Last week, Bloomberg Markets Magazine published a 7,000+ word, 14 author hit piece, on Koch Industries Inc. that was so pathetic, Bloomberg’s own Businessweek editorialized against it. This week, The New Yorker’s Jane Meyer, also of Koch hit piece fame, has published a new hatchet job, this time on retailing magnate Art Pope.
Pope owns and operates a number of retail store chains in the south and mid-Atlantic region, but has concentrated the bulk of his giving to North Carolina, which is where Meyer focuses her story. According to Meyer, Pope, “like several other farsighted conservative corporate activists, has been spending millions in an attempt to change the direction of American politics.” Sounds like a perfectly patriotic exercise of first amendment rights to us.
But Meyer sees it differently. The article is filled with bitter quotes from Democrats like State Senator Martin Nesbitt who told Meyer, “Art Pope set out to buy power, and it’s working.” And what public policies is Pope buying with his new influence? Meyer can identify only one that affects Pope’s bottom line: “Pope insisted that his political activism ‘has not been motivated by narrow corporate interest,’ but fellows at Pope-funded think tanks have repeatedly assailed minimum-wage laws.” – As if Wal-Mart has to pay a different federal minimum wage law than Pope does.
Meyer gives away the real purpose of her article in another great quote from Nesbitt: “I don’t hold anyone’s political views against them. But any time you have the takeover we did, with the influence of money and absolute power, you have to worry. It’s a blue state that has a Democratic governor, and voted for Obama in 2008, but in two years they turned it into a red state, all because of their money.”
And that is really what is fueling all these attack pieces on conservative philanthropists. Liberals are angry about Obama’s failure to turn the country to the left the way Ronald Reagan turned the country to the right. There must be some evil super-rich villains who are to blame. So far Meyer and co. have identified Pope and the Kochs. There will definitely be more enemies of the public to come.
