[net-gold] UNITED STATES: POLITICS: POLITICAL PARTIES: REPUBLICAN PARTY, TEA PARTY : INDUSTRIES: PETROLEUM INDUSTRY : POLITICAL ISSUES: Koch Brothers Spooked by Forthcoming Story
- From: "David P. Dillard" <jwne@xxxxxxxxxx>
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- Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2011 08:02:39 -0400 (EDT)
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UNITED STATES: POLITICS: POLITICAL PARTIES: REPUBLICAN PARTY, TEA PARTY :
INDUSTRIES: PETROLEUM INDUSTRY :
POLITICAL ISSUES:
Koch Brothers Spooked by Forthcoming Story
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Koch Brothers Spooked by Forthcoming Story
Anonymous Sources Try to Discredit Bloomberg Article on Koch Industries
Before It's Even Published
BY JUSTIN ELLIOTT
Salon
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/09/29/kochs_bloomberg
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Here's a rule of thumb about public relations: When P.R. pros begin
furiously spinning a story before it has even come out, there's a pretty
good chance the story is going to be damaging to the reputation of said
P.R. pros' bosses.
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And that's exactly what we're seeing right now, as 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.
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Based on the prebuttal items appearing this week in the Washington
Examiner, the Daily Caller, and U.S. News and World Report, the Bloomberg
story focuses on alleged malfeasance and/or fraud and/or bad behavior by
the conglomerate Koch Industries.
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One of those episodes apparently involves bribery by a Koch subsidiary in
France, according to the piece by Washington Examiner editorial page
editor Mark Tapscott. He reports that "Bloomberg reporters have been
trolling among former Koch employees overseas in search of disaffected
voices willing to talk," but Tapscott suspects the story may be animated
by bias against the Tea Party. And he notes that, "Koch USA officials say
they were as surprised and angered as anybody else when they were first
apprised of the bribery allegations, and moved as quickly as possible to
get to the bottom of the situation and fix it."
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All three of the prebuttal stories cite an unnamed source who was
interviewed for the Bloomberg story; it's not clear if that same source
spoke with all three publications. The Examiner describes the source as a
former government official.
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Another one of the issues addressed in the Bloomberg article will be the
Kochs' past business dealings with Iran, according to the Daily Caller's
Matt Lewis, who also argues that this is not "terribly newsworthy" and the
Kochs are being singled out for their politics.
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Charles Koch to Friedrich Hayek: Use Social Security!
Yasha Levine and Mark Ames
September 27, 2011 |
This article appeared in the October 17, 2011 edition of The Nation.
The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/article/163672/
charles-koch-friedrich-hayek-use-social-security
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A shorter URL for the above link:
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http://tinyurl.com/63zystz
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Theres right-wing hypocrisy, and then theres this: Charles Koch,
billionaire patron of free-market libertarianism, privately championed the
benefits of Social Security to Friedrich Hayek, the leading laissez-faire
economist of the twentieth century. Koch even sent Hayek a government
pamphlet to help him take advantage of Americas federal retirement
insurance and healthcare programs.
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This extraordinary correspondence regarding Social Security began in early
June 1973, weeks after Koch was appointed president of the Institute for
Humane Studies. Along with his brothers, Koch inherited his fathers
privately held oil company in 1967, becoming one of the richest men in
America. He used this fortune to help turn the IHS, then based in Menlo
Park, California, into one of the worlds foremost libertarian think tanks.
Soon after taking over as president, Koch invited Hayek to serve as the
institutes distinguished senior scholar in preparation for its first
conference on Austrian economics, to be held in June 1974.
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Hayek initially declined Kochs offer. In a letter to IHS secretary Kenneth
Templeton Jr., dated June 16, 1973, Hayek explains that he underwent gall
bladder surgery in Austria earlier that year, which only heightened his
fear of the problems (and costs) of falling ill away from home. (Thanks to
waves of progressive reforms, postwar Austria had near universal
healthcare and robust social insurance plans that Hayek would have been
eligible for.)
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IHS vice president George Pearson (who later became a top Koch Industries
executive) responded three weeks later, conceding that it was all but
impossible to arrange affordable private medical insurance for Hayek in
the United States. However, thanks to research by Yale Brozen, a
libertarian economist at the University of Chicago, Pearson happily
reported that social security was passed at the University of Chicago
while you [Hayek] were there in 1951. You had an option of being in the
program. If you so elected at that time, you may be entitled to coverage
now.
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A few weeks later, the institute reported the good news: Professor Hayek
had indeed opted into Social Security while he was teaching at Chicago and
had paid into the program for ten years. He was eligible for benefits. On
August 10, 1973, Koch wrote a letter appealing to Hayek to accept a
shorter stay at the IHS, hard-selling Hayek on Social Securitys retirement
benefits, which Koch encouraged Hayek to draw on even outside America. He
also assured Hayek that Medicare, which had been created in 1965 by the
Social Security amendments as part of Lyndon Johnsons Great Society
programs, would cover his medical needs.
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snip
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The private correspondence between two of the most important figures
shaping the Republican Partys economic policiesbillionaire libertarian
Charles Koch and Nobel Prizewinning economist Friedrich Hayek, godfather
of todays free-market movementwere obtained by Yasha Levine from the Hayek
archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This is the
first time the content of these letters has been reported on.
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The documents offer a rare glimpse into how these two major free-market
apostles privately felt about government assistance programsrevealing a
shocking degree of cynicism and an unimaginable betrayal of the ideas they
sold to the American public and the rest of the world.
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Charles Koch and his brother, David, have waged a three-decade campaign to
dismantle the American social safety net. At the center of their most
recent push is the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, which has
co-sponsored Tea Party events, spearheaded the war against healthcare
reform and supported Wisconsin Governor Scott Walkers attack on public
sector unions. FreedomWorks, another conservative group central to the
rise of the Tea Party and the right-wing attempt to dismantle Social
Security and Medicare, emerged from an advocacy outfit founded by the Koch
brothers called Citizens for a Sound Economy. FreedomWorks now exists as a
separate entity that champions the Austrian school of economics.
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Hayek, a founder of that school of thought, is primarily known for two
major works. The first, The Road to Serfdom (1944), grudgingly accepts the
possibility that some free countries might find it necessary to set up a
bare-minimum catastrophic social insurance program limited to the very
neediest, so long as the benefits do not incentivize productive members of
society to abandon free-market retirement savings or medical insurance.
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Hayeks comparatively liberal attitude toward social insurance hardened
considerably by the time he published his 1960 opus, The Constitution of
Liberty. Despite privately spending the intervening years paying into
Social Security, Hayek devoted an entire chaptertitled Social Securityto
denouncing the modern welfare state as a gateway to tyranny and moral
decay. Ironically, one of Hayeks main objections to government programs
like Social Security was the fundamental absurdity of using tax dollars to
promote their benefits. In other words, Hayek publicly objected to the
kind of brochure that Charles Koch sent him. In their private
correspondence, however, we could find no objection to this fundamental
absurdity.
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September 29, 2011, 5:00 pm
A Tea Party Darlings Offer on Social Security
By KATE ZERNIKE
New York Times
Politics
The Caucus
New York Times Blogs
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/
a-tea-party-darlings-route-to-social-security/
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A shorter URL for the above link:
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http://tinyurl.com/6g97spc
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With the advent of the anti-stimulus, anti-big government Tea Party
movement, he has enjoyed fresh affection protesters quote him on their
signs at rallies, and Ron Paul reports that people no longer go blank when
he mentions Hayeks name. (For those needing a primer on the differences
between Hayek and John Maynard Keynes, who is enjoying fresh antipathy
among the ranks of Tea Party supporters, there is a useful rap video.)
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But critics like to point out that Tea Party supporters and libertarians
are perfectly happy enjoying big government when it works for them. And
now it appears that Hayek himself was encouraged to enjoy the benefits of
government retirement and health care programs by one of the countrys
most prominent libertarians, the billionaire industrialist Charles Koch.
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According to a series of letters brought to light by The Nation , Mr. Koch
wrote to Hayek in 1973 asking him to be a scholar in residence at the
Institute for Humane Studies, a libertarian group founded by Mr. Koch.
Hayek declined, saying that he recently had had surgery in Austria, which
made him anxious about the problems (and costs) of falling ill far from
home.
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An associate of Mr. Kochs wrote back to suggest that Hayek could take
advantage of the generosity of Social Security if he came to this country
(and noting that it would be prohibitive to secure him private health
insurance here.) Mr. Koch followed up with another letter, enclosing a
brochure on the benefits of Social Security, and noting that while in this
country, Hayek (who had become eligible for government benefits because of
his earlier employment at the University of Chicago) would also get free
hospital care.
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See Charles Koch Flip Flop on Social Security [VIDEO]
Alternet
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2011/09/29/
see-charles-koch-flip-flop-on-social-security-video/
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A shorter URL for the above link:
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http://tinyurl.com/66jvquh
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Charles and David Koch built an distortion machine to do their dirty work
for them. Through think tanks, academic research, political donations and
conservative media, the Koch brothers have steamrolled Americans into
believing things that are false and into supporting policies that benefit
the Koch brothers profits.
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Social Security has long been among the brothers favorite punching bags,
but new reporting by the Nation shows Charles Koch praising,
advocatingpractically begging an ultra-free market economist and mentor to
participate and enjoy Social Security benefits.
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The complete articles may be read at the URLs provided for each.
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GOP : GAS OIL PETROLEUM
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WEBBIB1112
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Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
(215) 204 - 4584
jwne@xxxxxxxxxx
http://daviddillard.businesscard2.com
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