Koch bros fund the Tea Partys? Is this supposed to be news?

From The New Yorker,  CNN via C&L, another shot at showing people that the teabaggers are bought and paid for by the Koch Brothers who have given more than a hundred million dollars to right-wing causes.:

http://embed.crooksandliars.com/v/MTgxMTctMzk3OTQ?color=C93033

CNN has finally, even belatedly, with the publication of Jane Mayer’s background piece in The New Yorker (COVERT OPERATIONS: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama) begun to acknowledge that the so-called “grassroots” Tea Party has some powerful and extremely wealthy backers (or as Matt Kibbe puts it, “patrons”).

Now, as a background piece, a 7-minute interview on weekend CNN isn’t going to be highly informative, and this is not Rachel Maddow or 60 Minutes. But it’s still worthwhile getting out there who really pulls the strings in American politics and who are the willing dupes. The Kochs will spend $45 million for the coming midterms alone, funneling the cash through such organizations as Americans for Prosperity. They have also given the Republican Governor’s Association (RGA) another million, joining FOX News in that dubious distinction. In short, they are the ultimate power players within Republican ranks.

Read the Jane Mayer 10-page article online here.

That name, Koch,  should be on the lips of every liberal when discussing the astroturfing assholes known as Tea Partiers. The Koch’s are evil incarnate and a big part of the whole founding members of the rightwing nutter university group.  They buy everyone and everything in their path and with nuts like Dick Armey, these fuckers can pull it off.

Billionaire brothers spend millions to stop ‘the liberal agenda’.

These men rape the earth and make billions doing it. Their father founded the John Birch Society. I don’t give a tinker’s damn how much they give to the Smithsonian or any other non-profit, non-political organization, they are pond scum because they lie to the public at large and they finance the extreme rightwing nutter factory. From The Progress Report:

Billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch are the wealthiest, and perhaps most effective, opponents of President Obama’s progressive agenda. They have been looming in the background of every major domestic policy dispute this year. Ranked as the 9th richest men in America, the Koch brothers sit at the helm of Koch Industries, a massive privately owned conglomerate of manufacturing, oil, gas, and timber interests. They are best known for their wealth, as well as for their generous contributions to the arts, cancer research, and the Smithsonian Institute. But David and Charles are also responsible for a vicious attack campaign aimed directly at obstructing and killing progressive reform. Over the years, millions of dollars in Koch money has flowed to various right-wing think tanks, front groups, and publications. At the dawn of the Obama presidency, Koch groups quickly maneuvered to try to stop his first piece of signature legislation: the stimulus. The Koch-funded group “No Stimulus” launched television and radio ads deriding the recovery package as simply “pork” spending. The Cato Institute — founded by Charles — as well as other Koch-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, produced a blizzard of reports distorting the stimulus and calling for a return to Bush-style tax cuts to combat the recession. As their fronts were battling the stimulus, David’s Americans for Prosperity (AFP) spent the opening months of the Obama presidency placing calls and helping to organize the very first “tea party” protests. AFP, founded in 1984 by David and managed day to day by the astroturf lobbyist Tim Phillips, has spent much of the year mobilizing “tea party” opposition to health reform, clean energy legislation, and financial regulations.

STOPPING CLEAN ENERGY: David Koch presents himself as a champion of science. Next year, because of his donations, a wing of the Smithsonian will be named after him. Nevertheless, Koch has done more to undermine the public’s understanding of climate change science than any other person in America. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, funded in part by Koch foundations, has waged an underhanded campaignHot Air” tour, a nationwide roadshow using a balloon to depict climate change science as “hot air.” Despite the brothers’ extravagant wealth, Koch’s Americans for Prosperity has run populist ads mocking environmentalists as spoiled brats more concerned about their “three homes and five cars” than about economic conditions. In addition to its efforts to misinform the public, Koch Industries has spent nearly $9 million dollarsattempting to crash to falsely charge that a set of hacked e-mails somehow unravels the scientific consensus that global warming is occurring. Koch finances the ” so far on direct lobbying, much of it on climate change legislation. With a team of Koch-funded operatives going as far as the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this week, the brothers may succeed in scuttling any prospect for addressing climate change.

STOPPING HEALTH REFORM: Much of the fierce opposition to health reform can be credited to Koch organizations. As the health care debate began, AFP created a front group, known as “Patients United,” dedicated itself to attacking Democratic health care reform proposals. Patients United has blanketed the country with ads distorting various provisions of the health reform legislation, particularly the public option. Patients United even centered a media campaign around Shona Robertson-Holmes, claiming she had a brain tumor the Canadian system refused to treat. However, the Ottawa Citizen reported that Patients United has been exaggerating Holmes’ case, and that she in fact had a benign cyst. In their quest to block health care reform, Koch-funded groups have fostered extremism. A speaker with the roving Patients United bus tour repeatedly compared health reform to the Holocaust while an eight-by-five foot banner at an AFP health care rally with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) read, “National Socialist Health Care: Dachau, Germany” superimposed over corpses from a concentration camp. Although many were surprised at the level of anger AFP channeled into Democratic healthcare town halls in August, it wasn’t the first time Koch groups have helped to hijack the health reform debate. Back in 1994, Americans for Prosperity, then known as Citizens for a Sound Economy, worked closely with then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich to bring mobs of angry men to health reform rallies with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.

A LONG HISTORY OF STOPPING PROGRESS: The Koch brothers clearly have a financial stake in blocking reform. Koch Industry oil refineries are major carbon dioxide polluters, and George-Pacific, a Koch Industries timber subsidiary, is one of the largest contributors to the loss of carbon-sink capacity. According to the EPA, Koch Industries is responsible for over 300 oil spills in the U.S. and has leaked three million gallons of crude oil into fisheries and drinking waters. So there are clear business-related reasons why Koch would want to block regulatory enforcement, clean energy, labor, and other reforms. But part of their opposition stems from a long family tradition of funding conservative movements to shift the country to the far right. Fred Koch, father of Charles and David and the company’s namesake, helped to found the John Birch Society in the late 1950s. The John Birch Society harnessed Cold War fears into hate against progressives, warning that President Kennedy, Civil Rights activists, and organized labor were in league with communists. By presenting progressive reform as a capitulation to the Soviet Union, Fred Koch and the other industrialists bankrolling the Birch Society were able to galvanize hundreds of thousands of middle class people into supporting their narrow agenda of cutting corporate taxes and avoiding consumer regulations.

Rich irony alert: Obama is not a liberal, you douche nozzles. Anything that makes America better, for the people, is viewed as a liberal agenda by these uber rich racists, environmental rapists and haters. Their agenda is to maintain the status quo for the Corporatocracy..it’s as simple and horrific as that.