A Word from Our Sponsor | Jane Mayer - The New Yorker
Last fall, Alex Gibney, a documentary filmmaker who won an Academy Award in 2008 for an exposé of torture at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, completed a film called Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream. It was scheduled to air on PBS on November 12th. The movie had been produced independently, in part with support from the Gates Foundation. Park Avenue is a pointed exploration of the growing economic inequality in America and a meditation on the often self-justifying mind-set of the one per cent. As a narrative device, Gibney focusses on one of the most expensive apartment buildings in Manhattan740 Park Avenueportraying it as an emblem of concentrated wealth and contrasting the lives of its inhabitants with those of poor people living at the other end of Park Avenue, in the Bronx.
Among the wealthiest residents of 740 Park is David Koch, the billionaire industrialist, who, with his brother Charles, owns Koch Industries, a huge energy-and-chemical conglomerate. The Koch brothers are known for their strongly conservative politics and for their efforts to finance a network of advocacy groups whose goal is to move the country to the right. David Koch is a major philanthropist, contributing to cultural and medical institutions that include Lincoln Center and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. In the nineteen-eighties, he began expanding his charitable contributions to the media, donating twenty-three million dollars to public television over the years. In 1997, he began serving as a trustee of Bostons public-broadcasting operation, WGBH, and in 2006 he joined the board of New Yorks public-television outlet, WNET. Recent news reports have suggested that the Koch brothers are considering buying eight daily newspapers owned by the Tribune Company, one of the countrys largest media empires, raising concerns that its publicationswhich include the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Timesmight slant news coverage to serve the interests of their new owners, either through executive mandates or through self-censorship. Clarence Page, a liberal Tribune columnist, recently said that the Kochs appeared intent on using a media company as a vehicle for their political voice.
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A large part of the film, however, subjects the Kochs to tough scrutiny. Nobodys money talks louder than David Kochs, the narrator, Gibney, says, describing him as a right-wing oil tycoon whose company had to pay what was then the largest civil penalty in the E.P.A.s history for its role in more than thirty oil spills in 2000. At one point, a former doormanhis face shrouded in shadow, to preserve his anonymitysays that when he started at 740 his assumption was that come around to Christmastime Im going to get a thousand from each resident. You know, because they are multibillionaires. But its not that way. He continues, These guys are businessmen. They know what the going rate istheyre not going to give you anything more than that. The cheapest person over all was David Koch. We would load up his truckstwo vans, usuallyevery weekend, for the Hamptons . . . multiple guys, in and out, in and out, heavy bags. We would never get a tip from Mr. Koch. We would never get a smile from Mr. Koch. Fifty-dollar check for Christmas, tooyeah, I mean, a check! At least you could give us cash.
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In the end, the various attempts to assuage David Koch were apparently insufficient. On Thursday, May 16th, WNETs board of directors quietly accepted his resignation. It was the result, an insider said, of his unwillingness to back a media organization that had so unsparingly covered its sponsor.
Full article at New Yorker
DCKit
(18,541 posts)The only thing they're conservative about is preserving and expanding their own wealth and limiting the rights and benefits of others.
does that work?
DCKit
(18,541 posts)We need something stupid and ugly, like a bully would use.
BillyRibs
(787 posts)or the the Parasitic wealthy.