CPAC Conference: Love Of Torture And Hatred Of Obama

Conservatives’ Real Agenda Revealed at CPAC Conference: Love of Torture and Hatred of Obama

Day One of this year’s conservafest included a surprise visit by torture advocate #1 Dick Cheney, and the crowd went wild for him.

AlterNet / By Adele M. Stan

February 19, 2010 |

At first, the opening roster of speakers at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference sounded a common theme: How many ways can conservatives — a term re-purposed to describe the Tea Party movement — threaten the establishment of the Republican Party? Given the exuberant response of the CPAC crowd to those who expressed it, you’d be forgiven for thinking you had walked into a gathering of a coherent movement.

Then Dick Cheney, the former vice president, a guardian of the Republican establishment, took the stand in a surprise appearance, and the crowd went wild. When he teasingly said their reception had him thinking about running for office again, they cheered. When he immediately dashed that hope, their deflation was audible.

The speakers preceding the Cheney apparition brought the crowd to their feet decrying government spending and bailouts. The gathering had its own internal, if paranoid, logic. Yet when Cheney appeared, the profligacy and bailout schemes of the Bush administration seemed long forgotten. Never mind that George W. Bush, Cheney’s boss and protege, increased government spending more than any of the six presidents preceding him, including LBJ, according to Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center. (De Rugy, a former research analyst at the Cato Institute and former fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, continues: “In his last term in office, President Bush increased discretionary outlays by an estimated 48.6 percent. During his eight years in office, President Bush spent almost twice as much as his predecessor, President Clinton. Adjusted for inflation, in eight years, President Clinton increased the federal budget by 11 percent. In eight years, President Bush increased it by a whopping 104 percent.”)

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Right-Wing Does Corporate America’s Dirty Work

Inside Story on Town Hall Riots: Right-Wing Shock Troops Do Corporate America’s Dirty Work

By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet. Posted August 10, 2009.

How the health-care industry, the GOP and one media mogul made common cause with the anti-government fringe.

The recent spate of town hall dustups may look like an overnight sensation, but they’ve been years, even decades, in the making.

Since the days in the late 1970s, when the New Right began its takeover of the Republican Party, it has cultivated a militia of white people armed with a grudge against those who brought forth the social changes of the ’60s.

These malcontents have been promised their day of retribution, a day for which they are more than ready. Few seem to understand that they are merely dupes for a corporate agenda that will only worsen the conditions in which they live.

Why, you may ask, would men of power and fame shake the rough, unmanicured hands of gun enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists, gay-haters, misogynists and racists?

Because somebody’s got to do the dirty work. Magnates don’t like to soil their French cuffs, and it’s hard for a bunch of rich guys to garner sympathy for threats to their bottom lines. It’s the classic inside-outside game that the right wing of the GOP has played for the last two decades.

The Health-Care Industry Executive

Imagine you’re an executive at a pharmaceutical company. Your U.S. operations are your cash cow; they earn you wild net profits because, unlike in other industrialized nations, you do not experience the price controls of a government-administered program in which the government negotiates for the best price on prescription drugs and devices.

Along comes a government plan for health-insurance reform that includes a public, government-financed plan. The public option, they call it. As part of the plan, you will be required to negotiate with the government for the price of medications and devices to be distributed within the plan.

Now that could really screw up your massive profit margins. Private plans might then insist on prices more like those the government is getting.

Instead of increasing your profit by double digits in the worst year the economy has seen since the Great Depression, as did an outfit called The Medicines Co., your shareholders may have to settle for profits more in line with the overall growth of the economy. And wouldn’t that just stink?

Meanwhile, polls show a clear majority of Americans — you know, regular Americans, the kind who don’t want to own an AK-47, or who do accept the president’s citizenship status — favor the public option. In fact, in June, CBS News found that majority to be 72 percent.

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Those Fake Teabaggers…

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.

At first glance, the sites appeared to be unconnected and unplanned. But many were suspiciously well designed and strangely on point with their “nonpartisan” and “grassroots” statements. It was as if all of them were reading from the same script. The Web sites heavily linked to each other, spreading their mission with help of Facebook and Twitter feeds. FreedomWorks, as if picking up on rumblings coming from the depths of the conservative netroots, linked to them, too.

But as our investigation showed, the key players in the Tea Party Web ring were no amateurs, but rather experienced Republican operatives with deep connections to FreedomWorks and other fake grassroots campaigns pushing pro-big-business interests.

FreedomWorks has a long history of using such campaigns. Founded in 2004 by Dick Armey, the former Republican House Majority Leader and lobbyist from Texas, and publishing titan Steve Forbes, FreedomWorks represented the consolidation and rebranding of two older think tanks, Citizens for a Sound Economy, founded by the notorious Koch family, and Empower America, a powerful lobbying firm that has battled health care reform and minimum-wage bills while championing deregulation, corporate tax cuts and whatever else their corporate clients desire.

The idea was to bring these two dinosaurs into the Internet age so they could compete with the newly created MoveOn.org.

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