Think Again: Is Contemporary Conservatism Just ‘Payola’?

[applegrove]

Think Again: Is Contemporary Conservatism Just ‘Payola’?

By Eric Alterman at the Centre for American Progress

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/media/news/2013/01/17/49965/think-again-is-contemporary-conservatism-just-payola/

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Journalism has often been called “the first draft of history,” but oftentimes its addiction to surface-level examination of “the facts” obscures deeper, more important truths that citizens need to know in order to make sense of a story, regardless of what number draft it may be. This is particularly true of politics, where all too often statements of principle are taken at face value as if the speaker had no interests save personal altruism.

Principle, of course, is rarely the whole story. But it is even more rarely the case within the political right in Washington these days, as lobbyists and other moneyed interests have taken over the conservative movement and have refused to draw a line between their own personal enrichment and the policies they profess for the rest of us.

Case in point: Conservative organizer Grover Norquist, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, is almost always portrayed in the media as an extremely effective ideologue. He has recently become famous for his 1986 “Taxpayer Protection Pledge”—which bars its signatories from voting for any form of tax increase presented to them in Congress—a pledge that more than 95 percent of current Republican legislators in Congress have signed. It’s true that Norquist is a genuine antitax ideologue, but as a recent report by Lee Fang in The Nation notes, “Though Norquist claims to protect all tax credits, he seems to devote a great deal of his attention to some groups rather than others.” It turns out the taxes to which Norquist’s foundation devotes a great deal more effort to fighting are taxes that affect his major donors.

As Fang notes, energy subsidies, for example, are a topic of special interest on the Americans for Tax Reform website, and the foundation argues for billions of dollars of credits to oil and gas companies. To remove these generous subsidies to some of the most profitable industries on the planet, the group argues, would be to stick a “tax hike on energy producers and families.” Alas, between 2008 and 2011, an investigation by The Nation found that the American Petroleum Institute—a trade association for oil and gas companies such as Chevron and ExxonMobil—gave $525,000 to Norquist’s group.


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[meow2u3]

1. Rec'd and bookmarked

They really put the con in conservatism.