I found this item in the New York Times to day and had to laugh (better than crying, right?):
The Tea Party movement is as deeply skeptical of big business as it is of big government.
What’s funny about that? Well the rest of the article is all about the Tea Party’s support for big business, and its funding by (drum roll please) Big Business. In this case the NYT article focuses on an Indonesian Paper company with an environmentally unsound track record that – surprise – a Tea Party organization is supporting against the interests of American companies and workers.
[A] Tea Party group in the United States, the Institute for Liberty, has vigorously defended the freedom of a giant Indonesian paper company to sell its wares to Americans without paying tariffs. The institute set up Web sites, published reports and organized a petition drive attacking American businesses, unions and environmentalists critical of the company, Asia Pulp & Paper.
Last fall, the institute’s president, Andrew Langer, had himself videotaped on Long Wharf in Boston holding a copy of the Declaration of Independence as he compared Washington’s proposed tariff on paper from Indonesia and China to Britain’s colonial trade policies in 1776.
Tariff-free Asian paper may seem an unlikely cause for a nonprofit Tea Party group. But it is in keeping with a succession of pro-business campaigns — promoting commercial space flight, palm oil imports and genetically modified alfalfa — that have occupied the Institute for Liberty’s recent agenda.
In a quietly arranged marriage of seemingly disparate interests, the institute and kindred groups are increasingly the bearers of corporate messages wrapped in populist Tea Party themes.
In a few instances, their corporate partners are known — as with the billionaire Koch brothers’ support of Americans for Prosperity, one of the most visible advocacy groups. More often, though, their nonprofit tax status means they do not have to reveal who pays the bills.
Mr. Langer would not say who financed his Indonesian paper initiative. But his sudden interest in the issue coincided with a public relations push by Asia Pulp & Paper. And the institute’s work is remarkably similar to that produced by one of the company’s consultants, a former Australian diplomat named Alan Oxley who works closely with a Washington public affairs firm known for creating corporate campaigns presented as grass-roots efforts.
The tea Party is a creature much like Frankenstein’s monster, if Doctor Victor Frankenstein’s creation had been a financed by some of the wealthiest people in the world and then let loose on the peasantry for the benefit of Dr. Frankenstein’s finacial backers. The public face of the Tea Party has rarely been anti-business except in the immediate wake of TARP and the Too Big to Fail Bank Bailout. It has, however been, anti-health care reform, anti-taxes for the wealthy, anti-regulation for big business (including – surprise – Wall Street), anti-freedom for women to decide whether to have an abortion, anti-union, anti-teachers, and anti-Obama. <p.
Mr. Langer can seem disarmingly candid when discussing his work. In a recent interview, he explained how the institute pitched its services to opponents of the Obama health care plan, resulting in a $1 million advertising blitz.
“A donor gave us some money, and we went out on the ground in five states in the space of like six weeks,” he said.
It is also anti-any Democrat, anti-human rights, pro-torture, anti-jobs, anti-social security, anti-unemployment insurance, anti-environment and generally anti-Science (especially climate science and evolution). It is anti-poor people and pro-rich people. It’s pro-war if a Republican president started two of them unilaterally, but anti-war if a Democratic President is part of a coalition legitimized by the United Nations and backed by NATO.
The Tea Party groups are also very much pro-Big Agribusiness, including Monsanto:<p.
Last year, the two groups also supported the effort by the agribusiness giant Monsanto to ease federal restrictions on its pesticide-resistant alfalfa. (In February, regulators agreed to do so.) Mr. Langer said he decided “to try out our grass-roots method on that, and frame it as a dairy issue and access to affordable food.”
He got a column published in July in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, talking up Monsanto’s product and asking readers to consider the value of bioengineered foods as they “stroll down the aisle of the supermarket.” The institute’s Web site urged members to speak up, and Mr. Langer filed a petition with the Department of Agriculture.
Tea Partiers are also most definitely and defiantly pro-racist.
And anti-gay:
And anti-Muslim:
The Tea Party Groups are not, however, at least as far as I can see, anti-Big Business, even if that business is a foreign corporation and resides in a Muslim country. I guess its okay to hate Muslims as long as they pay the the Tea Party groups’ and Tea Party politicians’ bills.
Domestic paper companies and their employee unions, complaining that China and Indonesia were subsidizing exported paper products, petitioned federal trade officials several years ago to slap tariffs on them. The main target, Asia Pulp & Paper, is also under attack for its logging practices; several big retailers have stopped selling its paper.
Last year, with a tariff decision looming, Asia Pulp & Paper went on the offensive. It deployed lobbyists and retained Mr. Oxley, the Australian who runs a Washington-based policy group, World Growth International, which has long defended commercial forestry and palm oil interests in Southeast Asia.
I know that the Tea Party is a movement created and funded by Big Business, its lobbyists and Republican activists to protect their interests and get people to vote against their economic best interests by electing Republicans to office. You understand that, too. So why does the New York Times still feel obligated to put in this disclaimer in a story about the Tea Party’s deep connections to Big Business?
The Tea Party movement is as deeply skeptical of big business as it is of big government.
Beat’s me. Maybe you have an answer for me.
Where is the evidence that their disclaimer is remotely true? This whole article is designed to create the impression that there is a distinction between the “movement” and the people who bankrolled it, that this “sudden” marriage of “opposites” is a surprise.
As for Asia Paper & Pulp using “Tea Party” branding to sell their corporate message, that’s gonna be a major marketing FAIL. How could the crowds that chanted, “USA! USA! USA!” be swayed against tariffs on foreign products? I’m not saying it isn’t possible. After all, some people at rallies didn’t know that “my Medicare” was a government program. But, even really stupid people know that Asia isn’t part of “our country,” don’t they?
“The gubbmint is trying to force me pay more for toilet paper? That’s un-American! We need to keep the gubbmint’s hands off of our toilet paper.”
Using Tea Party rhetoric is laughably simple:
That’s it – that’s Tea Party rhetoric in a nutshell. You could use it to justify just about anything. There’s nothing patriotic about it – so long as you can formulate your “cause” within the simple bounds of an “I’ve got mine so fuck you” thought process you’re golden. That’s how you can get people holding up signs about “keeping the government’s hands off my Medicare.” It doesn’t matter if you’re American or not – there’s nothing particularly patriotic about Tea Partiers. They just wrap themselves in a flag because they apparently still have just enough shame that nakedly saying “I’ve got mine so fuck you” still rubs them the wrong way, so they have to dress it up as patriotism.
I seriously don’t think my Tea Party-member neighbor would fall for this and he’s pretty stupid. Large parts of the rural southeast and northwest in this country are economically dependent upon the production of… paper products. This is one of those rare instances where many in the audience for this message actually know more about it than the hacks who produced it.
Locally, couple of years ago a Canadian company bought the (mostly) US owned paper plant, laid off 3/4 of the employees and shut down to only being an electric supplier. The economic impact on the immediate vicinity was devastating. There are a lot of cheap, empty houses for sale because people had to move away to find work. The relatively rich owners of pine tree plantations were impacted. Independent truckers/loggers were impacted… and so on.
The company claimed that in our digital age, the demand for copy paper had declined to non-profitability because of competition from overseas producers. But so much pressure was put on them that they re-fitted the plant and are now making (gasp) toilet paper and other absorbent sheets used in the manufacture of diapers, etc.
I think the levers of change were: The local, county and state governments withdrew their subsidies/tax breaks to the plant and the umbrella power company said that due to decreased local demand they would no longer need to buy electricity from them. All that AND laying off their union workers ended up costing them a large sum of money even in a “right-to-work” state because of contracts, ya’know. So, hey, they’re now re-hiring some of those union workers because no one else knows how to run those big machines of theirs. The whole operation is much smaller than it was so the area is not having an economic resurgence.
Even before all of this went down, the local right-wing rag of a newspaper constantly beat the drum for “Made in the USA” and the need for higher tariffs on imports. This is a long-standing conservative position.
In parts of the country that depend on manufacturing jobs.
This is the key thing – if a conservative is directly impacted by a problem he can sound more liberal than Ralph Nader. This is the kind of thing that won’t fly in conservative parts like you’re talking about, but among the Tea Partiers I know in Columbus Ohio they wouldn’t bat an eye – their jobs tend to be IT based or service based, so I could easily see how they could be ginned up into hating on the tariffs on foreign products.
Now the folks down near Cincy or up in Cleveland? I know a few conservatives in those areas who would act exactly as you say – because they have manufacturing jobs and are directly impacted and so they actually have a bit of skin in the game and don’t need empathy to tell them that this might be a “bad thing” for someone else. (The “I got mine so fuck you” principal comes back around again here).
Yes, I have an answer, Steven. The New York Times is a part of the Big Business establishment. It plays a definite role in the farce that is America. If you expect honesty and fair play out of this stalwart of the mass media, then, you are clearly delusional. (I know you are not, so I guess your query is merely rhetorical.)
As to the Tea Baggers, they prefer to live in a fantasy land where everything corporate is ipso facto proper and good. What they need is a hearty dose of reality. When their economic resources decline along with their medicare and social security coverage, they may wake up. But, I am not too optimistic even then because I think their emotions run way ahead of their thoughts. Sadly, the wealthy have learned to use emotions to obscure truth particularly re those who cannot think on their own. So things will get a lot worse before they get better, if they ever do get better. Guess it’s time for another FDR.
Me! Me! I know the answer!!
The answer is (drum roll, please): the reporters at the NY Times have mush in their heads where their brains should be. Instead of critical thinking skills, they have some sort of tissue that calibrates what seems “reasonable” while also seeming “insider-y,” “savvy” and “insightful.”
These guys write for an audience of their peers, their bosses, their friends and family. And given that they work for the NY Times, they see no special reason to bother with research, facts, data, etc. Their grad student days are far behind them, after all.
THAT is the answer. Depressing, I know.
Even (some) big business compete with and against each other. Enrolling the Tea Party as part of your marketing/lobbying campaign is easy, cheap, and very cost effective because most of them do the work for free. You just allocate a part of your marketing/PR budget to the right Tea Party organs and let the viral multiplier effect do the rest. The beauty of it is that the Tea Party has done the work of pre-identifying and selecting the most gullible and susceptible to your message for you. No need to waste funds on scattergun campaigns most of which don’t fall on fertile ground.
If the Tea Party didn’t exist, PR/Marketing agencies would have to invent it. Oh wait…..