Leftie attacks Koch brothers

At the forefront of the movement [to 'out' the Koch Brothers as the bankers of the Tea Party] is the unlikely figure of Hollywood director Robert Greenwald, 65, who brought the world the Olivia Newton-John dance movie Xanadu. Greenwald reinvented himself as a leftwing documentary maker, and has his focus on the Koch brothers. His Brave New Foundation group organised the Lincoln Centre film show.

"The least we can do is ring their doorbell. What they are doing is hurting people's lives. Ideology has consequences."



Their money helped start Americans For Prosperity, a Tea Party-linked organisation that has campaigned vociferously against Barack Obama's healthcare reforms. It admitted helping to organise anti-union moves by the controversial Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, which led to some of the largest protests in recent American history.

The supposed grassroots movement is not that, at all, but an elite-financed political opposition movement aimed at undercutting the working and middle classes for the benefit of the wealthy, ironically using to disaffected working and middle class individuals by appealingto their fears and hates.

The Kochs have also given millions to thinktanks and groups that fight environmental legislation, especially to oppose the scientific consensus on global warming and try to lift regulations on air pollution and potentially dangerous chemicals. They believe in drastically cutting the role of government and slashing benefits such as social security.

And Larry Kudlow and his ilk support the ideology, wrapping it in the mantle of Reaganism, a failed set of political and economic tenets that remain as an ideological lair of the right wing.

The Kochs share the Tea Party view that Obama is a threat to the American way of life. Last week David Koch made a rare comment to a reporter from New York magazine, calling Obama "a hardcore socialist". "He's marvellous at pretending to be something other than that, but that is what I believe he truly is, a hardcore socialist. He's scary to me," he added.

Obama is the same sort of socialist as FDR: a conservative liberal seeking to change capitalism only gradually and in a very limited way, to smooth out a few rough edges.


There is nothing illegal about the Kochs' political activities. Greenwald concedes they have every right to fund whatever organisations they like.

Especially not with the assent of the Roberts Supreme Court.


Some groups have said however that their business practices are sometimes the opposite of their public campaigns. A non-partisan Washington watchdog group, the Centre for Public Integrity, reported last month that Koch Industries' ethanol business enjoys high incomes thanks to government subsidies, despite their disapproval of such policies. Equally, while they oppose a cap-and-trade system in the US to control carbon emissions, the trading arm of Koch Industries makes millions in Europe from such a system.

So much for ideological purity.