Eric Alterman: "Money Well Spent" (Charles and David Koch)

Eric Alterman (The Nation):

Jane Mayer's New Yorker profile of Charles and David Koch reveals a decades-long investment of many hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve a single goal. The billionaire oilmen sought to "bring about social change" to advance what Charles Koch calls their "radical philosophy." To make this happen, they've adopted a "vertically and horizontally integrated" strategy "from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action."
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The primary obstacle Powell identified was not the remnants of the late-'60s antiwar and civil rights movements, which were both in the process of disintegration. Rather, they sought to undermine the "respectable elements of society" and replace them with people like themselves.
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The Kochs, after all, do not fund much media. Rather, they fund the politicians, "experts" and (frequently phony) citizen leaders who create the context for the content of media debate. And perhaps their greatest success has been their ability to turn the establishment media into the credulous carrier of the constant stream of propaganda their grantees have become so adept at producing. MORE...