Şi ideile muncesc la patron

David H. Koch, un patron de idei

Ştiu că nu este subiect de duminică, dar marşul ălora de la "Tea Party" are o bătaie mai lungă. Şi cum americanii au încă jurnalişti, nu labe triste, pupincurişti şi fătuci cu microfon, aceştia au săpat să afle ce se ascunde în spatele acestei campanii, care sigur nu serveşte interesele dobitocilor care ţopăiau şi strigau în Washington. Deşi cei mai mulţi dintre manifestanţi ar crapa de foame dacă n-ar fi bonurile de alimente împărţite de guvernul federal şi de cele statale, de diverse organizaţii caritabile, biserici, etc., ei susţin vederile libertariene ale unor multi-miliardari, cum arată un articol extrem de bine documentat din The New Yorker. Este vorba despre fraţii Koch, cărora li se adaugă magnatul media Robert Murdoch.

S-o luăm pe scurtătură: după ce şi-au cumpărat politicieni, băieţii ăştia cu foarte mulţi bani vor să-şi cumpere şi o societate civilă. Şi cred că, dacă plătesc preţul "corect", vor putea să-şi promoveze agenda privată prin intermediul unei mişcări de mase, mai mult, s-o exporte şi în alte ţări. Deja decervelaţii ăia de la Tea Partx au admiratori în România. Ceea ce dovedeşte că, în materie de manipulare, comuniştii au fost nişte tâmpiţi! 

Sigur, faptul că averea familiei are legături cu URSS şi cu Stalin este un simplu amănunt: "The fiercely capitalist Koch family owes part of its fortune to Joseph Stalin. Fred Koch was the son of a Dutch printer who settled in Texas and ran a weekly newspaper. Fred attended M.I.T., where he earned a degree in chemical engineering. In 1927, he invented a more efficient process for converting oil into gasoline, but, according to family lore, America’s major oil companies regarded him as a threat and shut him out of the industry. Unable to succeed at home, Koch found work in the Soviet Union. In the nineteen-thirties, his company trained Bolshevik engineers and helped Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries. Over time, however, Stalin brutally purged several of Koch’s Soviet colleagues. Koch was deeply affected by the experience, and regretted his collaboration."

Asta e şi mai mişto: "In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover. Members considered President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Communist agent. In a self-published broadside, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties.” He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” he warned. Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech that prefigures the Tea Party’s talk of a secret socialist plot, Koch predicted that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”

În 1980 unul dintre fraţii Koch, David, a participat la campania electorală pentru Casa Albă, pe platforma Partidului Libertarian. "The Libertarian Party platform called for the abolition of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., as well as of federal regulatory agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Energy. The Party wanted to end Social Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control, and all personal and corporate income taxes; it proposed the legalization of prostitution, recreational drugs, and suicide. Government should be reduced to only one function: the protection of individual rights. William F. Buckley, Jr., a more traditional conservative, called the movement “Anarcho-Totalitarianism.”

De la experienţa din 1980, când au primit doar 1% din voturi, cei doi au început să urască partidele politice. "That November, the Libertarian ticket received only one per cent of the vote. The brothers realized that their brand of politics didn’t sell at the ballot box. Charles Koch became openly scornful of conventional politics. “It tends to be a nasty, corrupting business,” he told a reporter at the time. “I’m interested in advancing libertarian ideas.” According to Doherty’s book, the Kochs came to regard elected politicians as merely “actors playing out a script.” A longtime confidant of the Kochs told Doherty that the brothers wanted to “supply the themes and words for the scripts.” In order to alter the direction of America, they had to “influence the areas where policy ideas percolate from: academia and think tanks.

After the 1980 election, Charles and David Koch receded from the public arena. But they poured more than a hundred million dollars into dozens of seemingly independent organizations. Tax records indicate that in 2008 the three main Koch family foundations gave money to thirty-four political and policy organizations, three of which they founded, and several of which they direct. The Kochs and their company have given additional millions to political campaigns, advocacy groups, and lobbyists. The family’s subterranean financial role has fuelled suspicion on the left; Lee Fang, of the liberal blog ThinkProgress, has called the Kochs “the billionaires behind the hate.”

"The Kochs’ subsidization of a pro-corporate movement fulfills, in many ways, the vision laid out in a secret 1971 memo that Lewis Powell, then a Virginia attorney, wrote two months before he was nominated to the Supreme Court. The antiwar movement had turned its anger on defense contractors, such as Dow Chemical, and Ralph Nader was leading a public-interest crusade against corporations. Powell, writing a report for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urged American companies to fight back. The greatest threat to free enterprise, he warned, was not Communism or the New Left but, rather, “respectable elements of society”—intellectuals, journalists, and scientists. To defeat them, he wrote, business leaders needed to wage a long-term, unified campaign to change public opinion.

Charles Koch seems to have approached both business and politics with the deliberation of an engineer. “To bring about social change,” he told Doherty, requires “a strategy” that is “vertically and horizontally integrated,” spanning “from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action.” The project, he admitted, was extremely ambitious. “We have a radical philosophy,” he said.

In 1977, the Kochs provided the funds to launch the nation’s first libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute. According to the Center for Public Integrity, between 1986 and 1993 the Koch family gave eleven million dollars to the institute. Today, Cato has more than a hundred full-time employees, and its experts and policy papers are widely quoted and respected by the mainstream media. It describes itself as nonpartisan, and its scholars have at times been critical of both parties. But it has consistently pushed for corporate tax cuts, reductions in social services, and laissez-faire environmental policies."

Chiar merită să citiţi articolul cu creionul în mână, pentru că veţi vedea de unde ni se trage, cine sunt cei care fac agenda politicienilor, ce se ascunde în spatele aşa ziselor "rezervoare de idei", şi cum agenda publică este înlocuită cu agenda privată a unor indivizi care se cred Dumnezei, pentru că au bani şi pot cumpăra cu ei orice: politicieni, jurnalişti, intelectuali. Mai ales intelectuali. Şi cum spune în articol un adepta al Tea Party, "ideile nu sunt de capul lor. Ideile au patroni", citat aproximativ în formă, corect în esenţă.