Joe Miller is famously supported by the Tea Party. The Federal Election Commission reports for Political Action Committees aren’t in for the current quarter yet, so WC can’t tell the extent to which the Tea Baggers contributed to Miller’s late-campaign spending, but all of those deceptive, last-minute television ads didn’t come cheap, and certainly cost far more than the reported $198,656 he had spent through August 4. WC has to assume that the bulk of those additional expenditures came from one or another of the Tea Party PACs and Section 527 organizations.
WC’s teachers always told him to follow the money to figure out what was going on. So WC suggests that the voters educate themselves on who is paying for Joe Miller’s campaign.
WC’s recommended reading list starts with Jane Mayer’s thoroughly researched, excellent article in New Yorker, detailing the astonishing influence of David and Charles Koch. For example,
Public tax records show that between 1998 and 2008 the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than forty-eight million dollars. The Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, which is controlled by Charles Koch and his wife, along with two company employees and an accountant, spent more than twenty-eight million. The David H. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than a hundred and twenty million. Meanwhile, since 1998 Koch Industries has spent more than fifty million dollars on lobbying. Separately, the company’s political-action committee, KochPAC, has donated some eight million dollars to political campaigns, more than eighty per cent of it to Republicans. So far in 2010, Koch Industries leads all other energy companies in political contributions, as it has since 2006. In addition, during the past dozen years the Kochs and other family members have personally spent more than two million dollars on political contributions. In the second quarter of 2010, David Koch was the biggest individual contributor to the Republican Governors Association, with a million-dollar donation. Other gifts by the Kochs may be untraceable; federal tax law permits anonymous personal donations to politically active nonprofit groups.
The Tea Party, for all of its grass roots claims, is clearly a puppet to the Koch brothers, who have funded it since its inception. The puppets strings are the money.
Joe Miller’s political positions – to the extent they are more than vague statements – appear to be in lock step with the Koch brothers’ as Mayer describes them. Climate change denial – unsurprising in a company that sells fossil fuels. Abolition of social security. Abolition of a long list of federal agencies. Thinly disguised Libertarianism. Sounds like Joe Miller, doesn’t it? Miller’s ideas aren’t new; many of them trace to David Koch’s campaign for vice-president of the United States on the Libertarian ticket in 1980, or from the Koch-funded, libertarian Cato Institute.
Another interesting read is Frank Rich’s essay in the New York Times. As Rich notes,
The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the “ground zero mosque.”
All of this might matter somewhat less if it didn’t involve Alaska. Our state has a long history of being pillaged by billionaires who try to buy our votes. Guggenheim family and J.P. Morgan, who formed the Kennecott Copper Corporation in 1903, extracted one of the world’s greatest copper reserves from Kennecott, and never paid the territory of Alaska a dime in taxes. As Ernest Gruening noted in his fine history, The State of Alaska,
In common with the other larger mining, fishery and transportation interests, “the Guggenheims” were opposed to any extension of home rule [to Alaska] in the belief that it would increase taxes and lessen their control which they had been able to exercise successfully in a distant and disinterested Congress. Gruening, Ernest, The State of Alaska, (Random House 1968) p. 144.
The timber and fisheries industries fought statehood successfully for decades, and under the indifference of the federal government, salmon traps nearly destroyed southeast Alaska’s salmon stocks. (One of the first laws enacted by the Alaska Legislature after statehood was the abolition of salmon traps.)
Koch Industries, of course, owns Flint Hills, which owns the North Pole Refinery, the largest refinery in Alaska. The oil industry, at every chance, follows in the steps of mining, timber and fisheries. WC doesn’t need to remind his Alaska readers that Flint Hills has imposed higher gasoline prices on Interior Alaska than anyplace outside of Hawaii, despite the proximity of the refinery. The owners of North Pole Refinery may well be the largest single contributor to Joe Miller’s campaign.
Follow the money. In this case, like it or not, the extortionate price you pay at the gas pump is helping Joe Miller get elected. To quote Raging Moderate, “These confused people are like chickens that have been taught to clap for Colonel Sanders.”
Wickersham's Conscience 