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.
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