Ed Crane knew what he was doing. Ask yourself how he is living today, how much he made selling out the Freedom Movement. It was the failure of the Libertarian Party as a tool to enact freedom which forced formation of later movements. And at the same time allowed the Kochs to exert more and more control. - Melinda
Visit: Koch Truths
From: Desmogblog.com
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:
CSE describes the U.S. Tea Party site, "In 2002, our U.S. Tea Party is a national event, hosted continuously online, and open to all Americans who feel our taxes are too high and the tax code is too complicated." The site features a "Patriot Guest book" where supporters can write a message of support for CSE and the U.S. Tea Party movement.
Sometime around September 2011, the U.S. Tea Party site was taken offline. According to the DNS registry, the web address www.usteaparty.com is currently owned by Freedomworks.
The implications of the UCSF Quarterback report
are widespread. The main concern expressed by the authors lies in what
they see happening overseas as the Tea Party movement expands
internationally, training activists in 30 countries including Israel,
Georgia, Japan and Serbia.
As the authors explain:
"This international expansion makes it likely that Tea Party organizations will be mounting opposition to tobacco control (and other health) policies as they have done in the USA."
Freedomworks and Americans for
Prosperity are both multi-issue organizations that have expanded their
battles to include other policies they see as threats to the free market
principles they claim to defend, namely fighting health care reform and
regulations on global warming pollution. The report's warning about
overseas expansion efforts by Freedomworks should therefore also be
heeded by groups in the health and environment arenas.
Finally, this report might
serve as a wake-up call to some people in the Tea Party itself, who
would find it a little disturbing that the "grassroots" movement they
are so emotionally attached to, is in fact a pawn created by
billionaires and large corporations with little interest in fighting for
the rights of the common person, but instead using the common person to
fight for their own unfettered profits.
Tags:
tea party
stanton glantz
UCSF tobacco study
Americans for Prosperity
FreedomWorks
Koch brothers
Charles Koch
David Koch
big tobacco
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