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Old 08-29-2010, 03:22 AM   #1
ENGINESSQ

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Default The billionaire brothers secretly funding the Tea Party movement
It's 10 pages long, but definitely worth your time.

Covert Operations
The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.

With his brother Charles, who is seventy-four, David Koch owns virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars. The company has grown spectacularly since their father, Fred, died, in 1967, and the brothers took charge. The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made David and Charles Koch—who, years ago, bought out two other brothers—among the richest men in America. Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

In a statement, Koch Industries said that the Greenpeace report “distorts the environmental record of our companies.” And David Koch, in a recent, admiring article about him in New York, protested that the “radical press” had turned his family into “whipping boys,” and had exaggerated its influence on American politics. But Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”...

...The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to “educate,” fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, said, “The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.” With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there—people who can provide real ideological power.” The Kochs, he said, are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.”

A Republican campaign consultant who has done research on behalf of Charles and David Koch said of the Tea Party, “The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It’s like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud—and they’re our candidates!”

The Kochs and their political operatives declined requests for interviews. Instead, a prominent New York public-relations executive who is close with the Kochs put forward two friends: George Pataki, the former governor of New York, and Mortimer Zuckerman, the publisher and real-estate magnate. Pataki, a Republican who received campaign donations from David Koch, called him “a patriot who cares deeply about his country.” Zuckerman praised David’s “gentle decency” and the “range of his public interests.”

The Republican campaign consultant said of the family’s political activities, “To call them under the radar is an understatement. They are underground!” Another former Koch adviser said, “They’re smart. This right-wing, redneck stuff works for them. They see this as a way to get things done without getting dirty themselves.” Rob Stein, a Democratic political strategist who has studied the conservative movement’s finances, said that the Kochs are “at the epicenter of the anti-Obama movement. But it’s not just about Obama. They would have done the same to Hillary Clinton. They did the same with Bill Clinton. They are out to destroy progressivism.” ....

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...#ixzz0xxfFyRjn
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Old 08-29-2010, 12:33 PM   #2
Pataacculako

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Thanks for posting this. I'm still reading the New Yorker article, but at page four, I was struck by this particularly chilling exerpt:

Many of the ideas propounded in the 1980 campaign presaged the Tea Party movement. Ed Clark told The Nation that libertarians were getting ready to stage “a very big tea party,” because people were “sick to death” of taxes. The Libertarian Party platform called for the abolition of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., as well as of federal regulatory agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Energy. The Party wanted to end Social Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control, and all personal and corporate income taxes; it proposed the legalization of prostitution, recreational drugs, and suicide. Government should be reduced to only one function: the protection of individual rights. The Libertarian Party, as the article states, received $2 million from David Koch for the Party's 1980 presidential campaign. David Koch was named the vice presidential candidate.
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Old 08-29-2010, 01:01 PM   #3
fabrizioitwloch

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Thanks, again. Well worth the read. The Koch brothers have their hands, and their substantial wealth, into everything -- lobbyists, think tanks, media, "grassroots" organizations, museums, universities, scientific institutes, government on all levels, regulatory bodies -- you name the enterprise, you'll find money from the Koch brothers, the oil billionaires who want to "rip out the roots of government."

My lingering question is who will take control when these two die?
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Old 08-29-2010, 05:14 PM   #4
FsQGF1Mp

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Frank Rich shines a light on this as well: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/op...29rich.html?hp
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Old 08-31-2010, 03:49 AM   #5
ebBPxIai

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Thanks for the other link as well, Richard. I really hope other news organizations will continue to follow up with this. I doubt this is what Fox meant when they said to follow the money, but it's most definitely relevant. I've been posting this article everywhere I can, and I really hope people read it and think about it. Personally, this was really eye opening for me; I always knew, because I had been told, that money really is power in government, but I never really understood it. This is very scary. Maybe it's partly due to my finally getting involved with an organization that seeks to change things at the policy level and thinking about how to go about doing that, but this really lays clear what exactly we're up against.

As far as who will take over when those two bite it, I don't know that any of us are at liberty to know that; perhaps one of the children, who I'm sure have been indoctrinated, or another subordinate within the Koch industries. I won't be naive enough to hope that the Kochtopus will disintegrate without its leaders; there's probably a Frankenstein component here as well, that no one will be able to maintain such a vast empire other than its creators, but they will all continue to carry on the Koch intellectual legacy.
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Old 09-01-2010, 08:11 AM   #6
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Here is Koch's official response to the New Yorker piece: http://www.kochind.com/files/Respons...%20Attacks.pdf

In addition, some in the media have slammed the New Yorker, as expected. Here's an example. To their credit, this "independent publication of the Reason Foundation" does disclose that David Koch has been on the board of trustees for decades and his name appears in the masthead of Reason Magazine.

Here's another one, also with (former) ties to the Koch brothers.

The_Atlantic praises Mayers' article.

Oh, and I found this little tidbit:

In a darkened hotel ballroom, on the eve of Glenn Beck's burlesque of self-righteousness at the Lincoln Memorial, some 2,500 activists listened politely to the tall, impeccably dressed elder at the podium as he stumbled through his introduction of the evening's guest of honor, the conservative columnist George Will. The speaker was introduced simply as chairman of the board of the Americans For Prosperity Foundation, the organization that sponsored the event.

Few among the rank-and-file recognized the billionaire David Koch -- heir to the fortunes of Koch Industries -- or knew him as the man who bankrolls their activism, whose largess subsidized many of their trips to the nation's capital to take part in AFPF's organizing conference, and the Beck rally the following day. http://www.alternet.org/news/148014/...lenn_beck_fans
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