[guest post by Dana]
In the short span of a few months, Harry Reid has referred to those notorious Koch brothers a total of 134 times on the Senate floor.
In his non-stop verbal assault, Reid has hurled all manner of accusation against them,
The Koch brothers are radical. They are un-American. They promote lies. They’re trying to buy the country.
(On a side note, could Reid himself be a Koch-funded politician?)
And, as a reminder, this is what Charles Koch is all about,
A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value. In a truly free society, any business that disrespects its customers will fail, and deserves to do so. The same should be true of any government that disrespects its citizens.
No wonder Reid continues his full-frontal attacks, ad nauseam.
These two men are a pair of shadow billionaires spending millions of dollars to rig our political system, and who does it help? Them.
Because the left is certainly above such crassness, right? They would sneer at big money contributions. They would never attempt to “buy the country”. They would never try to “buy democracy”. They would never seek to re-shape the political landscape of the country. And certainly, they would never seek the favor of any “shadow” millionaires or billionaires. In other words, the left would never resemble the accusations and smears made against the Koch brothers.
Well, not so fast,
Some of the country’s biggest Democratic donors — including Tom Steyer and Jonathan Soros — are huddling behind closed doors next week in Chicago with union bigwigs and progressive superstars like Bill de Blasio to plan how to pull their party — and the country — to the left.
The setting is the annual spring meeting of the Democracy Alliance, a secretive club of wealthy liberals that’s the closest thing the left has to the vaunted Koch brothers’ political network.
This is not a club for those with lean bank accounts. This is for serious players who can pony up the big bucks,
Democracy Alliance partners, as the group calls its members, pay annual dues of $30,000 and are required to contribute a total of at least $200,000 a year to recommended groups. Since its inception in 2005, the DA has steered upward of $500 million to a range of groups, including pillars of the political left such as the conservative media watchdog Media Matters, the policy advocacy outfit Center for American Progress and the data firm Catalist — all of which are run by Clinton allies.
DA conferences are typically kept hush-hush, with locations tightly held, press barred from the sessions and participants prohibited from discussing the proceedings.
The DA, as the liberal group is known to insiders, is increasing its ranks of rich donors for the first time in years and is gearing up to spend huge sums on political data, voter registration, ground organizing and advertising to influence the 2014 midterms and 2016 presidential elections.
The New York Times ran a profile on Steyer, which included this,
A billionaire retired investor is forging plans to spend as much as $100 million during the 2014 election, seeking to pressure federal and state officials to enact climate change measures through a hard-edge campaign of attack ads against governors and lawmakers.
The donor, Tom Steyer, a Democrat who founded one of the world’s most successful hedge funds, burst onto the national political scene during last year’s elections, when he spent $11 million to help elect Terry McAuliffe governor of Virginia and millions more intervening in a Democratic congressional primary in Massachusetts. Now he is rallying other deep-pocketed donors, seeking to build a war chest that would make his political organization, NextGen Climate Action, among the largest outside groups in the country, similar in scale to the conservative political network overseen by Charles and David Koch.
Oh, did I mention “radical agenda”?
[P]panels will focus on elevating progressive issues like income inequality, climate change, drug reform, gun control, abortion rights and the death penalty.
“I anticipate the Democracy Alliance becoming both more progressive and more aggressive in the coming years,” said Erica Payne, who helped found the club, and now runs the Agenda Project, a progressive communications nonprofit. “That will disturb centrist Democrats, but it will be healthy and productive for the country. They need to be challenged on these things.”
Here is a fun video of Harry Reid discussing what he wants us to believe is a truly “radical agenda”,
–Dana
