One thing that I find both amazing and alarming about elements on the far right is how gullible they are when in comes to being manipulated by those who would play them for suckers so that the puppeteers can benefit themselves financially. Obviously, Rupert Murdoch's Fox News - a/k/a Faux News - falls into this category. While Fox News makes a joke out of the concept of "fair and balanced" - especially since Murdoch just gave $1 million to the GOP - there are other players who move behind the scenes on an even larger magnitude all the while duping the typical tea party member into thinking that he or she is bucking the system. Unfortunately, given the tea party crowd's and the Christian Right's active anti-intellectualism, indeed anti-knowledge mindset, they are the perfect dupes of those who have a family history of opposing social policies that abate the worse abuses of uncontrolled capitalism. Jane Mayer has a piece in the New Yorker that looks at two such cynical puppeteers who are actively controlling the tea party movement ultimately for their own financial gain. Who are these cynical puppeteers? Charles Koch and David Koch (pictured above) of Koch Industries. Together, they have given over $100 far right wing causes over the years. While they hide their larger agenda behind philanthropic efforts for the arts and other high profile civic endeavors, they should be anathema to anyone who believes in equality and equal rights for all citizens. The most recent recipients of their largess in political affairs are groups backing the tea party movement and organizing anti-Obama and ultimately anti-democracy efforts. Needless to say, the Kochs are likely laughing their butts off at the tea party activist who don't realize that they are being used as pawns of billionaire capitalists. Here are some highlights from this lengthy, must read article:*
In Washington, Koch is best known as part of a family that has repeatedly funded stealth attacks on the federal government, and on the Obama Administration in particular. With his brother Charles, who is seventy-four, David Koch owns virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars.
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Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests.
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In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change,
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The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”
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A few weeks after the Lincoln Center gala, the advocacy wing of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation—an organization that David Koch started, in 2004—held a different kind of gathering. . . . Five hundred people attended the summit, which served, in part, as a training session for Tea Party activists in Texas. An advertisement cast the event as a populist uprising against vested corporate power. The pitch made no mention of its corporate funders.
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Americans for Prosperity has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception. In the weeks before the first Tax Day protests, in April, 2009, Americans for Prosperity hosted a Web site offering supporters “Tea Party Talking Points.”
The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to “educate,” fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement.
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The Republican campaign consultant said of the family’s political activities, “To call them under the radar is an understatement. They are underground!” Another former Koch adviser said, “They’re smart. This right-wing, redneck stuff works for them. They see this as a way to get things done without getting dirty themselves.” Rob Stein, a Democratic political strategist who has studied the conservative movement’s finances, said that the Kochs are “at the epicenter of the anti-Obama movement. . . They are out to destroy progressivism.”
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Oddly enough, the fiercely capitalist Koch family owes part of its fortune to Joseph Stalin. . . Koch found work in the Soviet Union. In the nineteen-thirties, his company trained Bolshevik engineers and helped Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries.
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In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover. Members considered President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Communist agent.
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Charles and David Koch receded from the public arena. But they poured more than a hundred million dollars into dozens of seemingly independent organizations. Tax records indicate that in 2008 the three main Koch family foundations gave money to thirty-four political and policy organizations, three of which they founded, and several of which they direct. The Kochs and their company have given additional millions to political campaigns, advocacy groups, and lobbyists. The family’s subterranean financial role has fuelled suspicion on the left; Lee Fang, of the liberal blog ThinkProgress, has called the Kochs “the billionaires behind the hate.”
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Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, is the co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” a new book that chronicles various attempts by American industry to manipulate public opinion on science. She noted that the Kochs, as the heads of “a company with refineries and pipelines,” have “a lot at stake.” She added, “If the answer is to phase out fossil fuels, a different group of people are going to be making money, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re fighting tooth and nail.”
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During the 2000 election campaign, Koch Industries spent some nine hundred thousand dollars to support the candidacies of George W. Bush and other Republicans. During the Bush years, Koch Industries and other fossil-fuel companies enjoyed remarkable prosperity. The 2005 energy bill, which Hillary Clinton dubbed the Dick Cheney Lobbyist Energy Bill, offered enormous subsidies and tax breaks for energy companies. The Kochs have cast themselves as deficit hawks, but, according to a study by Media Matters, their companies have benefitted from nearly a hundred million dollars in government contracts since 2000.
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The Kochs’ sense of imperilment is somewhat puzzling. Income inequality in America is greater than it has been since the nineteen-twenties, and since the seventies the tax rates of the wealthiest have fallen more than those of the middle class. Yet the brothers’ message has evidently resonated with voters: a recent poll found that fifty-five per cent of Americans agreed that Obama is a socialist.
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The Kochs have long depended on the public’s not knowing all the details about them. They have been content to operate what David Koch has called “the largest company that you’ve never heard of.” But with the growing prominence of the Tea Party, and with increased awareness of the Kochs’ ties to the movement, the brothers may find it harder to deflect scrutiny.
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I cannot help but wonder how many misinformed individuals are now engaged in tea party activities believing that they are defending against a government and big corporation take over civic life and and an erosion of civil liberties. Meanwhile, the truth is that they are being cynically used by corporate titans like the Koch brothers who don't give a tinkers damn about average Americans. Instead, the only care about obscenely further enriching themselves and destroying government regulations that protect the average citizen from greed driven megalomaniacs like themselves.
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