Why? Because the billionaires in question are Libertarians who give money to conservative causes. Feast your eyes on their big exposé called “Covert Operations.”
The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.”
The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.
How does the New Yorker feel about far left billionaire George Soros who gives millions of dollars to far left causes? Just look at the headlines I dug up with a quick search…
The World According to Soros
Most of the instincts that Soros brings to his current incarnation–one in which he sometimes refers to himself as “a stateless statesman”–were developed in the course of his nearly 40-year career in the financial markets. He started Quantum in 1969. Today the fund and its diversified offshoots have assets of roughly $11 billion. Tells about the “open society” foundations he has established in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
The Wisdom of Soros
As a rule, I do not put much store by the statements of billionaires and central-bank chairmen. The former are accorded undue respect because of their wealth, the latter because of the positions they hold. In my experience, neither great riches nor high office are strongly correlated with economic wisdom and common sense. For today, however, I am making an exception: first for George Soros, the veteran speculator and philanthropist, and, in my next post, for Mervyn King, the head of the Bank of England.
The Money Man
Can George Soros’s millions insure the defeat of President Bush? Five billionaires joined half a dozen liberal leaders in a lengthy conversation about the future of progressive politics in America. The billionaires were not especially close socially, nor were they in complete agreement about politics or strategy. Yet they shared a common goal: to use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of President George W. Bush in the 2004 election.
Gee. That almost seems like a double standard, doesn’t it? Funny that.
Read more on this at Memeorandum.
