in New York Magazine titled Sugar Daddies and subtitled The old, white, rich men who are buying this election.
I am at school, and limited in crafting excerpts to make that clear to you. Here's one paragraph where he defines the universe about which he is writing (and his original is full of hyperlinks that I am not going to include):
Sugar daddies—whom I’ll define here as private donors or their privately held companies writing checks totaling $1 million or more (sometimes much more) in this election cycle—are largely a Republican phenomenon, most of them one degree of separation from Karl Rove and his unofficial partners in erecting a moneyed shadow GOP, David and Charles Koch. At last look, there were 25 known sugar daddies on the right (or more, if you want to count separately the spouses and children who pitch in). You’ve likely heard of Sheldon Adelson, the Vegas tycoon who is Benjamin Netanyahu’s unofficial ambassador to the GOP. But you may be less familiar with Irving Moskowitz, the bingo entrepreneur who funnels his profits into East Jerusalem settlements. Or Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund master of “flash trading” who poured a clandestine $1 million into ads attacking the “ground-zero mosque” and nearly another $3 million into a scale-model railroad in his Long Island mansion. Or Steven Lund, the co-founder of Nu Skin, which became “direct selling” sponsor of the Romney-run 2002 Winter Olympics after having spent much of the nineties settling complaints over false advertising and other unscrupulous practices with the Federal Trade Commission and six different states’ attorneys general.
Please keep reading
Rich notes that
What these sugar daddies specifically want from Mitt and his party, besides the usual conservative bullet points (codified in Paul Ryan’s tax-cutting, government-shredding budget), is clear enough: the widest possible regulation-free berth for any vulture businesses they have a hand in, from nuclear waste to “health” nostrums, from new houses to financial products created from those homes’ subprime mortgages.
He then goes on to talk specifically about the Koch brothers, again supporting his argument generously with hyperlinks.
As to those who might argue that David Koch, with his contributions to cultural institutions among others, is like Andrew Carnegie? Read how Rich demolishes that:
“In a sense, David Koch is becoming the Andrew Carnegie of his age,” wrote his Palm Beach Boswell. Not exactly. Carnegie, arguably the least egregious of the Gilded Age titans, offers a stunning contrast to Koch. His philanthropic obsessions led him to give away almost all of his wealth, with a reach unmatched by any of his sugar-daddy descendants. He argued for estate taxes and declared that the “proper use” of money was “for public ends” that “would work good to the community.” He had socialist roots in Scotland, preferred frugality to luxury, and was entirely self-made. The Koch brothers, by contrast, inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from their father, Fred, who also bequeathed them a paranoia and unrestrained hatred for political adversaries that would have been anathema to Carnegie. Fred Koch, a founder of the John Birch Society, published a manifesto, A Business Man Looks at Communism, in 1960. It accused Republicans and Democrats alike, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, of being under the sway of the Kremlin, and described welfare programs as a plot to attract blacks to cities and “foment a vicious race war.”
Enough quoting.
This is a MUST-READ by Frank Rich - not at all unusual given his track record. He is no longer limited by length as he was to a large degree while still at The New York Times.
Read it.
Make sure others do as well.
That will justify my taking time to put this up.
Peace.