The Koch Brothers...
johnny_t
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer
The billionaire Koch brothers’ war against Obama : The New Yorker
David H. Koch in 1996. He and his brother Charles are lifelong
libertarians and have quietly given more than a hundred million dollars
to right-wing causes.
On May 17th, a black-tie audience at the Metropolitan Opera House
applauded as a tall, jovial-looking billionaire took the stage. It was
the seventieth annual spring gala of American Ballet Theatre, and David
H. Koch was being celebrated for his generosity as a member of the board
of trustees; he had recently donated $2.5 million toward the company’s
upcoming season, and had given many millions before that. Koch received
an award while flanked by two of the gala’s co-chairs, Blaine Trump, in
a peach-colored gown, and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, in emerald
green. Kennedy’s mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, had been a patron
of the ballet and, coincidentally, the previous owner of a Fifth Avenue
apartment that Koch had bought, in 1995, and then sold, eleven years
later, for thirty-two million dollars, having found it too small.
The gala marked the social ascent of Koch, who, at the age of seventy,
has become one of the city’s most prominent philanthropists. In 2008, he
donated a hundred million dollars to modernize Lincoln Center’s New York
State Theatre building, which now bears his name. He has given twenty
million to the American Museum of Natural History, whose dinosaur wing
is named for him. This spring, after noticing the decrepit state of the
fountains outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Koch pledged at least
ten million dollars for their renovation. He is a trustee of the museum,
perhaps the most coveted social prize in the city, and serves on the
board of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where, after he donated
more than forty million dollars, an endowed chair and a research center
were named for him.
One dignitary was conspicuously absent from the gala: the event’s third
honorary co-chair, Michelle Obama. Her office said that a scheduling
conflict had prevented her from attending. Yet had the First Lady shared
the stage with Koch it might have created an awkward tableau. In
Washington, Koch is best known as part of a family that has repeatedly
funded stealth attacks on the federal government, and on the Obama
Administration in particular.
With his brother Charles, who is seventy-four, David Koch owns virtually
all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate, headquartered in Wichita,
Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion
dollars. The company has grown spectacularly since their father, Fred,
died, in 1967, and the brothers took charge. The Kochs operate oil
refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four
thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels,
Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among
other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in
the country, after Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made
David and Charles Koch—who, years ago, bought out two other
brothers—among the richest men in America. Their combined fortune of
thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and
Warren Buffett.
The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower
personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and
much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation.
These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study
released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s
Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the
top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a
report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.”
The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid
ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related
to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think
tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded
opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from
health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political
circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.
In a statement, Koch Industries said that the Greenpeace report
“distorts the environmental record of our companies.” And David Koch, in
a recent, admiring article about him in New York, protested that the
“radical press” had turned his family into “whipping boys,” and had
exaggerated its influence on American politics. But Charles Lewis, the
founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog
group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one
else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what
sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political
manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate,
and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our
times.”
A few weeks after the Lincoln Center gala, the advocacy wing of the
Americans for Prosperity Foundation—an organization that David Koch
started, in 2004—held a different kind of gathering. Over the July 4th
weekend, a summit called Texas Defending the American Dream took place
in a chilly hotel ballroom in Austin. Though Koch freely promotes his
philanthropic ventures, he did not attend the summit, and his name was
not in evidence. And on this occasion the audience was roused not by a
dance performance but by a series of speakers denouncing President
Barack Obama. Peggy Venable, the organizer of the summit, warned that
Administration officials “have a socialist vision for this country.”
Five hundred people attended the summit, which served, in part, as a
training session for Tea Party activists in Texas. An advertisement cast
the event as a populist uprising against vested corporate power. “Today,
the voices of average Americans are being drowned out by lobbyists and
special interests,” it said. “But you can do something about it.” The
pitch made no mention of its corporate funders. The White House has
expressed frustration that such sponsors have largely eluded public
notice. David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser, said, “What they don’t
say is that, in part, this is a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to
you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”
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If she circumcised her first child and he died
and a second one also died
she must not circumcise her third child
Babylonian Talmud
Rabbi Judah haNasi, redactor of the Mishneh