I see Soros has a pastor he bought to influence Zero.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/08/soros_has_a_pastor_close_to_ob.html
On 08/29/2010 09:11 PM, dick thompson wrote:
You must have missed the news reports about how the major benefactors
of the Dems are the rich while the average donor to the Republicans
are small business people and the lower middle class. And Wall Street
has given far more to the Dems than the Republicans for years.
On 08/29/2010 04:53 PM, tommysnews wrote:
The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party
By FRANK RICH
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/frankrich/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
Published: August 28, 2010
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
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/nyregion/23protest.html> the
“ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington
<http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/08/say_it_aint_so_5.php>,
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.
Enlarge This Image
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Barry Blitt
Go to Columnist Page »
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/frankrich/index.html>
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Frank Rich
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.
Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet
bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and
government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even
the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries
began <http://www.kochind.com/about/history.aspx> with oil in the
1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie
cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics.
Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’
father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch
Society’s top governing body
<http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F7061FFB3C5D13738DDDA80894DC405B818AF1D3>.
In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan
archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which
Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the
U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”
That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.
Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the
most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane
Mayer of The New Yorker
<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer>.
Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite
who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural
philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but
the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as
Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the
Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who
associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center
<http://www.lincolncenter.org/load_screen.asp?screen=visitorinfo_hallinfo_nyst>
with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas
branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans
for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who
had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”
The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s
FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting
events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens
for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own
from Koch family foundations
<http://mediamattersaction.org/transparency/organization/FreedomWorks/funders>.
Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave
out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes
and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch
Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its
political action committee
<http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/industry.php?txt=E01&cycle=2010>,
putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and
Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to
nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case.
The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives
in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and
Palin are on the payroll.
The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too
<http://www.kochind.com/kochfacts/default.aspx>. Some of Mayer’s
blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article
(titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch
grantees
<http://reason.com/blog/2010/08/25/the-official-koch-industries-r>.
None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of
them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire
backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is
transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals
— selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he
supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and
that, if anything, raise his taxes.
This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of
Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1
percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social
Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the
F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools
<http://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/16/arts/man-without-a-candidate.html>
— in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit
his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As
Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political
operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that
forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business.
While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial
Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to
stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another
product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known
carcinogen” in humans (which it is).
Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big
government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream
conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big
business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while
dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect
the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence
of the elderly.
Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as
articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the
putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner
<http://gopleader.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=203966>,
and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and
the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment
insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller
<http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/meet-joe-miller-tea-party-fave-with-extreme-abortion-views.php>.
Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to
running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the
superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides
money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund
<http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/677-e2-wire/107711-angle-reids-foe-calls-bp-claims-account-a-slush-fund>”;
opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a
freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil,
financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among
others) have been outrageous.
The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing
that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish
interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the
“ground zero mosque.” Last week on “Fox and Friends,” the Bush
administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly
terrorism-tainted Saudi prince
<http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/saudi-royal-backs-imam-and-fox-news/>
whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center. But as “The
Daily Show” keeps pointing out
<http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-august-23-2010/the-parent-company-trap>,
these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re
bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch
shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News
Corporation
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20100820/bs_yblog_upshot/news-corps-number-two-shareholder-funded-terror-mosque-planner>)
and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but
also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.
No less a Murdoch factotum than Neil Cavuto slobbered over bin Talal
in a Fox Business Channel interview as recently as January, with nary
a question about his supposed terrorist ties. Instead, bin Talal
praised Obama’s stance on terrorism and even endorsed the Democrats’
goal of universal health insurance. Do any of the Fox-watching
protestors at the “ground zero mosque” know that Fox’s profits are
flowing to a Obama-sympathizing Saudi billionaire in bed with
Murdoch? As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want “to cut
off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ ” are aiding that funding by
watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.
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
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/presidents/35_kennedy/psources/ps_conspir.html>
denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”
And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage>
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
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