NY Times - "The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party" - This Revolution Is Brought To You By...

[TomCADem]

Its the Fox News dream team of paid commentators! Fresh off of contributing a million dollars directly to Republicans (not including the fair market value of 24/7 propaganda), Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin headline an event on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Here is an article by Frank Rich calling them out:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html?_r=1&hp

ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

* * *

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

[aquart]

1. What Bush's tax cuts bought.

[applegrove]

2. Yup. The GOP knows that tax cuts for the rich result directly in more money for them.

And more money to confuse the ignorant.

[Raster]

5. "...this is an impressive crowd: the haves, and the have-mores....

...Some people call you the elite, I call you my base."

-George W. Bush*

[Hannah Bell]

3. The sad truth is, nearly all social movements are top-down; thought up & funded

by the rich.

[Dover]

4. Yes, and our intelligence agencies export the same kind of insurgencies and popular

uprisings under the label of "foreign policy" all the time.

Why not put it to use right here at home? And if a REAL grassroots uprising occurs, it must be put down immediately and its leaders beheaded. A house divided strategy - if you can get the working class fighting each other rather than focused on the real culprits, then that's a successful operation.

[rhett o rick]

6. I think this will backfire. The corporatist are happy with the current status quo.

They are getting most of what they want. Why risk it all with an idiot like beck?