AstroTurfing for public policy Re: [Peace-discuss] Re: Support
for Tea Parties
E. Wayne Johnson
ewj at pigs.ag
Wed Apr 22 14:42:11 CDT 2009
Ricky,
Is it that you just don't get it? or do you just enjoy being a contrarian?
If you are just being a contrarian, let's drop the whole nonsense and go on.
The constitutionalists, the libertarians, and the traditional
conservatives ("Bill Kauffman" conservatives) all hate this Endless War
just the same as you do. It's absolutely pointless to allow the hacks
to divide us.
If you really want to know who supports the tea parties, I suggest you
try to find a clue amidst Upstate New Yorker Kauffman's words about who
the Real America is. The Real America is the disenfranchised 80% who
dont think that the government represents them, no matter which head of
"McBama" won the last election, the 80% who say they don't like the war.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Bill Kauffman -
(The /italics/ are mine.)
http://www.counterpunch.org/kauffman06252003.html
25 June 2003
My America vs. the Empire
By BILL KAUFFMAN
In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, John Fogerty of the terrific (if
weather-mad) band Creedence Clearwater Revival recalled "feeling this
shame just sweep over me...I was terribly ashamed of our country."
He needn't have been, as he soon realized. For Richard Nixon was "not my
country. He's those guys--over in Washington. First thing I thought
about was the Grand Canyon and my friends and neighbors--and the people
all across the country. The people in power aren't my country any more
than a bunch of gangsters are my country."
Nor is the Fortunate Son in his fortified bunker on Pennsylvania Avenue
my country--or your country, either, unless you are as thin and
insubstantial as one of those vapid wraiths hissing of empire on CNN or
MSNBC or any of the other alphabetical collisions in our corporate-media
soup.
/There are two Americas: the televised America, known and hated by the
world, and the rest of us. The former is a factitious creation whose
strange gods include "Sex and the City," accentless TV anchorpeople,
Dick Cheney, Rosie O'Donnell, "Friends," and the Department of Homeland
Security. It is real enough--cross it and you'll learn more than you
want to know about weapons of mass destruction--but it has no heart, no
soul, no connection to the thousand and one real Americas that produced
Zora Neale Hurston and Jack Kerouac and Saint Dorothy Day and the Mighty
Casey who has struck out. /
/I am of the other America, the unseen America, the America undreamt of
by the foreigners who hate my country without knowing a single thing
about it. Ours is a land of volunteer fire departments, of baseball, of
wizened spinsters who instead of sitting around whining about their
goddamned osteoporosis write and self-publish books on the histories of
their little towns, of the farmwives and grain merchants and parsons and
drunkards who made their places live. /
/We are the America that suffers in wartime: we do the dying, the paying
of taxes, we supply the million unfortunate sons (and now daughters) who
are sent hither and yon in what amounts to a vast government uprooting
of the populace. Militarism and empire are the enemies of small-town
America, not only because some native sons come home in bodybags but
also for the desolating fact that many never come home at all. They are
scattered to the winds, sent out--by force or enticement of state--in
the great American diaspora, never to return to the places that gave
them nurture./
/War kills the provinces. It drains them of cultural life as surely as
it takes the lives of 18-year-old boys. Almost every healthy, vigorous
cultural current of the 1930s, from the flowering of Iowa poetry to
North Dakota cornhusking tournaments to the renaissance of Upstate New
York fiction, was terminated by U.S. entry into the Second World War.
Vietnam, like any drawn-out war or occupation, disrupted normal
courtship patterns on the homefront: the difference between republic and
empire might be restated as the difference between taking the girl next
door to the Sadie Hawkins Dance and paying a Saigon whore in chocolate
bars and the Yankee dollar./
Empire focuses our attention on matters distant and remote, affairs to
which we are mere spectators. You can care about your backyard or
Baghdad; you can't tend to both. Under empire, Madonna replaces our
mothers, imperial fantasies straight out of Henry Luce's LIFE erase our
lower-case lives, and the wolf at the door is named Blitzer. Only he's
not at our door--our doors are too insignificant for such a ravening
creature--but on the idiot boxes that broadcast without cease the
propaganda of the regime. Facile contemners of President Bush deride him
as a "Texas cowboy." If only he were. Alas, President of the World Bush
is a deracinated preppie, an Andover yell leader who blamed his first
defeat for public office, in a 1978 congressional race, on
"provincialism." It seems that the real cowboys were unimpressed by a
naughty boarding-school cheerleader who was unable to pronounce
correctly the name of the largest city in the district. Young Bush's
helpmate, Vice President Cheney of Haliburton, is a man so placeless
that once he humbly determined himself to be the most qualified running
mate Mr. Bush might have, he had to hop a plane to Wyoming and become an
instant citizen of the Equality State so as to avoid violating the
pettifogging constitutional clause that effectively prevents President
and Vice President from being residents of the same state. Bush and
Cheney have no similar constitutional scruples when it comes to honoring
Article 1, Section 8 of that forgotten document, which reserves to
Congress the right to declare war, but then such hairsplitting is for
epicene liberals, not big draft-dodging he-men like George and Dick.
So no, I do not feel "ashamed" of my country, for America, as John
Fogerty understood, is not Bush or Cheney or Lieberman or Kerry but my
friends, my neighbors, and yes, the Grand Canyon, too. Even better, it
is the little canyon and the rude stream and Tom Sawyer's cave and all
those places whose names we know, whose myths we have memorized, and
whose existence remains quite beyond the ken of the Department of
Homeland Security.
Will Rogers, an American of the old school, once said, "America has a
great habit of always talking about protecting American Interests in
some foreign country. Protect 'em here at Home! There is more American
Interests right here than anywhere."
The Men in Grey who rule the televised America won't protect American
interests because they have no interest in America. It's up to us
provincials. What's it gonna be, fellow hicks: serve the empire or
preserve the street where you live?
Ricky Baldwin wrote:
> Thanks, Wayne, but I don't think we can toss out this guy's ideas just
> because he is a "Republican and a friend of the Bush Family" and
> thinks that rabid s.o.b. Dick Armey is "a nice guy" (Besides his own
> idiocy, Armey collaborated with Steve Forbes last year to set up a
> fake "grassroots" group called "angryrenters.com" as a Beltway
> conservative front purporting to be ordinary renters opposed to the
> government bailout of the toxic mortgage scam victims, a type of PR
> lie called "AstroTurfing").
>
> Wead does, in fairness, give further evidence that these so-called
> "tea parties" were Libertarian fronts. But even if Ron Paul and his
> crew came up with the idea back when, it looks a pretty solid case
> that Armey, Fox News, et al. ran the April 15, 2009, show - thanks
> for these links, Mort! - in the same way Clear Channel et al ran the
> pro-war demos in 2003. But they're as bad as each other on this
> knee-jerk anti-tax issue.
>
> More importantly, Wead misrepresents the politics of taxes pretty
> obnoxiously. There are of course plenty of big corporations that
> lobby hard for "lower taxes": Exxon, Philip Morris (big donations to
> the National Taxpayers Union), - and yes, General Motors, Chrysler,
> AT&T, and others.
>
> Goldman Sachs and plenty of others have lobbyisys in bed with both
> major parties, of course: e.g.
>
> http://thehill.com/business--lobby/not-your-average-tax-lobbyist-2008-06-16.html.
> That's not the issue. Corporations definitely lobby against taxes.
>
> They just don't lobby for lower taxes for *you and me*. That's the
> Big Idea that's missing from this whole so-called
> anti-tax boat-missing party. It's simply not true that a tax is a
> tax. It matters *who* is paying and *for what*. Many if not all of
> the same corporations also pay big money to the pro-Iraq-war lobby
> group BKSH & Assoc.
> http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=BKSH_%26_Associates
> (of recent McCain scandal fame
> http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2008/02/charlie-black-john-mccain-aide-and-super-lobbyist)
> - not exactly a proponent of reducing government spending *as such*
> (though there may have to be cuts in *social services* for the
> domestic population living in poverty or teetering on the brink in
> order to pay for the war(s)) - it's more a question of 'priorities'
> for them, at least on the political level if not the economic level.
>
> Of course, as an aside, this is another damning point about the "tea
> parties" that has been raised over and over in the blogosphere: where
> were these guys when Bush & Co. were jacking up the budget for war?
> Some, like Ron Paul supporters were opposing the war agenda, but many
> tea party-goers either brought pro-war messages to the events or at
> least made at times amazingly jingoistic pro-war declarations online.
> I've burdened everyone on this list with enough examples of that. The
> point is, the result was not a protest against war but rather closer
> to the exact opposite.
>
>
> Anti-tax corporations such as the above employ "some of the best law
> firms in Washington" to lobby for their selective tax cut agenda —
> Covington & Burling; Patton, Boggs & Blow; Caplin & Drysdale; Miller &
> Chevalier; Pepper, Hamilton & Scheetz. They also have some large
> well-funded 'interest' (i.e. research, PR, lobbying) groups: the
> National Association of Manufacturers, for example, not only
> fights against on-the-job safety and health standards, and the like,
> but opposing taxes (that affect their biggest supporters). For
> example, new proposals to tax their offshore profits (many of which,
> of course, 'earned' in the outsource-and-import business of dodging
> higher labor standards in the US by exploiting the suffering of the
> foreign
> poor) http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/04/13/business-lobby-taxes/.
>
> But to focus on corporate lobbying alone is to miss at least to some
> degree seeing the forest for the trees. Corporations are vehicles for
> wealthy capitalists / investors / business people to make money.
> Ultimately they *are* just groups of wealthy investors - with a few
> non-wealthy suckers scammed into buying a few shares along the way
> (this is partly a financing scheme whereby the 'venture' gets a few
> more bucks from outside the 'Skull and Bones" fraternity, et al, but
> probably primarily a PR trick to get ordinary people to 'buy in' to
> the 'free market' ideology by getting a few crumbs from the table).
>
> There are any number of PR schemes they can try to put over on people
> to get them to oppose social - indeed humanitarian - public policy,
> even a kind of 'generation gap'
> http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1379 - another corporate-funded
> one, by the way. But the point of them remains the same.
>
> The fact is, taxes have dropped drastically for the wealthiest
> individuals since I was kid and the top tax rate was 70% or more,
> down to barely over 30% - which is mostly a sham, of course, because
> they find loopholes, 'business expenses', etc. But there always seems
> to be room to lower them more somehow. All we have to do is cut some
> of the social services, fire departments, and other public projects
> that have helped raise the American standard of living - but of course
> almost never the military, or the police-prison system. We'll need
> those because as you cut welfare and lower wages, and raise sales
> taxes - which is what happens when you lower other taxes and reduce
> federal and state aide to local communities - and so on, what you get
> is more crime. And if you don't, it's simple - just make more things
> illegal. But that's a discussion for another time perhaps.
>
> What's insidious is the way they get ordinary people to buy into their
> 'AstroTurfing' schemes, by tossing them a bone here and there: "you
> work hard, right, why should you have to pay higher taxes so some lazy
> welfare queen can fatten up on ice cream"; "Muslims hate our way of
> life and Obama is one of them"; "taxes are bad for your grandchildren
> and will make them hate you"; "lesbians and other perverts are turning
> our children into Dungeons-and-Dragons-playing witches in the public
> schools since they banned prayer"; "hell, you can't even tell a
> Pollock joke any more"; etc.
>
> Time to organize against the nonsense.
>
> Ricky
>
> "Speak your mind even if your voice shakes." - Maggie Kuhn
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag>
> *To:* Morton K. Brussel <brussel at illinois.edu>
> *Cc:* Peace Discuss <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, April 21, 2009 6:10:28 PM
> *Subject:* [Peace-discuss] Re: Support for Tea Parties
>
> Doug Wead, who is Pentecostal, Republican and a friend of the Bush
> Family, writes:
>
>
> ...The fact is that the first, notable, Tea Party since Boston was
> launched at a Ron Paul campaign rally in Austin, Texas in December of
> 2007. The second was the famous “money bomb” fundraiser for Ron Paul
> on the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party in the middle of the 2008
> presidential run. And most of the crowd and organizers of yesterday’s
> event were Ron Paul supporters. But congressman Ron Paul, the
> Nostradamus from Texas, who predicted the crisis we now face, was not
> mentioned once by the national media.
>
> Credit (or blame) for the event was given to former Texas congressman,
> Dick Armey, a nice guy but not THE guy or to Newt Gingrich, or to
> Washington conservative think tanks that mine for Ron Paul money but
> never give him any respect or credit, or FOX television who actually
> blocked him from an early debate in 2008, or from sinister “corporate
> interests.” Huh? Gee… I wonder what corporation could possibly be
> interested in lower taxes and less government spending? General
> Motors? AIG?
>
> The fact is that many in big business switched to the Democrats in
> 1964 when they learned how Lyndon Johnson’s new regulations could wipe
> out their small business competitors and gain them monopolies. And it
> gained momentum, even in Republican administrations where powerful
> corporate lobbies ponied up for their share of government largesse.
> McDonalds, for example, wanted and received government subsidies to
> compete with French hamburger joints. Chuckle, chuckle. Now you try
> that. Go ahead. Open a hamburger stand and ask the government for
> money. Good luck.
>
> Wall Street and big business have been in bed with the Democrats for
> years. Republican corporate greed is not just a myth, it is true too,
> but most corporate leaders give to both parties. Silicon Valley is
> solid Democrat. In 1992 the CEO’s of Apple, HP, Xerox all opposed the
> Republican incumbent administration...
>
> Read more...
> http://dougwead.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/screwed-again-how-the-national-media-ignored-ron-paul-and-why-it-will-be-their-undoing/
>
>
> Morton K. Brussel wrote:
>> Old news, but a few articles relating to the Tea Parties and how and
>> by whom they were promoted.
>>
>> http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/09/lobbyists-planning-teaparties/
>>
>> http://firedoglake.com/2009/04/13/corporate-lobyists-raising-money-for-tea-parties/
>>
>> http://www.truthout.org/041709C By Phil Wilayto
>>
>> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-hamsher/the-corporate-lobbyists-b_b_186367.html
>
>
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