Covert Operations: elected politicians as merely “actors playing out a script.”

Submitted by Norm Roulet on Wed, 08/25/2010 - 06:26.

Facts prove it is unsafe to live near the Arcelor/Mittal Cleveland Works steel mill, and citizens of Northeast Ohio have reasons to be concerned about 100s of other major toxic pollution point sources in the greater Cleveland area, yet our regional pollution monitoring has been broken since 2003, and is broken today, and citizens and the media do not care at all. How is it possible the people living in one of them most polluted places in America do not care about public health - about their own health? How did citizens here become such nihilists?

Northeast Ohioans must rise up from metal and soot ashes still being spewed upon us by excessively polluting toxic industrial forces that have corrupted local politics and destroyed the region and the lives of those living here... yet leaders and citizens here do not care.

Public enemy #1 is Lakshmi Mittal, the world's richest man, who pollutes Cleveland with his Arcelor/Mittal steel mill here. Why citizens of Northeast Ohio tolerate being so polluted is one of the great questions of modern civilization, world-wide!

What would lead Clevelanders to be so suicidal, to only really profit the world's richest man... an Indian billionaire squatting in the world's biggest palace in Luxembourg... or is it London?

To answer this question, realize we are all being killed by a few billionaires who believe the lives of the people in Northeast Ohio and other ghetto-states are expendable... billionaires like Lakshmi Mittal... and the Koch Brothers, owners of Koch Industries, who lead one of the most polluting families in the history of mankind, and personally provide much of the money behind the Libertarian and Tea Party political phenomenons now sweeping the nation.

As described in an important August 30, 2010, New Yorker feature on the Koch Brothers - Covert Operations - The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama:

The Kochs have given millions of dollars to nonprofit groups that criticize environmental regulation and support lower taxes for industry. Gus diZerega, the former friend, suggested that the Kochs’ youthful idealism about libertarianism had largely devolved into a rationale for corporate self-interest. He said of Charles, “Perhaps he has confused making money with freedom.”

Some critics have suggested that the Kochs’ approach has subverted the purpose of tax-exempt giving. By law, charitable foundations must conduct exclusively nonpartisan activities that promote the public welfare. A 2004 report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group, described the Kochs’ foundations as being self-serving, concluding, “These foundations give money to nonprofit organizations that do research and advocacy on issues that impact the profit margin of Koch Industries.”

That should sound very familiar to how politics and community development work in Northeast Ohio... some rich guy writes a script and the politicians and their minions follow, word for word... like those who kiss the asses of Kochs...

The New Yorker points out: "the Kochs came to regard elected politicians as merely “actors playing out a script.” A longtime confidant of the Kochs told Doherty that the brothers wanted to “supply the themes and words for the scripts.” In order to alter the direction of America, they had to “influence the areas where policy ideas percolate from: academia and think tanks.

Cleveland and Ohio politics are certainly impacted by the Kochs, but they are far from the only billionaires and mega-millionaires who control everyday life here, and make it miserable and unhealthy for all.

In Cleveland have been spawned and based many of the most polluting firms, families and their lawyers in world history, and they control and pollute here still... burn coal in poor neighborhoods.... as they name hospitals after themselves... and probably live in Luxembourg.

These most polluting firms, families and their lawyers beg, borrow and steal Federal economic stimulus funding from the Obama administration, as they in fact are co-conspirators with the Kochs, "out to destroy progressivism.”

How? Simple as this...

In a 2002 memo, the Republican political consultant Frank Luntz wrote that so long as “voters believe there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community” the status quo would prevail. The key for opponents of environmental reform, he said, was to question the science—a public-relations strategy that the tobacco industry used effectively for years to forestall regulation. The Kochs have funded many sources of environmental skepticism, such as the Heritage Foundation, which has argued that “scientific facts gathered in the past 10 years do not support the notion of catastrophic human-made warming.” The brothers have given money to more obscure groups, too, such as the Independent Women’s Forum, which opposes the presentation of global warming as a scientific fact in American public schools. Until 2008, the group was run by Nancy Pfotenhauer, a former lobbyist for Koch Industries. Mary Beth Jarvis, a vice-president of a Koch subsidiary, is on the group’s board.

Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, is the co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” a new book that chronicles various attempts by American industry to manipulate public opinion on science. She noted that the Kochs, as the heads of “a company with refineries and pipelines,” have “a lot at stake.” She added, “If the answer is to phase out fossil fuels, a different group of people are going to be making money, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re fighting tooth and nail.”

David Koch told New York that he was unconvinced that global warming has been caused by human activity. Even if it has been, he said, the heating of the planet will be beneficial, resulting in longer growing seasons in the Northern Hemisphere. “The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because far greater land area will be available to produce food,” he said.

Gee, I wonder where the Cleveland Plain Dealer gets its "science" about the environment?

Wonder where the Cleveland Foundation gets its script?

Seems their leaders have been out to tea and not telling citizens who has paid their tab. 

"The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party"

This NY Times column about the Koch's - "The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party" - sums up the Cleveland "liberal elite" response we must have to the polluters and leaders who enable polluting...

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 who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”

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