Monday, August 23, 2010

Billionaire Attack On Obama

Obama seems to be doing a pretty good job of staying away from the media during his vacation. But fear not! The media have filled the void with nothing but hate stories, mostly from the mosqueteers (as Jon Stewart calls them).
Anyway, here's a story in the New Yorker about a couple of billionaire libertarians and their war on Obama. It's tough out there for a billionaire:
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. Read the whole thing at the New Yorker