The seeds of the Powell Memo, planted nearly forty years earlier, had grown into giant spruces of corporatocracy with branches wrapped around our political, economic, and media institutions.
Just as the lessons learned in the Powell Memo were used to take power in the 1970s, they would be used to keep power during another time of crisis.
The Royalists in the Caucus Room gambled that if only this coming Progressive Revolution could be handcuffed for just two years, then maybe the revolutionary spirit of the American people could be broken, or better yet hijacked, and the Reagan Revolution might weather the storm and even exploit this crisis to push their own revolution further. That was the plan at least, and the Republicans in the room were confident they could pull it off.
As Newt Gingrich said after dinner, “You will remember this day. You’ll remember this as the day the seeds of 2012 were sown.”
Republican Representative Pete Sessions from Texas, in an interview with the National Journal, compared the Republican strategy moving forward to a “Taliban insurgency.”113
And so a suicide pact was drawn up the night that President Obama was sworn in to office, in January 2009. Which meant that even before Barack Obama went to sleep on his first night as president of the United States, he was dealing with an insurgency.
With the help of prominent media outlets, the Royalists, now a political minority, would engage in a scorched-earth strategy to defeat a coming Progressive Revolution, even if it meant crashing the United States as we know it. If they were going down, then the rest of the nation was going down with them.
Which is exactly what happened.
CHAPTER 8
The Royalists Strike Back
We needed to have the press be our friend… We wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported.
The very first Great Crash in our nation’s history—that of the economic exploitation in colonial America, which was followed by the Revolutionary War—was kicked off by a “Tea Party.”
We learn about the Boston Tea Party in elementary school. But rarely do we learn what really triggered this event (another consequence of the Great Forgetting).
As was mentioned in chapter 1, the Boston Tea Party was a revolt against the Economic Royalists, who had seized the British government and passed the world’s largest corporate tax break at the time, devastating colonial tea sellers.
The purpose of the Tea Act was to increase the profitability of the East India Company to its stockholders (which included the king) and to help the company drive its colonial small-business competitors out of business. Because the company temporarily no longer had to pay high taxes to England and held a monopoly on the tea it sold in the American colonies, it was able to lower its tea prices to undercut those of the local importers and the mom-and-pop tea merchants and teahouses in every town in America.
In response, in December 1773, a group of Bostonians boarded ships belonging to the East India Company and committed one of the largest acts of corporate vandalism in the history of the world—throwing what would be today millions of dollars’ worth of tea into the harbor.
War would soon follow.
Today, as the great cycles come back around, and battle with the Royalists reconvenes, the “Tea Party” has returned. Only this time, the Royalists are the ones dressed silly.
A Tea Party Reimagined
It’s hard to figure out when exactly the twenty-first-century Tea Party “started.”
The sentiment that government should be supersmall, that taxes are evil, and that social safety nets encourage laziness has existed in America since its founding, albeit usually only on the fringes of society. But what exactly caused tens of thousands of Americans around the country to start dressing up in eighteenth-century garb and dangling tea bags from tricornered hats in the summer of 2009 is a little trickier than those simple slogans.
The prominent Tea Party organization, the Tea Party Patriots, attributes the beginning of the Tea Party to a rant by CNBC talking head Rick Santelli in February 2009—less than a month after President Obama took office.[1] Santelli was reporting from the floor of the Chicago Stock Exchange when he went off on a program being floated by the Obama administration to help struggling homeowners during the height of the foreclosure crisis that was sweeping across the nation.
Santelli went unhinged while live on the air, yelling, “The government is promoting bad behavior… How about this president and new administration? Why don’t you put up a website to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages.”
By “losers,” Santelli was referring to struggling homeowners who had been hustled into buying adjustable-rate mortgages by predatory salesmen out to make a quick buck in the banking industry.
Never mind the program being proposed by the Obama administration to deal with that crisis was far weaker than the one passed through Congress by Franklin Roosevelt, which backstopped people’s mortgages to stop the train wreck of a foreclosure crisis during the Great Depression.
Santelli turned to traders standing nearby and asked, “This is America. How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise your hand. President Obama, are you listening?”114
The Economic Royalists were listening. And there was already a movement afoot to exploit Santelli’s rant for their own gain. Santelli himself gave up this fact when he shamelessly plugged what was likely the first-of-its-kind Tea Party rally, saying, “We’re thinking of having a Chicago tea party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.”
While on the surface Santelli’s rant may have seemed like the kickoff of the Tea Party movement, a closer look at the facts shows that a “Tea Party” was already being organized even before President Obama took office.
A 2013 study115 published in the scientific journal Tobacco Control revealed that today’s incarnation of the Tea Party goes back a long way—well before the election of Barack Obama.
Talk of a new Tea Party to advance corporate interests in America began in the 1980s and 1990s, when tobacco companies invested heavily in building new broad alliances with other organizations in hopes of fighting back against the emerging antismoking agenda in Congress.
Taking the advice of the Powell Memo, written a decade earlier, tobacco companies such as R. J. Reynolds, Lorillard, and Philip Morris funneled millions of dollars into an organization called Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). One funder of CSE is one of the most prominent Royalists of today, David Koch.
The purpose of CSE was to build a coalition of tobacco companies and corporate polluters to oppose regulations on smoking and air pollutants being considered in Congress. It’s estimated that at least $5.3 million was funneled into CSE by Big Tobacco.
Then in 1993, a Philip Morris PR flack wrote a “Powell-esque” memo outlining a strategy of fighting any new taxes by joining up with other antitax groups to create a “New Boston Tea Party.”
1
Tea Party national press release, November 4, 2010: “Tea Party Patriots wishes to extend a special thank you to Rick Santelli for his rant on February 19, 2009, which started this entire movement. Without Rick’s rant, this movement would never have started. Many others will try to take credit but don’t be fooled. He was the spark that began this fire.”