Boycott Koch Industries products: Quilted Northern, Angel Soft, Brawny, Sparkle, Vanity Fair, & more

[mod mom]

Rachel Maddow had an excellent segment last night with New Yorker's Jane Mayer

If you missed Jane Mayer on Rachel last night, it can be found here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x498570

Ms Mayer recently wrote an important article on the Koch brothers for the New Yorker:

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

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer#ixzz0xdvPHOHj

Why should anyone concerned with their attempts to destroy America with their RW agenda support them financially by buying their products?

Here is some background on them:

Sons Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch run the company as well as Koch Family Foundations, one of the largest single sources of funding for conservative organizations in the United States. Organizations and think tanks supported by the foundation include Citizens for a Sound Economy, the libertarian Cato Institute, Reason Magazine, the Manhattan Institute, the Heartland Institute, and theDemocratic Leadership Council. David H. Koch ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1980. Author Thomas Frank wrote in "What's the Matter with Kansas?" that "Koch money flowed throughTriad Management Services"<3>, an advisory service to conservative donors groups and candidates, for the 1996 Senate campaign of Sam Brownback.<4>

-snip

In 2003, Koch announced a $4.4 billion cash purchase of Invista, the world's largest fibers company and owner of brand names such as Lycra and Teflon; from DuPont. <16> In 2005, Koch purchased paper products giant Georgia-Pacific for $21 billion, acquiring brands such as Quilted Northern, Angel Soft, Brawny, Sparkle, Vanity Fair, and Dixie cups. Internationally, brands include Lotus, Colhogar, Delica, Tenderly, and the Vania brand of personal care products

-snip

According to the 2010 report by Greenpeace, Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine, Koch has out-spent ExxonMobil in funding climate change denial. From 2005 to 2008, ExxonMobil spent $8.9 million, while the Koch Industries-controlled foundations contributed $24.9 million in funding to organizations of climate change skeptics. Efforts include:

-ClimateGate Echo Chamber—At least twenty Koch-funded organizations have repeatedly rebroadcast, referenced and appeared as media spokespeople in the story, dubbed “ClimateGate,” of supposed malfeasance by climate scientists from stolen emails from the University of East Anglia in November 2009. These organizations claim the emails prove a “conspiracy” of scientists and "proves" climate change is a hoax.
-More than $5 million to Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFP) for its nationwide “Hot Air Tour” campaign to spreading misinformation about climate science and opposing clean energy and climate legislation.
-More than $1 million to the Heritage Foundation, a mainstay of misinformation on climate and environmental policy issues.
-Over $1 million to the Cato Institute, which disputes the scientific evidence behind global warming, questions the rationale for taking climate action, and has been heavily involved in spinning the recentClimateGate story.
-$800,000 to the Manhattan Institute, which has hosted Bjorn Lomborg twice in the last two years, a prominent media spokesperson who challenges and attacks policy measures to address climate change.
-$365,000 to Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), which advocates against taking action on climate change because warming is “inevitable” and expensive to address.
-$360,000 to Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy (PRIPP) which supported and funded An Inconvenient Truth...or Convenient Fiction, a film attacking the science of global warming and intended as a rebuttal to former Vice-President Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. PRIPP also threatened to sue the U.S. Government for listing the polar bear as an endangered species.
-$325,000 to the Tax Foundation, which issued a misleading study on the costs of proposed climate legislation.

-snip
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Koch_Industries

One thing that surprised me that perhaps shouldn't was that they also back the DLC! :mad:

[joeybee12]

1. KNR...yeah, the DLC...

what a surprise...not really, of course.

[aquart]

3. What are you talking about?

[mod mom]

7. in the sourcewatch article in OP. Here's more:

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.

-snip

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

[joeybee12]

8. See response #7...n/t

[Erose999]

2. Looks like one brand of asswipes funds another brand of asswipes.

[mod mom]

4. good one!

:rofl:

[pinboy3niner]

6. FTW!

:rofl:

[Oceansaway]

5. K&R...n/t

[Mimosa]

9. They also back the DLC...

That explains a lot. :(

[blm]

10. Wish I learned this last week - Last time I ever buy Vanity Fair napkins or Brawny paper towels.

.

[mod mom]

12. Did you know about the DLC?

That one had slipped right by me. :hi:

[blm]

13. I hate to say it but, like you, I'm not surprised.

.

[Dogmudgeon]

11. Doomed to failure ... unless ...

... we pick ONE or TWO well-known products and concentrate our efforts on them.

I suggest the Brawny and Dixie Cups brands. They are very well-known, it's easy to find generic alternatives for them, and significant loss of sales would hurt Koch.

The aim? Stop funding climate change pseudoscience.

Koch is an octopus and it will be impossible to bring it down in a single masterstroke. The aim should be for the Market to induce enough pain so that Koch is forced to decide between ideology and profit.

--d!

[d_r]

14. I just read the New Yorker article

It is long, but it is right up there with Jeff Sharlot's The Family in terms of understanding the forces behind the right wing.

[mod mom]

15. Shoot, that reminded me that Jeff Sharlet was on Fresh Air today to preview

his new book. I'll have to catch it online, later.

[d_r]

16. thanks for telling me

I'll have to check that out

[mod mom]

17. you're welcome...here is a link:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129422524

[d_r]

18. Hey thanks again

I just had a chance to listen to it. I am looking forward to his new book.