The Billionaires Behind the Tea Party

I've always had my suspicions that the Tea Party is well funded and not a true grassroots movement. Some local groups have headquarters (who pays for that?). The so-called movement is sophisticated in how it manipulates the media, and in how it engages in New Media.

They are well organized--too well organized, in my opinion, for a year-old "grassroots" organization.

The New Yorker takes a look at the billionaire Koch brothers, who operate oil refineries in Alaska and Texas, and their support of Tea Party-like causes.

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

A columnist for Long Island Press details the myriad conservative think tanks funded by the Koch family.

Every hazardous product manufactured by Koch Industries and every conservative and libertarian think tank established by the family members—Mercatus is eclipsed in absurdity by their other venture, the Cato Institute—pales in comparison to their most important creation to date: the Tea Party. This movement is the culmination of 40-plus years of radical free-market fanaticism beginning with the John Birch Society, of which father Fred was a founding member.

Frank Rich of the New York Times also writes about "The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party" calling them:

...the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

And lo and behold, the Koch brothers pop up again in California politics, having contributed $1 million to Proposition 23, which is a initiative on the November ballot aimed at suspending California’s 2006 law fighting global-warming.

Bottom line...Democrats need to show up to the polls in November to fight against the corporate-sponsored interests of these duped Tea Party activists. They're just pawns in a bigger game.