Peer Reviewed Study: Big Tobaco /Kochs Planned Tea Party for 10 Years

Thumbs and others were had and at best their response to legitimate rage at bailouts for big banks, was to choose to back the billionaire tormentors of the middle class. More details on how the bg corporations and a few cranky billionaires planned the Tea Party.

An interesting find is a web site from 2002 with the actual name "Tea Party" spouting the anti-government/tax /faux populist theme trotted out in 2009 and 2010.
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Big Tobacco, Koch Brothers Planned Tea Parties a Decade Before They Hit American Politics

Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance.


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

From the study: 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:

Click on the link to see the actual 2002 website.

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-a...tea-parties-decade-they-hit-american-politics

 

This is true and undoubtedly the Kochs and big tobaco did a good job of using their previously created Tea Party vehicle as a way to channel little folk rage over the banking debacle away from the elite and to push their agenda, especially in the 2010 midterm.

The mystery is why ordinary folks like Weslinder think that it was a movement somehow in their interests.

 

I still think it is a mystery why intelligent folks fall for stuff like trickle down and supply side and the simplistic econ of market fundamentalism as the answer to all the questions of how to organize society.

 

It is true. One of the good reasons to oppose the privitization hoax in which you privatize government services and turn them over to your contributors to make money off of.

Sadly not enough really rich people do not realize that "some things are more important in life than lining their pockets with more" money even if a higher tax rate would cause some people to not suffer horribly minute by minute.