donderdag 16 april 2009

The Empire 437


Fake Teabaggers Are Anti-Spend, Anti-Government: Real Populists Want to

Stop Banks from Plundering America


By Mark Ames and Yasha Levine and Alexander Zaitchik, 

AlterNet. Posted

April 15, 2009.


The tea parties are AstroTurf -- fake grassroots. But there is a real

movement growing against corporate greed and government malfeasance.


This afternoon, groups of angry conservatives will gather on street corners

and in parks across the country to protest.


They will carry signs and deliver speeches expressing outrage over the

Democrats' stimulus bill, over entitlements, over budget pork, over taxes.

They will dump boxes of tea on the ground and wear three-cornered hats. The

leading lights of the Republican Party will be on hand to cheer them on.


But as with so much on the right, these apparent displays of populist rage

are not what they will seem.


Six weeks ago, two of us (Mark Ames and Yasha Levine) published an

investigation exposing the nascent "Tea Party" protest movement for what it

really is: a carefully planned AstroTurf (or "fake grassroots") lobby

campaign hatched and orchestrated by the conservative advocacy organization

FreedomWorks. Within days, pieces of the scam had crumbled, exposing a

small group of right-wing think tanks and shady nonprofits at its core.


The Tea Party movement was born on Feb. 19 with a now-famous rant by

second-string CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli, who called for a "Chicago

Tea Party" in protest of President Barack Obama's plans to help distressed

American homeowners. Santelli’s call blazed through the blogosphere,

greased along by a number of FreedomWorks-funded blogs, propelling him to

the status of a 21st century Samuel Adams — a leader and symbol of

disenfranchised Americans suffering under big-government oppression and

mismanagement of the economy.


That same day, a nationwide "Tea Party" protest movement mysteriously

materialized on the Internet. A whole ring of Web sites came online within

hours of Santelli's rant, like sleeper-cell blogs waiting for the trigger

to act, all claiming to have been inspired by Santelli's allegedly

impromptu outburst.

Lees verderhttp://www.alternet.org/workplace/136688/fake_teabaggers_are_anti-spend%2C_anti-government%3A_real_populists_want_to_stop_banks_from_plundering_america/

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