Better breaks for billionaires
Posted on Monday, August 30, 2010 at 01:44 AM
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This week we learned that the billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles, have been discreetly bankrolling the supposedly grassroots Tea Party movement for over a year and that they really don't appreciate sudden public interest in the fact.
After all, it would be fair to say that many of the people who make a living writing about politics haven't even heard of them - and why should they? For most massively wealthy Upper East Side dwellers discretion is the watchword.
David Koch lives on Park Avenue in a 9,000-square-foot duplex apartment, a world apart from ordinary mortals. He's not used to public scrutiny, and boy he doesn't like it now it's arrived. All week David Koch has been slamming the 'liberal media' for doing their job and asking how much, where and when he and his brother have sprung to facilitate conservative causes.
Thankfully we already largely know. For years - decades actually - the Koch brothers, billionaire heirs of one of the largest privately held companies in the United States, have quietly promoted their hard-right ideology through third parties, think tanks, foundations and front groups.
Currently they influence the Tea Party through the Orwellian sounding organization with the almost laughable name: Americans for Prosperity. It makes you wonder why they didn't go the whole hog and call themselves Better Breaks For Billionaires.
This week they're howling about Jane Mayer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, who profiled the two brothers and their political connections in the magazine. They were particularly critical of her outrageous contention that their political interests 'dovetail with their corporate interests.' Why, the very idea. What a spurious charge.
In a way, you can almost feel their pain. I mean can't a man spend hundreds of millions quietly influencing elections from behind the scenes without being called onto the carpet by every two bit rag in the nation? Does living in Obama's America mean that someone so disproportionally influential now has to face this kind of scrutiny when they never have before?
Naturally, neither of the Koch's have ever attended a Tea Party rally or shouted themselves hoarse at a Town Hall meeting. There's no need to rally with the rabble when you know how to get results. Their father Fred Koch, rattled President Kennedy, funding the John Birch Society. The Koch brothers rattled Clinton, funding a lot of the attack groups and the rallies on Capitol Hill. Now they’re doing it to Barack Obama. And they’re going to keep doing it. Since 1998 Koch-controlled foundations have given out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions.
But rather than discuss the brother's undoubted influence, conservatives have fired back by changing the subject and insisting that the Koch's exert the same kind of influence that George Soros does for liberal causes.
But you'd be quite hard pressed to uncover any major contribution from the Koch's to improve the lives of the downtrodden. In fact, they believe in minimal social services for the needy - no Social Security, no Medicare, no Health Reform - and much less oversight of industry. Not much bleeding heart to speak of there.
And now, by giving money to educate, fund, and organize the Tea Party protesters, Mayer suggests they have helped turn their own private agenda into a mass movement. Critics contend they are trying to shape and control a populist uprising to promote their own corporate interests.
But as Mayer has noted, that implies the Tea Party movement is a myth. Instead of being a bottom up uprising of engaged citizens and working stiffs, Mayer calls it a massive, well financed political campaign against Obama and the Democrats, in part funded by the brothers who run America's second-biggest private company, Koch Industries.
This may give short shrift to the very real (and often divergent) passions animating the Tea Party, but it doesn't invalidate Mayer's contention. It's almost sad, in a way, to acknowledge that after a year of angry grandstanding from coast to coast the Tea Party is turning out to be just another corporate-backed attempt to influence policy to help big businesses make more money.
Americans for Prosperity are no doubt quite sincere in their goals, but it might be wise, in the coming months, to ask them exactly who's prosperity they mean.
UPDATE: This morning Americans for Prosperity (AFP) launched $500,000 worth of new TV ads in Arizona targeting Democratic Representatives Ann Kilpatrick, Harry Mitchell and Gabrielle Giffords is the latest indication that conservative group will be a major player in the November midterm elections.
The new Americans For Prosperity ads come a week after the group's sister organization, Americans for Prosperity Foundation, announced plans to launch a $4.1 million ad campaign targeting 24 competitive House seats in 11 states - a buy that will probably be the biggest of the summer.
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torbreezy | Aug 30, 2010, 01:48 PM EDT
I don't get the "connection" of this article to the Irish and see it as little more than a "hit piece" @ the "haves" (who are exercising their freedoms) and the "have nots". Another attempt to be disingenuously divisive . . . .
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JamesMurphy | Aug 30, 2010, 11:56 AM EDT
Right on, Cahir! The gullability of Tea Party members is nothing short of staggering. Unmistakeably, the Koch brothers are bankrolling organizations that support, promote and manipulate people who are, well, easily manipulated. Such organizations were instrumental, for example, in convincing their members and supporters that it was okay for the mostly reactionary Supreme court to strike down laws that prohibited direct corporate spending on campaigns. In supporting this disastrous ruling, the manipulated have made it easier for the Koch brothers and other extremists to hide behind groups such as Americans for Prosperity. Tea Partiers, wake up and smell the coffee!
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jmchrystal | Aug 30, 2010, 11:40 AM EDT
No duh! The uneducated and the head-in-the-sand group, have always fell easy prey to manipulation by the rich and powerful, especially if times are tough. With times as tough as these, it should be a no brainer that those who have been affected the most would be "backlashing" against the give-away-to-the-rich program that the republicans have been wagging on America since Reagan was the "acting" president. But no, the rich and powerful have
worked hard to manipulate the "masses" into believing all sorts of nonsense about the Democrats and especially O'bama. This is the same mechanism that the slave holding plantations owners used to get millions of poor, no hope whites (poor because the plantation owners had slaves and did not need a very large working class of whites) to fight and die by the thousands during the first civil war. And I say the first civil war, because with all the hate that people like the Koch brothers are manufacturing (as are others) just to get "their" side elected, is in fact, leading us down the road to a major social, economic and political maelstrom that more than likely will result in another civil war.
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hollabackgurl | Aug 30, 2010, 10:35 AM EDT
The article says they're influencing and funding the direction of the Tea Party through their organization Americans for Prosperity. They're on public record themselves for saying so.
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wjb1tex | Aug 30, 2010, 10:24 AM EDT
The charges that they are "bankrolling" the Tea Party are interesting in that no one says exactly how they are funding it. What are they paying for ? As far as I know none of the people attending Tea Party events are being paid and the meetings are at public parks which don't charge for the use.
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TheOldPerfessor | Aug 30, 2010, 09:07 AM EDT
A billion dollars isn't what it used to be.
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