AstroTurfing for public policy Re: [Peace-discuss] Re: Support
for Tea Parties
E. Wayne Johnson
ewj at pigs.ag
Wed Apr 22 15:07:09 CDT 2009
In case you missed in before, here is a video of Bill Kauffman speaking
at the Rally for the Republic last September at the Target Center in
Minneapolis.
He differentiates true patriotism from the mere jingoism that swept the
country on 9/12---
http://www.liberty4urbana.com/drupal-6.8/node/179
"There are a lot more of us than there are of Dick Cheney"
E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
> 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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