The Koch Brothers and Darrell Issa. Trying to list all the beneficiaries of the Kochs and their rich friends would be a daunting task.
Suffice it to say, they are the wallet for just about every right wing cause you can think of — from tea party candidates and ballot measures like California’s pro-pollution Prop 23, to right wing think tanks like the Cato Institute and astro-turf front groups like Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity. One of the country’s worst polluters — with business interests in everything from healthcare to the derivatives trading that helped push our economy off a cliff, the Koch brothers have spread hundreds of millions of dollars to protect their narrow ideological and financial interests over the years -- ensuring that the agenda of billionaires is inserted at every level of our government and political discourse, and often at the expense of the middle class.
No one has worked harder to kill Wall Street Reform, Healthcare Reform, or Energy Reform than the Kochs. Rep. Darrell E. The billionaire Koch brothers’ war against Obama. On May 17th, a black-tie audience at the Metropolitan Opera House applauded as a tall, jovial-looking billionaire took the stage.
It was the seventieth annual spring gala of American Ballet Theatre, and David H. Koch was being celebrated for his generosity as a member of the board of trustees; he had recently donated $2.5 million toward the company’s upcoming season, and had given many millions before that. Koch received an award while flanked by two of the gala’s co-chairs, Blaine Trump, in a peach-colored gown, and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, in emerald green. Kennedy’s mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, had been a patron of the ballet and, coincidentally, the previous owner of a Fifth Avenue apartment that Koch had bought, in 1995, and then sold, eleven years later, for thirty-two million dollars, having found it too small. The gala marked the social ascent of Koch, who, at the age of seventy, has become one of the city’s most prominent philanthropists. What's GOP Lawyers Group Up To?
The RNLA is the leading independent entity on the right devoted to preparing Republican attorneys for election day and post-election lawyering.
But it's also part of the right wing's bogus voter fraud noise machine, whipping up hysteria over the idea that elections are being stolen because of alleged but unproven monkeying with minority votes. For instance, last year RNLA paid a DC lawyer named Chris Berg tens of thousands of dollars for "research and investigation" and launched a program called "ACORN Watch. " Berg, who did a series of blog posts for the RNLA blog on ACORN, also posts on Andrew Breitbart's Big Government website, whose doctored footage of the ACORN sting launched the "scandal. " One of the speakers at RNLA events is J. Christian Adams, the apparatchik from the Bush Justice Department who has tried to turn the Obama Justice Department's handling of voter intimidation charges against the New Black Panthers into a cause celebre among conservatives, with some success.