T.eabagging an E.xcercise in A.stroturfing

My relatively neutral story for the Lode.

A week ago, Taxed Enough Already Concerned Citizens of the UP gathered at the courthouse for a Tax Day demonstration in concert with other gatherings around the nation on the day annual taxes are due nationwide. Participants gathered at the Houghton County Courthouse to walk to the Veteran’s Park across from the Portage Bridge.

A few onlookers who lived nearby the march path came out to see what was going on. The most prescient comments came from the hipster residents who live near Veteran’s Park. “I think its funny that people bought their kids —their tax-credit meal tickets— here with them” said Kate Pote. Kate —along with many students— got money back after taxes this year. The only people of color I saw were an East Asian couple and a few kids of different geographical origins  alongside an older white couple (suggesting adoption, maybe Kate was right about the “tax credit” idea).  I interviewed a number of people along the rally. I recognized a few people from campus; a former marine biker who teaches Rifle at Tech and a Grad Student who looks like he takes his Rush (the band) a bit too seriously. There were a score of others who were listening to Rush (the man who could take up as much space on stage as the band) on AM with their walkman-clone tuners. One of these fellows tried to convince me there were more than 500 people in attendance while my estimates ran around 175-200 (The Daily Mining Gazette and TV6 Marquette estimated 200). When interviewing a woman who commented on how few Michigan Tech students participated at the rally, she explained that Michigan Tech was a liberal campus.  Ohh, so that  explains why ACLU-MTU and feminist zine Technobabe Times folded over recently due to lack of interest and support from campus. If campus has any political leanings, it’s too apathetic to act on them.

I got the canned phrase from the same woman about how young people start out liberal and grow conservative as they become older. I thought this was funny, since I considered myself a libertarian as a teenager. The same type of teenager indoctrinated on Rand that thinks he is unique but misunderstood in the world and despises his parents despite their financial support, transportation, etc. The teenager developed into what I consider myself today —a Keynesian with Marxist leanings—  after coming to terms with my privilege in life.

The gathering was peaceful, cordial, expressive, and completely manufactured. The so-called spark of the movement was a February 19th diatribe by Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as part of the program Task Force on CNBC. The rant was a piece of faux populism telling of how the common hardworking American was irate about supporting people who needed foreclosure assistance and how there should be a Chicago Tea Party in retaliation. Websites and Youtube clips of Santelli were online minutes after the rant, suspiciously in concert. The movement was fabricated by many powerful and influential  groups under the pretense of spontaneous, grassroots support for their policy. The phrase for that is Astroturfing.

Writers Mark Ames and  Yasha Levine of Exiled Online first discovered that the web domain chicagoteaparty.org —in which the campaign’s website appeared hours after Santelli’s rant was aired— was bought by Zack Christenson, A conservative blogger and producer of  a Chicago AM radio show Extension 720 in August 2008 (an independent whois search confirms this information).  The connection between his movement and Koch Family that Ames and Levine point out is only by their modus operandi at this point, but the involvement of FreedomWorks is confirmed.

Looking out with my shoes on the ground, its hard to tell whether these people were in on the scheme or being duped by it. I had seen the acronym Taxed Enough Already and placards declarying Party Likes Its 1773 during the coverage in other cities, which suggests that elements of the protests were either cribbed from each other or they were manufactured. A google search for taxed enough already yielded teapartyday.com. A whois search on teapartyday.com called up the mail address of AFA —the American Family Association—  and the domain holder as Ron Shank, another conservative blogger who also runs a web design and domain service adhering to an interpretation of christian ethics.  Along with opposition to same-sex-marriage, “the gay agenda” and involvement of other religions except for Christianity in politics and media, the American Family Association has a hand in other goals unrelated to Family Values^TM such as oil industry deregulation and opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act currently on the table. One of the speakers Pete Mackin ran for state senate in 2006 for the Republican Party. Mackin is also a contributing writer for the Michigan-based  libertarian think tank Mackinac Center.

To call certain people caught up in the protest chumps doesn’t mean they’re stupid or ignorant. It may just mean they’re desperate. Even the most educated of us do things when they are desperate. Obama supposedly said that  blue collar Caucasians cling to their guns and religion. What he or the cherry pickers of that speech lost in the discussion is that these people do such desperate things  because their aspirations were taken from them by their employers who took the profits and ran, left their employees hanging and offered no loyalty while they were working.  The people who remained are desperate to blame anyone for the circumstances they have been dealt.

That’s where the media personalities representing the Right come in to tell then that they care about the plight of  “Hard-Working Americans” and that the enemies of the working class are whoever said media personalities oppose. The aforementioned people who were listening to Rush Limbaugh on their Walkmen were getting that message straight off the airwaves. It seems they still need affirmation despite being in a crowd of like-minded people. I left to catch class before I could see them head to the Portage to steep their teabags in a symbolic gesture. Lipton must have made a killing that day. According to The Keweenaw Report, Democrat State Representative Mike Lahti came in to hear what the crowd had to say and give his side as a government official amid booing and jeering.

Aaron Spalding —one of the other  hipsters living nearby— put it perfectly in three words. “Shit’s Fucked Up”

UPDATE 5/3: New issue of Buffalo Beast convers the teabagging