New York Times: The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party: Rupert Murdoch.... 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...... given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy ...... the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. .... 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). ..... The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks ...... Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. ..... Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008 ...... free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll. ...... Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial ...... inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda ....... the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller. ...... t 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” ...... 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. ..... Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League
The New Yorker: Covert Operations
