The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party
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by Frank Rich / New York Times OP-ED
August 28, 2010
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by Frank Rich / New York Times OP-ED
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 the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the
scene shifted to Washington, 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.
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 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. 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. 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 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. 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,
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. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld
the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they
have been Koch grantees. 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 — 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, 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. 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”; 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 whose foundation might
contribute to the Islamic center. But as “The Daily Show” keeps pointing out,
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) 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
denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”
And Obama? So far, sadly, this
question answers itself.
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© NY Times, August 28, 2010
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© NY Times, August 28, 2010
