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The Kochs’ very bad week

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Were there a way for a few billion clams to wipe a week off the calendar, one imagines that Charles and David Koch, the multibillionaire principals of Koch Industries, would like to see the final week of March 2012 vaporized, at least in the public mind. For the Kochs, it was a week of bad news: a new documentary about their political activity and corporate negligence was making a splash -- on the same day a story broke announcing an FBI investigation of two Wisconsin groups tied to Americans for Prosperity, the political ground organization they founded and fund. (Full disclosure: AlterNet is a supporter of the documentary, "Koch Brothers Exposed," and I appear in the film.)

How billionaires destroy democracy

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 21:00:00 +0000

There are many words that could be used to describe Barack Obama, but one adjective decidedly doesn’t fit: Aggressive. So it was more than passing strange when a prominent member of Wall Street — Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the private equity giant Blackstone Group — compared actions by President Obama to one of the most notoriously aggressive acts by one of history’s most aggressive villains. Speaking to the board of a nonprofit group, Schwarzman fiercely denounced initiatives by the Obama administration: “It’s war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

Exposing the Koch brothers

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Robert Greenwald and his Brave New Foundation debuted their feature-length film "Koch Brothers Exposed" in New York on Thursday night. (The DVD is available here; see the two-minute trailer for the film on the last page of this article.) "Koch Brothers Exposed" weaves together a series of short films produced over the course of the last year or so as part of an online video campaign of the same name. As principals of Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held corporation in America and one of the nation's top polluters, the Koch brothers have grown notorious for their funding of think tanks and astroturf organizations that aim to deregulate business and scale back government programs such as Social Security, Medicare and the new healthcare reform law.

Union-buster joins Wisconsin recall fight

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 21:50:00 +0000

The Wisconsin recall ad wars have a new player: the Center for Union Facts, the well-heeled union-bashing outfit founded by food and beverage super-lobbyist Rick Berman. A CUF source says the self-described “union watchdog” is spending “just over a million dollars” in Wisconsin, and “may do more in the coming weeks.”

Unlike the Koch-founded Americans for Prosperity’s pro-Walker campaign, the CUF’s ad buy makes no mention of Wisconsin or the union-busting “budget repair” that Gov. Scott Walker forced through last year. Rather, it consists entirely of ads that CUF has already been running around the country. You may have seen one on cable during GOP debates, or during the Super Bowl. But make no mistake, the ads are about keeping Walker in office.

You should care that the Kochs are seizing Cato

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 20:59:00 +0000

Charles and David Koch, of the famous anti-Obama billionaire Koch brothers, are attempting a sort of hostile takeover of the Cato Institute, one of the most prominent and independent arms of the D.C.-based American libertarian movement. Charles Koch co-founded Cato in the 1970s, but, as Dave Weigel explains, he left the think tank in 1991. David has been a minority partner since then, but the Kochs have largely left Cato to fund its libertarian research while they focused on polluting and evil cackling and other Koch-ish activities.

The Kochs have sued for the right to buy the shares in Cato held by the widow of co-founder William Niskanen. Their aim is basically to make Cato into another arm of their explicitly partisan messaging machine, along with Americans for Prosperity. To that end, they have already attempted to install some ridiculous Republican Party hacks on Cato's board of directors -- hacks like John "Hind Rocket" Hinderacker, the attorney and "Powerline" blogger with no history of support for "liberty" to speak of. Current Cato people are upset. Some have preemptively resigned, even. (Well, announced an intention to resign upon the completion of the Koch takeover, anyway.)

Koch-funded global warming proof goes unnoticed

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 12:38:00 +0000

If a scientific study helps to confirm that, yes, global warming is really happening, only nobody on cable news takes the time to mention the research ... did it even happen in the first place? What if the study in question was funded by the Koch brothers -- the very same billionaire industrial magnates who helped bankroll 2009's ClimateGate hysteria? Did it happen then?

As Jon Stewart pointed out on "The Daily Show" last night, Berkeley scientist Richard Muller recently lent his voice to the chorus of scientists arguing for the existence of climate change. Muller released the findings of a study this week that confirm some basic, but major, suppositions about our warming planet, and he did this after receiving $150,000 in funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. His research would seem to represent, at the very least, a major symbolic victory for the scientific community. Only you would never know that from watching cable news these past few days, which attended instead to more pressing news matters -- like the return of the McRib.

Protesters march on billionaires’ homes

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:06:00 +0000

New York progressive and community groups joined by Occupy Wall Street protesters marched through one of the city's poshest neighborhoods on Tuesday, visiting the homes of several billionaires to pressure Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the state Legislature to extend the life of a surcharge tax on the state's wealthiest residents.

Besides being good theater -- a giant check representing state tax cuts for the rich was left on the doorstep of hedge funder John Paulson's Upper East Side townhouse -- the march amounted to an attempt by veteran community and labor-affiliated activists to harness the intense media and popular interest in Occupy Wall Street to advance a specific progressive policy goal.

"We're not trying to grab the steering wheel. We're not trying to say Occupy Wall Street is all about one issue. But this is a concrete example of the kind of policies that are screwed up," said organizer Michael Kink, executive director of Strong Economy for All, a coalition of unions and community advocacy groups. "I think public opinion is galvanizing around Occupy," he added.

Karl Rove’s weekend of indignities

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:34:00 +0000

Karl Rove, the Republican Party's master of Atwaterian campaign tricks and primary architect of the updated Southern Strategy, had a bad weekend. He was the victim of an attempted glitter-bombing, and he's apparently fighting with his good friends the Koch brothers.

Rove, in Bloomington, Minn., for the Republican Midwest Leadership Conference (can't believe they held it the same weekend as the Values Voters Summit), was glittered by LGBT activists on Friday, in part because Rove was the one who decided Bush should endorse an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment in 2004 but mostly because he's just an all-around repulsive person who has made America a meaner, poorer place.

The glitter mostly missed him. But still: Good show, glitter-bombing folks.

Less embarrassing but probably more aggravating to Rove is the growing rift between him and his wealthy political allies, the Koch brothers, that Politico's Kenneth Vogel reports on today.

Koch brothers spooked by forthcoming story

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 19:15:00 +0000

Here's a rule of thumb about public relations: When P.R. pros begin furiously spinning a story before it has even come out, there's a pretty good chance the story is going to be damaging to the reputation of said P.R. pros' bosses.

And that's exactly what we're seeing right now, as an anonymous person or persons in the orbit of the billionaire conservative donors Charles and David Koch try to discredit a forthcoming story in Bloomberg Markets magazine.

Based on the prebuttal items appearing this week in the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller, and U.S. News and World Report, the Bloomberg story focuses on alleged malfeasance and/or fraud and/or bad behavior by the conglomerate Koch Industries.