The right is always better organized than the left. There always seems to be the shady moneybags, standing anonymously behind the astute political director who guides the outrage and feeds the talking points to the mob with impressively coordinated precision. This is no more democracy than the “blue” and “green” riots in Roman days constituted democracy. It is carefully directed, carefully orchestrated, and usually serves the interests of the ruling class.
In the Clinton years, we had Richard Mellon Scaife providing the money and Roger Ailes and Drudge calling the shots. Today, the new moneybags are some of the most sinister people you have never heard of – billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, who preside over a $35 billion fortune, exceeded only by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in the United States. The brothers are old-school industrialists from an old-school industry (oil and lots of it) with decidedly old-school views about economics. They are wedded to a pre-New Deal liberalism and support lower taxes on the wealthy, minimal social services, and less oversight of industry, especially environmental protection. And they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting their pet political causes, and fun the shady psuedo-grassroots outfits that form the backbone of tea party ideology (such as Americans for Prosperity). But while Soros is a media hound and fully transparent, very few have heard of the Kochs and what they are doing. And unlike Soros, their activities all seem geared to making Koch Industries even more profitable and wealthy.
The Kochs feel especially nervous about climate change, fully cognizant that theirs is an industry of the past, and future profits will come from a different source. Hence they have become, as Greenpeace puts it, the “kingpin of climate science denial”. The goal is to raise so much doubt over climate science that support for mitigating measure will fall. Hence all the ink and airtime devoted to the nonsensical “Climategate” non-scandal. They’ve done this before – one of their outfits was calling acid rain a myth back in 1990. And Koch Industries has been fighting tooth-and-nail to prevent the EPA from classifying formaldehyde (which they make in great quantities) as a carcinogen, while David Koch (probably on the basis of his large charitable donations) sits on the National Cancer Advisory Board.
There is a particular reason they hate the Obama administration – they remember the Clinton administration, which took a tough stance with big polluters like Koch Industries. Back then, the Justice Department filed two lawsuits against Koch Industries in connection with 300 oil spills. They paid a record $30 million fine. In 1999, Koch Industries was found guilty of negligence when two teenagers were killed in an explosion. And in the final Clinton months, the Justice Department indicted the company for covering up the leak of carcinogens from one of its refineries. But when the Bush administration arrived, the good times were back for the Kochs. They received friendship and huge subsidies and tax breaks, thanks to Dick Cheney’s backroom deals. They benefitted from about $100 million in government contracts since 2000. Not bad at all.
And now the Kochs are the brain trust behind Americans for Prosperity – which supports low taxes, low regulation, and low social safety nets – and Patients United Now, which whipped up some of the most frenzied protests against health care reform. Not surprisingly, Americans for Prosperity has a particular loathing for cap-and-trade legislation. As well as obfuscation on the facts, they adopted another tried-and-trusted technique on the right – make it personal (in this case, against Van Jones, Obama’s “green jobs” tsar).
Why should we care about this? We should care because democracy is being subverted, and because the wealth of incredibly wealthy industrialists is being used to nudge policy in a direction that benefits them personally. The Church has criticized this concentration of power, with the laissez-faire liberalism that facilitates it, since at least the time of Pope Leo XIII. It subverts solidarity, it subverts subsidiarity, it subverts justice. It’s time to reclaim our moral voice in the economic sphere.
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