LEAK EXPOSES HOW HEARTLAND INSTITUTE UNDERMINES CLIMATE SCIENCE
The Guardian has it that the Heartland Foundation has a scheme to distort science in our public schools on behalf of Big Energy, revealed from a leak. Such corporate-funded think tanks, distorting what goes out as news, in the mass media of the Land of the Free, contribute to the zombie-like condition of most citizens, but they appear to also want to control the minds of children with misinformation, children already getting crap from religious fundamentalists.
The Heartland Foundation is funded by, among others, Microsoft, where Bill Gates writes off his taxes with the Gates Foundation as he brings in workers from the third world to undermine wages from his own employees. Corporate media like to tell us how wonderful Bill is, justifying all the money going to him by pointing out the charity. If Gates wanted to really do something to change the world, his foundation would support a public interest media that would allow public interest topics to be discussed, resulting in an outbreak of democracy that would resolve most of our most serious problems.
Another funding source for Heartland is the billionaire Koch brothers, one of whom ran as the Libertarian Party vice presidential candidate, pushing the need to abolish the public schools. Not too bright, the Koch brothers, in their zealous efforts to bring about more ignorance for control, don’t seem to realize that their businesses would have to pay to educate employees if the public schools didn’t do it for free (we seriously doubt the Koch brothers are paying much, if anything, in taxes). While wanting everything the government does for the 99%, like most billionaires the Koch brothers are only too happy to take millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies for themselves.
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The link above leads to a March 2011 article about those porcine patricians, the Koch boys, and some of the ways they milk government for their own ends, to wit:
- The dirty secret of Koch Industries is its birth under the centrally-planned Soviet Union. Fred Koch, the founder of the company and father of David and Charles, helped construct fifteen oil refineries for Joseph Stalin before expanding the business in the United States.
- As Yasha Levine has reported, Koch exploits a number of government programs for profit. For instance, Georgia Pacific, a timber company subsidiary of Koch Industries, uses taxpayer money provided by the U.S. Forestry Service to provide their loggers with taxpayer-funded roads and access to virgin growth forests. “Logging companies such as Georgia-Pacific strip lands bare, destroy vast acreages and pay only a small fee to the federal government in proportion to what they take from the public,” according to the Institute for Public Accuracy. Levine also notes that Koch’s cattle ranching company, Matador Cattle Company, uses a New Deal program to profit off federal land for free.
- Koch Industries won massive government contracts using their close relationship with the Bush administration. The Bush administration, in a deal even conservatives alleged was a quid pro quo because of Koch’s campaign donations, handed Koch Industries a lucrative contract to supply the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve with 8 million barrels of crude oil. The SPR deal, done initially in 2002, was renewed in 2004 by Bush administration officials. During the occupation of Iraq, Koch won significant contracts to buy Iraqi crude oil.
- Although Koch campaigned vigorously against health reform — running attack ads, sponsoring anti-health reform Tea Parties, and comparing health reform to the Holocaust — Koch Industries applied for health reform subsidies made possible by the Obama administration.
- The Koch brothers have claimed that they oppose government intervention in the market, but Koch Industries lobbies aggressively for taxpayer handouts. In Alaska, blogger Andrew Halcro reported that a Koch subsidiary in Fairbanks asked Gov. Sarah Palin’s administration to use taxpayer money to bail out one of their failing refinery.
- SolveClimate recently reported that Koch Industries will reap huge profits from the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, which runs from Koch-owned tar sands mining centers in Canada to Koch-owned refineries in Texas. To build the pipeline, politicians throughout the Midwest, many of whom have received large Koch campaign donations, have used eminent domain — government seizures of private land. In Kansas, where Koch-funded officials advise Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS) and the Republican legislature, the Keystone XL Pipeline is likely to receive a property tax exemption of ten years, a special loophole that will cost Kansas taxpayers about $50 million.
- Koch Industries has been the recipient of about $85 million in federal government contracts mostly from the Department of Defense. Koch also benefits directly from billions in taxpayer subsidies for oil companies and ethanol production.
