14 Weeks

by Republican Governors Association

14 Weeks from Republican Governors Association on Vimeo.

Land Ownership at the Crux of Haiti’s Stalled Reconstruction

Written by Kim Ives
Wednesday, 14 July 2010 14:00
Source: Haiti Liberte

At a UN Conference on Mar. 31, about 60 countries and multilateral banks promised $5.3 billion for Haiti’s reconstruction over the next 18 months. Only about 10% of those promises have been delivered on (some of it just forgiven debt), and of that money delivered into a World Bank managed fund, only a fraction has been spent to help Haiti.

Meanwhile, private citizens around the world gave hundreds of millions of dollars to NGOs and impromptu efforts like the Clinton-Bush Foundation, but (where statistics are available) less than 25% of those contributions, sometimes much less, have been spent while desperation in Haiti grows. Much of the blame for Haiti’s faltering recovery has focused on this trickling release of money and the disorganization of inefficient, administratively costly NGOs which have received most of the funds to date.

But big NGOs reply that they are ready to build new storm resistant houses – the most urgent priority, everybody agrees, as the hurricane season bears down on the 1.7 million displaced people still living under tents and tarps. The problem, Bekele Gelata, the secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross Societies said last week, is that the Haitian government has not provided open land on which to build large numbers of houses. “We have high hopes that the Red Cross will get a little land soon,” he said.

In this way, the Jan. 12 earthquake reveals that the principal fault-line in Haiti is not geological but one of class. A small handful of rich families own large tracts of land in suburban Port-au-Prince which would be ideal for resettling the displaced thousands. The lands are located near the city, often with water and some trees, and are largely undeveloped.

However, these same families control the Haitian government and, more importantly, have great influence in the newly formed 26-member Interim Commission to Reconstruct Haiti (CIRH), co-chaired by former President Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. Thirteen of the CIRH directors represent multilateral banks like the IMF, World Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank and donor nations like the U.S., France and Canada. The other thirteen members represent Haiti’s elite.

The most prominent elite representative on the CIRH is Reginald Boulos, who heads one of the Haitian bourgeoisie’s most powerful families and backed both the 1991-94 and 2004-06 coups d’état against former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. (Despite regular and massive demonstrations asking for the Haitian government to facilitate his return, Aristide remains in exile in South Africa, without a passport or laisser-passer to return home.)

The CIRH is empowered for the next 18 months under a “State of Emergency Law” to seize land for rebuilding as it sees fit. (It is no coincidence that the time period for the “state of emergency” and the $5 billion injection coincide). But the elite families on this body in charge of expropriations are not volunteering their own well-situated land to benefit Haiti’s homeless.

As a result, only one major displaced person camp, Corail-Cesselesse, has been built about 10 miles north of the capital, on a forbidding strip of sun-baked desert situated between Titayen and Morne Cabrit, two desolate zones where death-squads dumped their victims during the anti-Aristide coups. The 6,000 person camp is several kilometers from Route National One, where transport toward the capital runs. One resident said he had to leave the camp at 4 a.m. for a three hour commute to his job in the city. Another resident said bus fares cost $1, a lot of money in Haiti.

Long-time democracy activist Patrick Elie told Democracy Now! on the quake’s six month anniversary that “the Haitian elites over centuries [have] appropriated land which [...], especially after independence and the end of slavery, would have been common property, and they appropriated vast tract of land, pushing the peasants – the newly freed slaved who did not want to work on the plantation system anymore – to the mountains.”

This appropriation process – some call it theft – is not ancient history. Some of Haiti’s best suited land for post-quake resettlements is located just north of the capital between the Freres Road and Tabarre. Over the past 25 years, Haiti’s bourgeoisie bought up large swaths of this fertile valley, where the Haitian American Sugar Company used to grow sugarcane. Now it is home to a Miami-style luxury home development known as Belle-Ville, an amusement park for rich kids , the Vorbe family car dealership, Brazil’s military base (Brabatt), and a giant new U.S. Embassy, among other things. “The elite paid the peasants pennies for the land not long ago, pushing them off,” Elie told Haiti Liberté. “Now they will look to sell it for a huge profit.”

The bourgeoisie has placed itself in charge of resettlement and is looking to make a killing. “The government had appointed Gerard-Emile ‘Aby’ Brun, president of Nabatec Development, a consortium owned by some of Haiti’s most powerful families, to be in charge of relocating the squatter camps in Port-au-Prince,” explained the AP’s Jonathon Katz in a Jul. 11 story. Brun then put Corail-Cesselesse on land owned by Nabatec, thereby making his company “first in line to gain part of $7 million the government will spend compensating landowners.”

And, Katz continues, “that’s just a small part of the potential payoff. Nabatec is also a lead negotiator with South Korean garment firms to build factories that Haitian officials say will likely go into Corail-Cesselesse.” Forty years ago, Cité Soleil, Haiti’s biggest and worst slum, was also built as a model development (then Cité Simone) to provide workers for the first industrial park near the airport, built and owned by the same wealthy families with U.S. support.

So the bourgeoisie keeps its best land and sells its worst for a huge, guaranteed profit. This is the Haitian equivalent of the U.S. bank bailout.

In this way, the Préval government and CIRH appear ready to squander the millions contributed to Haiti by buying land at inflated prices from the bourgeoisie, land which was often stolen or obtained by ruse in the first place.

Land is also needed to grow food for Haiti’s increasingly hungry masses, especially as post-quake humanitarian aid begins to drop off. Haiti’s bourgeoisie and big landowners are more interested in building assembly industries, office buildings and luxury homes, not on developing fields of rice, millet or corn. In the past six months, four new industrial parks, according to one report, have been built to take advantage of Haiti’s $3 a day minimum wage.

This struggle for Haiti’s principal means of production – the land – has now been thrown into sharp relief as sharks and vultures use this moment of a weakened state to expand their real estate holdings, not contribute them to their devastated compatriots.

A good example of this is in Ganthier, a town of about 72,000 located 18 miles east of the capital near the Dominican border. Half the town’s residents are peasant farmers who survive by farming on state lands used as a commons to grow food for over 80 years. But in recent weeks, two businessmen have laid claim to this state land.

Two weeks ago, the businessmen sent out a bulldozer that began to clear the peasants’ plots. The peasants banded together, burned the bulldozer, and blocked the road from the border. The local mayor, Ralph Lapointe sided with the peasants and was arrested for a few hours. He credits his partial freedom to immediate local protests and barricades. His office’s general director was imprisoned for more than 24 hours.

“We are both now under virtual house arrest,” he told journalists from Haiti Liberté and Democracy Now! “My life is in danger if I leave my home. As a government representative, I am supposed to defend the interests of the local population. Instead the judicial authorities are allying themselves with the marauding businessmen and are attacking the peasants and those that defend them, like myself.”

Meanwhile the interlopers, armed with false deeds to the land (the elite’s age-old weapon of choice), have enlisted the police in a manhunt for the leaders of the peasant rebellion against the land grab. Mayor Lapointe identified the two businessmen trying to take the land as Frank Galette and Gérald Brutus. “Because I don’t agree with their actions, they have promised to assassinate me,” the mayor said.

This stand-off in Ganthier does not bode well for Haiti’s reconstruction under the leadership of Préval and the CIRH. To build Haiti back better, Haitian authorities will need to expropriate at least some of the land the elite has stolen and accumulated over the past 200 years. Instead, landowners’ thugs, often in concert with police and UN troops, are brutally uprooting people, often at gunpoint and at night, from spontaneous settlements without giving them any alternative homes. The internally displaced just have to move farther up the mountainsides or further into the Arizona-like desert north of the capital.

Of course, seizing the ruling class’ land would exacerbate the already simmering class war, of which Ganthier is just an opening skirmish. “The landowners say if they’re not compensated, the ‘new Haiti’ in Corail-Cesselesse will end up making the violent slums of pre-quake Port-au-Prince look tame,” Katz wrote. “Every squatter seems to have had an encounter with gangsters they believe are sent by landowners.”

The need was there before, but the earthquake made it even more crying. Haiti needs a social revolution where the land of the rich is transferred to the ownership of the poor – that is, nationalized, as it was under Dessalines – so that it can serve not just as a means of production but also to build shelters from the coming storms.

NYT: We Stopped Calling Waterboarding ‘Torture’ Because The Bush Administration Didn’t Approve

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/01/nyt-responds-to-study-abo_n_632724.html?view=print
By Jason Linkins, July 3, 2010

Yesterday, we made note of a new study from the Kennedy School of Government that found that America’s major newspapers, after decades of reliably and accurately referring to waterboarding as torture, suddenly stopped doing so around 2002, when America started waterboarding people like the dickens! Adam Serwer offered this comment on the matter:

As soon as Republicans started quibbling over the definition of torture, traditional media outlets felt compelled to treat the issue as a “controversial” matter, and in order to appear as though they weren’t taking a side, media outlets treated the issue as unsettled, rather than confronting a blatant falsehood. To borrow John Holbo’s formulation, the media, confronted with the group think of two sides of an argument, decided to eliminate the “think” part of the equation so they could be “fair” to both groups.

Well, today Yahoo’s Michael Calderone has comment from a New York Times spokesman, who—while maintaining that the Times’s official position is that the study is “misleading”—nevertheless comes right out and confirms that they are in fact precisely the unrescueable cowards that Adam Serwer says they are:

However, the Times acknowledged that political circumstances did play a role in the paper’s usage calls. “As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture,” a Times spokesman said in a statement. “When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves. Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture.”

The Times spokesman added that outside of the news pages, editorials and columnists “regard waterboarding as torture and believe that it fits all of the moral and legal definitions of torture.” He continued: “So that’s what we call it, which is appropriate for the opinion pages.”

Isn’t that great? Waterboarding is totally torture so long as we are “outside of the news pages,” where journalists at the Times are free to believe that waterboarding “fits all of the moral and legal definitions of torture.” And, obviously, they want to make it clear that they feel that they deserve credit for having these important feelings about morality, despite the fact that they are too terrified to evince these principles in the “news pages” of a “newspaper” that’s best known for publishing “pages of news.”

[What’s especially dumb about all of this, is that waterboarding wouldn’t be newsworthy at all if it weren’t torture. If waterboarding was nothing more than say, a light splashing of water to the face, there would be no stories written about it at all. But for decades the New York Times wrote stories about waterboarding specifically because it was torture, referring to it as “torture."]

Of course, none of this explains the other side to the study, which found that, “In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible.” It’s pretty clear that at the New York Times, as a matter of policy, when someone other than the United States straps a person to a board and performs a harrowing simulation of drowning on them to extract information or mete out punishment, things get a whole lot clearer, morally and legally—and then suddenly, the very same “news pages” become a lot braver.

At any rate, the big takeaway here is that as long as you are able to frame immorality as an interesting point of view in a political dispute, the New York Times is ready to suspend decades of crystal-clear judgment, subserviently.

Arizona Police Already Feeling Pressure From New Immigration Law

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/01/arizona-police-immigration-law_n_633108.html
JONATHAN J. COOPER | 07/ 1/10 08:01 PM

PHOENIX — Police enforcing Arizona’s toughest-in-the-nation immigration law are allowed to consider if a person speaks poor English, looks nervous or is traveling in an overcrowded vehicle.

They can even take into account whether someone is wearing several layers of clothing in a hot climate, or hanging out in an area where illegal immigrants are known to look for work.

But top police officials issued a stern warning to officers Thursday, telling them in a training video not to consider race or ethnicity and emphasizing that “the entire country is watching.”

The officials cautioned that opponents of the law may secretly videotape police making traffic stops in an effort to prove that they are racially profiling Hispanics.

“Without a doubt, we’re going to be accused of racial profiling no matter what we do on this,” Tucson Police Chief Roberto Villasenor tells officers on the video, which was posted online. The recording demonstrates how officers should determine when they can ask someone for proof they are in the country legally.

Arizona’s law, sparked by anger over a surging population of illegal immigrants in the border state, generally requires officers enforcing another law – like speeding or jaywalking – to question a person’s immigration status if there’s a reasonable suspicion that the person is in the country illegally.

Under the law, officers are also allowed to consider if a person does not have identification or tried to run away. But the stakes for making a mistake are high: Officers can be fired if they start asking questions because of a person’s race, then lie about it later, the video warns.

“It is also clear that the actions of Arizona officers will never come under this level of scrutiny again,” said Lyle Mann, executive director of the state agency that trains police. “Each and every one of you will now carry the reputation for the entire Arizona law enforcement community with you every day.”

The law applies only to a traffic stop, a person who is detained or an arrest – not when a person flags down an officer. Police are not required to ask crime victims or witnesses about their immigration status, and anyone who shows a valid Arizona driver’s license is presumed to be in the country legally.
Story continues below

“The entire country is watching to see how Arizona and in particular Arizona law enforcement responds,” Mann said.

The law restricts the use of race, color or national origin as the basis for triggering immigration questions. But civil rights groups and some police officials argue that officers will still assume that illegal immigrants look Hispanic.

Arizona’s 460,000 illegal immigrants are almost all Hispanic. Yet Arizona also has nearly 2 million Hispanics who are U.S. citizens or legal residents, about 30 percent of the state’s population.

In the training video, an expert advises officers to ask themselves whether they would reach the same conclusion about a Hispanic person’s immigration status if the subject were white or black.

“If any officer goes into a situation with a previous mindset that one race or one ethnicity is not equal to another’s, then they have no business being a law enforcement officer in this state,” Arizona Police Association President Brian Livingston said in the video.

To determine whether the person is legally in the United States, officers dealing with a suspected illegal immigrant are told to call the Border Patrol, a police officer certified to enforce immigration laws or a federal immigration hotline.

They are supposed to ask federal immigration authorities to come pick up illegal immigrants. If the feds refuse, officers can arrest immigrants or take them to a federal detention center.

The instructional video and supporting paperwork will be sent to all 170 Arizona police agencies.

Police departments will decide the best way to teach their forces. There is no requirement that all 15,000 Arizona police officers complete the training before the law takes effect July 29.

Law enforcement officials around the state said they were reviewing the training materials. Most hadn’t decided yet how to use them.

Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County, home to smuggling corridors south of Phoenix, said he’s going to require all of his officers to watch the video, and he created a supplemental video with information specific to his agency.

“I have full faith and confidence in all of us as professionals to apply the law in a very professional way,” he said.

Stephen Montoya, a lawyer representing police officers suing to block the law, said the video is “a good introduction” but isn’t sufficient to train officers on immigration law.

“I thought it would be more detailed. I thought it would be more thorough. I thought it would be more expansive,” he said.

Gov. Jan Brewer ordered the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board to develop the training program when she signed the law April 23.

Opponents have challenged the measure as unconstitutional and have asked that a federal court block it from taking effect. U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton plans to hear arguments on the request later this month.

President Barack Obama on Thursday called the law an understandable byproduct of public frustration with the government’s inability to tighten the immigration system. But he also said it is ill-conceived, divisive and would put undue pressure on local authorities.

The law was passed in part with the lobbying muscle of unions representing rank-and-file police officers who argued that they should be allowed to arrest illegal immigrants they come across.

It was opposed by police chiefs who worried it would be expensive to implement and would destroy the trust they have developed in Hispanic neighborhoods.

The Tea Party Is Danger: Dispelling 7 Myths That Help Us Avoid Reality About the New Right-Wing

http://www.alternet.org/news/147307/the_tea_party_is_dangerous%3A_dispelling_7_myths_that_help_us_avoid_reality_about_the_new_right-wing_politics/
AlterNet / By Adele M. Stan, June 23, 2010

It may be fashionable to dismiss the Tea Party and its radical, right-wing pals, but we do so at our peril.

Few things are more confounding to liberals and progressives than the rise of the Tea Party movement, and the media’s infatuation with it. Just as we breathed a sigh of relief with the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s 44th president, after eight disastrous years under the reign of Bush the Younger, in swept a furious wave of misanthropic pique.

Really, we shouldn’t have been surprised. Just as a recession hit of unprecedented force, yielding high unemployment, conservatives found themselves sidelined, Obama’s triumph coming on the heels of the Democrats’ congressional victories of 2006. That partisan change would have been enough to make conservatives ornery, but the cultural change represented by the nation’s first African-American president struck fear into the hearts of many—especially after liberal San Franciscan Nancy Pelosi became the first woman to wield the gavel of the Speaker of the House.

The inevitable backlash against such a sweeping shift, shepherded by an array of corporate-funded entities, culminated in the creation of the Tea Party movement—a dangerous brew of resentment and fear that threatens to roll back the majority the Democrats enjoy in the House of Representatives, and set the nation on a path to a right-wing government even more restrictive and regressive than that of the Bush era.

But bad economies create bad politics, notes economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. Economic downturns traditionally, over the course of history, usher in swings to the right, Krugman writes. The administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an aberration in this regard, and, perhaps, as Michael Tomasky suggests, in the course of American history. But since the Great Depression offers our most recent experience of severe economic crisis, its story is etched in the progressive mind as the narrative for how the nation naturally responds to economic catastrophe.

More than a year ago, Robert Reich warned of the vitriol we see today from the Tea Party movement, as well as its likely targets. “Make no mistake: Angry right-wing populism lurks just below the surface of the terrible American economy,” Reich wrote, “ready to be launched not only at Obama but also at liberals, intellectuals, gays, blacks, Jews, the mainstream media, coastal elites, crypto socialists, and any other potential target of paranoid opportunity.”

We must not make the mistake Reich warned us about; we ignore the emergence of the Tea Party movement at our peril. We are the ones they’ve been waiting for.

The impulse to dismiss the Tea Party movement is understandable, especially given the kook factor (something that every grassroots movement has). The wacky signs, the crazy rhetoric about health care as some form of tyranny: How could this add up to a force able to defeat the massive coalition that led to President Obama’s election?

Charles P. Pierce, writing at Esquire’s blog, expresses this view with his claim that the Tea Party movement isn’t really a movement at all, but rather “the kind of noisy paranoid lunacy that used to be stapled to lampposts, or hollered about by people you would avoid in the public parks.” Some of that is true, but it also feeds an attendant denial of the kind of damage such a movement—or non-movement, in Pierce’s view—can do.

Ultimately, the same forces that launched the Religious Right in the 1970s lurk behind today’s Tea Party movement, aided and abetted by Fox News, corporate-funded organizing groups and far-right players within the Republican Party—forces which, taken in aggregate, constitute a sort of Tea Party, Inc. They have money. They have power. And they know how to get more of both.

Day after day, the themes favored by the billionaires and political operatives who mobilize the Tea Partiers are hammered with ruthless repetition not only by Glenn Beck and the rest of Fox News, but also by Rush Limbaugh and hundreds of radio talk-show hosts and right-wing syndicated newspaper columnists. And now those themes are finding their way into mainstream media as journalists feel compelled to address them in their reporting.

Over the course of the last 30 years, conservatives have held more years in power than liberals and moderate Democrats. But the men behind the right-wing fury don’t just want their power back; they want more of it than they’ve ever had before.

The right is patient, but it is not kind. Its leaders are content to take a long path to their goal of grabbing all the marbles. In the 2010 elections, they may win a few and lose a few, but in these two things they will succeed: moving both the civic discourse and the Republican Party further to the right.

Through the launch of successful primary challenges in key races for the U.S. Senate, they’ve introduced ideas far outside the mainstream of American political discourse: elimination of the Department of Education and the Federal Reserve, the outlawing of abortion under any circumstances. These ideas have never before had the breadth of coverage granted by national media to important electoral contests. Absurd as they may seem now, they may seem less so if liberal governance fails to heal the economy.

As progressives and liberals seek to make sense of the Tea Party movement, a handful of myths have emerged to explain the wishful thinking about the movement’s supposed inability to gain the kind of power that could set us back decades. Some are excuses for inaction, some are fantasies born of denial and some are simple simple misreadings of the times. Here are seven emerging themes for not taking the Tea Party movement seriously, and why they are wrong.

1. The Tea Party movement is largely a creation of the media, which devotes too much coverage to the Tea Party’s small constituency of malcontents.

There’s little doubt that media hype has played a significant role in both the growth and coverage of the Tea Party movement. But that does not negate the potential impact of this anti-government tribe on American politics or governance, as Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum believes. Rather, the role played by media in amplifying the Tea Party message simply speaks to one means—the major one, perhaps—by which the movement has grown. And now media are beginning to internalize some of those themes in their own assessments of the Obama administration, such as the obsession with reducing the federal deficit in an economy that, if history is any guide, will require serious deficit spending to repair.

Those who count supporters of the Tea Party movement as a small cohort within the American populace often cite, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Cynthia Tucker does, the finding from the New York Times/CBS News poll that Tea Party supporters account for 18 percent of the general population. If that’s evidence of their irrelevance, than liberals may as well count themselves out of the realm of political influence: The same poll shows that liberals make up a mere 20 percent. (The survey did not offer a designation for “progressive,” so it’s presumed that liberals and progressives are lumped together.)

When it comes to the Tea Party movement, the media comprise the message, as much as carry it. The structural role that media play in amplifying, growing and maintaining the movement has elements that set it apart from other movements, due to the role played by Rupert Murdoch and his two flagship U.S. properties: Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.

The personalities of Fox News and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal do more than magnify the Tea Party movement’s messages; they are communications strategists that reinforce the movement’s themes with cogent framing and clever wordplay, delivered incessantly across all forms of media in their purview and outside of it.

These media figures also function as movement organizers. Fox News targets the individual viewer and activist, repeating Tea Party themes relentlessly and spewing disinformation about progressives and the Obama administration, but also recommending courses of action, such as marching on Washington. Glenn Beck is Rupert Murdoch’s community organizer. It doesn’t matter to Murdoch how many advertisers Beck loses through his outrageous accusations against progressives or the White House; the deregulatory agenda Murdoch stands to gain through Beck’s success with viewers could reap the media mogul billions more than the paltry millions to be gained through advertising on Beck’s Fox NewsChannel show. (As the CEO of News Corporation, the parent company of Fox and WSJ, Murdoch’s interest in deregulation extends to the financial industry, and just about every other industry in which his personal billions may be invested.)

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal editorial page carries the Tea Party message to elites, via columnists such as John Fund and Stephen Moore, who leverage their own perches at the Journal to appear, in the guise of experts, on television and radio news programs beyond the Murdoch empire.

The relentless repetition of Tea Party messages by Murdoch’s minions, be they tropes about deficit spending or allegations of presidential ineptitude, seeps into the non-Murdoch media when they cover the controversies cooked up by Fox and WSJ. Even the New York Times is displaying symptoms of psychological infection, as my colleague Joshua Holland points out.

Progressives have no media structure that parallels Fox and the Wall Street Journal, and the nature of capitalism and for-profit media all but ensure they will not. Just because it features liberal and progressive program hosts and personalities, MSNBC is not a parallel entity to Fox NewsChannel. MSNBC is owned not by a progressive billionaire who seeks to impose the progressive agenda on the world. It is owned by General Electric, an immense corporation (and defense contractor). For GE, MSNBC is a profit center: the ideological bent of its liberal cable newschannel is the result of astute market research. Until MSNBC went liberal, there was a void in the market for a newschannel liberals could call their own.

Neither does the New York Times offer a parallel to the Wall Street Journal. It may have a largely liberal editorial board and op-ed page, but the New York Times is a paper of record for the nation on all manner of subjects whose readership includes elites of all sorts, not just the liberals who take comfort in the columns of Paul Krugman or Frank Rich. The Wall Street Journal, though national in scope, targets readers largely interested in business and finance—the community that stands most to gain from a Tea Party triumph.

If anything, the media’s role in fomenting and organizing the Tea Party movement is the number one reason to regard the movement as serious threat; not one to be used to dismiss it.

2. The Tea Party movement is not an authentic grassroots movement; it’s the creation of astroturf groups.

Actually, no. The Tea Party movement began as an authentic grassroots uprising, the result of real, on-the-ground resentment against the government (for the bank bailout), the new African-American president and the falling fortunes of middle- and working-class white people in the devastated economy. Corporate-funded astroturf groups such as FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity and the Club for Growth saw in this burgeoning resentment the means to undermine progressives and to pave the way for enacting an anti-regulatory agenda that could spell billions in new profits for corporations and the financial industry at the expense of everyday people. And so they got busy, initially organizing the discontented in opposition to the health care reform legislation passed earlier this year.

Blogger Stephen Markley exemplifies a common strain of thought that this means that the Tea Party isn’t a real movement, but that’s just a matter of semantics. Whatever you want to call it, it does have real power and, at the ground level, comprises real people.

FreedomWorks and Americans For Prosperity organized the opposition to disrupt town-hall meetings devoted to the bill called by members of Congress in their districts, with FreedomWorks’ Bob McGuffie actually offering a “how-to” kit on his Web site (PDF), Right Principles. Fox News hammered away, repeating lies about “death panels” for the elderly and abortion coverage in the bill. (At an Americans For Prosperity event AlterNet covered last August, personalities from either Fox News or the Wall Street Journal accounted for one-third of the 15 speakers on the roster for the conference plenary.) The organized Tea Party opposition helped to kill the public option, and created the pressures that yielded the current bill’s sweet deals for insurance companies.

Columnist Cynthia Tucker would have you believe that the amplification by right-wing media of the contrived town-hall confrontations—as well as subsequent Tea Party happenings—render them to be so much hooey. “[I]ts loud, publicity-oriented antics draw news media attention, giving it more an appearance of clout than actual influence,” writes Tucker.

But health care reform never was the main event for these groups; it was simply the best issue on hand at the time to organize around. Because health care is so personal, it stirs the emotions, especially of those whose distrust of government and the president run so deep. The real deal for the astroturfers is regulation of any kind—particularly of the energy industry, but including the financial system, telecommunications and the Internet.

Both FreedomWorks and Americans For Prosperity stem from a now-defunct group, Citizens for a Sound Economy, founded by David Koch, heir to the fortune of Koch Industries, the nation’s largest, privately held oil and gas company. Today, Koch chairs the board of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. While FreedomWorks claims that it receives no Koch money, it promotes Koch’s agenda.

The success of FreedomWorks, AFP and Fox News in mobilizing the Tea Party movement has brought an army of political operatives and lobbyists to the gates, and given rise to new entities, such as the Tea Party Express, an organization born of the Our Country Deserves Better PAC chaired by Republican operative Howard Kaloogian, who spearheaded the recall of Democratic Gov. Grey Davis in California. Taken together, I think of these entities as “Tea Party Inc.,” distinct from the grassroots right-wing movement they often successfully mobilize.

For a whole class of K Street lobbyists, political operatives and dirty tricksters, the Tea Party movement has become big business, if this anonymous account, said to be written by a Republican political consultant, in this month’s Playboy is to be believed. Whether or not the author inflates his own importance and that of the Tea Party PAC he says he was hired to advise, there is truth in the author’s claims of co-option of the movement by the professional class of political manipulators. But that doesn’t make the Tea Party movement any less dangerous.

3. The Tea Party movement cannot win general elections.

Well, the jury’s still out on that one. In the race for Nevada’s U.S. Senate seat, GOP candidate and Tea Party victor Sharron Angle is giving Harry Reid a run for his money, polling three points ahead of the Senate majority leader, according to the latest Mason-Dixon poll, which was conducted in early June. In Kentucky’s Senate race, the most recent SurveyUSA poll shows Rand Paul running ahead of Democrat Jack Conway.

On the other hand, Tea Party darling Marco Rubio, the GOP nominee-apparent, is in a tight race against the now-independent Gov. Charlie Crist for Florida’s U.S. Senate seat. Crist had the backing of the Republican Party establishment in the GOP primary, but ducked out of the party before the contest took place because he appeared to be headed for a loss of the nomination to Rubio, due to the latter’s strong backing from Tea Party Inc. Now straddling the middle, Crist is now narrowly leading in his attempt to win the seat as an independent, versus Rubio (who now has no real competition for the Republican nomination) and likely Democratic candidate Kendrick Meek.

But, really, all this is beside the point. The threat posed by the Tea Party movement is less about the next election than it is about the long-term fate of the republic. In 2010, the Tea Party movement and its astroturf manipulators will win a few and lose a few in the general election. Those, like Huffington Post blogger Jim Taylor, who see the Tea Party as a minimal threat will likely point to those losses as proof of the Tea Party’s insignificance. The real game this year is the one they’ve played in Republican primaries, where Tea Party candidates have impressively knocked out establishment GOP picks. The game is being played to push the Republican Party further to the right—to take power from the hands of establishment figures such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and put it into the hands of Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., beloved by both grassroots Tea Party followers and the barons of Tea Party, Inc.

Witness Kentucky, where the Tea Party-backed Rand Paul knocked off McConnell’s pick, Trey Grayson (remember him?), in his own state’s open U.S. Senate seat. The backing of Rand Paul by Tea Party, Inc.—the constellation of Tea Party consultants, astroturf groups and the DeMint machine that operates at the national level—was strategically designed to weaken McConnell’s leadership credentials.

Even if the Tea Party dons fail to win more than a handful of races with the candidates they’ve backed, they’ll likely consider election 2010 to be a success for their purposes. In addition to weakening the GOP establishment, they’ll have organized voters, compiling new lists of energized voters ready for use when the 2012 presidential primary season begins.

4. The Tea Party movement is actually good for the Democrats, because they look reasonable by comparison.

This is actually a variation on item No. 3, and it’s just as short-sighted. A recent proponent of this theory is Nevada Democratic strategist Dan Hart. Sure, the apparent craziness of Harry Reid’s opponent, Sharron Angle—who wants to end Social Security and the Environmental Protection Agency even as she accepts the support of right-wing “Christians” who want to replace the U.S. Code of Law with the Book of Leviticus—may make Reid look all the more reasonable by comparison, but many voters aren’t feeling very reasonable these days. “A rebellious electorate embraces crackpots, and crackpots with certificates of election make public policy,” Rutgers University Professor Ross Baker told Politico’s Jonathan Martin.

But say the Democrats do benefit in 2010 by comparison with the candidates of Tea Party Inc. In the meantime, the Tea Party movement and its astroturfers continue to shift the Republican Party further to the right, and that’s bad for everybody.

5. The Tea Party movement is destined to burn itself out.

I expect it to go on strong as long as Obama remains in office—and it’s quite possible that the present administration will be followed by the election of a right-wing Republican. Either way, if the Tea Party movement fades post-Obama, as American Prospect’s Mark Schmitt predicts, its effect on America’s political landscape may last for generations.

The Tea Party movement does not represent a new sentiment or set of ideas in American politics; it is merely a new expression of what was once called the New Right, which grew out of the failed 1964 presidential campaign of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz. The men who formed the New Right also created the Religious Right, plucking the late Rev. Jerry Falwell out of the closed universe of Southern Baptists to front a national political organization called the Moral Majority. That organization had much to do with electing Ronald Reagan, long considered to be something of a political joke, to the White House.

The Moral Majority existed for a mere 10 years, but gave birth to a movement that continues to shape the Republican political landscape and holds the keys to the GOP’s get-out-the-vote operations.

6. The Tea Party movement is disorganized and has no leader.

Those invested in diminishing the movement’s importance point to its lack of organization and lucidity.

But those are exactly the reasons it remains so dangerous: anybody with a paranoid claim that seems plausible in the right-wing universe can pick off a portion of the movement, and with some money and moxie, mobilize a throng of foot-soldiers for his or her cause.

The mobilizer could be corporate-backed astroturfers, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, or a one-note organization such as the so-called constitutionalist Oath Keepers (an organization of people either currently or formerly serving in the armed forces and law enforcement who pledge to defy enforcement of laws they deem to be unconstitutional).

As certain commentators deride the Tea Party movement as being too disorganized to impact electoral politics on a wide scale, right-wing leaders, seeking to tap the rage and resentment that underlies this populist movement, are using the 2010 mid-term elections to organize for 2012 – a presidential election year. The right’s old hands – men such as Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition, and Richard Viguerie, known as Ronald Reagan’s “postmaster general” for his direct-mail operation on behalf of 1980’s unlikely presidential candidate, are already on the ground, compiling databases and organizing local Tea Party groups to do electoral activism.

Campaigns that seem ridiculous to in-the-know political observers can provide the basis for potent voter mobilization efforts. Just witness the 1988 presidential campaign of Rev. Pat Robertson, whose losing bid for the Republican nomination yielded a data-mining bonanza that formed the basis of the Christian Coalition – the organization that laid the groundwork for the 1994 “Republican Revolution,” which in turn set the stage for George W. Bush’s ascension to the White House.

7. Tea Party supporters are all stupid, crazy or ignorant.

Except they’re not.

According to an April New York Times/CBS News poll, the percentage of Tea Party supporters with college degrees substantially exceeds the percentage of those in the general population (23 percent, compared with 15 percent for the general public), while 33 percent of Tea Party supporters attended college without obtaining a degree, compared with 28 percent of the general public. They may be less educated than liberals, but that doesn’t mean they’re dolts.

When people find their notion of reality upended by actual events (say, the near-collapse of the economy of the world’s wealthiest nation, in which you happen to live), they reach for explanations that don’t contradict their fundamental principles (such as a belief in so-called free markets, or the equation of capitalism with democracy). This is the classic recipe for both scapegoating and conspiracy-theorizing.

But as Chip Berlet, an expert on right-wing populism, writes in the Progressive, “[T]here is no social science evidence that people who join right-wing movements are any more or less crazy or ignorant than their neighbors. While some have psychological predilections for authoritarianism and tend to see the world in overly simplified us vs. them terms, the same predilections can be found on the political left. This is also true with belief in conspiracy theories.”

Time to Get Real

Minimizing the force and impact of the Tea Party movement does nothing to defeat it. No amount of ridicule will stop it. If progressives want to save the republic from the hands of the old New Right, they will have to sell their core principles to a public that is not much in a mood to buy anything. It can be done. But it will require a serious, sustained and strategically designed effort that is based around something more than launching progressive primary challengers to establishment Democratic candidates. That’s the start of a long-term effort to make the Democratic Party more progressive, but it doesn’t begin to meet the structural challenges posed by the Tea Party movement. Without a plan to meet regular Americans through their local media, or a way to articulate progressive goals as a plan of enlightened self-interest, progressives could see their moment slip away, carried on the winds of resentment.