DownWithTyranny!: Who Does Satan's Work In Washington?

Neo-fascist extremist and deranged "pastor," Bryan Fischer wasn't trying his hand at stand-up comedy this week with his demon hunter routine (above). Fischer is an annoying crackpot but Satan has higher-placed surrogates to do his work Inside the Beltway. In his brilliant book, The Machine, investigative journalist Lee Fang introduces us to the Koch Empire's chief political operative, Tim Phillips, one of the sleaziest and most destructive lobbyists in the history of K Street. If you don't believe in Satan, how do you explain Phillips?

As one of the most prolific creators of front groups in the Obama era, Phillips stands out among other Republican operatives. From his work orchestrating the anti-Obama Tea Parties to his sophisticated lobbying campaign to dismantle regional cap-and-trade programs in the united States, he has an outstanding track record of success.

Beginning his career as a Virginia-based political consultant, Phillips got his first big break managing the campaign of Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA). After serving as Goodlatte’s chief of staff for four years, Phillips joined former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed in 1997 to create a lobbying and campaign consulting operation called Century Strategies. The firm promised to launch "grassroots lobbying drives” and explained its strategy as “it matters less who has the best arguments and more who gets heard-- and by whom.”

Through Century Strategies and other similar companies, much of Phillips’s work has focused on exploiting traditional Christian values to advance one of two objectives. The first has been to shield his industry clients from laws against pollution, sexual exploitation, gambling, and corporate censorship. The second objective has been to deploy racial and ethnic slurs against a number of politicians, both Democrats and Republicans. Both efforts have met with considerable success, and neither has resulted in any serious repercussions for Tim Phillips or any of his companies.

Making its start with a recommendation from Karl Rove, Century Strategies signed one of its first major corporate clients-- Enron. Phillips and Reed were paid $380,000 to mobilize “religious leaders and pro-family groups” to push energy deregulation in Congress and on the state level, a policy shift that helped to lead to the energy crisis and recession of 2001. The Washington Post reported that the pair informed Enron that they had leveraged their relationships with members of Congress and “placed” articles in prominent papers like the New York Times.

In 1998, Phillips turned his attention to exploited women and children. The now-disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff hired Phillips’s firm to pressure members of Congress to vote against legislation that would have made the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands subject to federal wage and worker safety laws. A federal report found that “Chinese women [working in the Marianas] were subject to forced abortions and that women and children were subject to forced prostitution in the local sex-tourism industry.” Part of Phillip’s role at Century Strategies was to manage the firm’s direct mail subsidiary, Millennium Marketing.

Accordingly, Phillips sent out mailers claiming Chinese workers “are exposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ” while on the islands, and many “are converted to the Christian faith and return to China with Bibles in hand.” The mailers then encouraged the recipients to contact lawmakers and ask them to oppose the Marianas labor reform legislation. Of course, none of the pamphlets revealed that Tan Holdings of Hong Kong, a sweatshop empire, sponsored the campaign.

The Marianas stealth lobbying effort was not the only time Phillips worked with Abramoff to manipulate Christian activists. Reed and Phillips conspired to generate conservative Christian outrage toward gambling in Indian casinos in a cynical plot to encourage those same tribes to hire Abramoff to lobby on their behalf. In some cases, Phillips’s antigambling crusade would simply be part of an effort to kill off competition to Abramoff’s clients. And while Phillips and Reed pretended to be motivated by antigambling Christian values, the pair received money from the gambling industry. One of Abramoff’s gambling clients, an Internet company called eLottery, laundered its payments through a set of fronts. To conceal payments, eLottery would give donations to Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, another rent-a-front group, which would then be passed along to Phillips’s Faith and Family Alliance, before eventually going to Century Strategies.

Whether he is attacking Net Neutrality (what Phillips calls a “government takeover of the Internet”) or the Clean Air Act (“Churches would need an EPA permit”), Phillips furthers the corporate interest by combining right-wing resentment with folksy promises of “freedom.” Almost every charge he flings is false: EPA carbon regulations would be aimed at coal plants, not churches, and Net Neutrality guarantees a free and open Internet without traffic controls. Although he refuses to divulge who, other than Koch, funds his organization, Phillips has long practiced the art of funneling corporate money and fooling the public with campaigns ostensibly based on religious or cultural motivations.

Though Phillips and Reed are best known in the campaign consulting world for engineering the dual victories of Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Republican Gov. Sonnie Perdue in Georgia (by associating images of Osama bin Laden with the incumbent Democratic senator), the pair can also be credited with the most below-the-belt tactics ever seen in modern Republican primaries. The duo reportedly “spearheaded” the telemarketing and direct mail efforts for George Bush against John McCain in the 2000 primaries. It is widely believed that Century Strategies executed the mass mailers and robo-calls that accused McCain of fathering an illegitimate child with a black woman, using the image of McCain’s adopted daughter from Bangladesh.

Phillips has managed to escape most of the controversy that eventually embroiled his partners Reed and Abramoff, and has gone on to represent a wide range of clients and causes. While remaining behind the scenes himself, he has orchestrated exuberant, gimmick-filled campaigns across the country. He contracted an actual hot air balloon to press his case that climate change is just “hot air,” a hoax. Phillips’s campaigns are national and multifaceted. He runs multiple “tours” crisscrossing the country and in crucial congressional districts where he is trying to place pressure on a particular member of Congress. His “Save My Ballot Tour” paid Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, the unlicensed plumber and would-be small business owner from the McCain campaign, to tour the country attacking the Employee Free Choice Act, a key labor reform. His “Regulation Reality Tour”-- an outfit featuring inflatable moon bounces for children, as well as free food and drinks-- went to states like Arkansas and Nebraska to convince people to call their senators to support an amendment to gut the Clean Air Act and remove its ability to regulate carbon pollution.

...The effect in 2010 was so successful that Phillips expanded it in 2012, hiring over one hundred organizers for the election. Since taking over Americans for Prosperity’s operations, Phillips has played a key role in helping to mastermind the rise of the Tea Parties and has also taken on some of the largest progressive agenda items and won. Phillips’s organization is credited with pressuring Republicans firmly into the climate science denier camp following the 2008 election. One of his groups, No Climate Tax, issued a pledge, signed by nearly five hundred Republican candidates, to oppose efforts to tax and regulate carbon emissions. From climate change–related ads, Tea Parties organized around opposition to climate legislation, to aggressive media outreach, Phillips commanded an integrated public relations campaign that severely undercut reform efforts. In a meeting with conservative bloggers, Phillips explained that he worked to influence climate policy by increasing skepticism around climate science: “If we win the science argument, it’s game, set, match.” Koch Industries, cited as a major polluter responsible for burning over 100 million tons of carbon a year by one estimate, clearly benefited from the failure of climate negotiations.