A study published Friday in the scientific journal Tobacco Control unearthed documents
that reveal the tobacco industry’s desire to fund a new “tea party” to advance their
anti-regulation objectives years before the tea party, as it is known today, got its start.
The same documents show that the two organizations most identified with the modern
tea party, Americans for Prosperity (AFP) and FreedomWorks (FW), themselves got their
start with a healthy dose of money from the same industry.
Those two groups participated in the first round of tea party protests that captured
national media attention in 2009, but they were not originally created under those names.
As researchers Amanda Fallin, Rachel Grana and Stanton Glantz noted, they were were
originally a single entity called Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), an organization
co-founded in the 1980s by billionaire industrialist David Koch to oppose regulation of
tobacco and other air pollutants. Tobacco companies gave the organization millions of
dollars to help fund efforts to engineer and organize “grassroots” advocates to speak
against everything from federal tobacco regulation to smoking bans.
http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/early/2013/02/07/tobaccocontrol-2012-050815.abstract
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