The Right Wing's New Target: AARP

[Patrick Degan]

No sector of the citizenry is to be spared, apparently, from the teabagger Cultural Revolution:

Now that we know where the Ultra Rights Wing stands with Planned Parenthood, let’s move on to AARP which services about 36 million Americans 50 and over as a non- profit non-partisan advocate for better living after fifty.

Apparently their operations strike the House Republicans, the ones who get budget negotiations completely mixed up with advocating for political ideology, as irregular. So, in the spirit of Right Wingism, they have begun their quest to determine the legitimacy of the organization, much like asking for it to be verified by birth certificate.

Reps. Wally Herger of California, Dave Reichert of Washington, and Charles Boustany of Louisiana—all members of the Ways and Means Committee— have done some actuarial investigation. What they have discovered is that AARP’s business operations could make more than $1-billion over 10 years from increased demand for a specific kind of insurance plan designed to supplement Medicare.

And this money is not going to a mainstream health care conglomerate, like Blue Cross Blue Shield, say, in which these three hard working Americans could buy stock and receive the benefit of hyper increasing dividends. Herein lies the clue.

This new pitch fork and axe attack on another American Rights supporting organization, another social staple, somehow has the foul scent of a Wisconsin Union dismantling plot. The modus operandi is too similar to the Scott Walker assignment and the assignment of so many Tea Party moles who are wearing the monikers of various government officials, after a successful bamboozling of those who want to take their country back from those who do not.

The new laser focus on AARP has as much to do with their projected $1bn over ten years, as funding for Planned Parenthood has to do with a national budget deficit. It turns out that, the new Republican Order, has decreed that every system that remotely appears to be functionally compassionate is socialist/ communist or any thing else thatthey deem contrary to their interpretation Constitution and is thus, treasonous.

AARP messed up big time. It actually thought that it had the right to represent its 37 million members during the foreign President’s bid to reform the travesty that is Health care in the richest country in the world; the country that uses tax payers dollars to export free health care around the globe. AARP fought valiantly for reform and is now, so guilty of helping to usher in Obama Care that wants to offer health care reprieve to Americans at costs that would impact their dividend paying investments in the big healthcare/pharma companies.

And the worst part is that these people that Obama Care is actually trying to help are Americans. They are not the foreigners who should be receiving health care benefits on the backs of the American tax paying middle class and poor, who can’t afford to pay the exorbitant premiums that they are charged for health care benefits.

Now it’s AARP and the current stop gap budget is due to be voted into law the day before the Three Republicans of The Ways and Means Committee are slated to hold a hearing on the legitimacy of AARP’s right to earn a profit without offering them the opportunity to reap the benefits of dividends.

Something tells m that this time around, Boehner will see daylight between him and the Tea Party engine of the Right Wing Republicans. This time the demand will have to be more specific; like pass a rider to have the IRS audit the AARP and find them guilty of abusing their tax-exempt status when they lobbied for the new health-care law, knowing that they stood to earn $1bn that the Ultra Right Wing could not have legitimate access to.

And this time, these fierce nationalist warriors may not be moved by any amount of prime time declarations of solar affinity, or any amount of tearful expressions of zealous patriotism. Citizens United, the Tea Party militia puppeteered by the brothers Koch, has already shown Boehener his figurative head on their figurative stick.

Should he have to go through the AARP inquisition, my sense is that this emotionally unstable number three person in line for the 3am call, may just have worked all those hours in the family saloon, as he put himself through school, to be reduced to a snotty nosed, wailing, curious official, by a mobilized bunch of rabble rousers who not why they protest.

Do these teabagger zeebs not get that the old folks actually vote in large numbers?

[Serafina]

Well, the article already says it: AARP supported a proper health care reform and is therefore an enemy of the people the state the party the Fuhrer freedomloving americans.

[Zaune]

Do these teabagger zeebs not get that the old folks actually vote in large numbers?

I suppose the one characteristic of the Tea Party that warrants a little respect, however grudging, is that they campaign for what they sincerely believe instead of what will get them votes.

[DrMckay]

Goddammit. Herger's the Rep for my county/town. You'd think that a city with a large student population (Chico) would be able to get a Democrat in, but the town itself is REALLY conservative.

This strikes me as a really, really bad idea on the part of the Tea Party and Republican leadership, and may end up with a lot of old folks (and aging boomers) voting democrat in the next election.

[Rogue 9]

The article is... I don't know, poorly written; it's hard to follow with the random capitalization and poor sentence structure. Besides, it's apparently a blog or at least an opinion piece. Do we have a real source?

[FSTargetDrone]

Related Politico story:

GOP calls for IRS probe of AARP

By JONATHAN ALLEN | 4/8/11 5:07 PM EDT

House Republican tax-writers want the IRS to investigate whether AARP should lose its tax-exempt status.

In a letter sent to IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman Friday, Reps. Wally Herger (R-Calif.), Dave Reichert (R-Wash.) and Charles Boustany (R-La.) say a recent congressional probe “gave rise to a number of serious concerns regarding AARP’s organizational structure and activities, and it raised questions about whether AARP continues to qualify as a tax-exempt organization under Internal Revenue Service Code (IRC) 501(c)4.”

A 40-page report recently released by the trio of lawmakers accuses AARP of refusing to provide information about its practices.

“In addition … the attached report raises concerns regarding various issues including the organization’s substantial revenues, limited charity work, and generous executive compensation,” they write. “The AARP Foundation has enjoyed increased taxpayer funding, including at least $18 million in ‘stimulus’ funding and a total of $314 million in federal grants from taxpayers between 2008 and 2010. At the same time, AARP, Inc.’s charitable contributions have flat-lined or in some cases decreased.”

In the letter, the lawmakers ask Shulman to investigate eight separate questions involving the legitimacy of AARP’s tax-exempt status. Federal tax law requires non-profits to meet a complex set of criteria to qualify for an exemption from taxes.

In an op-ed in POLITICO earlier this month, former House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Bill Tauzin (R-La.) implored Republicans not to push for an end to AARP’s tax status on both policy and political grounds.

“f one of the largest non-profits in existence becomes an expendable political casualty for short-term political gain coming out of congressional hearings, every non-profit organization would be left wondering if they’re going to face similar inquiries,” Tauzin wrote. “This won’t help Republicans long-term and it won’t help seniors in the short term.”

Tauzin has a long-running relationship with AARP, a group he worked with when he helped shepherd the Medicare prescription drug program into law in 2003 and more recently when he was head of the pharmaceutical industry trade association, PhRMA.”

[fgalkin]

I sincerely hope the teabaggers go through with it and get into a fight with AARP, as it will be a fight the Tea Party will not win. 2012 would not see the end of the world, but it would see the end of certain careers in Washington.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Todeswind]

Isn't a majority of the voting population in the US over the age of 50?

[Alphawolf55]

While I'm not exactly the biggest fan of American's senior citizen's, the GOP has to know that going against the countries biggest lobbyist group is a mistake.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

While I'm not exactly the biggest fan of American's senior citizen's, the GOP has to know that going against the countries biggest lobbyist group is a mistake.

The GOP has waged a deliberate campaign against private- and public-sector unions for several years now. To them, the AARP is simply another union, only they represent the interests of old people. So it makes perfect sense, on Planet Teabagger, to go after them. Especially since the GOP has shown that they'd like to gut Medicare and throw future old people onto the nonexistent mercy of free-market health care. Which would be a-ok for rich, white, old jackasses whose retirements include rich white jackass health insurance, but not the kind of old person broadly represented by the AARP.

[JME2]

I sincerely hope the teabaggers go through with it and get into a fight with AARP, as it will be a fight the Tea Party will not win. 2012 would not see the end of the world, but it would see the end of certain careers in Washington.

Likewise.

[Simon_Jester]

If they carry through with this, well.

I'm reminded of Cromwell's "The Lord hath delivered them into our hands."

[Crossroads Inc.]

While I'm not exactly the biggest fan of American's senior citizen's, the GOP has to know that going against the countries biggest lobbyist group is a mistake.

The GOP has waged a deliberate campaign against private- and public-sector unions for several years now. To them, the AARP is simply another union, only they represent the interests of old people. So it makes perfect sense, on Planet Teabagger, to go after them. Especially since the GOP has shown that they'd like to gut Medicare and throw future old people onto the nonexistent mercy of free-market health care. Which would be a-ok for rich, white, old jackasses whose retirements include rich white jackass health insurance, but not the kind of old person broadly represented by the AARP.

This is the correct answer.

After this first broke, I made my rounds around the Conservative blogs to see what the response was, mostly to see if ANYone said "Whoa now! Maybe we should think about this!"
And sor far the response has been virtually universal in favor of bringing them down. It was as if some damn burst, that they all secretly wanted to go after the AARP but where too afraid of being the first to lead the charge. And the reason?

Of the various blogs and comments, they echo almost exactly what you said, "The AARP is just another union to be busted, its a Liberal Lobbying puppet, it's a scam that can be replaced by the free market!" Basically, when it comes to those 'in charge' there is not a single person with a brain on this. Unless this fight is left behind by some other crusade, I have no doubt the Far Right will bring down the full force (such as it is) on it.

[Simon_Jester]

No, Crossroads.

There are plenty of people with brains involved in this. The problem is that they are Jacobins. In their heart of hearts, the brainy people in the Tea Party movement really believe- believe that if they can just fill the government and the state with sufficient revolutionary fervor, everything will work out all right.

In private, they do not now and may not ever understand how anyone can not see the world as they do without being willfully evil. They believe their own anarchist messages, drink their own Kool-Aid, and accept it all because it forms a self-consistent frame of reference in which to interpret the world: one which offers them a legacy of heroes, and a great many dragons to slay.

They're quite capable of thinking tactically about how to achieve this, but the inflexibility and revolutionary nature of the ideology stops them from thinking strategically- which is how they end up picking fights with hurricanes like this.

[Alphawolf55]

The thing I don't get is why the AARP? If it's to fight against socialized medicine, it's not like the AARP will ever truly support a single payer system and members of the AARP aren't exactly socially liberal. The funny thing is, if Republicans tried to introduce some sort of campaign finance reform to help limit their influence.

[Simon_Jester]

Why the AARP?

Because they're not far enough to the right. As an organization, they are devoted purely to the interests of old people, ignoring pretty much all other factors. Even if a lot of their members are right-wingers, that doesn't matter.

When we take the Tea Party version of Jacobinism to its logical extreme, no one has any legitimate interests or rights, except on an individual basis. They'll take on any group that promotes the idea that large groups of citizens have common aims, interests, and needs, and a right to air their grievances to the government. They're willing to leave alone groups that don't directly cross their path, but make no mistake; if the interests of the Tea Party happened to conflict with a traditionally 'right wing' group like the NRA, they'd go after the NRA too.

That's key to the Tea Party ideology: people do not have legitimate interests*, apart from business interests- which are strictly a private matter. There are no interests that government can or should be looking after, no interests that what Terwynn likes to call the "rich white assholes" are bound to respect.

So any group which organizes to present the interests of a large group of citizens in public policy is fair game if it crosses their path. It is automatically suspect, automatically corrupt, and automatically a target to be dismantled by any means necessary.

In short, they're attacking "socialism" in the true sense, by attacking anything "social" in favor of absolutist individualism.

Because they believe that once the Anarchist Revolution (though they would never call it that) has gone to a great enough extreme, society will automatically fall 'back' into the healthy order they like to imagine it should occupy. The world's rich white assholes wannabe Bond villains entrepreneurs will create wonderful new things, the average white male WASP citizen will be free to prosper without being kept down by The Man, people who shouldn't prosper will know their place and stop being uppity.

And all this they can have, they dream, if they can just tear down all the damn socialist organizations in their way, leaving them the only ones who are organized, marching together to achieve the Anarchist Revolution.
___________

*People may, in Teapartystan, have rights... rights which extend very far out into the territory normally excluded by the rule "my right to swing my arm ends at your nose." Because only good people have rights in Teapartystan; bad people do not. It's a form of 'democracy' which was fairly common around 1800, and in the areas where the Tea Party is strongest, it never really went away.

People may, in Teapartystan, have desires: things they want to happen, and have the right to organize to make happen- though if what they want to happen conflicts with Tea-ism, it is by definition suspect. Which makes the people doing the organizing into bad people, which removes their rights, see above.

But while people in Teapartystan may have rights and desires, they do not have interests- do not have legitimate claims to a place in society, to a share of the prosperity they help create, to a space within the political arena where they can air their grievances. Thus, there is no concept of groups like the AARP or labor unions as being legitimate- those groups exist to promote interests of their members, and that is anathema under Tea-ism.

[Tribun]

No offense, but why the hell is it always the US that gives birth to such grand-scale madness like the Tea Party? Is there some sort special conditions that allow such idiocy to prosper?

[Zed]

France has Le Pen. Britain has its rampant Euroscepticism. Italy has Berlusconi. I'd not say that the USA has any sort of special status in this regard.

[Simon_Jester]

No offense, but why the hell is it always the US that gives birth to such grand-scale madness like the Tea Party? Is there some sort special conditions that allow such idiocy to prosper?

When was the last time the US gave birth to such grand-scale madness?

The Tea Party is the product of twenty or thirty years of radicalization on the right: a self-reinforcing process in which the party leadership systematically cast out whoever among their ranks was least Randist and least anarcho-capitalist, then propagandized the base into believing the new rhetoric from the new leadership. After repeating this process five or six times, yes you get a bunch of lunatics.

But this process is by no means unique to the US. Plenty of other nations have managed to self-radicalize political factions to the point where they actively embraced policies which any other place in the civilized world would deem insane.

What makes the US especially susceptible to the Tea Party's particular stripe of political madness is anticommunism. To a greater extent than any other Western nation, the US defined itself politically in terms of its opposition to socialist and communist models of how to organize society. Up through the 1950s and 1960s, that wasn't especially counterproductive: there were native-grown political trends that were quite capable of holding us together and keeping the country on a progressive track, without the need for anything like a powerful American Socialist Party. Hell, there still are.

But in the Age of Globalization, as the corporations get bigger and the world gets smaller, the need for a government that can commit itself to counterbalancing corporate power becomes more important. The US isn't immunized against that- our political narrative is not written in terms of our victories over corporate power or a wealthy aristocracy, as is the case for most of the European nations.

And now the ability of anarcho-corporatists to call upon the traditional American rhetoric of anticommunism, the idea that populist dissent against the power of the rich and privileged is some kind of sinister and foreign thing, becomes a problem. That was a big part of how what is now the Tea Party got started, and it's gotten bigger and bigger since then.

Not good.

[Tribun]

Ok, so it's not unique to the US.

I'm not well versed in the internal politics of the US. What are the possible outcomes of this whole mess? From the outside it looks like they've picked the worst moment to ignite conflicts in society and it can only be bad for the entire country.

[Crossroads Inc.]

No offense, but why the hell is it always the US that gives birth to such grand-scale madness like the Tea Party? Is there some sort special conditions that allow such idiocy to prosper?

I am sure others will say this better than I will. But "IMHO" it is a combination of two factors in American Histroy. The first is the lie fed to Americans that "Anyone can become Rich and powerful with hardwork!" For much of early America this was they case, and there are countless stories of "rags to riches" This has been deeply put into the brain of virtually all Americans, this voice whispering "You too could some day be a millionaire!"

As such, countless people continue to vote aginst their own interests so that the super rich get tax cuts because they too might, MIGHT some day be a millionaire.

The other factor has come about more recently within the last 30years, that is the lie fed to America that "The government cannot do ANYTHING right. That no mater what the program is, the private sector can do it better.

This has led to people who, as Simon very well laid out, basically believe in an absolutely insane concept of "everyone fend for themselves" or "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps"
That there should be no programs, no safty net, NOTHING to help someone, other then your own hard work.
Unemployed? Thats your own damn fault! This is AMERICA! Land of opportunity! If you don't have a job it's because your lazy!
Need Health Care? If you worked hard you would have the money to buy your own! Stop looking for a hand out!
Unions? How dare you ask for special treatment from a company! Just be thankful you have a job at all!

This is where we are now in America and it goes on because of a vicious cycle. The Right wing fosters a world where the people that Liberal ideas would help the most, are systematically told the reverse is true. That funding education, social programs, healthcare, that these things are evil and foster a "lazy" country.

Find some poor shmuck who never graduated from highschool, is working a dead end job with no union protection, has virtually no healthcare and ask him if he supports any of those thigns and he will say no because one day, he MIGHT be rich and powerful.

That is how we got to where we are.

[Simon_Jester]

Ok, so it's not unique to the US.

I'm not well versed in the internal politics of the US. What are the possible outcomes of this whole mess? From the outside it looks like they've picked the worst moment to ignite conflicts in society and it can only be bad for the entire country.

Pretty much.

The 1990s congressional Republicans and the Bush administration were, relative to the Tea Party, fairly moderate: if they wanted the same things they were prudent enough not to push for them. However, the watered-down version of anarcho-corporatism that they did support was itself enough to precipitate economic and social crisis in the US: the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a gradual decay of physical and social infrastructure, and so forth.

At the same time, the ongoing need to maintain the Republican majority left the party in a vicious cycle of escalating propaganda claims. Their policies alienated a larger and larger percentage of the people outside that base. Therefore, their election strategy depended on mobilizing a larger and larger percentage of the Republican base, which meant making more and more lurid claims about the opposition- convincing those Republican voters that we were about three minutes away from becoming the United Soviet Socialist Republics of America if the Democrats were allowed to win anything, ever.

At the same time they had to strike a balance- enacting actual policies that wouldn't pointlessly antagonize major groups like the AARP, while still acting in ways that won the approval of their powerful corporate donors, and somehow spinning all this to appeal to their increasingly propagandized base. Fulfilling their campaign promises to the base would mean alienating the center and possibly even alienating their donors... but making realistic campaign promises wouldn't keep the base radicalized enough to keep voting Republican every time a Republican congressman got caught in a gay rentboy scandal.

So you had a party which was trapped in a horrible death spiral: to stay in power they needed to appease corporate donors, which meant policies were bad for the country and would ultimately lead to economic disaster. AND they needed to maintain a large base of voters who would never ever consider voting Democrat no matter what happened, which meant pouring money and effort into convincing said voters that the Democrats were neo-Stalinist minions of Satan.

Which would be difficult enough to maintain, were it not for the fact that by the time you got round to 2006-08, a large fraction of the Republican base and leadership was made of people who had fully internalized the hype. These people had spent a dozen years being told, and telling others, that they were the heroic guardians of the American way of life, fighting for the anarcho-corporatist dream of a "permanent Republican majority."

After 2006, and especially after the financial crisis hit in 2008, the Bush generation of Republican leadership proved itself to be more or less unable to run either the country or the party well enough to ensure its future prosperity. This left a power vacuum, and the true-believers who had once been mid-rankers or foot soldiers in the "Republican Revolution" of 1994 started filtering into that vacuum. And they enjoy a very stable following from the large segment of the Republican base which is accustomed to backing anyone who speaks the right code words: free enterprise, national security, responsible (read: very very low) government spending, and so on. That movement is what we now call the "Tea Party."

Meanwhile, the American center-left rebelled* against anarcho-corporatism in 2006 and 2008, but was left demoralized and leaderless after Obama proved more willing to play along with the right than many of the left had expected. This created a vacuum not so much of power but of ideas, organization, and the will to impose a narrative on political events... one which the Tea Party was able to fill during the 2010 elections.

*in the metaphorical, nonviolent sense

---

As to the outcomes... My premise is that the Tea Party cannot do anything but try to control American politics, damning all attempts to compromise with the left, the center, or even the center-right, until it either triumphs or is destroyed as a functional political movement. I believe this because they seem (to me) too much in love with the Anarcho-Capitalist Revolution to do otherwise.


One possibility is that of the Tea Party successfully wresting dominance of the Republican Party away from both the 'old guard' and the more moderate 'Girondist' elements in its ranks, and securing at least two to four years' uncontested political dominance. This would be extremely bad for the country, and would probably result in the total destruction of many important US social programs and regulatory checks. It would be very hard to rebuild these programs due to the opposition of the irresponsible-rich (Terwynn's "rich white assholes").

This is unlikely in my opinion, because it can't really happen without a Tea Party president, and I have yet to see anyone capable of appealing to both the Tea Party and the American people on a national level as a presidential candidate. The Tea Party is strongest in states with a large, preexisting Republican majority, since it was born from the right flank of the Republican base. It is relatively weak in states where the Republicans didn't already dominate the place before 2006, and very weak in states where Democrats dominate.


Another possibility is that they will lose the struggle within the ranks of their own party: the ranks of the irresponsible rich will rally in favor of the moderate Republicans. In which case the Tea Party breaks up, and Tea Party candidates are quietly squashed in backroom deals until the movement loses its momentum. The consequence would be, basically, a reversion to the 2006 status quo: center-left Democrats, right-wing Republicans, and the irresponsible rich preventing any major reform of the American political system.

This is possible, but in my opinion still not very likely, because the Tea Party is the Republican voter base. These are the people they created to carry them forward, and I doubt the Republican leadership and donor base can stop them from carrying the party off a cliff at this late date.


The third possibility is that the Tea Party will succeed in setting the tone of right-wing political discourse and controlling the party agenda, but will show such transparent hatred of the American political mainstream that the center will be driven to the left in reaction. In that case we might see serious reform- if it is shown, to the satisfaction of the electorate, that the only answer anarcho-corporatism has to a crisis is to do what created the crisis in the first place harder. That yes, there are a disturbing number of people in the ranks of the movement with disturbing beliefs and attitudes toward things like race relations and government corruption.

This is probably me being optimistic.


We may see anything between those three outcomes, really- some combination of the three, political chaos ensuing from a split of the Republican Party*... I don't know.

*Not all that likely, but conceivable to me.

This

[Tribun]

So it essentially boils down to America getting ass-raped by the Knights of Anarcho-Capitalism for years to come? Jesus, compared to what you guys described, even our worst suckers of the capitalist dick are harmless compared to that.

I have to say it now clearly: it IS insanity.

[Simon_Jester]

So it essentially boils down to America getting ass-raped by the Knights of Anarcho-Capitalism for years to come? Jesus, compared to what you guys described, even our worst suckers of the capitalist dick are harmless compared to that.

I have to say it now clearly: it IS insanity.

Yes, it is. Political self-radicalization is an ugly thing.

I think there's still a very good chance that the sheer fanaticism of the anarcho-corporatists will lead to a popular revolt against their program, one that a progressive center-left agenda can build on. The main question is how long it takes and how much damage is done before it happens. Arguably the greatest risk is that the opportunity will be lost, that the Tea Party will be allowed to slink quietly back into the woodwork without the American center-left taking to heart their lesson of just how vicious it can be.

Note: they would never call themselves anarcho-corporatists.

[D.Turtle]

The thing I don't get is why the AARP? If it's to fight against socialized medicine, it's not like the AARP will ever truly support a single payer system and members of the AARP aren't exactly socially liberal. The funny thing is, if Republicans tried to introduce some sort of campaign finance reform to help limit their influence.

What are the biggest most successful government programs in the US?

Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.

Who profits from the existence of these programs: Old people, poor people, old people.

Who does AARP represent?

Old people.

What do you do if you want to remove the most successful government programs and move the massive amounts of money they take into the private sphere?

Privatise them.

Who stands in the way of privatising two of the three biggest programs?

AARP.

That is why AARP is a target.