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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.
The billionaire Koch brothers’ war against Obama : The New Yorker
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? | Talking Points Memo
When Richard DeVos, the Michigan billionaire who founded Amway and is a generous contributor to Republican causes, gives $150,000 to the Republican National Lawyers Association just a few weeks before the midterm elections, it makes you sit up and take notice. In the realm of political giving, $150,000 isn’t that much money, but the RNLA doesn’t buy TV ads, it has barely a handful of full-time staffers, and its overall budget is relatively modest. So what does the RNLA do and what did DeVos figure he’d be supporting with that money? The RNLA is the leading independent entity on the right devoted to preparing Republican attorneys for election day and post-election lawyering.