Why do rightwing billionaires spend hundreds of millions on elections if both parties are the same?

[HereSince1628]

36. Yes Koch money helped set them up. And Al Gore was one of the first chairs...

The history of the DLC is on the web for all to see.

As Bill Clinton moved forward as a prominent DLCer one of the things he pointed out was that there was no point in conceding the big money donors to the republicans.

To get them, you have to cozy up to them, and many governors in the south, including Clinton had developed the capacity to do that as they pushed for incentives that moved industries and thereby jobs from the north into the south...with tax holidays, reduced prices for industrial sites, resistance to labor and environmental regs, etc.

What makes all this really interesting is that people forget how things evolve. The DLC started out promising to deliver for everyone by being "winners" in the end they gained such a bad reputation with the base that they had to stop and rebrand themselves.

But the membership still lingers in politics and is still influential in the party.

Mostly we see them under the guise of the social liberal fiscal conservative, which really means spending less on social programs and being more supportive of American corporate interests especially with respect to overseas.

on edit here is some text and a link

As Bill Berkowitz writes, the Koch brothers have also been funding the Democratic Leadership Council.


According to SourceWatch, a project of the Center for Media & Democracy, the brothers are "leading contributors to the Koch family foundations, which supports a network of Conservative organizations and think tanks, including Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Manhattan Institute the Heartland Institute, and the Democratic Leadership Council."

Charles Koch co-founded the Cato Institute in 1977, while David helped launch Citizens for a Sound Economy [now FreedomWorks] in 1986.

This is no less stunning than if Scaife or the Coors family were funding the DLC. So do the Kochs just throw money at the DLC -- as long as the Council supports a free-market" (i.e. unrestricted/unregulated corporate power) agenda that the Kochs generally agree with. Or is it more than just that -- does this really buttress what Greens and other disaffected liberals contend -- that the DNC has just become a party of "Republicrats", thanks especially to the DLC? They would say that corporate backers like the rightwing/libertarian Kochs have co-opted the Democratic establishment -- a hostile takeover of (what was once) the opposition.


http://www.democrats.com/node/7789