Tea Party, Inc.

[ProSense]

Tea Party, Inc.

By Adele M. Stan AlterNet

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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The Capitol Hill Franchise

The self-appointed head of Tea Party, Inc.'s Capitol Hill division is the junior senator from South Carolina, Jim DeMint. DeMint is the top Senate recipient of donations from the Koch Industries' PAC, reeling in $22,000 in the current election cycle for a race he stands virtually no chance of losing. The Kochs' PAC is also the number three donor to DeMint's PAC, the Senate Conservatives Fund, which he spends on other races.

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The Money Men

The Tea Party’s two major patrons are fabulously wealthy. David Koch is heir to the fortunes of Koch Industries, described in 2008 by Fortune as the largest privately held corporation in the United States, and was ranked by Forbes as one of the world's richest people, with an estimated personal wealth of $17.5 billion. Rupert Murdoch, founder and CEO of News Corp — ranked by Fortune as world's second-largest entertainment company — was also rated by Forbes among the world's wealthiest, with personal wealth of $6.3 billion. Koch Industries, with David as executive vice-president and his brother Charles as CEO, presides over a vast conglomerate of oil and gas interests, as well as holdings in timber and chemicals. Since the 1970s, the two men have funded and controlled a large network of right-wing institutions, launching the libertarian Cato Institute in 1977 and the Mercatus Institute in 1985, all of which advocate business deregulation under the rubric of "free markets."

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[ProSense]

1. No comment? n/t

[Octafish]

2. Combine Scalia, the Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch and just feel the fascism.

They're all chummy. And more people should know about them.

Fox News: Architects Of The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

Posted by: Mark @ 1:54 pm

When Hillary Clinton coined the term “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” twelve years ago, many members of the VRWC ridiculed her and denied their own existence. Now Think Progress is in receipt of a private memo from the billionaire Koch brothers inviting some of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals and companies to a clandestine meeting last summer where they would strategize for the upcoming midterm elections. It’s a fascinating story that includes in-depth research on the participants in this cabal and their connections to political players and institutions.

The part I’m most interested in is the presence of the media in the group. Take a look through the list of participants and you can’t help but notice one name that keeps repeating: Fox News. Here is a list of the Fox News affiliated members of the Koch Klan:

■ Michael Barone
■ Glenn Beck
■ Charles Krauthammer
■ Steven Moore
■ Nancy Pfotenhauer

What’s striking about this is that these people are not attending the secret meetings as journalists. They are participating in the brazenly partisan campaign planning conducted by the biggest business special interests in the world. These media players are not bystanders. They are the architects of the conservative agenda. They join their boss, Rupert Murdoch, in this endeavor. Murdoch, it was recently revealed, has donated millions to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Republican Governor’s Association.

All of the usual suspects were present at the secret meeting, from the Chamber of Commerce to Big Oil to the pharmaceutical giants to defense, real estate, Wall Street, and the top right-wing think tanks. The attendees even included a couple of Supreme Court Justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Talk about your activist judges. After attending these meetings (which reportedly occur biannually, with the next one set for Palm Springs in January), these media hucksters return to the airwaves to promote the agenda they helped to fashion. And, of course, there is no disclosure that they had a hand in the policies they are peddling.

This is another example of a phenomenon that is increasingly confounding to me. How can the Tea Party, who describe themselves as average, middle-class, Americans who are seeking to restore Constitutional principles and make Washington accountable to “We the People,” continue to follow an elite assembly of wealthy corporatists whose interests are so far removed from those of the Tea Party? Why doesn’t the Tea Party, who fancy themselves as revolutionaries, revolt against these upper-crusty impostors who are so obviously trying to manipulate their movement to the benefit of their elite and wealthy friends? What sort of revolutionaries align themselves with the entrenched establishment?

Sorry to find this so late, ProSense. Outstanding info on these interesting people.

[ProSense]

3. Murdoch and Koch's RW shills are everywhere.

Jeff Jacoby: Smug Democrats:

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Trashing conservatives as “nutcases’’ and “wackos’’ — or worse — is all too common among left-wing pundits and politicos. But the electorate isn’t buying it. “Likely voters in battleground districts,’’ reports The Hill in a recent story on a poll of 10 toss-up congressional districts across the country, “see extremists as having a more dominant influence over the Democratic Party than they do over the GOP.’’ Among likely voters, 44 percent think the Democratic Party is overpowered by its extremes (37 percent say that about the Republicans). Even among registered Democrats, 22 percent think their party is too beholden to its extremists.

Heading into next week’s elections, Americans remain a center-right nation, with solid majorities believing that the federal government is too intrusive and powerful, that it does not spend taxpayer’s money wisely or fairly, and that Americans would be better off having a smaller government with fewer services. Nearly halfway through the most left-wing, high-spending, grow-the-government presidential term most voters can remember, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that so many of them are rebelling. The coming Republican wave is an entirely rational response to two years of Democratic arrogance and overreach. As the president and his party are about to learn, treating voters as stupid, malevolent, or confused is not a strategy for victory.

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Jeff Jacoby's column has been published on the op-ed page of the Boston Globe since 1994, when he was hired as a counterweight to the paper's liberal columnists. From 1987 to 1994, he was chief editorial writer for the Boston Herald. Within months of his debut at the Globe, he was described by the left-leaning Boston Phoenix as "the region's pre-eminent spokesman for Conservative Nation," and a columnist who had "quickly established himself as a must-read." Jacoby has also been a commentator on the local NPR affiliate, WBUR, and for several years hosted a talk show on local television. He is also a public speaker who lectures nationwide.

In 1999, he became the first recipient of the Breindel Prize, a $10,000 award (since increased to $20,000) for excellence in opinion journalism awarded by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. In 2004, he received the Thomas Paine Award of the libertarian law firm the Institute for Justice, an award presented to journalists "who dedicate their work to the preservation and championing of individual liberty."<1> In December 2009, he was presented by the Zionist Organization of America with its Ben Hecht Award for Outstanding Journalism on the Middle East, an award previously won by, among others, the Jerusalem Post's Caroline Glick, syndicated columnist Cal Thomas, the late A.M. Rosenthal of the New York Times, and Daniel Pipes, founder of the Middle East Forum and publisher of Middle East Quarterly.<2>

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Institute for Justice: The initial funding for the Institute came from the Koch Family Foundations which also fund the libertarian Cato Institute and Citizens for a Sound Economy.