Addicted to Koch? New documentary traces influence of Koch brothers' money in GOP

Power Players ^ | June 4th, 2014 | By Rick Klein, Olivier Knox, Richard Coolidge, Jordyn Phelps and Alexandra Dukakis

[Mariner]

A new documentary makes the controversial case that a political cocktail of big corporate money and racially charged sentiments has helped fuel the rise of the tea party. And squarely behind that movement, the film argues, are the Koch brothers.

Co-Directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin sat down with “Top Line” to discuss their film, “Citizen Koch,” and why they say the GOP’s deep-pocketed donors, the Koch brothers, are such figures in American politics today.

“Money – $100 billion now,” Deal said in explaining the Kochs’ influence. “When we started out making this film, their net worth was about $68 billion combined, and we have to keep going in and changing the film and updating it, because it was just recently reported they're up to $100 billion.”

.....

.....Deal and Lessin also make the controversial case in the film that the tea party was fueled by racist sentiment that pervaded in the wake of the election of the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, and was used to “rally working peoples around some of their inherent fears around a different agenda.”

[driftless2]

Oh, how horrible!!!....American citizens, Koch bros., exercising their first amendment rights and donating money to causes they believe in!!!....the horror of it all!!! (snicker)

[Sam Gamgee]

No kidding. They have the Ford and Tides foundations, the academia, Hollywood money, and we have 2 relatively rich donors. What a shocker. Conservative rich people support conservative political movements. The real question is why more of the Fortune 500 don't support pro-capitalist movements with their money?

[driftless2]

I had a high school classmate of that name...he pronounced it “cook.”

[driftless2]

The conceit of these moronic hypocrites is that if people like the Koch brothers didn’t donate money to conservative causes, conservatives would be jumping with joy at Obama’s socialist policies and demanding a soviet America. That’s how stupid these dopes are.

[driftless2]

A really laughable point these two dopey filmmakers try to make is that the leftist programming on PBS is being affected by the Koch bros. As I recall, leftist propagandists like Bill Moyers have their own programs on PBS. I don’t remember seeing any conservative advocacy programs. Buckley’s show has been long gone from PBS.

[Maelstorm]

They really think this is effective? November is coming and its going to be worse than they ever could imagine.

[4Liberty]