George Soros made his fortune by breaking the British pound and other manipulative currency trading, and became known as “The man who broke the Bank of England.”
Yet this currency speculator who destroys for the sake of money is a hero of the left-wing because he doles out bits and pieces of his fortune to support groups like the Center for American Progress, Media Matters and J-Street.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Think Progress (run by the Center for American Progress) has launched attacks on the Koch brothers, whose companies have created thousands of jobs in the United States, who actually manufacture and produce things here, and who have given generously to numerous charities. There is nothing Soros-funded groups hate more than real American success stories, because it goes against the Soros narrative that the United States is the source of most of the world’s problems.
The war on the Koch brothers has burst onto the scene with the Wisconsin union protests, as documented by Dave Weigel yesterday. But Weigel missed the point. The attempt to demonize the Koch brothers, as crazy as it sounds, is not recent.
Think Progress and the Center for American Progress have had a multi-year plan to marginalize the Koch brothers because the Koch brothers have a libertarian agenda which supports freedom for the individual and individual autonomy, which is the exact opposite of the statist nanny-state agenda of the modern Democratic Party and liberal interest groups.
And nothing was more near and dear to the Democratic Party agenda than Obamacare, so it is not surprising that after Obama’s election and as Obamacare picked up steam the Koch brothers were singled out as a possible threat to passage of Obamacare, and were targeted by Think Progress.
On December 6, 2009, Fang wrote an op-ed in The Boston Globe, In glitzy shadows, a health reform foe lurks:
While David Koch is celebrated as a patron of New York opera, his Americans for Prosperity donations have gone largely unsung. With his millions, he will not only have saved this year’s performance of the “Nutcracker,’’ but also contributed greatly to the obstruction of universal health care, the denial of climate change, and the derailment of much of President Obama’s domestic agenda.
In that op-ed, Fang hit on what now is a standard Think Progress tactic, attacking the Koch brothers because their father was active in the John Birch Society. This attempt to foist the father’s politics upon the sons was addressed by someone who wrote a Letter to the Editor of The Globe in response to Fang’s op-ed:
To make the atavistic allusion that David Koch’s father was a member of the John Birch Society is as puerile as my saying that the patriarch of the Kennedy clan was a Nazi sympathizer before Franklin Roosevelt had to remove him from the Court of St. James. When will this eyeball gouging end? …
Why Fang would resurrect the John Birch Society is unfathomable. Doesn’t he know that if you have to Google it, then it has lost its trenchancy? He does precisely that which he professes to most abhor – ad hominem demonization.
Koch is not going to obstruct universal health care, delay climate change advocacy, or derail President Obama’s domestic agenda any better than the president and his supporters are already doing.
Since then, there has been a non-stop war on the Koch brothers by Think Progress. A simple Google search reveals an incessant attempt to demonize the Koch brothers as part of Think Progress’s overall attacks on the Tea Party movement and those who oppose Obamacare.
The Koch brothers are capable of defending themselves, and they are.
But let’s not let allow the false meme to spread that the attacks on the Koch brothers are spontaneous or related to Wisconsin. The war against the Koch brothers simply is part of the astro-turfed Obama agenda to demonize all opponents.
[Note: Some changes to the wording were made after initial posting to clarify the timing of the linked op-ed.]
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Comments
Professor besides Soros, there are several super wealthy people who give to the democrats and far left leaning groups, perhaps you can look in to them. Among them are the principals of the progressive Insurance company.
Weird. They assail people for their father being a Bircher, but ignore Soros being a Nazi collaborator.
Who killed more people: Birchers or Nazis?
I still say the Coffee Party spells doom for the Koch brothers. They'll bide their time …
Growing up I, too, was taught that the Birchers were simply paranoid crazies who saw a commie under every bed, but in 1995 the Venona Papers were declassified (thanks to Moynihan) and they, together with Soviet archives since opened, reveal that communist infiltration and influence on US (and other western) government and institutions was far more extensive and effective than we good rational citizens were led (by the nose by center to left pols and the press) to believe.
That said, I agree with the above, that the Democrat's latest guilt by association tactic to discredit the Koch brothers is nothing but cheap ploy, especially since nothing about the Kochs' publicly enunciated politics smacks of bedskirt lifting. The smear campaign is a desperate attempt to take out potent money and ideas on the right, while unapologetically accessing vastly more fortunes for limp idea on the left.
We can only hope the Kochs and other rich and poor men and women who are thinking, funding and doing in ways the rest of us support don't ever get intimidated. The Nutcracker, indeed.
Yes, indeed, let's hold the son guilty for the father. Hmm. Obama's father was…huh…
No one will correct Rob Crawford's vacuous lie about Soros? Nice place you have here, professor.
I'm just glad in a country where the top 1% now receives 50+% of the income that William Jacobson is brave enough to stand up for poor oppressed people like David and Charles.
Please, Professor, continue to side with plutocrats against the middle class, because it's not our wages which have been stagnant for 30 years….oh, hold it, it is our wages that have been stagnant!
Meanwhile, Dave and Charlie work to gut environmental legislation (see California Prop 23), bust unions, astroturf the Tea Party and then get all pouty when they are called on their political machinations. David Koch didn't inherit Birther politics and 300 million from his Dad to be have Think Progress publicize their involvement, and it is nice to know that Glenn Beck fans and plutocrat apologists like Mr. Jacobson can gather together to defend these poor misunderstood geniuses.
And, not a word in defense of the Bradley and Olin foundations, either, Professor? Don't they deserve your rhetorical skills?
First they came for the Koch brothers (including the one who lives on his inheritance in Europe and paints castles and has, basically, never worked a day in his life), then they came for Bob Perry and Boone Pickens, then they came for Richard Melon Scaife, and finally all the plutocrats were left with only owning our govt and hiding in their gated communities with armies of servants and publicists, people made protest signs about them! Tre unfair!
Stick to your guns, Professor! Who else witll defend them, besides their lawyers, their think tanks (of which Weigel received largesse), their media connections, and their friends in government?
"Pick a target, freeze it, personalize it"
Same Old Spit.
Koch is the new Halliburton.
The amazing thing is, the folks who push these fallacious characterizations do so without any real fundamental understanding of what the Halliburtons/Kochs of the world really do. I'll submit that's because they, Halliburton/Koch, actually produce and contribute, employ and create, -Activities typically antithetical to the leftist professional class grievance peddler.
IMO estimation, The Sandlers of the infamous Golden Western mortgage disaster did more to create housing bankruptcies than any one else in America.
"These were mortgages offered at low "teaser" rates that ratcheted upward as interest rates increased. They were often sold aggressively to unsophisticated home buyers who did not comprehend the vast financial risks they were taking, or who assumed that housing prices would rise high enough to provide a profit to them when they sold their houses. They were targets for lenders peddling mortgages that should have been stamped with a skull and crossbones, for these were among the most seductive and dangerous types of mortgage."
". A huge percentage of these Wachovia ARMs were made to deep subprime borrowers with very poor credit scores. Most of these were "inherited from its ill-timed acquisition of Golden West" at the end of the housing boom in 2006.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/how_allies_of_george_soros_hel.html
The article has a whole lot more on rich American leftists uniting to insure a leftist takeover of America.
timb, and what "lie" about George Soros would you be referring to? The lie that Soros, and his Open Society promotes every radical far left organization in America, as well as abroad? The fact that Soros wants to impose socialism (at least his form) on the U.S. because it will continue to line his pocket (socialist never promote socialism for themeselves, just the "little" people)?
Soros is a bad dude, yet the left has no problem climbing into bed with him to act as his whore.
And someone should tell you that when you start with your pre-programmed left wing talking points, it was a left winger who actually made a fortune out of astroturfing. His name is David Axelrod. Or do you really believe that Organizing for America is a grassroots movement?
Shame on you. You come here and troll. Are you one of those OFA paid trolls who are sitting in your pajamas trying to promote Obama's plan for destroying this nation and "tranforming" it to some Saul Alinsky utopia?
My suggestion is you get a real job. Trolling doesn't have much of a future in a nation that is finally waking up to 100 years of progressivism meant to make us a third world nation.
Cubanbob: You are right. Peter Lewis is the guy who inherited smallish Progressive Insurance and turned it into a large and successful insurance conglomerate. He has been closely aligned with Soros for years, and has contributed to many of the same causes as Soros. He was arrested by New Zealand authorities for importing hashish and pot into that country. Publications have referred to him as a "functioning pothead" in print. He's also been a donor to his alma mater, Princeton University. Money talks. His arrests and flaunting of drug laws hasn't stopped the prestigious Ivy League university from allowing him to serve as one of its trustees.
The Leftist billionaires I'd like to see exposed are Herb and Marion Sandler. Like Lewis, they often donate alongside Soros in various Leftist causes and are major donors to finance Democrat political campaigns. They sold their mortgage outfit, Golden West Financial, to Wachovia for $25 billion at the precise peak of the housing bubble. Roughly two years after the sale, Wachovia was experiencing severe financial distress, in part because it was choking on the sub-prime mortgage portfolio it acquired from GWF. Government regulators ultimately stepped in to force a fire sale of Wachovia to Wells Fargo.
Herb and Marion Sandler's Golden West Financial was a major contributor to the housing/financial crisis still ravaging California. GWF was directly responsible for destroying thousands of peoples lives by giving them sub-prime mortgages they couldn't afford to repay. A prominent conservative writer could do a hit piece on the Sandler's that makes the Think Progress hit piece on the Koch's look like a children's book. Of course, it would never get any attention in the media, since the Sandler's are aligned with Soros, Democrats, and Left-wing causes.
So these three leading Leftist Democrat billionaires — Soros, Lewis and the Sandlers, all made vast fortunes in the financial services industry.
But if you listen to the rhetoric coming from the media, it is evil Republicans who are in the pocket of Wall Street fat cats. Right.
Actually, David Koch was also a member of the John Birch Society until May 1968.
Don't bother them with facts! Jacobsin is in rich guy protection mode!
"No one will correct Rob Crawford's vacuous lie about Soros?"
What lie? Soros has stated he collaborated with the Nazis.
As for your little class-hatred rant: *YAWN* Heard it all before, it's still a pack of crap pumped out by the brainless to make themselves feel better for being nothings.
Bland assertions aside, Crawford, you're wrong about the economics, but that's never stopped you from being wrong about anything non gnome-related before?
Here are links, one is to a report on corporate taxes paid and the other is a simple to read pie chart on how the top 1% is doing versus the rest of us. One is to a Politfact investigation on income inequality. If you want to yawn at it, because you listen to a former morning radio DJ and de-frocked English professor who can't find honest work, then that means you like to ignore facts.
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/02/26/main-street-tax-cheats/
http://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Share-of-wealth.png
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/dec/10/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-viral-speech-says-top-1-percent-ear/
Which brings us to Soros. I don't often let Abe Foxman speak for me, since he is, largely, a jerk and a tool of the Right wing, but he noted this about Beck's lie about about Soros:
From Jewishweek: “Look, I spit on Jews when I was six years old,” Foxman told me. “Does that make me an anti-Semite?”
http://www.thejewishweek.com/blogs/political_insider/glenn_becks_monstrous_soros_accusations_rile_holocaust_survivors_jewish
And
"Abe Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League (and a Holocaust survivor himself, like Soros) released a statement today calling Beck’s remarks “completely inappropriate, offensive and over the top”:
Now, Rob, I don't expect you fact check your idols, be they Jacobson or Jeff Goldstein or Glenn Beck, but I did for you. Go ahead and dislike Soros's current politics, that is, after all, as American as apple pie, but try to keep the slanders rooted in truth, rather than half-truth.
You know, for instance, Beck apologized for this assertion? You know, the one you run around internet posting with a disregard of truth so uncanny it reminds me of your own OUTLAW status. Oh, you don't know that either?
So, besides being wrong on politics, history, economics, and whether David Koch was a Bircher, is there anything you are right about?
As always, Rob, it was nice talking to your weird combo of righteous anger, paranoia, half-witted belief in far Right smears, and general obtuseness, but, and I trust you appreciate, you'd be a happier clam if you lived in reality, instead of this Tea party fantasy land you live in.
http://exiledonline.com/a-peoples-history-of-koch-industries-how-stalin-funded-the-tea-party-movement/
lulz keep failing…
also why does democrats being retards, make you any less stupid?