A study titled “‘To quarterback behind the scenes, third-party efforts’: the tobacco industry and the Tea Party” and published in the journal Tobacco Control (a publication of the British Medical Journal group) take a look at the obscure past of what is known today as the Tea Party, and shows how this movement traces its roots to the decades-long efforts by the tobacco industry to mislead the public on the dangers of its products. The study was funded by the National Institute of Health.
To start with, while about everyone thinks the Tea Party started in 2009 and in reaction to President Obama’s election, seems some of their websites were up a long time before that.
[I]n 2002, the… CSE [Citizens for a Sound Economy] designed and made public the first Tea Party Movement website under the web address www.usteaparty.com.CSE describes the U.S. Tea Party site, “In 2002, our U.S. Tea Party is a national event, hosted continuously online, and open to all Americans who feel our taxes are too high and the tax code is too complicated.” The site features a “Patriot Guest book” where supporters can write a message of support for CSE and the U.S. Tea Party movement.
Sometime around September 2011, the U.S. Tea Party site was taken offline. According to the DNS registry, the web address www.usteaparty.com is currently owned by Freedomworks.
The two main organizations identified in the…study are Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks. Both groups are now “supporting the tobacco companies’ political agenda by mobilizing local Tea Party opposition to tobacco taxes and smoke-free laws.” 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’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’s fight against government regulation. Hyde wrote: “… 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 “movement,” a national effort to change the way people think about government’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.”
Simply put, the Koch industrialists have been involved in organized science denial at least since 1984. And while back then their focus was casting doubt on health-related hazards of smoking, now climate science is their main target (and this transition has been discussed earlier on this blog), without ever having renounced the earlies goals, of providing a more friendly environment for the tobacco industry. Disturbingly, this unhealthy relationship between the industry and Tea Party activtists is turning out to be a public health issue internationally:
The implications of the…report are widespead. The main concern expressed by the authors lies in what they see happening overseas as the Tea Party movement expands internationally, training activists in 30 countries including Israel, Georgia, Japan and Serbia. As the authors explain: “This international expansion makes it likely that Tea Party organizations will be mounting opposition to tobacco control (and other health) policies as they have done in the USA.”
Hence, concerning the question of how the anti-environmentalist movement has become so extreme over the years, we seem to have the answer: it is driven by money coming from the industry.
