The San Diego Union has been reporting a lot on San Diego billionaire Irwin M Jacobs lately starting on August 14. He and wife Joan have singlehandedly saved a number of San Diego institutions like the Symphony and the new Central Library which, if not for their recent $20 million donation, might not even be built. Four days later he was back in the paper again celebrating the 25th anniversary of Qualcomm, the company he founded which is the source of his good fortune. Then the next day he was in the paper again unveiling a $30 million dollar parking plan for Balboa Park that would free up the park's central square and build a parking garage.
The Jacobs' have been major benefactors and philanthropists in San Diego and elsewhere donating to education at UCSD, providing funds for hospitals, radio station KSDS, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the La Jolla Playhouse, the La Jolla library, the Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma Research Foundation, the ACLU and many other arts and cultural charities too numerous to mention. The Jacobs tend to give when and where it can make a significant difference.
Recently they joined Bill Gates and Warren Buffet who have formed a group of billionaires dedicated to giving away half their fortunes. This is from the Telegraph.co.uk:
Mr Buffett is an extremely successful investor and one of the world's richest men, as well as one of its biggest givers to charity. Having pledged to give away 99 per cent of his estimated $47 billion fortune, much of it to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the so-called Sage of Omaha had wanted to get together a small group of like-minded billionaires to encourage their peers to join the ranks of what he dubbed the "Great Givers". Mr Gates, who has taken on an almost messianic role in advancing philanthropy since relinquishing the reins of Microsoft, needed no persuading to get involved.
Irwin Jacobs was present at that meeting. Probably not present at that dinner were libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch. Their company Koch Industries makes $100 billion a year and they give mainly to right wing causes. They have become the major thorn in the side of President Obama's administration spending millions on lobbyists and funding think tanks like the Cato Institute (which they founded) and the Heritage Foundation and groups like Americans for Prosperity which funds the Tea Partiers. They give tons of money to academics to deny climate science and global warming while being named one of the top ten corporate polluters by University of Massachusetts at Amherst's Political Economy Research Institute. An exhaustive article in the August 23 edition of the New Yorker magazine details in depth all their activities which have set much of the conservative and anti-intellectual tone that the Obama administration is having to deal with including outright lies and distortions about Obama hinself such as that he's a Muslim (believed by 20% of Americans).
Now it's all well and good that humanitarian philanthropists donate to educational institutions, hospitals, arts and cultural institutions and the like, but, if they want to have a society worth preserving, they might want to think about setting up a think tank to advocate for sane public policy. It's not even a matter of the left-right political divide so much as it's a matter of the smart-dumb cultural divide. The Koch brothers are on a crusade to dumb down America. Their theory is that, if a lie is repeated often enough and enough people come to believe it, then they have effectively created the Truth. And I'm sure that smart guys like Irwin Jacobs, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett don't want to see American society become convinced of such lies as global warming doesn't exist when all reputable scientists have declared that it does.
Ralph Nader has written a book, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us which is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but the message is clear. If right wing billionaires are funding think tanks, academics, lobbyists and even mass movements like the Tea Party while liberal billionaires are out doing good deeds like funding educational institutions, hospitals and museums, the field is left open to the hate mongers and spin artists who are gradually moving the American people in a rightward direction. When a larger percentage of the population believes that global warming is not real today than believed it five years ago, something is wrong. We're going in the wrong direction. People are being uneducated, made dumber, despite the best efforts of educational institutions. An untruth is winning out over the truth. Science is being denigrated and think tanks are generating falsehoods.
Interestingly, enough both Irwin Jacobs and the Koch brothers graduated from MIT. They both narrowly escaped death in a plane accident, Jacobs by not going on a trade mission to Croatia with Ron Brown at the last minute and Koch being the only first class survivor of an actual plane wreck in LA. Other than that they don't have much in common. Jacobs is a Democrat who had a fundraiser for Barack Obama and supported Clinton and John F Kennedy.
Warren Buffett has made the public comment that he doesn't think it's fair that he pays taxes at a 15% rate while his secretary pays at a 30% rate. Obviously, these men have good intentions. So why aren't they publicly advocating in a billion dollar way the facts that global warming is real and that billionaires should pay more taxes?
This is from the New Yorker article:
The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to “educate,” fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, said, “The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.” With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there—people who can provide real ideological power.” The Kochs, he said, are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.”
So there are billionaires who want to do good and there are the Koch brothers who are building a popular movement based on lies and distortions whose agenda includes undermining true educational and liberal values in the interests, well, of Koch Industries and their $100 billion a year in revenues. It's a natural to be a climate science denier if part of your corporate empire is oil. While philanthropists like Jacobs, Gates and Buffett give for the benefit of humanity, the Koch brothers' charitable interests are completely self-serving:
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.”
The Kochs have gone well beyond their immediate self-interest, however, funding organizations that aim to push the country in a libertarian direction. Among the institutions that they have subsidized are the Institute for Justice, which files lawsuits opposing state and federal regulations; the Institute for Humane Studies, which underwrites libertarian academics; and the Bill of Rights Institute, which promotes a conservative slant on the Constitution. Many of the organizations funded by the Kochs employ specialists who write position papers that are subsequently quoted by politicians and pundits. David Koch has acknowledged that the family exerts tight ideological control. “If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent,” he told Doherty. “And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding.”
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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.”
In 2008 President Obama described the science on global warming as "beyond dispute." The Cato Institute, however, took out a full page ad in the New York Times to contradict him. They have parried Obama at every turn using their "scientists" and academics to dispute him. This has created the climate where Obama has been called every name in the book, accused of every crime, attacked at every turn no matter which way he turned. If Hillary had won, they would have done the same to her. In fact they used the same play book on Bill Clinton.
So high minded billionaires beware! While you are out there doing good deeds, your counterpart billionaires like the Koch brothers are doing their level best to move the electorate to the right, spread intolerance, denial of science and outright hatred for the values you gentlemen and ladies represent. Perhaps you should reconsider your giving, start a THINK TANK with liberal values, heed Ralph Nader's call for public advocacy and consider 'the pledge' in a new light.
Please read the New Yorker article.
The Kochs have long depended on the public’s not knowing all the details about them. They have been content to operate what David Koch has called “the largest company that you’ve never heard of.” But with the growing prominence of the Tea Party, and with increased awareness of the Kochs’ ties to the movement, the brothers may find it harder to deflect scrutiny. Recently, President Obama took aim at the Kochs’ political network. Speaking at a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser, in Austin, he warned supporters that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Citizens United case—which struck down laws prohibiting direct corporate spending on campaigns—had made it even easier for big companies to hide behind “groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity.” Obama said, “They don’t have to say who, exactly, Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation”—or even, he added, “a big oil company.”
