“What happened to the country that loved the underdog and stood up for the little guy?”
-Glenn Beck, “We Surround Them”, 3/12/2009
The Tea Party mythology – that it is a grassroots, “insurgent” movement bent on overthrowing the “establishment” – has taken root in the corporate and even independent liberal media, largely because of the Herculean efforts by conservative think tanks, media sources, and big corporate funding (as I discussed in the last essay in this series, Lisbeth Salander: The Dark Metal Sarah Palin).
The Tea Party PR fairy tale is so pervasive that it has become a commonplace, and thus, the normal, “factual” way in which the media covers the election, as we see in the McClatchy newspapers’ report “Tea Party, Palin put GOP establishment on ropes in Florida, Alaska.” The headline – which introduces an “objective” news report – spreads this conservative manufactured myth, that the Tea Party is separate from the Washington establishment, that it is in fact “fighting” the beltway. The headline was published across its network of 31 papers nationwide, even growing into the independent media, even at progressive media bastion Truthout (who I have published with).
In the last week, the media – both corporate and independent – has unreflectively spread the manufactured myth that Tea Party candidates are outside of the political establishment. In simply reporting the Tea Party as a separate entity from the Republican Party, many media sources have helped perpetuate the false notion that its leaders represent a new political movement.
In even using the brand “Tea Party” we perpetuate the idea that it is not the same old Republican party.
To the contrary, while claiming to fight on behalf of the “little guy,” who is angrier than ever about the state of affairs today according to a recent PEW poll, the Tea Party leadership – which is ideologically and financially connected to the Republican establishment, and billionaire activists – sees the opportunity to turn the rage at government into a love for big business (Much to the intense criticism of some real grassroots Tea Partiers). As a result, the Tea Party movement, whether or not the on the ground activists are aware of this, appears to be acting as a set of sacrificial pawns on behalf of the corporate elite – the Plutocracy – at the expense of its own middle class interest.
The Tea Party candidates, their leadership, and their corporate sponsors are not anti-establishment. Let’s no longer use this fabricated fable, especially those of us working in the independent media, and no longer act as pack-mules for think-tank propaganda.
Grassroots Greed
There is an important distinction between the on-the-ground Tea Party activists, and its leadership. The Tea Party itself is not completely Astroturf, or a fake grassroots movement. No doubt, the rage that members in the Tea Party feel is authentic. Further, as New Yorker reporter Ben McGrath points out in an insightful profile on the Tea Party, it isn’t fair to say that the activists are “mere tools of right-wing media figures like Glenn Beck.” Rather, McGrath shows us a portrait of real members of the party in protest, with real rage at the state of the world, and the country. “The blogosphere,” McGrath writes, “can make trained foot soldiers of us all, with or without corporate funding.” (And as you’ll read in the conclusion, some Tea Partiers are actively fighting against corporate control).
And we can’t doubt that there are grassroots members of the Tea Party, the Republican establishment and major corporations, deliberately hidden from scrutiny behind layers of non-profits and think-tanks, have provided it extensive support and sponsorship. The April 2009 Tea Party protests were subsidized in part by FreedomWorks, which former Texas Republican Dick Armey chairs. Of FreedomWorks, Former President George W. Bush said “they have been doing a great job all over the country of educating people” about basic Republican philosophy: “Lower Taxes, Less Government, More Freedom.”
FreedomWorks appears not only plugged into the mainstream Republican Party, but also Fox News (whose parent company, News Corporation, donated one million dollars to the Republican Governor’s Races). Fox commentator Beck, an architect of the Tea Party brand, promotes an activist kit on FreedomWorks website. Beck has had Armey on his program, which FreedomWorks in turn posted on YouTube. FreedomWorks also sponsored a segment on his Fox News radio program, and Beck explains their collaboration – that they have the “organizational power” to help the Tea Party in its objectives. “FreedomWorks had the resources to break the Tea Parties big,” writes Michael Brendan Dougherty of The American Conservative “[T]he group commands a budget in the $8 million range and claims 902,000 members.”
And to get big, Armey’s organization has received financial support from big business. FreedomWorks received nearly $3,000,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which according to MediaMatters “is financed by the Mellon industrial, oil, and banking fortune,” and which donates major money to many conservative causes and think tanks. (See SourceWatch for more details). Further, Steve Forbes – of the “nation’s leading business magazine” Forbes, famous for their list of the richest companies and people in the world – is on the board of directors (Not surprisingly, Forbes was also a Ronald Reagan appointee, and is now chair of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation).
And speaking of Forbes, Koch Industries, the magazine’s second wealthiest private company in America, has helped fund the Tea Party, as Jane Mayer shows us in her must read recent New Yorker profile of the Billionaire Koch brothers (“Covert Operations: the billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama”). As Mayer reports, the Koch brothers have used their 35 billion dollar fortune to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into constructing an invisible hard-right propaganda infrastructure, consisting of pro-business think tanks that manufacture pro-business ideas and strategies, and PR propaganda machinery to spread these messages pervasively and persuasively. One of these projects is the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which funded a July 4th summit titled “Texas Defending the American Dream.” This summit, Mayer explains, served as a tool for promoting the “grassroots” Tea Party movement:
Five hundred people attended the summit, which served, in part, as a training session for Tea Party activists in Texas. An advertisement cast the event as a populist uprising against vested corporate power. “Today, the voices of average Americans are being drowned out by lobbyists and special interests,” it said. “But you can do something about it.” The pitch made no mention of its corporate funders. The White House has expressed frustration that such sponsors have largely eluded public notice. David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser, said, “What they don’t say is that, in part, this is a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.” (Italics added)
Even if the Tea Party is an authentic, grassroots democratic movement, even if its adherents didn’t receive corporate funds, even if its members purport to hate corporations, its ends ultimately serve corporate interests – the billionaires’ interests. Why else would big oil, Forbes, and the Koch Brothers help seed and cultivate its grassroots?
What good business would invest in a project they don’t expect a return on?
Capitalists Revolt!
The pro-corporate bias of the Tea Party should come as little surprise, as it was founded on the floor of the Chicago Trading Floor by CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, in response to the “bailouts” of those faced with foreclosures (see the rant that started it all here). The Tea Party grew from outrage – outrage at the prospect of “subsidizing the ‘loser’s mortgages,” with a call to “capitalists” to come protest. The Tea Party is “opposed to bailouts, which favor the wealthy and connected,” explains Matthew Contenetti, an editor at the conservative Weekly Standard and author of The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Media Elite Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star, in his detailed profile of the Tea Party (which is well worth reading, as he cogently critiques Beck’s “conspiracy theory” thinking). “They…believe that redistributing goods to the ignoble is unjust,” he concludes, that the “winners,” those who have fared well in the economy, should not have to help those who have made poor decisions – those ignoble losers. And while Contenetti claims the Tea Party is “no single party,” but a diverse amalgam of philosophies, its members share this moral outrage at “subsidizing bad behavior,” and believe firmly in fiscal conservatism – cutting spending and limiting the size of the government.
As Contenetti shows us, the Tea Party, in its core values, is the Republican Party. It is like Coke in a new bottle, re-branded, re-packaged with new logos and slogans, but with the same essential ingredients – small government and support of big business.
The Tea Party is the Republican Party with a catchy name, that doesn’t have the stink of George W. Bush on it.
Not surprisingly, the vast majority of those who agree with Tea Party ideals are already Republicans – far fewer Independents and Democrats are sympathetic, according to PEW and Gallup. In other words, while the Tea Party appears to be a new movement, it essentially operates in the pro-business confines of the traditional Republican philosophy and establishment. “Even the most militant rebels aren’t upending the establishment,” Doughtery writes. “They’re still playing safely within the confines of Republican orthodoxy.” He concludes that “The Tea Party is nothing more than a Republican-managed tantrum.”
And thus, the Tea Party’s anger towards the “elites,” the “wealthy and connected,” doesn’t include those in big business. Contennetti acknowledges that for all its righteous indignation towards the federal government in the wake of the bailout, the Tea Party “activists haven’t had much to say, for example, on the topic of the big banks.”
In this capitalist revolution, multinational corporations are the Tea Party’s comrades in arms.
Tea Party Leaders Defend (B)ig (P)rofits
Tea Party star Rand Paul, who upset the Republican selected Senate candidate in a recent primary, illustrates that this movement of the “little guy” is a cover for a traditional Republican pro-big business agenda. While Paul appears to have received no corporate contributions , which seems to give him more Tea Party credibility, he was endorsed by FreedomWorks, and according to the title of a recent Kentucky newspaper, “Feels Love from GOP.” (Though very recently, Tea Partiers have been mad at him for “taking DC money”). At a recent speech, Paul makes the connection between the Tea Party and Republicans clear: “What unifies Republicans is a belief that the Constitution restrains the size and scope of government.” And like Santelli, Paul – an eye-surgeon and son of libertarian star Ron Paul – got into the race because of his outrage at the bailout. Further, recent statements illustrate his hard-line pro business stance: he doesn’t believe the federal government should get involved in telling businesses they shouldn’t discriminate based on race, though says he wouldn’t repeal the Civil Rights Act (which legally forces businesses to not discriminate). In a recent ABC interview, he questions the existence of minimum wage, and castigates Obama as “really un-American in his criticism of business” after the BP Gusher. In other words, Rand believes government should stay out of business – even if business discriminates, harms the environment, exploits workers, and overall, damages the public good at the expense of the public (quite literally).
Much like Paul, Tea Party heroine Sarah Palin also came to the aid of BP, the fourth largest corporation in the world, in the guise of helping the “small people.” Palin stepped into defend BP in a recent Tweet, in which she passed along a blog by Thomas Sowell, a National Review writer, and conservative think tank Hoover Institute fellow. Sowell argues that the Obama administration has committed a “totalitarian” power grab by setting up a fund for BP, to ensure they pay out those damaged by the volcano of their oil washing onto Gulf shores, and destroying their small businesses. In “Is the US on a Slippery Slope to Tyranny,” Sowell uses an analogy to Nazi Germany, and argues that the attack on BP is in essence an attack on constitutional democracy – on the American people (Sowell frequently uses the Nazi comparison with liberals, and liberal ideas. See our recently released Project Censored 11, Ch.3 “Manufacturing Distraction,” which I co-wrote, for more details)
Importantly, Sowell is associated with a number of major corporate interests as fellow of the Hoover Institution. The Sarah Sciafe Foundation – who supported FreedomWorks, – gave nearly $10,000,000 to the Hoover Institute. Further, Hoover appears to be connected – at least ideologically – to Americans for Prosperity, which is another Koch Industries’ front. AFP Director James Miller is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, and served as Ronald Reagan’s Budget Advisor (Read more at the Washington Post on “Americans for Prosperity,” which is also intimately connected to the Republican Party).
Sowell’s stance – supported by the Hoover Institute, by the National Review, by the Republican Establishment – is clear: protecting big business is protecting democracy, a belief which squares with Palin’s stated beliefs. In “God and Woman at Wasilla,” Michael Kazin, who reviews Palin’s and Contenetti’s books, writes that “Palin can confidently assert that both big businesses and small ones ‘are built by regular people,’ and so should be left to innovate and prosper.” In other words, from Palin’s perspective, defending big business, defending BP after it destroyed the Gulf coast and the small businesses that relied on its waters, is akin to helping out average Americans.
Populists for Plutocracy
No doubt, Palin and Paul are building on the Republican ideological foundation: Reagan’s Trickle-Down Economics (Palin has cited Reagan as her inspiration to get into politics). If BP can prosper, so can everyone, including Joe Six Pack. If BP succeeds, if big oil succeeds, if big business succeeds, so do the American citizens, so does America. Imposing any kind of regulation on BP, therefore, is “un-American,” as it stifles freedom, innovation, and shared prosperity.
The only problem, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich points out in “Unjust Spoils”, is the fact that the rich are getting richer, and are not bringing the rest of us with them: “America’s median wage, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for decades,” though the wealthiest 1% now own 23% of the entire nation’s income – up from about 9% in the late 70s. Adjusted for inflation, incomes for high school graduates are the same as in 1969, and those with college degrees are only “modestly higher,” according to senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Jeff Madrick. Overall, while the middle and lower classes have stagnated, the top 20% increased their share of our nation’s income. The other 80% have lost their share (See The Nation’s series on “Inequality in America” for more detail). The middle and lower classes have not benefitted from the increased wealth concentrated at the very top.
The Tea Party is retro-Reaganomics, rebranded, selling economic inequity as middle class empowerment.
You need not look at a “liberal rag” such as The Nation for evidence that Retro-Reganomics will increase inequity. The infamous leaked Citigroup memo “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances”, (featured in Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story) argues that “the rich are getting richer,” and that the “Plutonomy,” or the concentration of wealth at the very top 1%, will continue – so long as “income inequality is allowed to persist and widen.” And further, the memo speculates, the Plutocracy was strengthened in mid-1980s by “reduction in corporate and income taxes” – Reagan pro-business policies. Finally, the memo argues that, so long as wealth doesn’t trickle down, so long as income inequality exists, their “plutonomy basket should continue to do very well.”
In this context, Palin, Paul, and Beck’s battle against a tyrannical government is not a battle for the little guy, for the average American, but for big business, for those sitting at the very top of the wage pyramid – for the Plutocrats, for the Koch Brothers. Their battle is for the elites, not against them.
Conclusion: Growing a Real Tea Party
While fighting evils of an “Orwellian government,” Palin and Paul not only ignore the evils of centralized corporate power, but appear to actively defend them in the name of the American people. Thus, the official Tea Party policies – which are those of the Republican Party establishment – serve to help the “elite,” the “wealthy and connected,” the very establishment it claims it wants to bring down. In short, the Tea Party leaders strive to perpetuate the Republican tradition of stratifying the economy, and thus actively undermining the “unconnected” little guy.
Some grassroots activists in the Tea Party are growing from under the Astroturf, recognizing the dangers of excessive corporate power. According to a report in the TPM Muckraker, some Tea Partiers came out strongly against the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which gives corporations – like Koch Industries – unlimited spending in campaigns. “We might as well be able to vote for Disney,” one activist commented, diverging not only from the Republican establishment, who applauded the ruling, but also from Tea Party leader Paul, who is supported by – drum roll – Citizens United.
But these voices have been drown out by Tea Party leaders, who for all their anti-establishment posing, are clearly well connected to the Republican establishment and major corporate interests. Thus, the Tea Partiers rage – and that of the American public – is being successfully harvested by corporate America to retain and increase their power and wealth, which trickles up to the Plutocrats. Their rage – our rage – is being harvested to buttress the Plutocracy, rather than to regulate the super rich in ways that benefit the commonwealth, the unconnected little guy who has been so damaged by our economy.
A real Tea Party movement is one which adequately represents what the name symbolizes, one which represents the interests of the people, fights all excessive, abusive powers, not just those within the government, but those in multi-national corporations as well, who are not subject to democratic, transparent oversight. A real Tea Party movement will be skeptical of all those with unchecked, unbalanced and thus undemocratic power – in the government and without.
Only then can we follow Beck’s words, and be a country that truly stands up for the underdog. Only then will the Tea Party be anti-establishment.
Until then, let’s call the Tea Party by its true name – The Republican Party.
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