Printer-friendly version
Send by email
It is a measure of our politics that David Koch says he is the frequent subject of death threats.
It is a measure of our politics that he so dominates it.
Last Saturday, Koch was in Palm Beach, where he owns an estate, for a fundraiser for Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center. That’s when he told a Palm Beach Post reporter about the threats.
Koch, who along with his brother Charles, is the embodiment of the one percent, does much good work. According to The New Yorker, he has given millions to the American Ballet Theatre. A building at New York’s Lincoln Center bears his name. So does an endowed chair and research center at Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Koch’s name also is on a cancer research center at MIT, his alma mater.
That philanthropy provides nice cover. Last year, the Tampa Bay Times disclosed a 2008 deal that gave the Kochs, champions of a remarkably extreme idea of anything-goes free market capitalism, veto power over hiring decisions at the FSU economics department in return for a $1.5 million donation.
The Kochs have funded several rightward think tanks. A couple of U.S. Supreme Court justices and Gov. Rick Scott number among their friends.
And the Kochs have sent millions to the Tea Party, through Americans for Prosperity.
It is hard to understand how so many ordinary people, who don’t make in a year what the Kochs make in a day, are willingly led by men so rich they can buy anything they want — including a government the Tea Party believes is corrupted by special interests. But the Kochs and the Tea Party have one interest in common — the political destruction of President Obama. He is a socialist, a commie, Hitler.
David Koch, indeed nobody, should fear for his or her life for their political views.
But extremism begets extremism. Threats of violence can arise from the sensation that you are powerless in front of a relentless force.
Some Tea Party followers apparently feel this, although the force, to them, is coming from the left.
Those who have threatened Koch likely see the threat as coming from the right.
He appears to have no insight about this.
Koch is putting money into Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s drive to save his job, in the face of a recall campaign following his attack on labor unions in the state where the labor movement all but began. “We’re helping him, as we should,” Koch told the Post. “We’ve gotten pretty good at this over the years. We’ve spent a lot in Wisconsin. We’re going to spend more.”
This is who we are now, victims of the politics of money, pawns in extremism’s game, a game in which David Koch is a player like no other.
“They make me sound like a bully,” he complained to the Post. “Do I look like a bully?”
Mary Jo Melone, former columnist with the Tampa Bay Times, is a writer in Tampa.
© Florida Voices
Add comment