Executive Director, DeSmogBlog.com
Posted: 02/11/2013 1:26 pm
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. Both
groups are now "supporting the tobacco companies' political agenda by
mobilizing local Tea Party opposition to tobacco taxes and smoke-free
laws." Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity were once a single
organization called
Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE).
CSE was founded in 1984 by the infamous Koch Brothers, David and
Charles Koch, and received over $5.3 million from tobacco companies,
mainly Philip Morris, between 1991 and 2004.
In 1990, Tim Hyde, RJR Tobacco's head of national field operations,
in an eerily similar description of the Tea Party today, explained why
groups like CSE were important to the tobacco industry's fight against
government regulation. Hyde wrote:
"... coalition building should proceed along two tracks: a) a
grassroots organizational and largely local track,; b) and a national,
intellectual track within the DC-New York corridor. Ultimately, we are
talking about a "movement," a national effort to change the way people
think about government's (and big business) role in our lives. Any such
effort requires an intellectual foundation - a set of theoretical and
ideological arguments on its behalf."
The common public understanding of the
origins of the Tea Party is that it is a popular grassroots uprising that began with anti-tax protests in 2009.
However, the
Quarterback study reveals that in 2002, the
Kochs and tobacco-backed CSE designed and made public the first Tea
Party Movement website under the web address
www.usteaparty.com. Here's a screenshot of the
archived U.S. Tea Party site, as it appeared online on Sept. 13, 2002:
CSE describes the U.S. Tea Party site,
"In 2002, our U.S. 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." The site features a
"Patriot Guest book" where supporters can write a message of support for CSE and the U.S. Tea Party movement.
Sometime around September 2011, the U.S. Tea Party site was taken offline. According to the DNS registry, the web address
www.usteaparty.com is currently owned by Freedomworks.
The implications of the UCSF
Quarterback report are
widespread. The main concern expressed by the authors lies in what they
see happening overseas as the Tea Party movement expands
internationally, training activists in 30 countries including Israel,
Georgia, Japan and Serbia.
As the authors explain:
"This international expansion makes it likely that Tea Party
organizations will be mounting opposition to tobacco control (and other
health) policies as they have done in the USA."
Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity are both multi-issue
organizations that have expanded their battles to include other policies
they see as threats to the free market principles they claim to defend,
namely fighting health care reform and regulations on global warming
pollution. The report's warning about overseas expansion efforts by
Freedomworks should therefore also be heeded by groups in the health and
environment arenas.
Finally, this report
might serve as a wake-up call to some
people in the Tea Party itself, who would find it a little disturbing
that the "grassroots" movement they are so emotionally attached to, is
in fact a pawn created by billionaires and large corporations with
little interest in fighting for the rights of the common person, but
instead using the common person to fight for their own unfettered
profits.
Follow Brendan DeMelle on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/bdemelle
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