A few US billionaires are using their wealth to fund the movement's right-wing agenda, writes TONY KINSELLA
SOME OF the lobbyists behind the populist right-wing Tea Party movement in the United States made their way to Europe last week, spreading the gospel at a gathering of the UK Taxpayers’ Alliance.
They would like to be seen as a spontaneous grassroots protest movement. But are they really? The best way to find an answer is to follow the money.
In August 1963, about a quarter of a million people joined the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” to hear Martin Luther King deliver his famous “I have a dream” speech.
At the end of last month, some 100,000 people gathered at the same spot for the “Restoring Honour” rally, led by Fox News pundit Glenn Beck, and featuring special guest Sarah Palin.
The 1963 demonstrators were predominantly young, and about two-thirds of them were African-American. The Tea Party rally, by contrast, was overwhelmingly white and significantly middle-aged.
The two meetings sought to achieve diametrically opposite results. The civil rights demonstrators demanded government action. The 2010 gathering sought a libertarian society, regulating itself through the application of selected religious principles, with minimal government.
Anyone who has ever tried to organise their fellow humans knows just how fraught a process it can be. It takes time, experience, logistics and resources. Organising a national rally in a country as vast as the USA requires massive preparation, effort and resources.
Martin Luther King’s “Jobs and Freedom” march was organised through a number of experienced organisations. These included his own Southern Christian Leadership Conference, other civil rights organisations, trade unions such as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and student bodies like the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee.
Officials and activists from these bodies had, over years, learned their organisational skills in America’s prisons, pulpits and picket lines – skills that would help make the 1963 march the epoch-changing success it became.
No similar network of seasoned organisations featured in the organisation of the Tea Party bash. Glenn Beck is a talented, if abrasive, broadcaster and writer. His Glenn Beck programme is syndicated on radio stations across the US while his television show on the Fox News channel draws considerable audiences.
His personal voyage from the Catholic to the Mormon church and his struggle with substance abuse have undoubtedly left him with a wealth of experiences. But mass organisation is not one of them.
Sarah Palin’s organisational experience as mayor of Wasilla and its 10,000 inhabitants, and later as governor of Alaska for a couple of years, is hardly the stuff of national rallies either.
This begs the practical question of just how the “Restoring Honor” rally was organised. Who reached out to those who travelled from all across the US? Who booked the hotels and sound systems? Who printed the badges and organised the security?
Since there was no seasoned organisational structure, that effort had to come from competent professionals. Such a use of professionals leads to the twin questions of who paid and why?
Dig a little and you find resources and ideas flowing from bodies such as the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, Patients United Now, the Institute for Justice, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Bill of Rights Institute, the Independent Women’s Forum, the Mercatus Centre at George Mason University, Virginia, the Heritage Foundation, the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment, and many others.
A little further research into these bodies and their funding and certain wealthy American family names start to appear regularly. The Olins, the Mellons, and most generously of all the Koch brothers, Charles (74) and David (72).
The Koch conglomerate is involved in oil, chemicals, wood, paper and a host of other sectors and is, in the words of David Koch, “the largest company that you’ve never heard of”. Their combined fortune of $35 billion (€27.5 billion) puts them in third place in the personal wealth stakes behind Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
As Jane Mayer explained recently in the New Yorker, the Koch brothers have very quietly spent over $250 million on right-wing political campaigns during the last 10 years. No wonder President Obama's senior adviser David Axelrod commented acerbically on "a grassroots citizens' movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires". Knowing who has paid the piper often helps you understand the tune.