"The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party" --Invisible Hands / Frank Rich

[KoKo]

August 28, 2010
The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party
By FRANK RICH

ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

Vive la révolution!

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Truly frightening. i hope that today's history will be written with a similar ending as the attempt

to take down FDR....EPIC FAIL for these greedy, evil maniacs.

[Smarmie Doofus]

2. I wonder where they stand on "school reform." nt

[Stuart G]

3. I wonder where they stand on aid to unemployed? nt

[Smarmie Doofus]

5. They're not exactly unrelated.

The "school reformers".....i.e. mega-billionaires ( like the Koch Bros.) and their foundations, mostly,,,, are looking to dump older, unionized, expensive teachers ( like myself, truth be told) and replace 'em w. cheap, non-union labor.

Aid to the Unemployed will thereafter be my signature issue. Followed closely by the recommendations of the Cat Food Commission, of course.

Sounds like the chief difference between between Koch Bros ( "Kochtopus" their entity is called in the NY Mag article) and the other school "reform" $$$$ foundations like Gates and Broad is one of degree. And of subtlety. Koch, et al is more blatant about it's anti-working class agenda.

The others dress themselves up rhetorically all "perdy-like".

When you get down to it.... not much is "exactly unrelated" to much of anything else.

[izquierdista]

4. Will be??

We've been on quite a ride, ever since the "October surprise" installed St. Ronnie the Forgetful and bounced out Jimmy Carter (the most decent of 20th century presidents). Gates has managed to monopolize the business of software, the Waltons have a near monopoly on retailing, and Buffett has a percentage of almost every other business out there. They are the "owners" of America that George Carlin referred to. It's a big club, with about 5000 members, and you and I are not in it.

[Smarmie Doofus]

6. Affirmative. To the nth degree. nt

[KoKo]

7. Link for Frank Rich's Article...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html?ref=frankrich

[Doctor_J]

8. Another snip

When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”

And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.

Too true

[eppur_se_muova]

9. historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title ...

I'm reading through that book now. A great read so far, much hidden history.

http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780393059304-0