Corporate MEdia trying real hard today to equate Tea Party with current protests
How many times did you hear that GrOPers shouldn't make the same mistakes that Dems made in the past by blowing off the Tea Party as paid partisans this morning? I heard it multiple times on multiple channels. Trying to say that just like today, the tea partiers were genuine people with genuine anger. Except they weren't.
http://time.com/secret-origins-of-the-tea-party/
The Secret Origins of the Tea Party
HOW BIG OIL AND BIG TOBACCO PARTNERED WITH THE KOCH BROTHERS TO TAKE OVER THE GOP
The spring of 1993 was a lousy time to be associated with the Republican Party in Washington, D.C. Bill Clinton had just stormed into the White House. The Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress. Even undersecretaries of powerful cabinet departments from the Bush administration discovered that they were unloved, unwanted, and unemployed in the nation’s capital.
(snip)
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.
(snip)
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.
(snip)
According to publicly available IRS records, the five essential pillars of just such a Tea Party movement network were all funded and in place by that spring of 2009—the Sam Adams Alliance to direct grassroots efforts; the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity to direct propaganda efforts in state capitals across the United States; the State Policy Network to coordinate funding and free-market policies at state-based think tanks; hundreds of grants from the Koch foundations to American universities that were linked in through SPN; and, of course, CSE’s successor, Americans for Prosperity, built to coordinate the effort nationally.
(end snip)
I even heard on of the GrOPers say that "the Kochs are in Kansas", meaning that they weren't influential outside of my home state. Except, their money has a great many tentacles.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations
http://www.salon.com/2015/10/27/charles_kochs_frankenstein_problem_he_created_the_tea_party_monster_and_now_he_laments_the_results/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/13/tea-party-billionaire-koch-brothers
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