Koch Crimes and Tea Party Chumps

We got a preview of how damaging an upcoming Bloomberg Markets magazine story on the Koch brothers would be last week. Salon's Justin Elliott reported that "an anonymous person or persons in the orbit of the billionaire conservative donors Charles and David Koch try to discredit a forthcoming story in Bloomberg Markets magazine."

"Based on the prebuttal items appearing this week in the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller, and U.S. News and World Report," he continued, "the Bloomberg story focuses on alleged malfeasance and/or fraud and/or bad behavior by the conglomerate Koch Industries."

That's right, prebuttals. They want to discredit the story before it ever even hits the newsstands. But this weekend, Bloomberg put up what Politico calls an "early glance" of the article up on their website and what's there is explosive. And detailed.

There's plenty there; illicit business dealings with Iran, bribery in Africa, India, and the Middle East, firing the company's internal investigators for not turning blind eyes to obvious wrongdoing ("They didn't know what to do with me," says one. "They were really kind of baffled that I had ethics"), and general corporate culture of lawlessness and corruption. If you want an idea of what the perfect corporate climate would be for the Koch brothers and the Tea Party, look no further. Just imagine nearly everything they're already doing, only made legal.

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Celebrities For Prosperity: Sarah, Andy, and the Professional Protest Crew Put on a Big Show

Check out this video from the big Tea Party "rally" in Madison this weekend, where a group of rightwing celebrities -- headlined by Sarah Palin -- parachuted in from out of state to take Wisconsin back from... well, Wisconsinites, I guess.

Ah, the sweet smell of astroturf.



As you can see, things didn't go quite according to plan. If you check mainstream media, however, you learn it was a tremendous success. Which doesn't explain why Andrew Breitbart -- after complaining about the lack of civility -- told the booing crowd to "go to hell."

Almost nothing about this rally was real. The only thing grassroots about this was the boisterous counter-protest. The stage, the PA, that big plasma screen monitor for the people in the back, even the crowd, were all paid for by Americans For Prosperity, a Koch-funded front group.

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Auction House Democracy

You've probably heard the name, now meet the Koch Brothers, as introduced by Jane Mayer on NPR's Fresh Air (Video courtesy of Crooks and Liars):



OK, so a couple of rightwing nutjobs are giving money to the GOP -- who else would these days? There are two possible intentions in giving a political donation and it always pays to keep this in mind. People will give to candidates or parties because they agree with them, which only makes sense. If candidate Bob believes what you believe, you're going to want him to win. So you're going to do what you can to help him.

The other intention is as a legal bribe. If candidate Bob is sort of squishy on your issues, then maybe a big campaign contribution will give him an incentive to be a little more solidly on your side. Where the first intention is the political system as it was meant to operate, the second is corruption -- and there's a very fine line between the two. Unfortunately, both are legal. Which only makes sense, since it would be nearly impossible to distinguish between the two with any level of certainty.

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