[Kätzchen]

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

How Billionaire 'Philanthropy' Is Fueling Inequality and Helping To Destroy the Country

Much of philanthropy today has become a weapon in the class warfare of the 1 percent.

A closer look at how the world’s wealthiest are choosing to give away their money provides clues. While pretending to fix inequality, contemporary philanthropy’s actual role has been to strengthen the arrangements that make gross inequality possible in the first place. It has become a weapon in the class warfare of the 1%, the carrot to win people over to their ideology complementing the stick of political spending to coerce them into the same.

The Koch brothers

David and Charles Koch, together worth $35 billion, have perfected this philanthropic misanthropy perhaps better than anyone else. Their Kansas-based Koch Industries is the second largest private company in the country after Cargill, with annual revenues estimated to surpass $100 billion. Together they control thousands of miles of oil pipelines from Alaska to Texas; fertilizers, minerals and biofuels; Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups and Lycra.

A research team at American University found that from 2007 to 2011, Koch foundations gave $41.2 million to 89 nonprofits and sponsored an annual libertarian conference. The report details how Koch Industries’ $53.9 million federal and state lobbying budget routinely goes hand-in-glove with Koch-affiliated nonprofits’ “public advocacy” for reasons having little to do with the public and everything to do with the brothers’ sprawling business interests. Koch lobbyists advocate for bills like the Energy Tax Prevention Act — which sought to roll back the Supreme Court ruling allowing EPA regulation of greenhouse gases — that are then supported in congressional testimony by “experts” from Koch-funded nonprofits.

http://http://www.alternet.org/econo...thropy-trouble

Thanks for this post, Miss Tick. And, once again, it is articles like the one above which illustrate the timeless concept of Hegemony (by Antonio Gramsci):

"...the rule of one class over another is not dependent on economic or physical power alone but on persuading the ruled to accept a system of beliefs belonging to the ruling class (James Joll, UK, 1977).