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United States News Title: In trouble, White House searches for a billionaire to blame In 1998, when the Clinton White House found itself in the middle of the Lewinsky scandal, one of its key defense strategies was to attack the conservative philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife as the dark power behind the allegations against the president. The Clinton camp believed Scaife to be "the Goldfinger of the right-wing conspiracy," as Newsweek put it in a February 1998 report. Now it's the Obama White House that is in trouble. The president isn't engulfed in scandal, but his political fortunes are waning, with historically low job approval ratings for this point in his term and an administration struggling to pass its initiatives, even with big Democratic majorities in Congress. And now, as in the Clinton years, White House surrogates are looking for a billionaire to blame. This time, they've found two. "The Billionaires Behind the Hate" is the title of a new report published by the Center for American Progress, which is the liberal think tank run by John Podesta, the former Clinton chief of staff who also ran the Obama transition and serves as an outside adviser to the Obama White House. The supposedly hateful billionaires in the article's title are brothers Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries, one of the nation's largest conglomerates. And what do they hate? The "progressive agenda." The Kochs, according to Podesta's group, are "responsible for a vicious attack campaign aimed directly at obstructing and killing progressive reform." First, they opposed the stimulus, financing "television and radio ads deriding the recovery package as simply 'pork' spending." Imagine that! Then, through the group Americans for Prosperity, they helped organize some of the first "Tea Party" protests. From there, it was on to stopping environmental cap-and-trade legislation. According to the Center, the Kochs have helped fund "an underhanded campaign to falsely charge that a set of hacked e-mails somehow unravels the scientific consensus that global warming is occurring." In addition, Americans for Prosperity has run ads "mocking environmentalists as spoiled brats concerned about their 'three homes and five cars' than about economic conditions." As if all that weren't bad enough, the Kochs also oppose the Democratic party's national health care plan. The brothers stirred "fierce opposition" to national health care and have "fostered extremism" by "hijack[ing] the health reform debate" at town halls across the country last August. The result of those town halls was that the White House learned for the first time that many Americans do not favor an across-the-board remaking of the health care system. The hate, apparently, never stops. By the way, the Center concedes that the Kochs are "best known for their wealth, as well as for their generous contributions to the arts, cancer research, and the Smithsonian Institute." But Podesta's group argues the Kochs oppose the progressive agenda because their businesses are big polluters and also because they have "a long family tradition of funding conservative movements to shift the country to the far right." Put it all together, and you have "a long history of stopping progress." Aside from its remarkable language -- is it "hate" to believe the stimulus, cap-and-trade and the current health care proposals are bad policy? -- the Podesta group's attack on the Kochs is striking because the Center for American Progress is itself the product of politically-active billionaires. It would never have come into existence without the backing of California-based Herbert and Marion Sandler, who founded Golden West Financial Corporation and made billions engaging in some of the most irresponsible subprime lending of the first years of this decade. (After the financial collapse, their reputation sank so low that they were brutally parodied in a "Saturday Night Live" sketch last year.) In 2003, Herbert Sandler approached Podesta, then a law professor at Georgetown, with a proposal to found what would become the new think tank. It turned out Podesta had already been thinking about a similar idea, and the two men talked at length, and talked further when Podesta flew to San Francisco for more detailed discussions. The Sandlers, who are also close to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ended up talking Podesta into taking the job. There is another billionaire, George Soros, who is also close to the Center. In 2003, in the middle of spending nearly $30 million of his own money in a quest to unseat President George W. Bush, Soros pledged to give the Center $1 million a year for three years. It was less than the Sandlers gave, but it was key support for an institution then getting off the ground. (I wrote about the founding of the Center, and how Podesta created an institution that combined the functions of think tank and political war room, in my book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy.) You might say that all that money from the Sandlers, Soros and others has gone toward opposing -- hating? -- the conservative agenda. But it is Charles and David Koch who are "The Billionaires Behind the Hate." If you are looking for a sign that the White House, having gone through Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Glenn Beck, and others, is flailing around in the search for new enemies to blame for its troubles, you can't do better than the new Center for American Progress report. Author's disclosure: I gave an unpaid speech at a Koch-sponsored event in Colorado earlier this year.
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#1. To: Happy Quanzaa (#0)
The billionaires we have to watch out for are the international bankers.
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