Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Forecast the Facts Launches Petition Against the Koch Brothers Buying the Los Angeles Times
Corporate media is abuzz with the possibility that the Koch brothers will use their majority-control of Koch Industries to buy eight daily newspapers owned by the Tribune Company, including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, the fourth and ninth largest dailies in the country, respectively. If the Kochs’ bid is successful, it will signal a plan by the Kochs to stop hiding behind front groups and the launch of a full-scale, open assault on reshaping the country to fit their agenda: deregulation, privatization, and dramatically shrinking the Federal government.
Tribune also owns two of the largest dailies in the battleground state of Florida: the Orlando Sentinel and the Sun Sentinel out of Fort Lauderdale. Other dailies include The Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant, The Morning Call and Daily Press.
According to the 2013 Forbes list of billionaires, both Charles and David Koch increased their wealth by $9 billion (that’s billion with a “b”) year over year, each now worth $34 billion. But obscene wealth has never been enough to satisfy the Kochs. David ran on the Libertarian ticket for Vice President in 1980, alongside Ed Clark. The twosome promised to abolish Social Security, the minimum wage, and virtually all Federal watchdog agencies including the SEC, FBI, and EPA. They received 1 percent of the vote.
From that point on, the Kochs’ strategy was to push their agenda standing in the shadows behind multi-layers of front groups structured as nonprofits – thus allowing the unwitting taxpayer to subsidize their non-populist political agenda. Watch the video as David Koch stands before an Americans for Prosperity convention, as its leaders explain how they formed Tea Party groups, and Koch says he and his brother, Charles, provided the start up funds for Americans for Prosperity.
In addition to Americans for Prosperity, and an earlier entity, Citizens for a Sound Economy, last year it was learned that for the past 35 years, as the Cato Institute pumped out its free market, small government white papers by the boatloads under the guise of an independent think tank, Charles and David Koch were two of a handful of men who owned the Institute outright. How does one own a nonprofit? By having a very smart Kansas lawyer.
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