Tomorrow and Saturday two of the Tea Party movement’s corporate shills, Eric Odom and Allen Fuller, will bring their unique brand of right-wing astroturf to their hometown of Nashville.
The two-day conference, RootsHQ2009, is being billed as a “center-right new media summit” and will cover “social media, new media technology, internet marketing, search engine optimization, collaborative information movements and NOW media.”
But the attention should be on the motivation of both Odom and Fuller and their willingness to misrepresent themselves in order to manipulate the people. The TNDP has the scoop:
Eric Odom and Alan Fuller founded two firms, Strategic Activism and Flat Creek Management, to provide strategic communications and on-line training for Tea Party activists.
“Tea Party demonstrators have been receiving how-to-disrupt packets from organizers like Odom and Fuller, who get paid to stop legislation opposed by their corporate benefactors,” Tennessee Democratic Party Chairman Chip Forrester said.
“People need to stop for a moment and consider who organizes these events and the origins of this movement. It’s beginning to look more and more like corporate interests are fueling the Tea Party movement.”
Last February, Eric Odom was exposed as having ties to Rick Santelli’s rant on CNBC that “spontaneously” launched the Tea Party movement. On the same day of the rant, a website called Officialchicagoteaparty.com and registered to Odom went live. The summer before, Odom had organized DontGo.com, a fake grassroots campaign meant to pressure Congress and Nancy Pelosi to pass an offshore oil drilling bill. And who would this kind of bill benefit? Meet Fred Koch and his family, “multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America,” “funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks,” and “co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.”
Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake produced a Tea Bag movement timeline that prominently features Mr. Odom:
February 19 — Rick Santelli rant: “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.” First mention of the term “tea party.” Clip goes straight onto Drudge.
Within hours, a site called officialchicagoteaparty.com went up, with the domain name registered to Eric Odom. At the time he was working for a group called the Sam Adams Alliance, a 501 c(3) non-profit that legally can’t engage in political activity. Its chairman, Eric O’Keeffe, is on the board of the Club for Growth. He’s since been taken off the website, but it’s cached here.
Odom is one of the organizers of the Tax Day Tea Party group, and Matt Stoller accused him of astroturfing during the Drill Drill Drill campaign. Last year the Alliance started “an ambitious project … to encourage right-leaning activists and bloggers to get online and focus on local and state issues.”
February 20: A Facebook page goes up calling for Tea Party demonstrations across the country:
Rick Santelli is right, we need a Taxpayer (Chicago) Tea Party
Rick Santelli is dead right! Enough bailouts of everyone who acted recklessly! It’s time to stand up for all the regular people who played by the rules! Taxpayer Tea Party!
Listed admins include Odom and Brendan Steinhauser of Dick Armey’s Freedomworks. The creator is Phil Kerpen of Americans for Prosperity, and the Facebook Group leads back to a site called taxpayerteaparty.com, run by Americans for Prosperity.
February 27 — the first official “Tea Parties” are held in eight cities across the country. According to John Hendrix, who organized the Tampa Bay event, the original idea came from Tom Gaithens of Newt Gingrich’s Freedomworks.
The idea that the Tea Baggers are a “grassroots” movement that Right Wing infrastructure subsequently tried to exploit is not supported by the facts.
Supported by facts or not, Odom and Fuller will insist that they are grassroots activists and not paid corporate shills.
They’re delusional, writes Matt Stoller at Open Left, “I mean, according to their theory, Newt Gingrich and House Republicans did the messaging and organizing work on a campaign, which was funded by billionaires, and used essentially the same playbook the right has used since 1978, but it finally tipped because some GOP junior consultants with blogs signed up for Twitter. F**king morons.”
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