Joe Conason: The Billionaire Right-Winger

[babylonsister]

http://www.observer.com/2010/opinion/billionaire-right-winger

The Billionaire Right-Winger
Joe Conason

snip//

It certainly seems unlikely that David Koch has ever encountered any of the folks who turn up at a typical Tea Party event or that he has ever showed up at a Congressional town hall meeting to scream about health care reform. He lives on Park Avenue in a 9,000-square-foot duplex apartment and spends his time cultivating elitist Manhattan society with donations to New York cultural institutions, notably the ballet. He used to divide his time between a yacht in the south of France and a palatial home in the Hamptons, where he hosted "an East Coast version of Hugh Hefner's soirees" in the clothes-optional Playboy mansion.

In short, Mr. Koch is not exactly a pitchfork populist and has no interest in mingling with such unfashionable types. He also doesn't care much what they think. A former Koch adviser told The New Yorker that the Kochs back the Tea Party movement for the most cynical reasons. "This right-wing, redneck stuff works for them. They see this as a way to get things done without getting dirty themselves."

The kind of things that the Kochs want to "get done"-aside from advancing their social profile in places like the Upper East Side-mostly involve reducing taxes and regulations on themselves and their companies. If they had their way, Social Security and Medicare would disappear tomorrow, and so would any other program that benefits families without a billion dollars at their disposal. So would the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act and every other obstacle to their massive effusions of deadly filth. Lately, they have been trying to prevent stricter regulation of formaldehyde, a known carcinogen, because their company produces enormous amounts of the stuff for commercial use.

Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and historian who worked at one of the many right-wing think tanks funded by Koch money, believes that the Koch brothers are "trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies." Perhaps the Tea Party activists should take a harder look at those policies—and try to figure out whether the national interest truly coincides with the avaricious, destructive attitude of these "libertarians."

[e-mail]

[RandomThoughts]

1. You do know that if you.

Think on that differently.

"libertarians"

Take out the ET

You get better results.

Librarians.


Aliens, even when not real, are not the answer and are a delusion.



If you think that is not tolerant to Scientology, or Alien Believers, just change the meaning of 'take out'.

Or get angry at me for posting it, and change the meaning again to something else.

Or change the meaning of aliens and go all anti immigrant.

Or read a book. :D

[Dr.Phool]

2. Ah, a good peyote harvest this year.

[John Q. Citizen]

3. Beautiful green buttons, plump and fresh! And obviuosly very strong from the words of the

supposed indulger.

[DCKit]

4. Shoot, I'm trippin' just reading it. n/t

[Overseas]

5. K&R on who's funding the "genuine grass roots" teabaggers. //nt

[KoKo]

6. Thomas Frank warned about Koch Bros. in 2004 in book "What's the Matter with Kansas" ...(article)

Amazon.com: What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won ...
Published on November 3, 2004 by Robert Moore ... What's the matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank has done a good job of explaining it. Take decent God-fearing, ...

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The Rightwing Koch Brothers Fund the DLC
Submitted by Ted Kahl on February 9, 2006 - 10:44pm

* Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)
* Republicans & Conservatives
* Tom DeLay

Do deep-pocketed "philanthropists" necessarily control the organizations they fund? That has certainly been the contention of those who truck in conspiracy theories about the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations funding liberal and neo-liberal organizations. As for the rightwing, journalists such as Joe Conason and Gene Lyons uncovered that the "vast right wing conspiracy" -- or the New Right network of think tanks, media outlets and pressure groups -- was marshalled under rightwing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife for his Get-Clinton campaign. Prior to the work of Conason and Lyons, Russ Bellant extensively documented in "The Coors Connection" how the Coors Family, Scaife and other wealthy rightwingers have funded the New Right movement since the early '70's. Among these rightwing benefactors are the Koch brothers. But the Kochs have been working both sides of the fence. As Bill Berkowitz writes, the Koch brothers have also been funding the Democratic Leadership Council.

According to SourceWatch, a project of the Center for Media & Democracy, the brothers are "leading contributors to the Koch family foundations, which supports a network of Conservative organizations and think tanks, including Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Manhattan Institute the Heartland Institute, and the Democratic Leadership Council."

Charles Koch co-founded the Cato Institute in 1977, while David helped launch Citizens for a Sound Economy in 1986.

This is no less stunning than if Scaife or the Coors family were funding the DLC. So do the Kochs just throw money at the DLC -- as long as the Council supports a free-market" (i.e. unrestricted/unregulated corporate power) agenda that the Kochs generally agree with. Or is it more than just that -- does this really buttress what Greens and other disaffected liberals contend -- that the DNC has just become a party of "Republicrats", thanks especially to the DLC? They would say that corporate backers like the rightwing/libertarian Kochs have co-opted the Democratic establishment -- a hostile takeover of (what was once) the opposition.

A Washington Post interview with Thomas Frank, author of "What's the Matter with Kansas?", touches on this question.

In the concluding chapter of "Kansas," Frank assigns "a large part of the blame for the backlash phenomenon" to the "criminal stupidity" of the Democratic Party in abandoning its commitment to labor and economic justice in pursuit of white-collar votes and corporate contributions. The DLC in particular, he writes, thinks that "to collect the votes and -- more important -- the money of these coveted constituencies," Democrats must stand firm on issues like abortion rights while making "endless concessions on economic issues" such as NAFTA, welfare, privatization and deregulation. The result? Democrats become Tweedledum to the Republicans' Tweedledee on the laissez-faire economy, leaving their opponents free to woo blue-collar voters with backlash issues.

Earlier in the book, Frank takes his anti-DLC rhetoric to an even higher pitch. He notes that generous contributions from the Kansas oil billionaires who run Koch Industries have propped up numerous institutions that champion laissez-faire economics, from the Cato Institute to Citizens for a Sound Economy. And he includes the DLC on his list of Koch-funded "hothouses of the right."

"That's crazy," says Ed Kilgore, the DLC's policy director. "If you can't tell the difference between the DLC and the Republicans, you're not paying attention."

Sure, the DLC took some Koch money, Kilgore says. But it has never advocated abandoning the working class or taking economic issues off the table, and it is proud of Clinton's economic record. "If you have to be self-consciously and vocally anti-business in order to be considered a legitimate Democrat or progressive," he says -- well, sheesh: That would rule out the party's current presidential nominee.

Informed of this return fire, Frank seems uncharacteristically exasperated. But his fundamental stance remains: Bring 'em on.

Has the DLC taken economic issues off the table? "Of course they haven't taken them off the table -- they've just become Republicans."

Does a Democrat have to be anti-business? "I don't think I'd call myself anti-business. . . . I'm critical of the species of capitalism that we're living under today."

Is that Koch money innocent? "Okay, it is Koch that funds right-wing organizations. And it's the Democratic Leadership Council that's been working hard for years to push the Democratic Party to the right. Not to the left. To the right."

But isn't that where the American mainstream has been heading for decades? And hasn't he positioned himself way outside it?

Frank concedes this last point, but nothing more.

The Koch brothers also fund "Triad Management", which was at the center of a Republican money laundering scandal back in 1996. In fact, this was the very first Tom DeLay scandal -- and Koch money was present back then as well. For more on "Triad", here is a PBS report on the affair.

In a related thread, Democrats.com member Bill Harding writes:

The following quotes are from today’s NYT Letters to The Editor section. They underscore how Democrats are perceived by a cross-section of readers, under our current “centrist” DLC, stand-for-nothing “leadership.”

http://www.democrats.com/node/7789

[bulloney]

7. The Kochs are prime examples of today's conservatives/libertarians.

To paraphrase a great quote from the late Ann Richards, "They were born on third base and they think they hit a triple."

Most of the conservatives/libertarians I know are living comfortably, if not wealthy, because of wealth handed to them that originated by parents, grandparents or another family member. They never had to make tough decisions on what purchases get priority and which get deferred if they are made at all. They've never had to worry about how their children's college education gets paid; how they will maintain a standard of living if unemployment or catastrophic illness affects their family. This gives them the luxury to scheme up ways to make more money faster and easier. And the way these people are doing it is by attacking the tax code, regulations and social programs so that there's a bigger share of the pie for them.

I often wonder where the Koch brothers and people of their ilk would be today had they not been born into wealthy families. Many of the wealthy people I know have no critical thinking skills; no awareness of the real world around them; essentially survive in their own little bubble because they can.