“I’ve never met either of the Koch brothers, I suspect that like most libertarians, they’d rather avoid the unseemly world of politics as often as possible, where winning generally means forcing other people to bend to your will. (David Koch did run for Vice President on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1980, but on a platform of legalizing drugs and prostitution, and abolishing the FBI and CIA.) They seem more interested in contributing to voluntary, civil society, by promoting ideas … the arts, research, and by fighting particularly pernicious laws like the PATRIOT Act…”
—Radley Balko, “The Koch Brothers’ Right-Wing Conspiracy to Undermine the PATRIOT Act,” Feb. 25, 2011
If the Kochs are so anti-interventionist, then why does a 2005 State Department cable show Charles Koch’s premier libertarian think-tank meddling in the former Soviet Union and circle-jerking with one of the most notorious CIA/State Department front-groups for the American Empire?
The cable is brief, but revealing: Titled “Tajikistan: Freedom House In Strategic Retreat,” the communique was sent from the U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, on November 9, 2005, and notified the folks back home that Freedom House, an infamous CIA/State Department outfit that had been tasked with funding pro-Western opposition movements and seeding regime change across the former Soviet Union, was being booted out of Tajikistan and had no choice but to abandon the NGO front group it had set up in the country. But luckily all was not lost. As the cable explained, the Institute of Humane Studies, a libertarian recruitment and educational organization controlled by Charles Koch since the early 1960s, had come to the rescue, and was ready and willing take over running and funding the Tajik NGO directly.
It would seem the Kochs have been more involved in meddling in the internal affairs of other countries than they and their lackeys lead on… (more…)
Thanks to Pope’s investments into ideas, North Carolina’s politics have been transformed from the mind up, from ideas generated in universities, to the level of public politics and policy. It’s sort of like global warming: With climate change, some species will thrive in the altered environment (jellyfish and algae, for example) and some will die out (polar bears, coral reef).
Here is the private letter from Charles Koch to Nobel Prize economist Friedrich Hayek, godfather of today’s free-market movement. The letter was obtained by Yasha Levine from the Hayek Archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. It is part…
Slate’s David Weigel is one of the few libertarian media figures who at least has had the courtesy to disclose, on occasion, his past relationships with Koch-funded outfits (Institute for Humane Studies, Reason Magazine…). But half-disclosures can be deceiving. The…
Urgent update, folks! Andrew Breitbart’s Koch-monkey, Joel B. Pollak, just outdid himself as the top ace gumshoe reporter of the retarded-right. Yes folks, Joel. B. Pollak, peddler of the “Johnny Chen Conspiracy Theory” that changed the face of journalism as we know it, now has another shocking scoop about eXiled editor Mark Ames–and to get the scoop, he even used what hi-tech futuristic types call a “proxy.”
Welp folks, I’m now a Made Man in the depraved and hilarious world of American Pop Culture–the only World that really matters in this country. Andrew Breitbart, the Brentwood-born West Hollywood princeling, has officially anointed me “Important Enough To Hate.”…
Last month, the New York Times magazine published a fluffer-friendly profile of James O’Keefe, the rightwing activist who specializes in bashing the poor and the vulnerable with a series of “pranks” against organizations like Medicaid and ACORN. One of the…
Khloe Kardashian, Donna D’Errico of Baywatch, former Miss USA Susie Castillo, Playboy nude-model Tammy Banovac, Jesse Ventura and Alex Jones: to most Americans, a list of names like that sounds like the punch-line to an elaborate pop culture comedy routine….
This anti-TSA protester coming straight outta Waco! On Saturday June 4, a dozen or so anti-TSA protesters marched on the Texas State Capitol, demanding that state legislators and Governor Rick Perry stand up to the federal government and pass a bill…
Does anyone here in this house speak goldbug-babble? Anyone who can make sense of Dr. Paul’s logic in the clip below, I’m curious what the fuck this man is trying to hawk to his 1988 C-SPAN viewers. I mean I…
Data pulled from publicly-accessible federal contract databases shows that over the past 15 years, the Kochs have milked the U.S. war machine for about $170 million, all while funding libertarian groups, organizations and media outfits with anti-war positions.
It’s been sort of strange watching America’s sudden, belated discovery of the billionaire Koch brothers, and the shock realization about just how much they’ve been manipulating and managing–and ruining–our country and our lives. It’s been a long time coming. As…
Charles Koch—Moms, keep him away from your kids! It’s official: the Kochs pay social media PR companies to troll the Internet on their behalf. According to Lee Fang over at ThinkProgress, an internal Wikipedia investigation revealed that a number of…
