Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Tea Party Zombies

By Jeff Simpson

Thanks to some actual reporters and Academia, we know that the "tea party" was the perfect example of astroturf!  

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.

Wow, the "tea party" is just a bunch of sheep doing what they are told by their corporate masters, who could care less about them but uses them to continue to make obscene profits without having to get their hands dirty by doing the actual dirty work of democracy!  

Who knew?

Now we see that even the local "tea party"'s know that their group members are NOT capable of independent thoughts:

Voted, and called into 620 because the Tea Party in Racine does a horrendous job of getting out the vote. People were calling in and didn't even know who to vote for.

 Apparently, even the "tea party" knows that no one in the "tea party" was able to go to the polls on their own without their Marching orders from Charlie Sykes!

 

2 comments:

  1. Isn't it spelled ASStroturf?

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  2. Ultimately the Tea Party is backfiring on its financiers and organizers. Reading the Wisconsin Tea Party Facebook page, you see angry people who are paranoid and arguably no longer clinging to reality. They have too much control in the Republican Party and have turned the GOP into a toxic brand.

    Efforts to bring the Party back to the middle are met with stiff resistance. Immigration reform is seen as treason. They believe massive government spending cuts will balance the budget based on highly erroneous information.

    As a matter of fact, the Wisconsin Tea Party Facebook page is nothing but erroneous information, and paranoid as well. These are some of the nuttier comments:

    “In my personal opinion anybody who keeps their money and valuables in an American Bank, especially NOW considering the mind control AND temptation of easy, simple and convenient transactions, Internet purchases, deposits and transfers, deserves to be Cyprus-ed. “

    “Alex (Jones of Infowars) has joined the Southern Baptist convention the Vatican, and other victim disarmament organizations calling for immediate gun confiscation.”

    “I heard today that the Obama administration is drafting procedures under the guise of "Green Energy" whereby Federal energy & transportation dollars will only be sent to large cities. This is a means of redistributing suburban money to the large cities and force people in the suburbs to move to apartment living in the big cities. Does Agenda 21 ring a bell to anyone?”

    “The real question is: Is the House of Representatives getting serious about IMPEACHING this make believe POTUS?”

    This is the Republican base. Paranoid zombies are not attractive to a majority of American voters.

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