge, and which is counter to their own best, highest wellbeing.
See also new book:
American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget Wat Made America Great. By Jacob hacker and Paul Pierson.Simon Schuster. 455p.
Hacker and Pierson get it. Their 2010 book lays it out well—-Winner Take All Politics—a VERY good read.
Reblogged this on A Green Road Daily News.
So at the grassroots level, legitimate feelings of patriotism, national pride, concerns about big government and the economy, have been co-opted and bent, with low information voters attending Glenn Beck rallies, reading from a script prepared for them decades ago, serving a corporate agenda of which they have absolutely no knowledge, and which is counter to their own best, highest wellbeing.
This. It’s what happens when the general electorate is not well enough educated to detect the BS that is being fed to them by by the 1%, counter to their own interests.
An educated public is a danger to Republicans. They thrive on ignorance.
No wonder that the American education system is so poor and so unequal.
It must be intentional.
American (and not only American) education and mainstream media in general, and infotainment networks such as Faux News in particular, are mainly tasked with silencing truth by means of distracting noise. Today I happened to read Aldous Huxley’s Foreword (1946) to ‘Brave New World’ (1932) where he says:
“The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is the truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr Churchill calls an ‘iron curtain’ between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals.”
Why else would even the BBC give a c fifteen minute slot to news about the death of David Bowie and other similar happenings which fifty years ago would have been a footnote on an arts page.
I am not saying that 50 years ago there were not similar propaganda campaigns for many who study history will be aware of the dead hand of Lord’s Northcliffe, aka Alfred Charles William Harmsworth and Beaverbrook, aka William Maxwell Aitken of previous generations.
I’m not sure the “uneducated electorate” is a creation of the Tea Party/present day GOP as their having rediscovered it. In U.S. history, scholarship was seen as a characteristic of the elite, probably because only the elite had the money and time for it. This coincided with “great awakenings” in Prostestantism, a form of Christianity which emphasizes personal salvation and a relationship with a Divine Savior, and champions it over knowledge. (In contrast, and for example, both Catholicism and Judaism, at least among the ranks of Conservative and Orthodox sects, respect learning and scholarship, not only of the religion, but in many fields.) If all one needs to be “saved” (which is what’s really important, no?) is to feel something personally, why oughtn’t that “gut feel” approach apply to other (less) important things in one’s life?
The ascent of Andrew Jackson in the early 19th century was emblematic of a revolt by “crude” frontiers people against what they perceived to “stuck up” Whig city folk.
In fact, I don’t think Science was well respected in the United States until it became clear that its proper pursuit was critical to national security and the national economy, but I’m not sure What Makes Science Tick is really well appreciated in policy circles. Certainly, if Australia is to be considered an alternate future for the USA, it seems they do not, with their dismantling of the wonder that used to be their CSIRO.
Apart from a few popular scientists, like deGrasse Tyson, Sagan, Nye, and Einstein, most people don’t seem to know or appreciate what scientists (and mathematicians!) do and how they do it, or why. And they really founder when they try to assess whether these efforts are “worth it.”
I think the Tea Party/current day GOP is just latching on to this tendency and exploiting it.
So the real question is how to get corporate media to be more independent of the huge influence of very large concentrated wealth.
This takes me to Bernie Sanders campaign of how the corporate world rigs the game so that they win.
So question is; is Hilary right in that Bernie is just unrealistic in his expectations are just way too high?
Or is Hilary one of the elite supporting the corporate need to rig the game for themselves?
Oh dear. Fetch my fainting couch. My pearls are already scattered on the floor.
Anyway, good to see what we all thought we knew confirmed by people who’ve done the hard work, dredging through the rubbish dumps and the swamps.
I knew the TP ‘grassroots support’ was astroturf. I didn’t know it was 24-carat astroturf.
Rock’n’Roll…
The subpoena of the Competitive Enterprise Institute by the Virgin Islands AG represents a widening of the investigations into Exxon and other companies.
=> Think Tank With Fossil-Fuel Ties Subpoenaed in AG’s Climate Inquiry
The Smithsonian Institution’s new transparency policy hasn’t kept prominent climate contrarian Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon from reeling in $65,000 in “dark money” to fund a secret research project.
=> Smithsonian Gives Nod to More ‘Dark Money’ Funding for Willie Soon
We are seeing the first signs of the exact same thing happening in Australia. Our conservative party ironically named the Liberal Party has been infiltrated by an organisation known as the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). The IPA is made up of and funded by a range of fossil fuel, tobacco and religious groups. They are secretive about their substantial funding but their board of directors is made up mostly of mining executives and former Liberal Party politicians. They are anti-tax, anti-anti-discrimination, homophobic, xenophobic, anti-worker, anti-science etc etc etc. They produced a sort of wishlist for Australia that out current government has so far delivered on more than a third. These were laws and policies such as removing the carbon tax, abolishing the Climate Council, removing incentives for renewables etc etc. There was until recently a few IPA members in our upper house of Parliament and when one Senator recently left, by virtue of our system was replaced by a young unelected upstart straight from the IPA. Thankfully, it woul seem that the tide is turning here as we gt closer to an election this year and it seems we are likely to have a change of government. It won’t be as spectacular as what happened in Canada but it will be a start.
And you will note that IPA upstart was a protegee of Morrison who sent him to the States to futher his “education”, he has only ever worked in the IPA and is co author of their 75 Point wishlist
The parallel system of jobs, education and ideological inculcation on the extreme libertarian/corporatist right has become a destructive, powerful cult — powerful especially because the press (which has been heavily infiltrated) accepts it as serious and legitimate (even authoritative) on economic issues. Here in Canada nearly every newspaper endorsed the conservatives, despite 60% of the voting population being clearly, openly desperate to change the government (a feeble awareness of that fact appeared in the Globe and Mail’s bizarre, too-strange for fiction endorsement of the Conservative Party, combined with the insistence that its leader should resign from office if they were to win government again).
East Coast Twiterati writes:
I thought that in English-speaking countries other than the United States “liberal” was typically taken to refer to parties that are in rhetoric pro-“free market” and in reality often pro corporate welfare. A bit like how we spell your “colour” as “color”, “organisation” as “organization”, speak of the “ground floor” as the “first floor”, “football” as “soccer”, and instead of properly driving on the left side of the road almost to a person insist on driving on the right, the latter of which may have some bearing on why we have more than twice as many accidents as Australia or the United Kingdom per inhabitant per year.
East Coast Twiterati continues:
It would seem they are promoting an “us vs. them” mentality that regards tribal values as supreme, viewing science and reality as irrelevant and the world through an ideological lens of cultural relativism and culture war. That does seem vaguely familiar.
You’re absolutely correct re the “Liberal” thing but I’ve caused confusion on other (mostly American) blogs with the word in the past. I’m reluctant to refer to our Liberal Party as “conservative” also as I can consider their far-Right wing ideology as extreme and often refer to them as extremists.
The culture war in Australia has always happened to some degree but the polarisation of politics and the insidiousness of the fascism we are now experiencing has made it much much worse.
The discussion on some other threads has touched on what ‘morons” Trump and his “politics of resentment” supporters are. Living just outside DC, we were inundated with coverage of the Tea Party-Glenn Beck rallies a few years back.
There are many videos of interviews with the Tea Partiers on Youtube, but this is by far the best at showing how ignorant these people are (which explains how easy it was to co-opt the TP movement and turn it into an army of foot soldiers for the Kochs et al). It’s a bit long but jaw-dropping in so many places—-anyone who wants to see who supports Trump MUST watch it.
https://youtu.be/ht8PmEjxUfg
PS The single definitive photo of what the TP movement is all about is the young man holding up a sign with the word “MORANS” on it.
The opening sequence of that Glen Beck rally with people walking to the sound of ‘John Brown’s body’ reminded me of the TV series ‘The Walking Dead’, not that I watch that discombobulating programme for I see more than I want via trailers.
Yes, and if the Walking Dead could speak, they’d likely sound just like these people. I attended the Colbert-Stewart “Restoring Sanity” rally on the Mall and it was a far different crowd. I wore my tinfoil-covered “Indian Jones” style hat with tea bags hanging around the rim and labels that said “You can’t make me think”—-got asked to pose for many pictures.
What I hear as subcontext behind the anger in this video, is “I am afraid”. Their way of life that they have grown up with is shifting politically and culturally, and by definition, a conservative wants to conserve the status quo, despite whether those changes are for the better of worse. They are being left behind, and they know it.
A more open minded person will look critically at the changes around them and try to make an informed choice on whether to support or oppose them, but many of these folks are just making gut decisions based off things that their preferred media outlet (usually a poor source such as FOX News, Beck, or Limbaugh) is feeding them, and seldom if ever fact check anything.
In short, they are just taking the path of least resistance to form their skewed view of reality, tailor made to confirm their biases and reduce their cognitive dissonance.
I find myself both repulsed by them and also feeling somewhat sorry for them in that they have been taken in by such an obvious con job.
Well said.
May be of some interest… The Koch “Citizens for a Sound Economy ‘Tea Party'” website from August 2, 2002, as preserved by Internet Archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20020802162847/http://www.usteaparty.com/
With Internet Archive you can enter the website address and it will let you know the days for which it has “snapshots.” Click on a date to see the snapshot, including, in this case, a dynamic flash animation. You can also click on links, and if the links are to pages that were archived they will work, taking you to those archives. In this case, the other webpages were hosted on the Citizens for a Sound Economy website, and they link not to the the tea party page but to an earlier copy of it that existed on the CSE website back on June 3 of that year.