{"id":177567,"date":"2019-08-16T18:45:00","date_gmt":"2019-08-16T23:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/08\/16\/kochs-gave-seed-funding-to-the-dlc-as-well\/"},"modified":"2019-08-16T18:45:00","modified_gmt":"2019-08-16T23:45:00","slug":"kochs-gave-seed-funding-to-the-dlc-as-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/08\/16\/kochs-gave-seed-funding-to-the-dlc-as-well\/","title":{"rendered":"Kochs Gave Seed Funding to the DLC as Well"},"content":{"rendered":"
It turns out that Third Way, the corporatist faux Democrats, are being bankrolled by the Koch brothers<\/a>.<\/div>\n

This is not a surprise.<\/p>\n

Their political activities are not about political parties, they are about supporting their own self-interest and their own libertarian ideology:<\/p>\n

In the fall of 2007, the tide was beginning to turn against free trade, as the ongoing hollowing out of the American middle class was becoming associated with globalization and the offshoring of jobs. Its leading public opponent was the bombastic CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, a proto-Trump whose economic nationalism curdled easily into racism and nativism. Many Democrats, too, were turning sour on free trade. Then-President George W. Bush relied on Republican votes to ram through the Central American Free Trade Agreement in 2005, but future deals were looking far from certain, particularly after Democrats seized control of Congress in the 2006 midterms. <\/p>\n

This was a direct threat to Koch Industries, the sprawling business empire long led by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. The fossil-fuel giant\u2019s business has long been based on importing oil<\/a> from Canadian tar sands, which it refines at its massive Pine Bend plant in Minnesota \u2014 and the opposition to free trade threatened to make that business much more costly. The Kochs desperately needed help with Democrats, so they turned to a reliable partner: Third Way. <\/p>\n

According to the new book \u201cKochland<\/a>,\u201d written by investigative reporter Christopher Leonard, Koch Industries secretly financed a report<\/a> by Third Way, a corporate-funded<\/a> think tank with ties to the centrist wing of the Democratic Party. The report, titled \u201cWhy Lou Dobbs is Winning\u201d and published in November 2007, was written to promote the free trade agenda to liberals. The white paper explained it would be the first salvo in a yearlong effort to reshape the messaging around trade policy, warning that \u201ca new and powerful populist strain has emerged on both the left and the right of American politics that threatens to turn the nation fearful and inward.\u201d<\/p>\n

Third Way did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

It may seem odd to see the Koch brothers, who operate today as partisan Republicans, aligning with business-friendly Democrats, but the strategy dates back further. (After publication, Nicholas Gass, a Koch spokesperson, noted that David Koch has stepped away from advocacy and that the Koch strategy is less partisan in its focus than previously.) <\/p>\n

A 2001 American Prospect investigation<\/a> noted that Koch Industries was a member of the executive council of the Democratic Leadership Council, founded in 1985 by centrist Democrats to combat the left inside the party. Hall, thanked in the report, was a member of the DLC\u2019s event committee at the time.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is the least surprising news that I’ve heard in a long time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It turns out that Third Way, the corporatist faux Democrats, are being bankrolled by the Koch brothers. This is not a surprise. Their political activities are not about political parties, they are about supporting their own self-interest and their own libertarian ideology: In the fall of 2007, the tide was beginning to turn against free …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[365,368,364,387,374],"class_list":["post-177567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-business","tag-corruption","tag-evil","tag-hypocrisy","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177567"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177567\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}