"How the Koch Brothers Orchestrated the Shutdown"

[applegrove]

How the Koch Brothers Orchestrated the Shutdown

by Eric Zuesse at the Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/how-the-koch-brothers-did_1_b_4143928.html?utm_hp_ref=politics

"SNIP...................................


Here now is some background on those two top funders of Cruz's career:

The Club for Growth, which was the top donor ($700,000+) to Cruz, was founded in 1999 by Steve Moore. As Right Wing Watch has noted, "Before founding the Club for Growth, Moore was the director of fiscal policy at the Cato Institute, and has stayed on as a Senior Fellow."

Here is how iron the Koch's control over the Cato Institute was, and is: David Weigel at slate.com bannered on 25 June 2012, "Ed Crane Steps Down to End Koch Brothers' Attempted Coup at Cato," and Weigel reported that the Kochs were firing Crane (who by that time was America's longest-serving think-tank CEO), because he wasn't doing a good enough job to "provide intellectual ammunition that we can then use at Americans for Prosperity and our allied organizations" in order to oust Barack Obama and the Democrats, and replace them with Republicans. When the Kochs had provided the start-up money for Cato in 1976, they became its controlling owners, and now they were firing its creator, Crane, so as to assist Mitt Romney's 2012 Republican Presidential campaign. Subsequently, Weigel, who was already working under a false headline that called this firing (of the since-the-founding leader of Cato, their employee Ed Crane) as being no coup but only an "Attempted" coup, softened Slate's account even further. He changed it to say that the Kochs had actually lost what they wanted, and that the integrity of their "think tank" was maintained, because the Kochs hadn't been able to boot also a dissident board-member. This, now the third version of Weigel's story, got an even softer headline: "Cato at Peace." The key quotation that had been in the original version, "provide intellectual ammunition that we can then use at Americans for Prosperity and our allied organizations," wasn't even included in the final version of Weigel's news report, but there was, finally, added to it a shocking admission, buried right in the middle of the third version, an admission that should have been at very the top or bottom of each one of its two prior versions: "Disclosure: I worked at Reason magazine, which got Koch funding, for two-and-a-half years." In other words: it seems that, throughout his reporting on this, Weigel didn't want to offend his past employers (ultimately the Kochs), who might, after all, someday become, yet again, his employers. But Slate was apparently conflicted about whether to report at all on this blockbuster news story of his - their editors not only gave it deceptive headlines, but they also let slip in its first two versions the reporter's possibly compromised position reporting on it.




..................................SNIP"

[hedda_foil]

1. Super-important investigative reporting. A crucial piece in the right wing puzzle.

Please read the whole article. You won't be sorry you did.

[applegrove]

2. I didn't read the whole thing. So many details. I'll read it later.

Maybe. But I thought others might be in the mood to dig in.

[blkmusclmachine]

3. The Kocks have their tentacles into EVERYTHING.

[Scuba]

4. They own us here ...

[change_dont_complain]

5. Koch products

I'll stop buying... Will you?

http://kochwatch.org/?q=node/28