The greatest threat to free enterprise, he warned, was not Communism or the New Left but, rather, “respectable elements of society”—intellectuals, journalists, and scientists. To defeat them, he wrote, business leaders needed to wage a long-term, unified campaign to change public opinion - Read more in the New Yorker
Today I heard a story about the Koch Brothers on WHYY's FRESH AIR, with Terry Gross. In an article called Covert Operations, in The New Yorker Magazine, Jane Mayer, a staff-writer, describes how these two hard-line Libertarians, David and Charles Koch, have spent hundreds of millions to try and destroy the US Government, and challenge the Obama administration.
KOCH Industries Inc., this privately held corporation, a fortune built off Stalin's need for oil, and the second largest in the USA, is actively seeking to undermine the US Government by funding the Tea-Party. Paradoxically these oil billionaire hypocrites are using money granted them through US Government subsidies.
Among the various organizations the Koch Brothers fund are a complete infrastructure dedicated to manufacture public opinion for their ideology:
- The Cato Institute
- The Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia - which one Democratic strategist called "ground zero for deregulation policy in Washington." The founder of the Mercatus Center is Richard Fink, formerly an economist. Fink heads Koch Industries’ lobbying operation in Washington. The Wall Street Journal has called the Mercatus Center “the most important think tank you’ve never heard of,” and noted that fourteen of the twenty-three regulations that President George W. Bush placed on a “hit list” had been suggested first by Mercatus scholars.
- Citizens for a Sound Economy - which staged media events to oppose President Clinton's proposed BTU tax on energy
- Citizens for the Environment, which called many environmental problems, including acid rain, "myths."
- Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which has been linked to the Tea Party — training hundreds of activists in Texas and hosting talking points for Tea Party activists on its website.
- The Institute for Justice, which files lawsuits opposing state and federal regulations
- The Institute for Humane Studies - which underwrites libertarian academics.
- The Bill of Rights Institute - which promotes a conservative slant on the Constitution.
- The Independent Women’s Forum - which opposes the presentation of global warming as a scientific fact in American public schools.
- Americans for Prosperity Foundation - founded and run by Richard Fink
- Market-Based Management Institute - created by Charles Koch from his book called “The Science of Success,” Charles recommends instilling a company’s corporate culture with the competitiveness of the marketplace. Koch describes M.B.M. as a “holistic system” containing “five dimensions: vision, virtue and talents, knowledge processes, decision rights and incentives.”
- The Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment - a group funded by Koch family foundations.
- Citizens for a Sound Economy - seemed like a grassroots movement, but according to the Center for Public Integrity it was sponsored principally by the Kochs. Its mission, “was to take these heavy ideas and translate them for mass America. . . . We read the same literature Obama did about nonviolent revolutions—Saul Alinsky, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. We studied the idea of the Boston Tea Party as an example of nonviolent social change. We learned we needed boots on the ground to sell ideas, not candidates."
In 2004, Citizens for a Sound Economy was accused of illegitimately throwing its weight behind Bush’s reëlection. The group’s Oregon branch had attempted to get Ralph Nader on the Presidential ballot, in order to dilute Democratic support for John Kerry. Critics argued that it was illegal for a tax-exempt nonprofit organization to donate its services for partisan political purposes. (A complaint was filed with the Federal Election Commission; it was dismissed.) - Patients United Now - which organized more than three hundred rallies against health-care reform.
- The Freedom School, in Colorado Springs - Founded in 1956 around anarchist Robert LeFevre.
- Radicals for Capitalism - a book about eliminating all taxation and protecting only property rights.
"The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, is a multimedia exploration of the theory that mankind evolved in response to climate change. At the main entrance, viewers are confronted with a giant graph charting the Earth’s temperature over the past ten million years, which notes that it is far cooler now than it was ten thousand years ago. Overhead, the text reads, “HUMANS EVOLVED IN RESPONSE TO A CHANGING WORLD.” The message, as amplified by the exhibit’s Web site, is that “key human adaptations evolved in response to environmental instability.” Only at the end of the exhibit, under the headline “OUR SURVIVAL CHALLENGE,” is it noted that levels of carbon dioxide are higher now than they have ever been, and that they are projected to increase dramatically in the next century. No cause is given for this development; no mention is made of any possible role played by fossil fuels." Read more
Next, they'll be telling us our spines will evolve curves so that we can all live in underground cities when the world gets too hot.
