| POISON TEA How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP Jeff Nesbit New York: St. Martin's Press, February 2016 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-250-07610-6 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-250-07610-2 | 262pp. | HC | $25.99 | |
Poison Tea uncovers the truth, history, and the hidden motives and secrets of the people pulling the strings behind the curtains of big oil, big tobacco, and the creation of the Tea Party movement. It presents new information that will surprise Democrats who are pro-big-government solutions as well as Republicans who are worried as they watch their party being hijacked by a vocal minority. It reveals the Tea Party not as a sudden emergence due to reactionary movements against big government but rather the behind-the-scenes, secret strategy of wealthy corporations and individuals that began in the early 1990s to control the GOP. It uncovers the hidden alliances made to further this purpose. And it details the steady progress of remaking one of America's two political parties. Poison Tea is for all those who care about the true nature of the national political discussion in the country today. – Pages 3-4 |
Jeff Nesbit is well positioned to tell that story. A longtime political insider, he worked in senior policy positions at the FDA and as communications director for Vice President Quayle during the last two years of the George H. W. Bush administration. Then, casting about for a paying position in the wake of Bill Clinton taking over the White House in 1992, he began consulting for a new group called Citizens for a Sound Economy. He soon learned that the group Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) was the first effort by Charles and David Koch at influencing American politics toward their libertarian outlook. Though presented as a grassroots movement, it was actually funded by their private fortunes and organized by staffers they had picked, with Richard Fink usually heading the list.
Charles Koch described his outlook toward government in 2011:
He wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2011 that government spending was fundamentally the root of all ills in American society. "Government spending on business only aggravates the problem. Too many businesses have successfully lobbied for special favors and treatment by seeking mandates for their products, subsidies (in the form of cash payments from the government), and regulations and tariffs to keep more efficient competitors at bay. Crony capitalism is much easier than competing in an open market. But it erodes our overall standard of living and stifles entrepreneurs by rewarding the politically favored rather than those who provide what consumers want." – Page 37 |
CSE runs like a dark thread through the tangled tale of dark-money-funded groups. It served ably during the tobacco industry's fight against excise taxes on its products, and against Congress granting the FDA the authority to regulate tobacco because of its nicotine content. During that period it received substantial portions of its funding from Big Tobacco (RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris), but the Koch Brothers funding was ever-present as well. After the Tobacco Settlement gave researchers a paper trail to expose the funding and personnel of these astroturf groups, CSE morphed into Americans for Prosperity. In 2009, a much-heralded outburst by Rick Santelli at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange was taken as the birth of the Tea Party Movement, but the Tobacco Papers showed it had its origin earlier.
In short, Poison Tea names the individuals directing this long-running subversion of American democracy, the donors funding it, and the shifting identities of the front groups that are its public faces. The history of the movement is covered in exacting detail by the author, who lived a large part of it and is uniquely qualified to expose it.
Those front groups, changing year by year as their true purposes became public knowledge, funneled vast sums of donated money from corporations and wealthy partisans into "astroturf" campaigns designed to conceal their objectives. They have, by and large, been successful in reshaping American politics. A 2014 study found that individual votes have little to no effect on public policy. This outcome is worth billions to the corporations contributing funds to make it happen.
How much have these individuals and corporations invested? Owing to laws that let them duck disclosure, the record is incomplete. But here is what the author was able to discover.
How much have the Kochs spent on politics? Public tax records between 1998 and 2008 reveal the following: the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, more than $48 million; the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation (which dissolved in 2013), more than $28 million; the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation, more than $120 million; Koch Industries, more than $50 million just on lobbying. And KochPAC, Koch Industries' political action committee, "has donated some eight million dollars to political campaigns, more than eighty per cent of it to Republicans, reported The New Yorker in August 2010) [sic]. And those are only the monies that can be traced. Considerably more than this has certainly been spent anonymously. From its roots at CSE, then through Americans for Prosperity, a 2013 study by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) identified seventeen non-profit groups backed by Charles Koch's donor network that had received more than $400 million in the 2011-2012 election cycle. And far from becoming discouraged by the election results in 2012, they doubled down in 2014—and found success in the federal midterm elections. But all of that may be just a prelude to 2016, when Charles Koch finally hopes to seize the grand prize that has, so far, eluded him. – Page 202 |
From the hindsight of 2022, this is prescient. But no great insight is needed to forecast that a trend a wealthy faction has pursued over decades will persist into the future unless intervention stops it.1 Poison Tea is an essential reference the voting public needs to understand that trend — and to motivate its intervention. With its thorough documentation, its notes and index, its list of key events, and its annotated bibliography, the book is a must read.2 I give it full marks.
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