Marco Rubio To Give Keynote Speech For Koch Brothers' New John Birch Society

The Koch family spent a lot of money getting Marco Rubio into office and they're not about to throw it all away just because the teabaggers and Know Nothings they cultivate as their shock troops are upset over some issue-- immigration reform-- the Koch don't even care about. Papa Fred-- a gussied up, old line KKK redneck who struck it rich-- would have cared, but Charles and David only care about money. The Kochs are standing behind Rubio-- with a wall of cash funneled through all their high-flyin' front groups.

Fox News viewers in Florida will see a new commercial in the coming weeks urging them to call Senator Marco Rubio. “Thank him for keeping his promise, and fighting to secure the border,” a narrator says in the ad, which is paid for by the conservative American Action Network.

Another group, Americans for a Conservative Direction, led by former Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and other top Republicans, has been running ads in Iowa lately that implore those watching to “stand with Marco Rubio to end de facto amnesty.”

And when the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the Koch brothers’ political advocacy group, decided to move its signature annual conference outside Washington for the first time, it picked a spot right in Mr. Rubio’s political backyard: Orlando. The keynote speaker? Mr. Rubio. ... Rubio has been attacked at Tea Party rallies (his name elicits boos), on conservative radio (“a piece of garbage,” Glenn Beck called him) and in National Review (“Rubio’s Folly,” declared a recent cover).

Still, running interference on Mr. Rubio’s behalf is fraught with risk for conservative groups, who are going against many in their own base.

“We know that there’s a lot of folks on both sides,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity. “But I think the vast majority of people appreciate the fact that Senator Rubio is doing what he thinks is best for the country. And that he’s doing it in an open and honest way.”

Mr. Phillips declined to discuss any implications for Mr. Rubio and 2016, but said, “We think that he’s got a bright future within the movement, and in whatever he chooses to do down the road.”

And, the Koch family's obsession with transforming America into a John Bircher hellhole is intergeneration and will never end. Investigative journalist Lee Fang has written extensively about the Kochs and their insidious right-wing operations in his new book, The Machine: A field Guide To The Resurgent Right. This is just a tiny portion of a treasure trove of information about one vile plutocratic family working effectively to overthrown democracy in America.

Obama, unlike Roosevelt with Du Pont, waited years before confronting the Koch brothers in the public arena. Rather than taking them on directly, Obama, for a short period during the midterm elections, mocked the Koch-financed group called Americans for Prosperity, saying the name was misleading. The Koch brothers were accused of rampant oil speculation, driving the price of gasoline up for consumers, and their allies in the banking sector of crashing the economy. However, Obama and the Democrats were slow to recognize the political threat, and for some reason, were too timid to explicitly denounce the Koch brothers. The circumstances, of course, were also different. America suffered through a housing market collapse, a financial crisis, and perpetual unemployment as Obama took office, but not an earth-shattering event like the Great Depression. Backlash against the rich never materialized in the same way as it had under Roosevelt, and Obama suffered from the right-wing charge, amplified on Fox News and talk radio, that he was a “socialist.” Maybe Obama thought a confrontation with the Koch brothers would only lend credibility to the belief that he practiced left-wing “class warfare.” In any event, the calculation to largely ignore the Koch brothers only helped them lurk in the shadows, exercising even greater influence.

And the Koch brothers were prepared for battle with Obama unlike any plutocrats of the past. The Du Ponts stumbled awkwardly into forays with Roosevelt and never learned to avoid the press and public scrutiny into their lobbying. More profoundly, the Koch brothers had developed a political strategy perfected by generations of right-wing tycoons-- including their father, the founder of the Koch family conglomerate, Koch Industries. For fifty years, the Koch family plotted, experimented, and financed groups to advance a very right-wing form of conservatism. The tactics employed against Obama had been concocted for many years prior.

The Koch brothers surpassed the influence of any other single wealthy individual or business group because of their holistic approach to, as Charles would say, “advancing liberty.” Organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would fund advertisements and pay insider lobbyists. The Coors family funded conservative think tanks and cultural institutions. John Allison, former CEO of BB&T bank, single-handedly financed an array of professors dedicated to the beliefs of Ayn Rand at major universities. Conservative activists like Grover Norquist convened regular meetings for ideological peers to collaborate. The Koch brothers incorporated all of these tactics, and more. They funded talent to come up with even better strategies and offered to lend money to anything-- movies, internships, ad campaigns, books, social networking websites-- that would “create value” to further the cause.

...As Obama prepared for his inauguration, the Koch family declared political war. In January after the presidential election, Charles proclaimed in a newsletter to his fifty thousand employees that America was quickly arriving at the “greatest loss of liberty and prosperity since the 1930s.” The somber warning noted what he saw as the parallels between Roosevelt’s Keynesian response to the Great Depression and Obama’s calls for fiscal stimulus in light of the financial crisis. He warned against “piling on even more regulations” and new “make-work” government programs modeled after the Roosevelt administration. Charles lectured, “it is markets, not government that can provide the strongest engine for growth, lifting us out of these troubling times.” Many of the programs Roosevelt had started in reaction to the Great Depression persisted for generations, Charles warned. In challenging the new president, Charles appeared to be anointing himself the heir to Irénée Du Pont’s crusade against Franklin Roosevelt, or his own father’s fight against John Kennedy and moderate Republicans. Only this time, Charles hoped to succeed.



And inflaming Charles’s worst fears, Obama gave a bold, progressive speech at his inauguration, making clear his intention to transition to a clean energy economy, to reform the nation’s health care system, and to remake the country’s sagging infrastructure. The financial crisis, Obama said, “reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control.” “The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous,” he added. Billionaires like the Koch brothers took note.

As Obama announced his promise to change America, it seems doubtful that he could have known that among the many entrenched business interests gearing up to lobby against reform, a single ultra-rich family was preparing to fight him across the board. He didn’t even have to look far from where he stood to see their reach. Ironically, INVISTA, a Koch Industries subsidiary, had won the government contract to provide the imperial blue and red carpeting for the inauguration ceremony. The second Obama became president, he was standing atop a Koch product.

Within two days of Obama’s swearing his oath of office, the Koch network sprung into action. A website called NoStimulus.com launched, along with a television advertising campaign, a petition, and a series of media events designed to defeat Obama’s first signature accomplishment, the $800 billion Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as simply the stimulus. In what later blossomed into the Tea Party movement, Koch-funded organizers fanned across the country organizing “Porkulus” rallies decrying government spending and regulations. Koch-supported groups, for instance the Competitive Enterprise Institute and state-based think tanks like the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy, fired off a volley of anti-stimulus press releases, op-eds, and joint events with Republican lawmakers. Koch operatives staged media events with the most vitriolic opponents of the stimulus, like Governor Mark Sanford and Senator Jim DeMint, both from South Carolina.

By early February, as the vote neared, Americans for Prosperity, one of the main Koch-financed front groups, sent a letter to congressional Republicans instructing them to oppose the stimulus, regardless of any amendments or adjustments made to the bill. Indeed, in a bid for bipartisanship, Democrats offered a slimmed-down version of Obama’s proposed stimulus. In order to gain the vote of three Senate Republicans, tax cuts comprised a third of the stimulus.

While the stimulus ultimately passed, the anti-stimulus hysteria helped conservatives shift the national debate from the causes of the financial crisis to issues like the national debt and government waste. More importantly, the right-wing echo chamber, comprised in no small part of dozens of Koch-funded nonprofits, provided cover for every Republican in the House and nearly every Republican in the Senate to vote against the bill.

Sporadic advertising from Koch groups attempted to spark populist outrage. One television spot, which began soon after Obama took office, featured a middle-aged man exclaiming loudly: “Congress should stop wasting our money and start focusing on real problems!” As the disheveled-looking man yelled about the government, text decrying global warming as a “hoax” flashed across the bottom of the screen. The ad didn’t propose an alternative or any solution for that matter; rather it seemed to be crafted simply to stir general outrage. Another Koch ad, which began airing around the same time, showed an actor who said his name was “Carlton, the wealthy eco-hypocrite.” The ad was not a large buy, but the script was a perfect specimen of Koch-funded fake populist outrage:

Hey there, I’m Carlton, the wealthy eco-hypocrite. I inherited my money and attended fancy schools. I own three homes and five cars, but always talk with my rich friends about saving the planet. And I want Congress to spend billions on programs in the name of global warming and green energy. Even if it causes massive unemployment, higher energy bills, and digs people like you even deeper into the recession. Who knows, maybe I’ll even make money off of it!

Of course, the Koch brothers inherited their money, attended elite private schools, and own an array of private jets and vacation homes. Their opposition to addressing global warming had nothing to do with energy prices. In fact, many of the serious plans from Democrats to tackle global warming would have lowered energy prices for the vast majority of Americans, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Denying the threat of global warming only permits the Koch brothers to make vast amounts of money from their pollution-based empire. But the Koch brothers weren’t interested in an honest debate. They wanted to kill attempts to regulate their pollution, and were willing to say or do anything to provoke middle- and lower-income voters to turn against Obama.

Still... Rubio wanted to burnish his credentials with the far, far right before the Koch confab. So he announced this morning that he'd offer the same anti-Choice legislation nationally-- knowing full well it would never get out of committee-- that is tearing Texas, North Carolina and Ohio apart this week. Divisiveness is a win-win for the far right, since those people don't want anything to ever work anyway. Their strategy on the bill-- despite polls showing how unpopular it is-- is that it "might strengthen GOP candidates in the 2014 midterm election."

Rubio’s decision to play a major role in the abortion debate is bound to stir political speculation. He is viewed as a likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

But he’s recently prompted serious criticism by Republicans over his support for the immigration reform bill that passed the Senate last week. His front-and-center role on a key anti-abortion measure is likely to ease concerns about him among GOP voters.

Here are part 2 and 3 of that BBC look at the Wall Plot fascist plot to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt that people fear Koch is emulating:

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Tea Party Civil War

We all love watching the Republican civil war between the greed and selfishness wing and the hate and bigotry wing as it unfolds. In the radio interview above, Palin declares war, again, on Marco Rubio and Kelly Ayotte. But how about the civil war that's tearing apart the Tea party itself... a civil war within a civil war? Those are always the most fun.

Over the weekend Luke Mullins covered an aspect of that for the Washingtonian: Armey In Exile. A month before Romney went down in flames, Dick Armey had agreed to resign as chairman of FreedomWorks, one of the big-money Tea Party fronts, forced out by Matt Kibbe with an $8 million payoff to just go away. Mullins asks and answers the question about what had turned Armey and Kibbe into bitter enemies and ripped FreedomWorks apart just as-- in their deranged minds-- Romney was sweeping into the White House and Republicans were taking over the Senate?

Though Armey rose to political prominence during the Gingrich Revolution, congressional staffers saw that he lacked political instincts-- "forgetting people’s names and arriving late to votes because he was chatting with his staff. 'He was a Mr. Magoo type of character,' says a former GOP leadership aide. 'Everyone knew that he didn’t know what was going on.' Armey also talked himself into controversy. He referred to Hillary Clinton as 'Marxist' and to Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank-- an openly gay congressman-- as 'Barney Fag.'" After resigning from Congress, Armey joined Matt Kibbe's radical right Citizens for a Sound Economy, an early version of the Tea Party, funded by the John Birch Society's Koch family. Armey's starting salary was $430,000 a year and he was able to keep his $750,000 a year job as a slimy K Street lobbyist at DLA Piper. The Kochs soon left in a huff over something or other and started their own teabagger front, Americans for Prosperity, and the Kibbe-Armey rump renamed itself FreedomWorks. They struggled for a while before glomming on to Rick Santelli's anti-Obama rant on CNBC, at which time Kibbe started quietly paying off Hate Talk Radio hosts Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to endorse the organization on the air.

Despite being Beltway elites, Armey and Kibbe emerged as emissaries for the populist, anti-Washington revolution. The New Yorker described Armey-- who flew first class and had a chauffeur-- as “the de-facto leader of the Tea Party movement.” Newsweek called Kibbe-- a former chief of staff to a Republican congressman-- a Tea Party “mastermind.”

As FreedomWorks’ profile expanded, contributions doubled from $7 million to $14 million between 2008 and 2010. Its number of volunteers jumped from 500,000 to 1.2 million. FreedomWorks fired up a long-dormant political-action committee and supported hard-line conservatives-- such as Republicans Marco Rubio in Florida and Mike Lee in Utah-- in Senate primary campaigns against more moderate GOP opponents for the 2010 midterms.

Fueled by Tea Party enthusiasm, the GOP picked up 63 seats in the House-- enough for control of the chamber-- six seats in the Senate, six new governorships, and nearly 700 seats in state legislatures.

It was finally happening-- Armey and Kibbe were at the center of the most powerful conservative movement in a generation. Together they wrote a bestselling book, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, and appeared on NBC’s Today show. Driving to Tea Party rallies around the country, Kibbe played his Grateful Dead tapes for Armey, hoping to convert the country-music lover.

But Armey was lame and considered, at 70, too old. His public comments made right-wing operatives at FreedomWorks cringe, often insulting people on TV-- echoes of "Barney Fag"-- and more often screwing up details of anything he talked about, including the names and work of right-wing heroes. He clearly needed to be kept away from live microphones. The go-go wingnuts saw him as a liability that could destroy their whole mission-- and the big salaries they were drawing. Kibbe's wife, an ugly stereotype of a catty, overly ambitious wife, wanted to push Armey out and make Kibbe the sole head of FreedomWorks. She was jealous of Armey's wife and made fun of her for being a devout Christian. Mrs. Kibbe is an atheist filled with contempt for Christians. Meanwhile Mr. Kibbe's priorities were changing. He went from being obsessed with elections and campaigns and grassroots and public-policy fights to his own image and selling books and doing Glenn Beck TV. Armey was pushed out of the media spotlight and media requests for him were given to Kibbe.

The ostensible break came over Kibbe's new book. Profits from the book he and Armey had written belonged to FreedomWorks. Kibbe insisted that the profits from the new book were his personally, even though the book had been written by FreedomWorks staffers on company time. "Diverting nonprofit resources for personal use is a violation of federal tax code," writes Mullins. "If Kibbe had used 'significant staff resources' to produce his book, he would have put FreedomWorks’ tax-exempt status at risk. Kibbe, Armey says, 'had put the organization in jeopardy, and he had done it to line his own pockets.'”

Kibbe has mutton chops-- and a childish impulse to insult Hillary Clinton

Furious, Armey and his wife flew to Maine to show the document to FreedomWorks’ third trustee: C. Boyden Gray, a former White House counsel.

Armey and Gray called a special meeting of the board for Tuesday, September 4, 2012. Kibbe arrived at Gray’s DC law office without knowing why he’d been summoned. When they were around a conference table, Armey argued that Kibbe had pilfered his media requests and used FreedomWorks’ resources to profit personally.

The trustees voted two to one-- Armey and Gray for, Kibbe against-- to remove Kibbe from the board, and then put Kibbe and Brandon [FreedomWork's press secretary] on administrative leave.

Before Kibbe left, the trustees asked him to sign a document preventing him from launching an organization similar to FreedomWorks for the next four years, a FreedomWorks executive says, adding that the agreement came with a $100 signing bonus: “It was meant to be insulting.” (Armey denies that there was a signing bonus and says that the document was just a confidentiality agreement.)

Kibbe refused to sign.

Armey worried that Kibbe might instruct his allies to destroy documents related to the book deal, so he telephoned Jean Campbell, who was waiting outside FreedomWorks’ Capitol Hill headquarters.

“Go ahead,” Armey told her.

She secured the office, marshaling employees away from their computers and into the conference room. An armed former Capitol Police officer accompanied her-- in case there was any trouble.

“Dick Armey will be here soon with an announcement,” Campbell told the staff.

Some 30 anxious staffers surrounded the rectangular table when Armey and his wife marched in. Armey announced that Kibbe and Brandon had been put on leave, but he didn’t explain why.

FreedomWorks staff divided into two camps. While some senior employees respected Armey’s authority, many newer ones weren’t old enough to remember his days in Congress and-- because Armey worked from Texas-- didn’t really know him. In Kibbe, they found a hip libertarian who went on television and hosted parties at his home. Younger staffers developed a “cultish admiration” for Kibbe, a former official says. Some even wore their chops you can believe in T-shirt at the office.

To the young staffers, Armey seemed ill suited to run the organization. He put three additional FreedomWorks employees on administrative leave but-- when they broke down in tears-- immediately reinstated them. Staffers say he referred to a Japanese employee with a ponytail as “that Indian fella.” (Armey denies this.) And when Armey kicked his cowboy boots up on a table in Kibbe’s office, that was it. “It was kind of like, ‘Well, I’ll be damned if this is going to happen,’ ” a young employee says.

Kibbe and Brandon had retreated to Kibbe’s Capitol Hill home, where they contacted FreedomWorks donors, activists, and board directors to establish support outside of headquarters. Directors were angry that Armey hadn’t consulted them before taking action. Glenn Beck and members of Congress called Kibbe to offer encouragement.

Soon after Armey’s takeover, a group of young Kibbe loyalists arrived at Kibbe’s house for pizza and wine. They told Kibbe about Armey’s office management. Among Armey’s first moves was ordering the removal of all references to Kibbe from the FreedomWorks website. (Armey says he only asked for the removal of references to Kibbe’s book.)

“In our limited experience dealing with Armey, [we] saw him as this lovable grandpa,” says a young staffer. “To see him tailspin into this power-hungry, totally out-of-touch person was really frightening.”

The younger staffers used their cell phones to record conversations with Armey or Campbell. They disregarded Armey’s instructions, refusing, for example, to provide him with Kibbe’s schedule of upcoming donor meetings. Says Armey: “They started trying to sabotage things right from day one.”

...Armey and his wife stopped at the Chicago home of Richard Stephenson on their way back to Washington. A reclusive millionaire who had founded the for-profit Cancer Treatment Centers of America, Stephenson was a big FreedomWorks donor and Kibbe’s strongest ally on the board of directors.

When Armey arrived, Stephenson introduced a therapist who he suggested could mediate Armey and Kibbe’s dispute. Armey didn’t know it, but Kibbe had flown in from Washington and was waiting in another room. “If you think you’re going to therapize me into working with Matt Kibbe again, you’re kidding yourself,” Armey told the therapist.

He had previously told Stephenson that the allegedly rerouted media requests gave him a legal case against FreedomWorks for tortuous interference. He calculated damages at $8 million-- the potential earnings Armey felt he’d sacrificed by staying at FredeeomWorks. (The figure is based mostly on Armey’s $750,000 annual contract with DLA Piper, which his position at FreedomWorks forced him to give up.)

Either Kibbe goes or I go, Armey said. “And if I go, I’m going to have to sue. I can’t go away with empty pockets.”

As Armey left, he saw Kibbe sitting on a couch in an adjacent room. Neither said a word.

The next afternoon, C. Boyden Gray summoned Armey to his Washington office: Stephenson was willing to pay Armey $8 million to retire. The deal would be arranged as a consulting contract between Armey and Stephenson, payable in annual installments of $400,000 over 20 years. In return, the trustees would reinstate Kibbe as FreedomWorks president and Armey would leave the organization after the election.

Armey accepted.

Kibbe and Brandon were back in the office by the end of the day and spent the next few weeks settling scores, former staffers say. They labeled employees who had been helpful to Armey as “collaborators” and stripped them of authority. Kibbe promoted two young staffers who had remained loyal to him during the crisis, and he donated his $50,000 book advance to FreedomWorks. (Brandon denies punishing employees and says all promotions were merit-based.)

...Meanwhile, FreedomWorks is struggling. Key staffers and board members have fled, and first-quarter fundraising has slipped. Things may get even worse. Two watchdog groups have asked federal authorities to examine $12 million in suspicious donations that FreedomWorks received right before the election.

...Following the disastrous 2012 election, public support for the Tea Party has crumbled, and establishment GOP figures such as Karl Rove have launched initiatives to prevent less electable Tea Party candidates from winning primary campaigns. At its most recent tax-day rally at the Capitol, the crowd numbered in the dozens-- a turnout that recalled FreedomWorks’ early days.

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Tobacco Industry Lobbyists And P.R. Hacks Reinvented The Tea Party-- All They Needed Were Some Angry, Lo-Info Kooks Willing To Wear "Attention-Drawing Accouterments"

Howie with a crackpot happily wearing attention-drawing accouterments, Pasadena, 2009 

Many Republicans will tell you former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) invented the TEA Party-- Taxed Enough Already-- to help popularize the Republican scheme to eliminate progressive taxation, which they feel puts too much burden on the wealthy-- and replace it with a flat tax that would force the burden down the income scale. But, as Lee Fang points out in his new book, The Machine-- A Field Guide To The Resurgent Right, that's not exactly what happened. The tobacco industry's expensive p.r. firms and lobbyists came up with the idea, fumbled it and watched Armey grab the ball and run with it. It was never grassroots at any time, though-- and always strictly astroturf.

[T]he roots of the modern antigovernment, antitax Tea Party can be traced to carefully formulated plans concocted by the tobacco industry. In the late eighties and throughout the nineties, the tobacco industry faced an assault from all sides. Legislators, litigators, and ballot initiatives alike sought to prohibit tobacco advertising to children, ban indoor smoking, tax tobacco products, place warning labels on tobacco products, and fine the industry for intentionally misleading consumers about the health effects of its products. The tobacco industry’s efforts to win the battle of public opinion by funding fake citizens’ groups sympathetic to the tobacco industry, such as “smokers’ rights” leagues, are well documented. It has also been reported that the industry made huge investments in conservative think tanks and bought off academics to produce junk studies casting doubt on the health effects of smoking. A less well-known tactic, however, was the attempt to create a “Tea Party” movement against government as a shield to protect the tobacco industry. Tobacco lobbyists, needing to win over public opinion-- and perhaps inspired by antitax political operatives like Norquist, who was on the tobacco industry payroll-- thought they could instigate a backlash against government regulation and taxes, and in doing so, stop government and consumer intrusion into the tobacco industry’s business.

Memos from the American Tobacco Company, Philip Morris, and R.J. Reynolds detail a broad array of strategies to engineer an antigovernment backlash, using a “Boston Tea Party” theme. A campaign advertisement from tobacco giant Philip Morris sought to use former Republican Senator Howard Baker to compare curbs on tobacco products to infringements on freedom tantamount to the British repression that led to the Tea Parties. A document, dated 1989 and archived at the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library at the university of California, San Francisco, outlined an advertisement with the following script: “British policies of minority rule, increased government intervention, unfair taxation... Ironically, those same issues face us again today. Excise taxes, advertising restrictions, franchise legislation, price supports, and smoking bans make it necessary to act to protect our rights as citizens of the united States.” After a movie clip of colonists casting tea into the harbor, the advertisement proposal indicated that Senator Baker was supposed to say, “The Boston Tea Party was one of the sparks that ignited the Revolution.” A call to resist government regulation of tobacco closed the video.

One attempt to create a national Tea Party phenomenon was defused when O’Dwyer’s Washington Report, a trade publication for the public relations industry, exposed the plan. O’Dwyer’s revealed a proposal from a tobacco industry group, Coalition Against Regressive Taxation (CART), to contract the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to create a citizens’ protest against a proposal to eliminate deductions on excise taxes on products such as tobacco. Burson-Marsteller said it would create a “Boston Tea Party theme” that included a “guerrilla campaign after Labor Day” aimed at the 1992 presidential candidates. Burson-Marsteller's agents would hand out signs while wearing “attention-drawing accouterments” to create political buzz for the cause. One of the fake citizens’ groups suggested in this campaign was Citizens for a Sound Economy, a corporate front group that would later play a dominant role in the anti-Obama Tea Parties (subsequent documents from the late nineties, naming the tobacco industry’s “3rd party allies,” showed that Philip Morris had budgeted up to $2 million a year for Citizens for a Sound Economy).

The exposure of the CART document killed the Tea Party idea in 1992, but Tea Party themes from tobacco lobbyists continued to emerge in later years. When President Clinton proposed taxing cigarettes to fund his health reform plan, the tobacco industry needed citizen outrage. In June of 1994, the New York Times reported that “about 3,000 tobacco farmers mounted what was billed as a modern-day ‘Boston Tea Party’ today, cheering as bales of tobacco were tossed into the Kentucky River to protest proposals to increase taxes on tobacco products to help finance health care.” The Times reporter, as well as dozens of other media outlets which carried the story, did not realize that the event was orchestrated by political operatives working for big tobacco. In an October 5, 1995, memo to Philip Morris, the PR firm Jack Guthrie and Associates of the Worldcom Group took credit for the event. The lobbyists at Jack Guthrie and Associates saw the Kentucky River protest as just a start. The memo outlined that a broad antigovernment Tea Party movement could be orchestrated as a political maneuver to kill proposed Food and Drug Administration regulations on tobacco products as well:

It is conceivable that tens of thousands of people from the six states-- representing hundreds of industries and interests-- could carry a powerful message to the President, Congress and the FDA. JGA (Jack Guthrie and Associates) will explore possible “themes” that could be associated with such rallies. (In June 1994, for example, JGA organized a reenactment of the Boston Tea Party, where 6,000 farmers converged at the Kentucky state capitol to hurl stalks of tobacco into the Kentucky River-- in protest to President Clinton’s proposed tax increases on cigarettes to pay for health care reform. The event, organized on behalf of the Council for Burley Tobacco, was covered by nearly every national print and broadcast outlet.)

Ultimately, the anti-FDA Tea Party never took place. But the David vs. Goliath ethos of the Tea Party clearly took hold within the executive suites of the tobacco industry. “The government’s plan to influence personal behavior through higher taxes is reminiscent of colonial times,” wrote Philip Morris CEO Michael Miles in a letter to shareholders. He added, “back then” the people responded with the “Boston Tea Party.”

And then along came Armey and his big money sugar daddies, the Koch brothers, with their plans to slash government functions-- like privatizing Social Security and e and shift more of the tax burden onto the middle class. How ironic that by trying to cheat the IRS by setting up phony social welfare organizations and triggering a badly handled series of investigations, the Establishment has played right into their hands.

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Tea Party Crackpots Shouldn't Be Investigated?

I'm not a tax accountable and I'm not an election attorney. But I do run a PAC and we have an accountant and an attorney on retainer to keep us from running afoul of the FEC's and IRS' myriad arcane rules and regulations. A few years ago, a notorious GOP shill complained that we were coordinating our campaign efforts with Nancy Pelosi. We sent in so much paperwork showing that we were working at cross-purposes to Pelosi by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars against Blue Dog Democrats she was helping to defend that the "case" was immediately thrown out. This was while Bush was president but the FEC staffer told me that the complaint came from someone does that all the time.

There was also an instance of an FEC staffer who is a conservative and who was constantly harassing Blue America. We knew she wasn't acting on Bush's orders and that she was just a nasty zealot. But she was just a pest and because of her we had to retain our attorney.

I don't want to get into this whole Republican attempt to smear Obama with this IRS mess. They're on a roll, appealing to their base. But I'm not so certain that these Tea Party groups looking for tax exempt status shouldn't be thoroughly investigated. I'm in the middle of reading investigative journalist Lee Fang's stupendous new book, The Machine: A Field Guide To The Resurgent Right. These two pages make the case very clearly who these people absolutely should be investigated.

Colin Hanna, the silver-haired chairman of the Republican front group Let Freedom Ring, approached the podium and announced that his group had covertly provided training and resources to the Tea Party Patriots throughout the election. Young men working for Hanna handed out pamphlets to the reporters in the room detailing their efforts, which included providing the Tea Party Patriots with a small army of election lawyers, training for over 1,748 Tea Party Patriot “poll watchers,” and state-of-the-art technology from the Republican consulting firm Edge Targeting. Hanna’s group paid for the Tea Party Patriots’ automated phone calls, which reached over 1.6 million households focusing on twenty-three swing congressional districts. Hanna said his Let Freedom Ring group, which had aired a series of million-dollar ads supporting establishment Republican John McCain in 2008, was itself part of the Tea Party revolution.

Let Freedom Ring was not the only group propping up the Tea Party Patriots. Staffers from FreedomWorks, the front group led by Dick Armey, had managed the Tea Party Patriots’ listserv. Corporate front groups like Americans for Prosperity and the Heartland Institute provided many of the talking points and speakers used by the Tea Party Patriots Free training seminars and online tutorials for grassroots organizing were provided to the Tea Party and its affiliates.

Patriots by the Leadership Institute, which is funded by the billionaire Koch family as well as by other corporate interests, including Amway. Even the Tea Party Patriots’ website was sponsored by a who’s who of Republican front groups, including Regular Folks United, FreedomWorks, and Americans for Tax Reform. A mysterious donor granted Tea Party Patriots an additional $1 million for increased electionseason outreach.

Shortly before the election, a memo from the Tea Party Patriots leaked. The Tea Party Patriots had attended a meeting of the Council for National Policy, a secretive group of conservative donors, and presented a wish list with dollar amounts attached. The Tea Party Patriots asked the donors to underwrite their campaign efforts. To fund the Tea Party Patriots’ “traditional” get-out-the-vote walk and phone lists, they asked for $150,000, as well as $250,000 for “GPSenabled smart-phone walk lists and technology,” $125,000 for help setting up house parties, and finally $250,000 for “collateral material.” It didn’t end there. For efforts after the election, the memo demanded $110,000 for help protesting possible legislation during the lame-duck session of Congress, $175,000 for a summit to entertain newly elected Tea Party politicians, $300,000 for “Younger Generation Outreach,” at least $500,000 for a renewed advertising budget, $200,000 for help organizing tax-day Tea Parties in 2011, and a litany of other high-priced requests.

Aside from their somewhat casual attire, Mark Meckler, Jenny Beth Martin, and the Tea Party Patriots leadership were indistinguishable from any ordinary Republican consultants with high-priced demands and orthodox supplysider beliefs. With donors from the Reagan-era Council for National Policy and allies like Koch Industries and Let Freedom Ring, the Tea Party Patriots were like any other Republican group. However, to the media and to millions of Americans, they were still rag tag protesters fighting against the grain of the establishment.

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Mommy, How Did The Tea Party Start?

If we were alive back in the 1770s, today's Tea Party activists would probably have been active back then too-- but active on behalf of the British. Conservatives fought against the revolutionaries who wanted to throw off the British imperial yoke and many conservatives would up fighting on the side of the British troops, killing patriots. Today's Tea Partiers would have been those traitors to America.

How do I know? If you think teabaggers only live in backward, theocratic parts of South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Texas, you've never been to California's Inland Empire. I was there yesterday, and the sun was beating down in sweltering Lake Elsinore in the heart of Ken Calvert's blood red 42nd congressional district. Obama had one of his worst results in California there against Romney, a pitiful 41.4%. When I parked the car, I noticed the digital thermometer gage was hovering on the wrong side of 100. I looked in the back seat and found my bright yellow baseball cap emblazoned with the logo "99%." Who would even know what it meant? They knew. And I was soon arguing with a Tea Party fanatic who is convinced that Ken Calvert-- whose ProgressivePunch score is zero this year (and 1.43 for his career; that's 1.43 out of 100)-- is a liberal "Obama-symp." How do you even have a political conversation with someone like that? All his "information" came directly from Glenn Beck-- although I detected a smattering of Alex Jones in there as well. I asked him if he knew where Benghazi (which he was using as a punctuation mark for every statement he made) was, remembering I had just seen a poll that showed that 40% of teabaggers had no idea. He was one of those 40%. "Cuba," he asserted aggressively. Who was I to disabuse him of his cherished ignorance. I asked him if he knows anything about the actual Boston Tea Party. And he did have some vague notions about it-- mostly wrong... although he did know it involved Indians and Boston and tea and taxes. He was right about Boston. When I told him the real story of the Tea Party, he didn't believe me and looked at me in a way that made me think he was wondering if I was armed and if I'd shoot at him if he took a swing at me.

The story of the Boston Tea Party was very fresh in my mind because I just started reading Lee Fang's fascinating new book The Machine and he's got the actual story they gloss over in elementary school American History. It was all about the British East India Company, which was, back them something like Exxon-meets-Enron-- the biggest and most powerful company in the world. And they had well-connected lobbyists too.

Fierce competition from the Dutch and a variety of other factors pushed the British East India Company to near bankruptcy in the mid- to late eighteenth century. Members of Parliament, as well as the king and his family, were large shareholders of the East India Company. So with little hesitation, in 1767 the British government began passing a series of laws called the Townshend Acts to help the East India Company solidify its monopoly over the market in the American colonies as well as in England. American shipping companies competed directly with the East India Company by opening new trading lines, and small American retailers purchased products in bulk from the Dutch. To mitigate the East India Company’s competition, the Townshend laws included harsh measures to give the corporation new powers to search American homes and businesses for smuggled goods. Other Townshend Acts imposed new fees and taxes for various goods, including glass items and paint. Of course, none of these laws were passed with the colonists’ democratic input or consent.

To the colonists, perhaps the most insulting measure was the Tea Act passed in May of 1773. The Tea Act was a tax cut for the East India Company that allowed the corporation to bypass any duties and taxes on tea so it could sell directly to the colonists. The tax loophole applied only to the East India Company and allowed the company to severely undercut the price on tea imported by private American businesses.

Popular disgust at the East India Company rippled through the colonies. As news broke of the Tea Act, the May 27, 1773, edition of the Alarm, an insurgent paper bent on agitation, circulated around the colonies. The newsletter charged that the East India Company, through “Barbarities, Extortions and Monopolies,” had stolen land in Asia and forced famine in colonized countries for the sake of profit. The newsletter, signed by the anonymous “Rusticus,” asked the question: “Are we in like manner to be given to the disposal of the East India Company, who have now the Assurance, to step forth in Aid of the Minister, to execute his Plan, of enslaving America?” The colonial press buzzed with similar furor at the Tea Act, spurring a broad coalition of opposition.

The first shipments of the untaxed East India Company tea met well-organized resistance in November and December of 1773. In Charleston, South Carolina, protesters forced customs officials to keep the tea on the dock, and eventually the East India ship sailed back to England. In Philadelphia, a confrontation with the captain of the East India Company ship arriving there stalled the tea from making delivery. And in Boston, more than one hundred protesters, led by Samuel Adams, boarded the East India Company ship and dumped containers of the company’s tea, worth nearly two million in present-day dollars, into the harbor. The so-called Boston Tea Party faced down employees of the East India Company, many of whom acted as spies for their employer, as well as the military force of the British Empire, which at that time served the interests of the company. As the East India Company demanded repayments for their lost property, a series of escalating confrontations between British soldiers, acting on orders from the East India Company, and American colonists resulted in America’s war for independence.

"You see," I told the Glenn Beck Teatard from Lake Elsinore-- he was actually from Corona up the I-15 and worked at a place doing something with Monster Energy drinks-- "the Boston Tea Party wasn't about reducing taxes, it was about tax loopholes for big companies, which the Tea Party is protecting today. The were angry about the tax cuts that London gave to the British East India Company."

He looked more angry than confused. And he looked dumb as shit and I figured it was time to finish my business at Lake Elsinore and go back to L.A., where it's 20 degrees cooler and... well, you can walk around for a week and never run into a teabagger or a Glenn Beck fan or at someone who will look twice a bright yellow "99%" baseball cap.

As for Ken Calvert, he was caught by police getting a blowjob in a parked car from a heroin addict. He actually tried to drive away when the police interrupted him. (Here's a copy of the official police report.) He was later caught in various crooked real estate deals. His district is so red and so dumb that he keeps getting reelected anyway. Last year he beat his Democratic opponent, Michael Williamson 117,407 (61%) to 74,776 (39%). Unless a teabagger takes him out in a primary, he's there forever.

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