Shane Goldmacher and Tim Alberta — Conservatives Build 7 Million-Strong 'Digital Army' to Push GOP Rightward in 2016

The digital army sprung to life with a click of a mouse in a nondescript office park in Alexandria. Less than 10 miles away, at the White House, the phones began to light up. One call came into the switchboard and then another. Thousands of people flooded the phone lines. 

It was early August 2014, and the callers were conservatives lambasting President Obama for promising what they described as "executive amnesty." The deluge of angry activists was not the work of a heavily coordinated national campaign, a pricey phone-banking operation, or really an exhaustive effort of any kind. 

It resulted from a single post on Facebook.

Taking the Tea Party to the next level.

A similar approach was used on the left by Adbusters to launch Occupy Wall Street.

National Journal
Conservatives Build 7 Million-Strong 'Digital Army' to Push GOP Rightward in 2016
Shane Goldmacher and Tim Alberta

Mary Bottari — Astroturf “Fix the Debt” Caught Ghostwriting for College Students

...Jon Romano, press secretary for the inside-the-beltway PR campaign “Fix the Debt” and its pet youth group, The Can Kicks Back, have been caught writing op-eds for college students and placing the identical op-eds in papers across the country.

This is the latest slip-up in Fix the Debt’s efforts to portray itself as representing America’s youth. Previously, they were caught paying dancers to participate in a pro-austerity flash mob and paying Change.org to gather online petition signers for them.The newspapers involved in the scam were not amused.

Campaign for America's Future

Astroturf “Fix the Debt” Caught Ghostwriting for College Students

Mary Bottari

Eric Zuesse — Final Proof The Tea Party Was Founded As A Bogus AstroTurf Movement

Eric Zuesse traces the history.

The Huffington Post
Final Proof The Tea Party Was Founded As A Bogus AstroTurf Movement
Eric Zuesse

Thom Hartmann — The Libertarian Billionaire Agenda Propelling the Tea Party Monster That Has Shut Down Congress

The Tea Party's astroturf roots should have been obvious to anyone paying attention to their rallies....

But as the smoke cleared, it became clear that the Tea Party was far from a democratic grassroots movement and even far from reflecting traditional American values. In fact, it was the very opposite of grassroots and democratic. It was the creation of billionaires intent on destroying our government, preventing Americans from getting access to healthcare, and sabotaging any attempt to regulate Wall Street or the oil industry.

The small handful of oil and Wall Street groups behind the Tea Party, groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, were all front organizations for the billionaire oil tycoons and banksters who wrecked the economy. 

And if you need any more proof of whose interests the Tea Party actually represents, consider this: Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks actually began as parts of the group Citizens for a Sound Economy, which was created in 1984 to defend the interests of big tobacco companies. They even started something they called a "tea party" in the 1980s so that smokers could have a "smokers' rights" group.  

The billionaires behind these groups weren't trying to save democracy, they were trying to hijack it, and they were rich and powerful enough to be able to essentially buy their own politicians and dupe a few thousand "American" activists to do their bidding.

AlterNet — Tea Party And The Right
The Libertarian Billionaire Agenda Propelling the Tea Party Monster That Has Shut Down Congress
Thom Hartmann / The Big Picture

Brendan DeMille — Study Confirms Tea Party Was Created by Big Tobacco and Billionaires

A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.

Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry's role in driving climate disruption.

The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health, traces the roots of the Tea Party's anti-tax movement back to the early 1980s when tobacco companies began to invest in third party groups to fight excise taxes on cigarettes, as well as health studies finding a link between cancer and secondhand cigarette smoke.

Published in the peer-reviewed academic journal, Tobacco Control, the study titled, 'To quarterback behind the scenes, third party efforts': the tobacco industry and the Tea Party, is not just an historical account of activities in a bygone era. As senior author, Stanton Glantz, a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) professor of medicine, writes:

"Nonprofit organizations associated with the Tea Party have longstanding ties to tobacco companies, and continue to advocate on behalf of the tobacco industry's anti-tax, anti-regulation agenda."

Who knew?

DESMOGBLOG
Study Confirms Tea Party Was Created by Big Tobacco and Billionaires
Brendan DeMill
(h/t Climate Progress)

Alarm — Compact for America (actually contract on America)

The latest astroturf movement. Be aware, or be square.

Compact for America
States coming together to stop the insanity
(with a balanced budget amendment)
(h/t Charles Hayden at FaceBook–MMT Deficit Owl USA Committee)