This country does not believe in rule by strongmen or cult personality figures.
Which sounds good, until you learn that this was said by Randy Kendrick, "a leading Koch donor," who is "'extremely disappointed about the Koch network being off the playing field'," concerning the looming nomination of Donald Trump.
And it still almost sounds good, until we remember that what the Kochs and cronies do in fact prefer rule by strongmen -- themselves. Sure, they don't like "cult personality figures." When they're buying, they prefer toadies.
On a related note, a recent piece by the great Jane Mayer bears a read. It's about the Koch brothers' attempts at rebranding themselves. (My runner-up choice for the title was Compassionate Conservatism II.) It would be comical if it weren't so horrifying.
This paper conducts an analysis of the financial resource mobilization of the organizations that make up the climate change counter-movement (CCCM) in the United States. Utilizing IRS data, total annual income is compiled for a sample of CCCM organizations (including advocacy organizations, think tanks, and trade associations). These data are coupled with IRS data on philanthropic foundation funding of these CCCM organizations contained in the Foundation Center’s data base. This results in a data sample that contains financial information for the time period 2003 to 2010 on the annual income of 91 CCCM organizations funded by 140 different foundations. An examination of these data shows that these 91 CCCM organizations have an annual income of just over 900million,withanannualaverageof64 million in identifiable foundation support. The overwhelming majority of the philanthropic support comes from conservative foundations. Additionally, there is evidence of a trend toward concealing the sources of CCCM funding through the use of donor directed philanthropies.
Conservative groups may have spent up to $1bn a year on the effort to deny science and oppose action on climate change, according to the first extensive study into the anatomy of the anti-climate effort.
The anti-climate effort has been largely underwritten by conservative billionaires, often working through secretive funding networks. They have displaced corporations as the prime supporters of 91 think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations which have worked to block action on climate change. Such financial support has hardened conservative opposition to climate policy, ultimately dooming any chances of action from Congress to cut greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet, the study found.
News of the unsurprising, and mighty discouraging news at that, but a shoutout to Prof. Brulle for making the effort to document the atrocities, and a vote of sympathy to him for the character assassination he will doubtless be suffering in the next few weeks.
More than two dozen of the nation’s biggest corporations, including the five major oil companies, are planning their future growth on the expectation that the government will force them to pay a price for carbon pollution as a way to control global warming.
The development is a striking departure from conservative orthodoxy and a reflection of growing divisions between the Republican Party and its business supporters.
A new report by the environmental data company CDP has found that at least 29 companies, some with close ties to Republicans, including ExxonMobil, Walmart and American Electric Power, are incorporating a price on carbon into their long-term financial plans.
... with this ...
During the 2012 election, every Republican presidential candidate but one, Jon Huntsman, questioned or denied the science of climate change and rejected policies to deal with global warming.
Better sit down for this part:
But unlike the five big oil companies — ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, BP and Shell, all major contributors to the Republican party — Koch Industries, a conglomerate that has played a major role in pushing Republicans away from action on climate change, is ramping up an already-aggressive campaign against climate policy — specifically against any tax or price on carbon. Owned by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, the company includes oil refiners and the paper-goods company Georgia-Pacific.
You thought super PACs were bad? Read this and weep.
Two conservative nonprofits, Crossroads GPS and Americans for Prosperity, have poured almost $60 million into TV ads to influence the presidential race so far, outgunning all super PACs put together, new spending estimates show.
These nonprofits, also known as 501(c)(4)s or c4s for their section of the tax code, don't have to disclose their donors to the public. [Unlike super PACs, which do.]
[...]
Crossroads GPS, or Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, is the brainchild of GOP strategist Karl Rove, and spent an estimated $41.7 million. Americans for Prosperity, credited with helping launch the Tea Party movement, is backed in part by billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, and spent an estimated $18.2 million.
Campaign-finance reform advocates say the spending by the two organizations highlights the role anonymous money is playing in this election, which will be the most expensive in history.
One of the most talked-about "dark money" groups of the election released its tax returns yesterday, showing it raised almost $77 million from fewer than 100 donors over 19 months. Most of the money spent in its first year went directly to political ads or grants to other groups.
Not to make this all about me (because who would stand for such a thing, on a blog?), but in less than a month, ALEC has gone from an organization I'd never heard of to the front page of the New York Times.
ALEC stands for the American Legislative Exchange Council, something I just learned about. It's so mind-reeling and discouraging I don't even know where to begin, so I'll just pass along some links for now.
A guy named Bill Press has a new book out, titled The Obama Hate Machine: The Lies, Distortions, and Personal Attacks on the President---and Who Is Behind Them. Until a few minutes ago, I didn't know anything about him, and I haven't yet read the book, obvs, but I thought I'd call it to your attention.
Here's as good an introduction as any: Bill Press appearing on The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann. What's embedded below is the whole show; Press's segment runs from 14:39 to 26:36. [1]
A review of the book by Jason Easley of Politicususa (link goes to a cached version; as of posting time, Politicususa.com was experiencing technical difficulties)
[1] Monty Python fans should probably watch for another minute or two after that. And who knew there was someone in the Oklahoma state legislature that we could applaud? You go, Sen. Constance N. Johnson!
[2] It's worth going to the Amazon page just to look at the wingnuts' "reviews." Unsurprisingly, none comes close to the ones the legendary reasonable conservative used to post, but you have to love the kneejerk fury and its semi-literate expression.
... the Charles G. Koch Foundation," says an op-ed by two FSU professors (original, cached). They continue:
In 2008, the foundation signed a memorandum of agreement with FSU in which they committed to a proposed budget of $6.5 million over a period of six years, with most of the effort to be located in the economics department. The provisions called for the hiring of five professors and other staff; establishing a program for the Study of Political Economy and Free Enterprise (SPEFE) and a program for Excellence in Economic Education (EEE); and the development of educational programs for undergraduate students.
A careful reading of the memorandum reveals a number of strings attached to the "gift." [...]
This op-ed led the St. Petersburg Times to look into it, and Ed from Gin and Tacos noticed. (Ed is a professor at another college.)
PRAGMATISM vs. THE GAG REFLEX
The great but largely forgotten journalist Sydney Harris once said, "You may be certain that when a man begins to call himself a 'realist,' he is preparing to do something he is secretly ashamed of." That quote kept coming to mind as I read this:
A conservative billionaire who opposes government meddling in business has bought a rare commodity: the right to interfere in faculty hiring at a publicly funded university.
A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University's economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting "political economy and free enterprise."
Traditionally, university donors have little official input into choosing the person who fills a chair they've funded. The power of university faculty and officials to choose professors without outside interference is considered a hallmark of academic freedom.
Under the agreement with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, however, faculty only retain the illusion of control. The contract specifies that an advisory committee appointed by Koch decides which candidates should be considered. The foundation can also withdraw its funding if it's not happy with the faculty's choice or if the hires don't meet "objectives" set by Koch during annual evaluations.
My favorite Calvin and Hobbes panel features Calvin lamenting not that everyone has a price, but that the price is always so low. [...]
David W. Rasmussen, dean of the College of Social Sciences, defended the deal, initiated by an FSU graduate working for Koch. During the first round of hiring in 2009, Koch rejected nearly 60 percent of the faculty’s suggestions but ultimately agreed on two candidates. Although the deal was signed in 2008 with little public controversy, the issue revived last week when two FSU professors — one retired, one active — criticized the contract in the Tallahassee Democrat as an affront to academic freedom.
Rasmussen said hiring the two new assistant professors allows him to offer eight additional courses a year. “I’m sure some faculty will say this is not exactly consistent with their view of academic freedom,” he said. “But it seems to me it would have been irresponsible not to do it.”
Not exactly consistent? Rasmussen, meanwhile, sang quite a different tune in a letter to the Tallahassee Democrat responding to the professors, striking a strident tone, accusing the profs of “ideological bias,” and asserting something that appears to be demonstrably untrue: [...]
Bruce Benson, chairman of FSU's economics department, said that of his staff of 30, six, including himself, would fall into Koch's free-market camp.
"The Kochs find, as I do, that a lot of regulation is actually detrimental and they're convinced markets work relatively well when left alone," he said.
Benson said his department had extensive discussion, but no vote, on the Koch agreement when it was signed in 2008.
He said the Koch grant has improved his department and guaranteed a diversity of opinion that's beneficial to students.
"Students will ultimately choose," he said. "If you believe strongly in something, you believe it can win the debate."
Benson makes annual reports to Koch about the faculty's publications, speeches and classes, which have included the economics of corruption.
Orwell wept.
Of course, FSU is still at the fluffer stage compared to another school we could name:
The big exception has been George Mason University, a public university in Virginia which has received more than $30 million from Koch over the past 20 years. At George Mason, Koch's foundation has underwritten the Mercatus Center, whose faculty study "how institutions affect the freedom to prosper."
To save the lurking glibertarians the effort of huffing and puffing that THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE, we will link to ex(?)-Reason employee and perennial liberal-basher David Weigel, who says THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE. (But at least he gave the backstory and the link to the op-ed.)
[Added] On 2012-07-30, I added a label to this post, which somehow caused the posting date to be set to today. I changed it back by hand to a reasonable guess as to when it actually was posted.
David Simon: Again, we would have to ask ourselves a lot of hard questions. The people most affected by this are black and brown and poor. It’s the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. As we said before, economically, we don’t need those people; the American economy doesn’t need them. So as long as they stay in their ghettos and they only kill each other, we’re willing to pay for a police presence to keep them out of our America. And to let them fight over scraps, which is what the drug war, effectively, is. Since we basically have become a market-based culture, that’s what we know, and it’s what’s led us to this sad dénouement. I think we’re going to follow market-based logic right to the bitter end.
Bill Moyers: Which says?
David Simon: If you don’t need ’em, why extend yourself? Why seriously assess what you’re doing to your poorest and most vulnerable citizens? There’s no profit to be had in doing anything other than marginalizing them and discarding them.
One of the Koch-whores in Wisconsin, state Sen. Randy Hopper (R-Obvs.), has been busted as having been thrown out of his house by his wife, due to his habit of shacking up with a 25-year-old named Valerie Cass. Cass "was previously a state senate staffer who worked on the Senate Economic Development Committee alongside Mr. Hopper," and she now works for a right-wing lobbying outfit. Surprisingly, her page has been scrubbed from their site. However, screen grabs do exist!
In possibly related news, Hopper's maid has signed the petition seeking to recall him, and reports are that his wife will, too. (She may already have, but the site that broke this story is down at the moment, due to traffic load.)
Thump and Whip has some pictures of the dramatis personae.
P.S. Ed is right, of course, but only to some degree. There is a time when having a concrete image -- a face of the opposition -- is useful. Not all citizens are as well-informed as those of us who obsess over politics would like, and given that reality, it is important to come up with ways to pique their interest. These approaches work, like it or not. With the stakes as high as they are, the smart activist uses what works. We can all sing kumbaya and have Very Serious Thoughtful Discussions when we get things back in balance.
Besides, the Koch brothers spend huge amounts of money funding the denialism of anthropogenic global warming. WHICH DOESN'T EXIST BECAUSE AL GORE HAS A BIG HOUSE AND FLIES IN AIRPLANES!!!1!
CONGRESS' ANTI-CONSUMER-SAFETY CONTINGENT.... On her show last night, Rachel Maddow had a segment on the political efforts of the right-wing Koch brothers, and there was one data point that I hadn't heard about before.
First , a little background. In 2007, following a series of scandalous incidents, federal officials created on online consumer-product-safety database, allowing Americans to go online and access free information about the safety records of household products. It passed the House unanimously, sailed through the Senate, and was signed into law by George W. Bush.
Who could possibly oppose this? Why would even the most unhinged Republican reject giving Americans free access to such materials? Or as Rachel asked, "Dear Lord, who is going to object to consumer product safety information being put online?"
The answer, it turns out, is Rep. Mike Pompeo (R) of Kansas, who ran a surprisingly racist campaign, and won last year thanks to generous support from his largest campaign contributors, the Koch brothers and their political action committee. Pompeo also happens to represent the district where Koch Industries is located.
As it turns out, the Kochs don't care for the consumer product safety database, so their congressman pushed a measure to delay and weaken it. As the Kansas City Starexplained, Pompeo wanted to push off implementation "to give Congress a chance to make changes that both he and the business community would prefer."
The point of the database couldn't be any more of a no-brainer. The Consumer Safety Product Commission has valuable information, but faces challenges in reaching the public. For very little money, the government has created an online resource that will help families make more informed choices, and create a new incentive for manufacturers to put safe products on the market.
As Michael Lipsky explained today, "One would think it hard to find a politician who opposes reducing preventable dangers to children. [Pompeo] has stepped up to this challenge."
Pompeo's proposal, an amendment to the House spending-cut bill, was approved with 227 Republican votes, but it's not expected to be part of the compromise with the Senate. Still, the fact that he tried, and that the GOP backed his measure, should tell voters a great deal about the party's priorities.
The billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch no longer sit outside Washington's political establishment, isolated by their uncompromising conservatism. Instead, they are now at the center of Republican power, a change most evident in the new makeup of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Wichita-based Koch Industries and its employees formed the largest single oil and gas donor to members of the panel, ahead of giants like Exxon Mobil, contributing $279,500 to 22 of the committee's 31 Republicans, and $32,000 to five Democrats.
Nine of the 12 new Republicans on the panel signed a pledge distributed by a Koch-founded advocacy group — Americans for Prosperity — to oppose the Obama administration's proposal to regulate greenhouse gases. Of the six GOP freshman lawmakers on the panel, five benefited from the group's separate advertising and grass-roots activity during the 2010 campaign.
Claiming an electoral mandate, Republicans on the committee have launched an agenda of the sort long backed by the Koch brothers. A top early goal: restricting the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the Kochs' core energy businesses.
The new committee members include a congressman who has hired a former Koch Industries lawyer as his chief of staff. Another, Rep. Morgan Griffith of Virginia, won a long-shot bid to unseat a 14-term moderate Democrat with help from Americans for Prosperity, which marshaled conservative activists in his district. By some estimates, the advocacy group spent more than a quarter-million dollars on negative ads in the campaign. "I'm just thankful that you all helped in so many ways," Griffith told an Americans for Prosperity rally not long after his election.
Ah, yes. That front group: David Koch's [Misguided] Americans for [My] Prosperity. Co-founded with a man named Fink.
Back to the LAT:
Perhaps the Kochs' most surprising and important ally on the committee is its new chairman, Rep. Fred Upton. The Republican from Michigan, who was once criticized by conservatives for his middle-of-the-road approach to environmental issues, is now leading the effort to rein in the EPA.
Upton received $20,000 in donations from Koch employees in 2010, making them among his top 10 donors in that cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The rest of the article is well worth reading if you want to know how deep they've sunk their claws into the GOP.
One look at the "hairstyle" and the al Qaedas and Talibans would die laughing.
You have to love the comedy at the site, right from the beginning:
The Draft Trump 2012 committee is an independent grass-roots citizen's efforts to make Donald Trump President. We are neither funded nor directed by Donald Trump but we are encouraged by his public indications that he is seriously considering the race.
Uh huh. Just like those conservative Grassroots™ activists in Wisconsin.
Following a link from the sidebar on Rachel Maddow's blog, I was led to this short clip from her show, "Free press confounds man who can buy anything." This is a delicious bit of snark directed at David Koch, who simply does not care for those people who report on his less savory activities.
As you'll have noted, Maddow mentioned a piece about Koch in The Daily Beast, which is not the Tucker Carlson webzine but that other one. Turns out the piece was written by one Elaine Lafferty. We will now go off on a brief tangent to examine this member of the Liberal Media, So Called.
On her DB bio page, we see that she is "a former staff correspondent at Time magazine." Also from there, we see that Lafferty has authored several other DB posts, two of which are "Palin's Smart Move" and "Sarah Palin's a Brainiac."
Trust me. You don't want to click those links. They are about as fawningly nauseating as you could imagine.
I am reminded of another journamalist who can't stop gushing about Palin, what's her name, that Scientologist from FoxNews … Oh, here, back on that Lafferty bio page: "She is co-author of My Turn at the Bully Pulpit with Greta Van Susteren."
Okay, now that we have some sense of where Elaine Lafferty is coming from, let's get back to David Koch and his butthurt.
First, a little context. You might recall that in late August, Jane Mayer wrote a long New Yorker piece on the Koch brothers -- "Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama." Mayer was unable to get an interview with either David or his brother Charles:
The Kochs and their political operatives declined requests for interviews. Instead, a prominent New York public-relations executive who is close with the Kochs put forward two friends …
After the piece ran, Koch Industries put out a press release ("Response to Recent Media Attacks"). At the same time, Nick Gillespie, the editor of the glibertarian rag, Reason magazine, attempted to debunk Mayer's piece. (For both, see here.) Reason, as you may or may not know, is also largely funded by Koch. Evidently, this double-barreled response didn't suffice, and so, amazingly, Lafferty was able to get an interview with David Koch.
But, he says, no one from the Tea Party movement has ever approached him for money, and when I ask him straight up if he’s funding the Tea Party, all he says is, “Oh, please.”
Hard-nosed reporter that she is, she asks a series of penetrating follow-up questions quickly moves on to another topic: his donations to Democrats.
To which I will pause to say, y'know, Ms. Lafferty, I'd think someone in your position would not be shocked, shocked to find out that rich people give money to both parties, especially when they're aware that the one they favor less is about to be in power. It's called buying access and future consideration. I might also observe that David Koch giving politicians or anybody else a couple hundred thou over the years is about like me buying a piece of penny candy and getting back change.
There is one useful thing in Lafferty's piece, though: as part of her description of the "media attacks" on poor David Koch, she mentions another profile, written about a month before Jane Mayer's New Yorker piece. This one is by Andrew Goldman, and it ran on NYMag.com on 25 July 2010. It's worth a read.
Lafferty wraps up her fluffery with several paragraphs of glowing description of the donations Koch has made to fund cancer research. To which I say, BFD. This doesn't make him a saint or even necessarily altruistic. He has cancer. He's undoubtedly acting, at least in large part, out of self-interest. A more honest reporter, like Andrew Goldman let us say, might have mentioned something like this:
“I’ve been living with it for sixteen years,” he told me two years ago. “I look pretty healthy, don’t I? My doctor thinks the treatment I’ve been getting will work for many more years, but eventually it will fail. So I’ve been financing the development of other treatments that could kick in when the traditional treatments I’m getting stop working.”
Oh, and let's just have a couple of other bits from Goldman's piece, to illustrate some other things Lafferty did not address. How about the oilman's view of global warming?
"The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because a far greater land area will be available to produce food," he says.
“That I was saved when all those others died. I felt that the good Lord spared my life for a purpose. And since then, I’ve been busy doing all the good works I can think of.”
Further comment here, as they say, would be superfluous.
And to close out, let's get back to the Koch bankrolling of the teabagger movement, and observe Goldman doing a bit more than just obediently typing, "Oh, please."
On October 3 of last year, at the Crystal Gateway Marriott hotel in Arlington, Virginia, Koch spoke from a podium at the Defending the American Dream Summit, a convention put on by Americans for Prosperity Foundation. The convention had brought out 2,000 attendees and an impressive roster of speakers from the right, from Senator Jim DeMint to Newt Gingrich to the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund. There was little doubt as to Koch’s importance to the group. “Right from the beginning,” said AFP president Tim Phillips, “it was David’s vision that launched our organization.” Then Koch took the microphone. “When we founded this organization five years ago,” he said, “we envisioned a mass movement …"
And:
“David Koch likes putting his name on all his things that aren’t evil,” says Lee Fang, a blogger for the liberal Thinkprogress.org. “He’ll put his name on his theater at Lincoln Center, but look at the Americans for Prosperity website and his name is virtually missing. All of his groups have used these same tea-party tactics before they actually had the tea-party brand.” Americans for Prosperity, AFPF’s political arm, has certainly not shied away from joining arms with the tea party. In April of last year, AFP took credit on its website for helping to organize Taxpayer Tea Party rallies in Sacramento, Austin, and Madison, and told visitors to “save the date” for National Tea Party Tax Day in Washington, which AFP would be hosting.
That's probably as much attention as Elaine Lafferty deserves. However, you might be interested in reading more about about the Koch brothers and their less well-publicized funding activities. For example, Goldman says towards the end of his article:
In April, Fang posted a dossier on Koch that attributes to his groups a decades-long pattern of “Astroturfing”—funding movements designed to look grassroots, but which in fact represent corporate interests.
But really. Only a million dollars? Pikers. I mean, compared to …
Valero Energy Corporation and Tesoro Petroleum Corporation, two Texas refining companies, [who] have together donated more than $4.5 million to the campaign to repeal AB 32, the state’s clean air and energy law.
But! Good news! The AP also reports:
According to the Los Angeles Times, a spokeswoman for Flint Hills Resources said the company "may consider additional support."
And why are the Koch brothers and these other Good Corporate Citizens™ giving so much money to this proposition? Because they care about the little guy! Not about whether he and his kids can breathe or stay out of floods, but his "jobs!"
This proposition to overturn California's Global Warming Act of 2006 is called the "California Jobs Initiative." You know, kind of like the tobacco lobby-backed proposition from 1994, which was spun as an "anti-smoking" proposition that would Protect the Children™. And more recently, like George W. Bush, who gave his environment-killing agenda items names like "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests."
Hurrah for not being bullshitted by billionaires, who only care about Your Best Interests™!
Oh, one other thing: you'll also be delighted to know that despite a concerted effort to avoid getting pinned down about where she stands on this, Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina finally announced -- on the Friday before Labor Day Weekend, but that's probably a coincidence, amirite? -- that she stands with Big Pollution and supports Prop. 23. And we know Carly Cares™ about jobs. After all, when she was running Hewlett-Packard, she added, what, negative ten thousand of them?
If you want to learn more about where the money is coming from and going to, here are some starting points:
Ballotpedia Prop. 23 page: a good executive summary of the issues and the players, with lots of solid reference links.
Cal-Access: the California Secretary of State's official database of campaign contributions. Layout is a bit clunky, but if you're willing to dig, the information is there. Start here or here, perhaps.
OpenSecrets.org's page on the oil and gas industry. This is a national effort, so you'll also be able to find out where, and who, else the likes of Valero, Tesoro, and the Koch brothers are seeking to buy.
One final note: Louise Bedsworth, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, said in back in spring it's likely campaign spending on this ballot measure will set a new record. That means well more than $150 million burned up on buying ads and politicians. I wonder how many jobs we could create for that. With bonus cleaner air thrown in.
(h/t: TC and PF, via email, for the heads-up about the Koch AP story | pic. sources: Wonk Room and Open Salon)
