Billionaire Koch Brothers Using Money to Destroy President Obama

By admin
Aug 25, 2010
3:39 pm

In this

age of increasing anti-government sentiment, which can really be reduced to anti-Obama sentiment, many Americans have started to do what they can to slander and condemn every action that our current president takes. From the Tea Party, to the birthers to the idiots who pretend to believe that Obama is a Muslim, now we can add the billionaire Koch brothers to the list.

David and Charles Koch own Koch Industries Inc., a conglomerate headquartered in Wichita, Kan., which includes Koch Pipeline and Koch Nitrogen. It is estimated that their annual revenues are close to one hundred billion dollars. Although they claim to have no involvement in politics or the Tea Party, the brothers have given more than one hundred million dollars to right-wing causes and made some very direct statements regarding the movement via Americans for Prosperity, an outgrowth of an earlier Koch organization called Citizens for a Sound Economy.

Recently, while speaking at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser, in Texas, President Obama took aim at Americans for Prosperity and the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that struck down laws prohibiting direct corporate spending on campaigns. Specifically the president said “They don’t have to say who, exactly, Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation” — or even, he added, “a big oil company.”

David Koch founded Americans for Prosperity in 2004. The organization provides education, training and support to Tea Party activist groups across the nation and has even distributed “Tea Party Talking Points.” Some of the individuals associated with AFP include Peggy Venable and Sibyl West. Venable honored West, of the Texas Tea Party with its Blogger of the Year Award. In June of this year, West, described Obama as the “cokehead in chief” who showed symptoms of “demonic possession.”

Americans for Prosperity has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception and even asked Tea Party members to send tea bags to President Obama. But this is nothing new. The Cato Institute, which was also founded by Charles Koch, has always operated under the guise of scholarship to publish and disseminate a multitude of reports distorting Democratic policy, most recently the impact of the economic stimulus and supporting a return to Bush-style tax cuts to combat the recession. It is open season on Obama and mega-wealthy conservatives will stop at nothing it seems to destroy America’s first African American president.

–torrance stephens, ph.d.