Besides strong displeasure at what I know about their tactics, my initial reaction to the news from Rachel Maddow and others that much of the ruckus against health care is coming from coal and petroleum lobbyists was basically just "that's odd" and I assumed that Americans for Prosperity has a client paying for their work against health care reform. But a recent AlterNet article by Adele Stan made me realize that isn't necessarily so.
Health care is not something Americans for Prosperity has cared about in the past and what's known about their funding reveals no financial motive, and therefore no real interest in health care per se.
Americans for Prosperity is by far the slickest of the astroturf groups organizing disgruntled right-wingers of the "regular folks" variety into shouting mobs at town-hall meetings focused on health-care reform.
Sponsored in the past, according to SourceWatch, by the oil interests of Koch Industries, and a foundation headed by notorious right-wing financier Richard Mellon Scaife, AFP is wedding public fear about health-care reform -- fear it has done its best to stoke -- to a larger agenda embraced by ground-level activists that includes opposition to the cap-and-trade climate bill and Internet neutrality.
Indeed, AFP's exploitation of fears about health-care reform appear to be merely a means to a larger end.
Think these guys are appeased by the administration's talk of dumping the public health insurance option from the health-care reform bills currently working their way through Congress?
Phil Kerpen all but said he'd rather the plan be kept in the bill, the better to organize against.
Adele Stan suggests they are just warming up the mob mentality in advance of climate change legislation. Americans for Prosperity's past activities and what's known about their funding certainly allow that possibility. I think another possibility is that AFP's decision to incite violence with misinformation is no part of any currently-funded campaign, but is intended merely as an advertisement, targeted to petroleum and coal corporations for their upcoming misinformation campaigns against legislation to limit carbon dioxide pollution. Either way, Americans for Prosperity obviously deserves very careful scrutiny for their demonstrated willingness to cross the boundaries of free speech, to commit fraud, incitement, sedition and conspiracy against the rights of others to take part in the processes of politics.
I think Glenn Greenwald and others are right when they suggest that the quality of reporting suffers when reporters' "success" is gauged by the access granted by high-level government officials to themselves, who frequently are interested in uncritical, less than thorough, and occasionally, unattributed descriptions of themselves and their work. If reporters tailor their messages to politicians who aren't even bribing them, why not lobbyists? Knowing that many reporters are susceptible to that pressure to say only what's pleasing to those "sources" on whom they're dependent, even though they know their credibility is undermined by such compromises, I really do not believe that lobbyists, who never had any integrity in the first place, would hesitate to employ the tactics Americans for Prosperity has used against health care merely to advertise their astroturf prowess to their target audiences, the corporate petroleum and coal markets for anti-government / anti-reform astroturf lobbying. I think it's actually very plausible that Americans for Prosperity, and a significant number of other anti-health care reform lobbyists are working pro bono, as marketing to Koch and Exxon, to say to them "Look how many people we have convinced to hate and fear the government and whatever it might or might not do, how outrageously we can lie to how many people for how long, and with how little factual basis. We can still help you fight Waxman-Markey or any other form of cap-and-trade the Senate may scribble, even this long after the science is in." If I was over-privileged on petroleum money, I'd be very attentive by now to what Americans for Prosperity is able to do with no facts on their side.