In the 90’s the republican party could not stand the fact that they no longer had the presidency, so the billionaires of the party(Richard Mellon Scaife), started the Arkansas Project, strictly to discredit Bill Clinton. The whole time, in order to distract from what they were doing, complained about the one liberal billionaire, George Soros.
Now that the republicans lost the presidency again, we are subject to the same game with different players. Jane Mayer, one of the top investigative journalists in the business, just came out with a brilliant piece on the Koch Brothers war against President Obama.
Some highlights:
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.”
* Americans for Prosperity Foundation—an organization that David Koch started, in 2004
*In 1977, the Kochs provided the funds to launch the nation’s first libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute.
*n the mid-eighties, the Kochs provided millions of dollars to George Mason University, in Arlington, Virginia, to set up another think tank. Now known as the Mercatus Center, it promotes itself as “the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas—bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.” Financial records show that the Koch family foundations have contributed more than thirty million dollars to George Mason, much of which has gone to the Mercatus Center, a nonprofit organization. “It’s ground zero for deregulation policy in Washington,” Rob Stein, the Democratic strategist, said. It is an unusual arrangement. “George Mason is a public university, and receives public funds,” Stein noted. “Virginia is hosting an institution that the Kochs practically control.”
*In 2004, David Koch and Richard Fink started a new group, Americans for Prosperity, and they hired Tim Phillips to run it
As Ms. Mayer does a great job of documenting, the Kochs tried to run for office and got a whopping 1% of the vote, and realized that the public would never buy what they were selling. They then turned their money and efforts into playing the republican party, and the “tea partiers” like a marionette.
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