NYT: The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party (Cue spooky music)

The New York Times ^ | August 28, 2010 | Frank Rich

[2ndDivisionVet]

ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

Vive la révolution!

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R.

[hieronymous]

Doesnt Frank work for Carlos Slim, the Billionaire “Cell-Phone Mogul”... Lots of cell phones smuggled across the border...”Cell-phone cartel”???

[ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas]

Nowhere in the article is the tea party bankrolled by anyone, nor also Beck and Palin.

Exactly. I kept reading, looking for proof of billionaires sneaking chump change to the "astroturf" rabble.

Instead, this article preaches to the elite choir:

"Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite...."

The real audience for this journalistic sewage revealed.

Zero reader comments. Comments have been blocked. Wonder why?

[hsrazorback1]

Soros is transparent only because Beck has been washing the window.

[cranked]

Did the NYT ever run an article on Soros and others billionaires backing the AnnointedIdiot? Thought not....FUNYT and the Obama horse you rode in on.... =.=

[windsorknot]

The New York Times

[andy58-in-nh]

I had to look pretty hard, but I finally found a picture of Frank Rich that truly does him justice:

[MNJohnnie]

Another foaming at the mouth with hate, completely divorced from reality, rant from hyper partisan Progressive Fascist Frank Rich.

[Qbert]

The billionaire bankrolling Frank Rich and bailing out the NYT: Carlos Slim

[November 2010]

Soros is controlling the country with institutes. It’s horrible.

[bri4n]

They are both. There are those who manipulate, and those that can be manipulated. It is not only a conservative issue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

[eclecticEel]

Leaders who no one’s ever heard of? It’s so silly you’d think it would be even below the minimal editorial standards at the Times.

[King Moonracer]

And where did BO get north of $600 Million for 2008? A bunch of riff-raff, garlic eaters?