Tea Party Inc.: The Big Money and Powerful Elites Behind the Right-Wing's Latest Uprising

[Hissyspit]

ttp://www.alternet.org/story/148598/tea_party_inc.%3A_the_big_money_and_powerful_elites_behind_the_right-wing%27s_latest_uprising

AlterNet/The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute / By Adele M. Stan

Tea Party Inc.: The Big Money and Powerful Elites Behind the Right-Wing's Latest Uprising

The Tea Parties are billed as a people's movement. But they wouldn't exist without the help of deep-pocketed billionaires.

October 24, 2010 |



Photo Credit: YieldMedia.org/The Nation Institute

This article was reported in collaboration with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

Win or lose, the Tea Party movement will come away from next week's elections triumphant, having injected into the Republican Party a group of candidates pledged to the dismantling of government and wed to the religious right. Of the movement's dozen favored candidates for U.S. Senate, all are anti-abortion, and five oppose it even in cases of rape and incest. Among their number are Colorado's Ken Buck, who has compared homosexuality to alcoholism, and Nevada's Sharron Angle, who wants to demolish both the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency. Major GOP players, from political strategist Karl Rove to former Bush speechwriter David Frum, have fretted publicly over Tea Party extremism, with Frum complaining of the movement's "paranoid delusions."

But it has now become clear that these Tea Party "outsiders" are all part of an inside game, a battle for control of the Republican party.

Though billed as a people's movement, the Tea Party wouldn't exist without a gusher of cash from oil billionaire David H. Koch and the vast media empire of Rupert Murdoch. Many of the small donations to Tea Party candidates have been cultivated by either Fox News Channel, a property of Murdoch's News Corporation, or the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, chaired by Koch. The movement's major organizations are all run, not by first-time, mad-as-hell activists, but by former GOP officials or operatives.

Taken together, Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks (another far-right political group seeded by the Kochs) and Murdoch's News Corp, owner of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, form the corporate headquarters of a conglomerate one might call Tea Party, Inc. This is the syndicate that funds the organizing, crafts the messages, and channels the rage of conservative Americans at their falling fortunes into an oppositional force to President Obama and to any government solution to the current economic calamity. Groups such as Tea Party Express, Tea Party Nation, and the FreedomWorks-affiliated Tea Party Patriots; the bevy of political consultants for hire; and various allied elected officials can be understood as Tea Party, Inc.'s loosely affiliated subsidiaries. The Web sites of FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity and the Tea Party side projects of Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck are linked with those of Tea Party Express and Tea Party Patriots, all of which in turn solicit support for Tea Party candidates.

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[NewJeffCT]

1. It's not just a battle for control of the Republican Party

The Tea Party was also formed to be so far right that many Republicans will seem more "moderate" and "mainstream" in comparison. "Sure Candidate X is conservative, but he's no teabagger - he'll wait a few days before resorting to 2nd amendment remedies instead of taking up arms immediately."

[subsuelo]

3. Ultimately it's a battle for our money

With only the government standing in the way.

Capitalism is about profits - no matter what. Get enough people to hate the government and they'll fight against anything the govt says or does, just because it's the government, and regardless of whether or not the government might actually be doing something good, or at least, something that serves the best interests of everyone, not just a few elite corporate capitalists.

[felix_numinous]

2. The goal of polarization has been to extinguish the middle,

the bargaining table, diplomacy and civility so that there is no chance of public discourse. I believe they want to exhaust the intelligentsia and everyone skilled and or willing to arbitrate between the two parties.

These extremists actually despise real free independent thought, creativity, and have tried to normalize a hostile environment where think tanks and problem solving cannot even get started. This polarization stands in the way of a balanced foreign policy (an understatement..), or any progress on domestic challenges of energy, poverty, infrastructure, and just about every aspect of our declining country.

Polarization is evidence of a destructive mindset by people who do not care about collateral damage. They cannot be allowed to continue this path.

[subsuelo]

4. I follow you, but....

I think that exhausting intelligentsia and destroying public discourse are just side effects. The goal is still to weaken the power of the government so that an elite ruling class of corporate capitalists can continue the current course of squeezing the world's resources dry, running schemes to rob the middle to lower classes, access to military power where needed (Iraq + Afghanistan, for example), and generally mucking up the planet as long as there is a profit to be made.