AstroTurfing for public policy Re: [Peace-discuss] Re: Support for Tea Parties

Thu Apr 23 14:54:53 CDT 2009

"Is it that you just don't get it? or do you just enjoy being a
contrarian?"

I might ask you a similar question, Wayne: do you just not want to hear about all the problems with this "tea party" idea, or do you just not care?

 Ricky

"Speak your mind even if your voice shakes." - Maggie Kuhn

________________________________
From: E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag>
To: Ricky Baldwin <baldwinricky at yahoo.com>
Cc: Morton K. Brussel <brussel at illinois.edu>; Peace Discuss <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 2:42:11 PM
Subject: Re: AstroTurfing for public policy Re: [Peace-discuss] Re: Support for Tea Parties

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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