Posts tagged Tea Party
OPED: Koch brothers poisonous tentacles
Oct 9th
From the Huffington Post
by Eric Zuesse
Investigative Historian
Posted by Ron Baird
Boulder Channel 1 News editor
On October 7th, I reported in a two-part story, how the Koch brothers and their friends started in 2002 a plan to get control of the Republican Party so as to become enabled ultimately to shut down the Federal Government and maybe even drive it into default, so as to cause the American public to despise “government,” but actually to despise democracy itself; i.e., to despise this country’s democratic government, specifically.
Today, I report on the crucial role that the tobacco industry played in helping the Kochs to finance this operation, all of which was done with a profound contempt for the public, and with a deep pride for these aristocrats to rule the U.S. instead of the despised public controlling public policy through an honest and transparent Congress and Presidency.
Whereas that previous news report focused upon the Kochs’ expansion of their orbit of control to include the Heritage Foundation, from 2002 onwards, which is an operation that has not previously been covered, today’s report concerns instead the three major foundations that the Kochs themselves started and operated during this period: Americans For Prosperity, FreedomWorks, and Citizens for a Sound Economy.
The scholars, Amanda Fallin, Rachel Grana, and Stanton A. Glantz, published on 8 February 2013 in the online edition of the journal Tobacco Control, their blockbuster study,“‘To quarterback behind the scenes, third-party efforts’: the tobacco industry and the Tea Party,” and they laid out there the history of the key alliance between the tobacco companies and the Koch brothers.
This enormous study, through thousands of pages of archives, was funded by the National Cancer Institute; and it reported that, “Rather than being a purely grassroots movement that spontaneously developed in 2009, the Tea Party has developed over time, in part through decades of work by the tobacco industry and other corporate interests. … Simultaneously, they funded and worked through third-party groups, such as Citizens for a Sound Economy, the predecessor of AFP [Americans For Prosperity] and FreedomWorks,” all of which were/are Koch operations.
These researchers reported that, “In 2002, … CSE started its US Tea Party (http://www.usteaparty.com) project, the website of which stated ‘our US 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.'” (Amazingly, that damning webpage can still be accessed, via the web’s archive authority.)
Already, “Between 1991 and 2002 the tobacco companies, mainly Philip Morris, provided CSE with at least US$5.3 million,” and Philip Morris’s V.P. for Government Affairs justified these expenditures in a memo by saying: “They are adding this level of value. They have provided significant grassroots assistance, in the nature of several thousand calls to the Hill,” and are “very active on our behalf in the field in key states with key Members” of Congress. So: when the “spontaneous” “Tea Party” organization rose up in February 2009, to protest Obamacare, it was actually neither spontaneous, nor at all new.
America’s greatest living investigative journalist is perhaps Pam Martens, who provided a good summary of that study, and she supplemented it with an investigation of her own. In her 20 May 2013 article at her muckraking site “Wall Street on Parade,” she headlined “The Criminal Case Against the Tea Party Cabal,” and she reported also an additional Philip Morris memo (not mentioned by those three researchers), which described the role of CSE as follows: “We are funding a major (400K) grassroots initiative in the districts of House Energy & Commerce members to educate and mobilize consumers, through town hall meetings, radio and print ads, direct mail, patch-through calls to the Capitol switchboard, editorial board visits, polling data, meetings with Members and staff, and the release of studies and other educational pieces.”
They had already done this during 1994, with the Clinton Administration’s proposed healthcare reform, and they claimed there that it was “to show the Clinton plan as a government-run health care system replete with higher taxes and government spending, massive job losses, less choice, rationing of care and extensive bureaucracies. CSE is taking aim at the heart of the plan – employer mandates, new entitlements, price controls, mandatory health alliances, heavy load of new taxes and global budgets – and, with the program well underway, [it] is by all accounts getting rave reviews in the respective districts.”
Another wing of this operation to gut democratic government has been operated by Grover Norquist, who, on 25 May 2001, said on NPR’s “Morning Edition”: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” He was referring only to taxes, not really to spending (which many naïves interpreted him to mean).
Virtually every Republican congressional candidate thus signed Norquist’s “No New Taxes Pledge,” in order for them to be able to qualify for Norquist’s massive campaign-funding commitments from mega-corporate America. Norquist had been set up by Ronald Reagan to run Americans for Tax Reform, in order to do this, but the idea wasn’t actually new with Reagan. The far-right economist Milton Friedman had first introduced this idea, in 1978; candidate Ronald Reagan then adopted and defended it in 1980. Here’s how Reagan himself put it, during a Presidential debate, on 21 September 1980: “John tells us that, first, we’ve got to reduce spending before we can reduce taxes. Well, if you’ve got a kid that’s extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker.”
The idea of the plan is basically to strangle democracy. This is done by privatizing everything, so that the aristocracy, who already own most of the private wealth in this country, will be able to farm the public – farm the serfs with debt, as the public used to be known during the feudal era. Now, however, the aristocracy are no longer based upon their passing on to their heirs vast landed estates with serfs, but passing on to them vast international corporations with employees and consumers; so, instead of acres, they pass on shares of stock. So, instead of feudalism, it’s fascism. It is the modernized form of feudalism; it is conservative dictatorship for the world of today.
Their plan is working, brilliantly. They call it “libertarian,” but the liberty is to be only for aristocrats. For everyone else, it’s serfdom, if not outright slavery. Conservatives love hierarchy; it is morality, in their vision of things.
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Just like Boulder city Council US House Votes to End Money for NPR, and Senate Passes Spending Bill
Mar 18th
Readers of the Daily Camera overwhelmingly supported the end of free speech in Boulder. It is now coming to an end in the US house and Senate. this is a sad day for boulder and America
from NY Times: WASHINGTON — The House voted Thursday to cut off financing for National Public Radio, with Democrats and Republican fiercely divided over both the content of the bill and how it was brought to the floor.
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Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, praised the spending measure and said that over 10 years, $10 billion in cuts over all would amount to $140 billion in savings.
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SENATE VOTE 44
Passes Stopgap Budget
HOUSE VOTE 192
Approves Ban on NPR Funding
Ask the reporter a question on the move to defund NPR – which is almost certain to fail in the Senate – via Twitter. She will answer by video on Friday on The Caucus blog.
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Across the Rotunda, the Senate approved a short-term spending measure passed earlier in the week by the House that would keep the government financed through April 8. Members of both parties and chambers said the move, which once again averted a government shutdown, should be the last of its kind. The measure, which cut spending by $6 billion for this fiscal year, passed the Senate 87 to 13, with nine Republicans, three Democrats and an independent voting in dissent.
As in the House, some of the Senate’s more conservative members voted against the spending measure, known as a continuing resolution, arguing that its cuts were insufficient. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, offered his own plan, which he said would balance the federal budget in five years by eliminating the departments of education and energy, among other measures.
Senate Republican leaders backed the stopgap measure, praising the $6 billion in cuts that came on top of $4 billion in reductions contained in the current budget bill, which expires Friday. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said that over 10 years, the $10 billion in cuts would amount to $140 billion in savings. “All in all, a good day’s work,” he said.
But Senator Daniel K. Inouye, the Hawaii Democrat who is chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said the continued cutting was bound to harm federal agencies. “How much more can we cut before we have no funds to pay employees to monitor our borders and ports?” he asked. “How much more before we have to cancel the construction of dams, bridges, highways, levees, sewers and transit projects and throw thousands of private sector workers onto the street?”
The NPR bill, sponsored by Representative Doug Lamborn, Republican of Colorado, would mean that stations could not buy programming from NPR or any other source using the $22 million they get from the federal government.
“The time has come for us to claw back this money,” said Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee.
This was the second time that the House has moved to defund NPR; a rider was attached to a short-term spending bill passed last month by the House but rejected by the Senate. Thursday’s measure, which House Republicans rushed to the floor before a one-week recess begins, passed 228 to 192 ; all the Democrats who were there and seven Republicans voted against it and one Republican, Representative Justin Amash, voted present.
The bill, should the Senate even bring it to the floor, is almost certain to fail in that chamber. Democrats control the Senate, where members of both parties have expressed skepticism about cutting off NPR because it remains popular among many of their constituents.
The organization, in the crosshairs of Republican lawmakers for years, came under intense fire recently with the release of a video that showed one of its fund-raising executives criticizing members of the Tea Party, and the hasty firing of the commentator Juan Williams for remarks he made on Fox News about Muslims.
Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the Republican majority leader, said recently that the revelations of the video, made by a conservative advocate who posed as a potential donor to the entity “makes clear that taxpayer dollars should no longer be appropriated to NPR.”
Democrats said it was politics, not fiscal austerity, that drove the bill. “Why are we wasting valuable floor time on an ideological battle?” said Representative Louise Slaughter of New York.
The House debated the bill, and the procedure by which it was brought to the floor, for several hours Thursday. Republicans argued that NPR should be able to sustain itself through private donations, and Democrats countered that the cut would have negligible impact on debt reduction or the nation’s fiscal problems. They also accused Republicans of ignoring joblessness in lieu of attacking “Car Talk” and picking on Elmo.
Mr. Lamborn said that while he personally enjoyed NPR, “I have long believed it can stand on its own.” He added in a speech on the floor, “I want NPR to grow on its own, I want to see it thrive. Just remove taxpayers from the equation.”
Democrats objected to how the bill was brought to the floor. On Wednesday, the House Rules Committee held an emergency hearing to expedite the bill, and it went to the floor under a so-called closed rule, which does not allow for amendments, counter to the promise of more openness made by Speaker John A. Boehner. Republicans pointed out that the content of the seven-page bill had already been debated when it was part of the larger spending bill.
NPR expressed grave concern in a statement today about the impact of the bill on the entire public radio system, saying it was a direct effort to weaken it that would ultimately choke local stations’ ability to serve their audiences.
“At a time when other news organizations are cutting back and the voices of pundits are drowning out fact-based reporting and thoughtful analysis, NPR and public radio stations are delivering in-depth news and information respectfully and with civility,” Joyce Slocum, interim chief executive officer of NPR, said. “It would be a tragedy for America to lose this national treasure.”
Carl Hulse contributed reporting.