AN EXTREMELY WELL-FINANCED CIRCULAR FIRING SQUAD
I saw this at Mother Jones last night:
Last week, the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers held their latest get-together with wealthy conservative political donors.... Last September, Mother Jones obtained exclusive audio recordings from a Koch seminar held outside Vail, Colorado, where Charles Koch had declared that the 2012 election would be "the mother of all wars" ...
According to a Huffington Post source, 250 to 300 guests attended the most recent event, which was held in Palm Springs, California. They included Citadel CEO Ken Griffin and casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who along with his wife has given a staggering $10 million to a pro-Newt Gingrich super-PAC....
Former ThinkProgress.org blogger Lee Fang ... wasn't able to get inside [the Palm Springs event], but he did manage to identify several additional guests by scoping out their private jets at the Palm Springs International Airport. They included ... Foster Friess, a Wyoming investor who's helped keep Rick Santorum afloat by pumping $381,000 into two super-PACs supporting the candidate....
So these guys get together for the Koch confabs, pledge to spend millions of dollars in order to defeat Barack Obama ... and then go out and spent millions of dollars trying to beat up one another's candidates. Adelson is bankrolling Gingrich's super PAC; Friess is funding Santorum's. Ken Griffin, as we learn from the chart accompanying this New York Times article on super PACs, is funding Romney's (as, by the way, is William Koch, brother to Charles and David, who organize these gatherings; William has had legal disputes with his better-known brothers).
This right-wing wealth machine is formidable. We won't really have a democracy as long as such a thing can have the undue influence it has on our politics. I'm not sure our side can beat it -- the best we can hope is that it beats itself. And, given the ugly nature of the GOP primaries, which really should be effectively over by now but aren't, maybe that's precisely what's happening.
I'll be glad to give them the hatchets with which they can hack one another to pieces.
ReplyDeleteThanks for Citizens United, SCOTUS!
I hope the 5 judges who signed off on it get ugly and painful lesions and on their lips and asses from blowing their rich Overlords, and allowing them to have their way with them, while they bow obsequiously.
But, but, but....Soros!
ReplyDeleteSomewhat in line with the thesis that the right's internal contradictions are increasingly evident, I eee in today's headlines an actual criminal conviction for voter fraud. Unfortunately for the ACORN-haters, the convicted felon is none other than the Indiana elections poobah - yes, ladies & gents, a proud Republican elected in the TPotty year of 2010 who apparently committed the fraud out of that archetypical R motivation: personal financial greed.
ReplyDeleteHar. And har again.