Tweet
Were David Koch (and his brother Charles) planning to astroturf the Tea Party even earlier than formerly suspected?
Shattering the public perception that the Tea Party is a spontaneous popular citizens movement, a new academic paper provides evidence that an organization founded by David and Charles Koch, attempted to launch the Tea Party movement in 2002.
The peer-reviewed study appearing in the academic journal, Tobacco Control and titled, ‘To quarterback behind the scenes, third party efforts’: the tobacco industry and the Tea Party,‘ shows that the group Citizens for a Sound Economy launched a Tea Party movement website, www.usteaparty.com, that went live in 2002.
According to the website DeSmogBlog.com, who broke this story earlier today, CSE was founded in 1984 by the infamous Koch Brothers, David and Charles Koch in 1984. David Koch sat on the board of CSE for many years and the group’s first president, Richard Fink, went on to become a senior VP at Koch Industries.
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.
You can find a screenshot here of the archived U.S. Tea Party site, as it appeared online on Sept. 13, 2002.
The site is described as, “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.” There is also “Patriot Guest book” available for visitors to voice their support and write a message for CSE and the U.S. Tea Party movement.
The US Tea Party site is no longer online and appears to have been taken down sometime in mid-2011. A DNS registry search, finds that the web address usteaparty.com is currently owned by Freedomworks, an organization heavily involved in Tea Party organizing today.
Image by Donkey Hotey released under a Creative Commons license.
18 Comments
Good catch! Thanks!
Let me know when a news story from our MSM is actually the truth. Until then I will be holding my breath. the washington post is not called pravda on the potomic river for nothing
When is Time Magazine gonna have a “Most Despicable Character of the Year.”
Or, is it that the Koch Brothers would win EVERY time???
That is actually what Narcissists Weekly calls their annual award. Last year they had a tie between Barack Obama, David Koch, Lloyd Blankfein, Charles Koch, and Congress. It was a crowded cover photo.
Good catch. Utterly unsurprising. I never thought that this movement was “spontaneous,” as the rallies began so quickly after Obama was first elected in 2008. I knew that, at the least, the dittoheads had been quite convincingly “rallied” by Rush Limbaugh & Glenn Beck.
It’s all very well to claim that you’re “grass roots” because you think you “believe in” the stuff you’re “protesting.” But it’s hard to say it with a straight face when various mass media/propoganda outlets, such as Fox “News” & ClearChannel Radio are giving you very clear marching instructions.
Let’s get real. I believe it was Rachel Maddow who did some digging back in 2008/2009 to find the link between the Koch Brothers funding at least part of the Tea Party movement. Good for RM and thanks for the update.
The Tea Party ideology can be traced from the 1850′s to today:
Know Nothings – Klan – John Birch Society – Tea Party
Daddy Koch (Fred) was a founder of the John Birch Society. It is not surprising that his son’s would use their inherited wealth to organize the paranoid to influence American politics just like dad.
I’d add the Liberty League to that timeline.
Interesting. I had always thought it was the Koch brothers usurping populist revolt against the charade of the 911 report in 2006:
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20061217193729511
YES THE DICK brothers have the money (and it costs actually very little to support all the crap they do)but the so called tea party is what it was/is because of fox news that being an arm of the republican party ran ads and so called news features AROUND THE CLOCK supporting it.
2 interesting things here..first the rest of the media still to this day have never challenged the idea that this is not another party at al but just the john birch wing of the republican party that overtly because of fox news spout their racist intent.
and also it is the FCC under obama that is on board with the ongoing consolidations in the media.
obama may dislike fox like he may dislike bibi but he will NEVER upset his owners but standing up to them .
obama is simply the most amazing man to have ever achieved power in that he no matter how treated will NEVER NEVER NEVER use his power to stand up to those who tell him what to do no matter how it humiliates him or no matter how much harm it does to others.
he simply is not capable of harming anyone but those that look to him for help and justice.
I have pictures of the koch get together in Rancho Mirage with their fascist-appearing storm troupers lined up in front. All they needed was the right arms slanted out in front of them in obeisance to these creeps to complete the picture.
The right wing are fools, and the kochs are apt leaders of these clowns. With all koch money they can’t educate themselves what Americans are really like. Trash.
Well, at least this shows that the Tea Party wasn’t a racist reaction to the election of a black president. However, it helps prove that the Tea Party dolts are just the useful idiots of self-serving billionaires that don’t want to pay any taxes and want to pollute the air and water without any constraints.
The irony, of course, is that the Tea Party was just as much a revolt against the East India Tea Company, the original monster global corporation.
Jane Mayer wrote an article about the Koch brothers published in New Yorker magazine. According to that article, the Koch brothers began plotting the Tea Party in the 1980s.
Indeed, they formally established Freedomworks, the fairy godmother of the Tea Party in 1986. http://www.democrats.com/node/7789
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer
It was genius branding to name it the Tea Party, when is is not a political party at all, merely a wing of the same old Republican Party.
Interestingly enough, in the 1980s, when the Koch brothers were founding Freedom Works and supposedly cooking up the Tea Party, the Republican wing of the Democratic Party was formally organizing itself into the Democratic Leadership Council.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Leadership_Council
And the Koch brothers donated to the DLC. http://www.democrats.com/node/7789
That is absolutely astonishing, that the Koch brothers contributed to the DLC. Political reality in the U.S. today is not more cynical than we imagine, it is more cynical than we can imagine.
Never knew astroturf was made from tobacco.
Ba-da-bump!
Are left wingers fools, also? Do left wingers, as a group, or right wingers, as a group, have much political power in the US? Heck, does the mainstream American public have much political power in the US?
Or is the country run by plutocratic interests, who are mostly concerned about conserving their own wealth? And quite happy to dupe both left and right wingers, also?
One of the things on my todo list is to investigate the claim that discussing “Bill McKibben’s finances” will get you censored from posting comments at the Nation. A-googling around, via “350.org’s funding sources”, I found this
( From Hot Air, Photo Ops and Bill McKibben’s “Greenest” City)
Part of own criticism of 350.org involves their peculiar myopias wrt 3rd world CO2 production, dense, carbon free fusion energy as a Plan B, and their curious silence about ALEC, which is a player in facilitating hydro-fracking.
The Nation has been called a “left gatekeeper”. (Alas, leftgatekeepers.com is no more.)
Then again, there’s stuff like this and this.
Aren’t left wingers, who ignore who is funding left-leaning putative reform groups, also fools?
And aren’t the biggest fools those who fail to notice plutocratic funding of both left and right wings organizations?
I can see where the entire idea of having some egregious energy offender donating big bucks to your environmental activist organization might just be considered a ‘coup.’
Back in the days before ‘gatekeepers’ were quite so prevalent, it may have been considered anarchistic.