The Tea Party's Brain-Trust, John Galt and Ayn Rand.
Anne Rearick / Agence VU/Redux
History is important, and its amazing how much history Koch’s Americans for Prosperity has. Here I share some details from Jeff Nesbit who wrote: Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP, which is followed by tips and links to 10 other articles about various aspects of this long running strategic campaign aimed at an ultimate hostile take-over of our United State of American’s government of the people, by the people and for the people, by a few wealthier than god oligarchs.
With Trump’s people holding the White House and a Republican party that has made itself cast of the ethics of honesty and are now blind to all but their own short-term self-interest - that achievement feels terrifyingly closer than ever.
It would be easy to dismiss this as just an oddball treehugger's imagination run wild, but the thing is all the information I'm finding reveals my fears are supported by overwhelming facts. Hell, it's worse than even I ever imagined. Basically rational liberty loving people have one or two election cycles to make their stand, or forever hold your peace.
Citizens for a Sound Economy (AFP’s ancestor) - SourceWatch
Citizens for a Sound Economy - news and investigations - PublicIntergrity.org
Who Is Citizens for a Sound Economy? - Austin Chronicle
Anatomy of a fraudulent “grassroots” campaign: Citizens for a Sound Economy - Noah Page
Study Confirms Tea Party Was Created by Big Tobacco and Pollutocrat Kochs - Brendan DeMelle
Tea Part Ties To Koch Brothers Ignored by Media in IRS Scandal - Jesse Coleman,
Americans for Tax Reform - SourceWatch report
Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) Koch Industries Climate Denial Front Group - Robert Maguire and Viveca Novak
ATR’s Tax Forms Raise Questions About Use of Crossroads Grant, “Social Welfare” Purpose - OpenSecrets
Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) Koch Industries Climate Denial Front Group - Greenpeace report
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THE SECRET ORIGINS OF THE TEA PARTY
How Big Oil and Big Tobacco partnered with the Koch Brothers To Take Over The GOP. By Jeff Nesbit
The spring of 1993 was a lousy time to be associated with the Republican Party in Washington D.C. …
So I did what many others did in that spring of 1993 in the nation’s capital: I began consulting. My first client was a think tank that I’d never heard of—a small outfit with big dreams and a curious checkbook.
At the time, no one knew much about Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). …
CSE was, in effect, a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned company in the United States, with interests in manufacturing, trade, and investments.
But what I didn’t know when I began consulting for Citizens for a Sound Economy was what any of the connections between CSE and the Koch brothers were really all about. What was the endgame? Today, we know. …
The long rise of the Tea Party movement was orchestrated, well funded, and deliberate. Its aim was to break Washington.
… One of my first assignments as a consultant for CSE was to join the CSE leadership on a New York fund-raising trip to meet with a huge corporate partner with vast experience in building real political muscle who could help CSE reach beyond Koch oil money for their new grassroots efforts. We visited Philip Morris’ headquarters in New York.
…
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 …
In successive phases in the 1990s, with the Kochs’ CSE as its core mobilization network partner, Philip Morris and RJR helped create state-based anti-tax and anti-regulation propaganda campaigns such as Get Government Off Our Back, Enough is Enough, and Citizens Against Regressive Taxation.
Over the years, Rich Fink, Charles Koch’s political adviser, and his various Koch protégés have occasionally talked publicly about what would be needed to take over one of the two national political parties from the outside and place Libertarian, free-market principles at its center. It would take:
• an extensive academic network to support it intellectually;
• policy networks in every state to draw on that intellectual underpinning from hundreds of American universities;
• a true political grassroots alliance that extended to all of those state capitals and worked closely with the academic and policy network;
• a propaganda arm that could bring tightly controlled messaging and narratives to the fore in the state networks in a way that looked like in- dependent journalism;
- and a national coordinating group that could enforce discipline in what would otherwise be a chaotic, unruly, wildly disconnected political network that ran the gamut from the patriot movement to American exceptionalism.
…
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. …
Adapted from Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP, copyright © 2016 by Jeff Nesbit. First hardcover edition published April 5, 2016, by St. Martin’s Press. All rights reserved.
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Citizens for a Sound Economy - (ancestor to Americans for Prosperity)
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Citizens for a Sound Economy - news and investigations
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Who Is Citizens for a Sound Economy?
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Anatomy of a fraudulent “grassroots” campaign: Citizens for a Sound Economy
by Noah Page on 2/13/04
The campaign by the right-wing organization Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) to overturn a legislatively approved tax increase in Oregon and implement more than half-a-billion in cuts to public services was presented by both CSE and its supporters as a “grassroots” political operation. This claim is worthy of serious examination.
CSE, a Washington, D.C.-based corporate front group founded by David and Charles Koch of Koch Industries …
… Powell’s memo precipitated an immediate and vast influx of corporate profits into establishing right-wing “think tanks” and beefing up existing ones.
These groups included the Business Roundtable, founded in 1972 by the CEOs of Alcoa, General Electric, U.S. Steel, and other companies; the Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973 with a quarter-million-dollar gift from the ultra-conservative businessman Adolph Coors; and the Cato Institute, founded in 1977 by petroleum millionaire Charles Koch. …
Two years later, another right-wing group, Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), was launched out of Reagan’s White House, intended as an in-house operation to build support for the 1986 tax “reform” bill. ATR eventually became an independent entity and is headed by right-wing strategist Grover Norquist …
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Study Confirms Tea Party Was Created by Big Tobacco and Pollutocrat Kochs
By Brendan DeMelle | FEB 11, 2013 | THINKPROGRESS
A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.
Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry’s role in driving climate disruption.
The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health, traces the roots of the Tea Party’s anti-tax movement back to the early 1980s when tobacco companies began to invest in third party groups to fight excise taxes on cigarettes, as well as health studies finding a link between cancer and secondhand cigarette smoke.
Published in the peer-reviewed academic journal, Tobacco Control, the study titled, ‘To quarterback behind the scenes, third party efforts’: the tobacco industry and the Tea Party, is not just an historical account of activities in a bygone era. As senior author, Stanton Glantz, a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) professor of medicine, writes:
“Nonprofit organizations associated with the Tea Party have longstanding ties to tobacco companies, and continue to advocate on behalf of the tobacco industry’s anti-tax, anti-regulation agenda.”
The two main organizations identified in the UCSF Quarterback study are Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks. …
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By: JesseColeman, May 29, 2013
10 out of 11 Tea Party spokespeople quoted in major news outlets regarding the IRS scandal have ties to the Koch funded Americans for Prosperity .
The Internal Revenue Service, not the most popular government agency to begin with, has been in the midst of a scatological squall for the past 3 weeks over their treatment of tea party groups. According to an agency spokesperson, organizations garnered additional scrutiny of their applications for non-profit status for having “Tea Party, Patriot, or 9/12” in the application materials. Non-profit status is granted by the IRS for “social welfare organizations” and federal law puts legal limits to the amount of overtly political things you can do if you are applying to be a non-profit, and thus tax-exempt.
In the coverage of this story, now a scandal, there are a couple of important facts that some of the reporting has missed. …
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Americans for Tax Reform
Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) is an anti-tax lobbying group founded in 1985 by Grover Norquist, whom the New York Times has called "one of the Republican Party's most influential policy strategists."[1] ATR has close ties to the Republican Party and has frequently allied itself with the tobacco industry.
ATR describes itself as a group that "believes in a system in which taxes are simpler, flatter, more visible, and lower than they are today. The government's power to control one's life derives from its power to tax. We believe that power should be minimized.”[2]
ATR is an "associate" member of the State Policy Network, a web of right-wing “think tanks” in every state across the country.[3] …
ATR has several significant ties to the Koch brothers and their network of conservative donors …
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Americans for Tax Reform (ATR)
Koch Industries Climate Denial Front Group
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ATR’s Tax Forms Raise Questions About Use of Crossroads Grant, “Social Welfare” Purpose
by Robert Maguire and Viveca Novak, November 18, 2013
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Americans for Tax Reform (ATR)
Koch Industries Climate Denial Front Group
$110,000 from Koch foundations, 2003-2012
Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) denies the basic science of global warming and opposes federal policies to address it.
In 1998, ATR’s Peter Cleary was part of a meeting at the American Petroleum Institute that produced the Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan. The plan was published by the New York Times, revealing how fossil fuel companies and would finance surrogate groups to strategically undermine public trust in climate scientists and their research.
ATR focused on costs and denial in their 2008 “Cost of Government” report.
In 2009, ATR’s Todd Hollenbeck promoted a film featuring climate science deniers called “Not Evil, Just Wrong,” smeared Al Gore in attempts to discredit climate science, and encouraged ATR’s members to oppose national climate legislation. Despite promoting doubt over climate science, Hollenbeck has no scientific qualifications. He now works at the Foundation for Economic Education and was previously a Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow at the Independence Institute and a Students for Liberty campus coordinator.
Americans for Tax Reform is a member of the State Policy Network. …
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