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" Remember the Tea Party, that spontaneous grassroots uprising of citizens all across this great land who were so utterly terrified of The Debt that they took to the streets and elected the silliest Congress this side of Gulliver&amp;#039;s Travels? The vanguard of the new wave of citizen politics that would sweep away the old methods of doing business in Washington and return the country to the sacred principles of its Founders, may their names be blessed? The movement that grew, spontaneously, from the veins popping in Rick Santelli&amp;#039;s forehead? Yeah, it was all a scam. The two main organizations identified in the UCSF Quarterback study are Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks. Both groups are now &amp;quot;supporting the tobacco companies&amp;#039; political agenda by mobilizing local Tea Party opposition to tobacco taxes and smoke-free laws.&amp;quot; Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity were once a single organization called Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). CSE was founded in 1984 by the infamous Koch Brothers, David and Charles Koch, and received over $5.3 million from tobacco companies, mainly Philip Morris, between 1991 and 2004. In 1990, Tim Hyde, RJR Tobacco&amp;#039;s head of national field operations, in an eerily similar description of the Tea Party today, explained why groups like CSE were important to the tobacco industry&amp;#039;s fight against government regulation. Hyde wrote:  &amp;quot;... coalition building should proceed along two tracks: a) a grassroots organizational and largely local track,; b) and a national, intellectual track within the DC-New York corridor. Ultimately, we are talking about a &amp;quot;movement,&amp;quot; a national effort to change the way people think about government&amp;#039;s (and big business) role in our lives. Any such effort requires an intellectual foundation - a set of theoretical and ideological arguments on its behalf.&amp;quot;  They even had a spiffy logo. This is not unprecedented. The conventional wisdom is that the rise of the Religious Right was occasioned by the Supreme Court&amp;#039;s decision in Roe v. Wade when in actuality, the organizing issue was the protection of tax-exempt status for the racially segregated &amp;quot;Christian academies&amp;quot; that sprung up all over the South in the wake of the desegregation of the public schools and the success of the civil rights movement. In other words, like almost all of modern American conservatism, the Religious Right was born in the foul detritus of American apartheid. And, like almost all of modern American conservatism, the Tea Party was born in the foul detritus of corporate gangsterism as a way to fool the rubes into support private profits at the expense of the public good. Hence, when people ask the question of why so many of the people at the rallies acted against their own personal economic interests, we now have an answer. And &amp;#039;twas ever thus. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a17481/the-long-roots-of-tea-party-astroturf/>