Who Is Buying Elections?

In an earlier post today I showed you what libertarian, political insider, the notorious Roger Stone had to say about the Ryan pick.  He asserts that the Koch Brothers bought Ryan’s spot on the ticket by promising $100 million in super PAC ads to bash Obama.

Who are these billionaire libertarians who are going around and buying elections, and do they sometimes work through intermediaries in order to keep their names out of the spotlight?

Meet the Koch Brothers.

The Koch brothers have vaulted into the American political spotlight in recent years. Koch Industries has spent more than $50 million to lobby in Washington since 2006, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks political donations. The company opposed derivatives regulation and greenhouse gas limits.

The brothers have backed a foundation that has trained thousands of Tea Party activists. The Tea Party, a popular movement whose name stands for Taxed Enough Already, has grown into a potent force in national politics. Sixty representatives of Congress, out of a total of 435, identify themselves as Tea Party members. Virtually every Republican candidate for president — including Texas Governor Rick Perry and Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann — has solicited the group’s support. [veteranstoday]

Billionaire philanthropist David Koch is in his Madison Avenue office showing me one of his more unusual possessions, a mechanical-looking doodad on the coffee table next to the couch. “This is a plastic version of my artificial knees,” he says. “If you spent as many years as I did begging girls for favors, you’d have bad knees, too.” The 70-year-old Koch actually wore out his knees playing basketball. Until recently, he held the record for most points scored in a single game at M.I.T.: 41. “I played basketball when you could be white and be good,” he says.

Fred Koch, [David's father] a native of North Texas and son of a Dutch immigrant, liked to say that he didn’t want his sons “to turn into country-club bums.” Fred graduated from M.I.T. in 1922 with a degree in chemical engineering and, like David, excelled in sports, in Fred’s case as a boxer.

Koch became a founding member of the John Birch Society. “Father was paranoid about communism, let’s put it that way,” says David.

In some ways, David Koch’s political views resemble those of the wealthy crowd with whom he socializes in New York. He thought the Iraq War was folly, and supports stem-cell research and gay marriage. In other ways, David is very much his father’s son. Shortly after joining his father’s company, David’s brother Charles began immersing himself in the economic philosophy of the Austrian free-market economist Ludwig von Mises, considered a god in libertarian circles.

David and Charles both actively support Republican causes. Charles founded the conservative think tank the Cato Institute.

Koch concedes that he sympathizes with the tea party…Koch’s critics, however, say he’s being coy about his tea-party connections….“He’ll put his name on his theater at Lincoln Center, but look at the Americans for Prosperity website and his name is virtually missing. All of his groups have used these same tea-party tactics before they actually had the tea-party brand.” Americans for Prosperity, AFPF’s political arm, has certainly not shied away from joining arms with the tea party. In April of last year, AFP took credit on its website for helping to organize Taxpayer Tea Party rallies in Sacramento, Austin, and Madison, and told visitors to “save the date” for National Tea Party Tax Day in Washington, which AFP would be hosting. [New York Magazine]

[Paul Ryan's] campaign finance record is not without some minor controversy. To begin with, he has long been a favorite of the libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch. Before entering Congress, Ryan worked with a conservative group that would eventually merge with a Koch brothers’ group to become FreedomWorks, a leading sponsor of the Tea Party movement. Their mutual interests in libertarianism could explain why the private energy corporation Koch Industries has given Ryan more than $65,000 over his career. The Koch brothers have promised to funnel $400 million through outside groups to defeat President Obama this year. [US News]

The reactionary Koch brothers, along with Tea Party advocates and gloves-off free-market capitalists have used the Citizens United decision to pressure Romney into selecting Ryan as his running mate. The Koch brothers are staunch supporters of Ryan; in fact, they have been among the largest contributors to Ryan over his entire political career. 

Ryan’s mission is likely to fulfill papa Fred Koch’s vision to restore America to its former glory days as a white Christian nation ruled by a plutocratic moneyed elite. The elder Koch was the founder of the notorious John Birch Society (“Diamond,” Sara (1995). NY: Guilford Press. p. 324. ISBN 0-89862-862-8). As the progenitor of the Koch family, the elder Koch candidly and unabashedly wrote, “the colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” and “welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment a vicious race war”). [TruthOut]

For if David Koch is nothing else, he is most definitely a member of “the 1 percent” — the top tier of income-earners in the United States, as is his brother, Charles.

Together, the pair have used their wealth not merely to assure its continuance, but to advance an ideology designed to secure the dominance of American politics and, indeed, the control of global capital, by themselves and a very few similarly endowed individuals.[Alternet]

When I grew up, the John Birch Society were the crazies — heirs to McCarthy, finding communism in any government program, seeing the Civil Rights Movement as just another arm of the communist party.  They were crazy enough to be repudiated by William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater.

The 2012 Republican Party is barely distinguishable from the John Birch Society.  It is funded in large part by the Koch brothers, the heirs of Fred Koch, one of the Birch Society’s founding members.  The Kochs may not be members of the Society, but their ideas — extreme  laissez-faire capitalism with communism lurking in any regulation, unions, health care and even Civil Rights laws — are virtually the same. (One of the current right’s few attempts to avoid looking like Birchers is morphing communism into “socialism.” No need to explain to the faithful that they’re really the same.) [Daily KOS]

You will note that many of the sites linked above are left wing leaning or liberal leaning publications.  But that doesn’t mean their facts are wrong.

The left is opposed to the influence of the Koch brothers because they are opposed to continuing the New Deal policies which threaten their world view.

However, what you should glean from the above is that there is a battle for political control and it is being fought with private money from a very few, very wealthy individuals.

That fact should be of some concern.  Why?  Because history is very clear: it would be the rare person who would be both wealthy enough to buy elections, and at the same time, humble enough to do it for the sake of the rest of us.