Meet The Tea Party Puppetmasters

Charles and David Koch, the wealthiest men in America behind only Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, have built a vast network of think tanks and veiled nonprofits, hoping to destroy the United States Government.

Among their front groups are Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity -- the groups who brought you the Tea Party and the much-ballyhooed protests against Health Care reform.

Glenn Beck is their rodeo clown, Fox News their megaphone, Sarah Palin their candidate.

The precedent, of course, is Wall Street's attempted coup against FDR in the 1930s -- a putsch in which fascist industrialists hoped to enlist Major General Smedley Butler, who had carried the water for "US interests" -- corporations -- across the world.

The Tea Party folks may be well-intentioned and scared by change and uncertainty, but they're also being manipulated by very, very, very wealthy liars and propagandists.

First they caused a run on ammunition with the false charge that Obama would outlaw all guns.

Will these folks come top DC, all revved up, their heads full of Fox's lies, Beck's paranoia, and Palin's exhortations of violence, bristling with loaded weapons as they have at so many similar events around the country since Obama was inaugurated?

Guns or not, if Glenn Beck, from his electric pulpit on the National Mall, says "storm the White House," will they?

And then what happens?

This is what my relative, a refugee from Nazi Germany, who survived Kristallnacht in Berlin, was talking about when worried aloud, two years ago, that the nosediving economy made fertile ground for fascist violence.

The bottom line is that a well-armed segment of the US population is being hornswaggled by the most powerful corporate interests in the country into supporting a supposedly-anti-corporate, supposedly grassroots movement, which is actually designed to enshrine those corporate interests' dominance of American politics and governance.

This weekend, read the outstanding reportage on the Koch Brothers by the New Yorker's Jane Mayer, here.

Mayer was on Fresh Air yesterday, as well.

If you want to see how the message is fed to the faithful, get a taste of how FOX "covered" Obama's first 100 days, from Media Matters: