Relevant roastings

With variations, there are only about a half-dozen recurring refrains from the right wing in resistance to themes advanced in this space.

One, to be addressed today, is that I write regularly of the big-monied menace from the right of the libertarian Koch brothers, David and Charles, without addressing the big-monied menace from the left of George Soros.

To that charge I plead guilty by reason of relevance.

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First there is my belief that billionaire industrialists who fashion a vast and secretive political network to pose a sneaky anti-government menace from the right are more egregious than a billionaire empire’s human rights and political advocacy from the left.

Beyond that matter of opinion and personal preference, there is this underlying fact: I write about Arkansas politics.

The Koch tentacles are ubiquitous and deep in Arkansas. They beam all over your television screen these days.

The Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity tells you out-of-context about the travails of a woman named Wanda with canceled health insurance. It shows you that soft-voiced woman who says she hates political ads even as she embarks on one.

That commercial doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work.

Then there is the Concerned Veterans for America, a Koch small-government facade, praising Tom Cotton for trying to save veterans’ pension raises.

In fact, it was Mark Pryor who advanced the bill to save those raises. It is the Concerned Veterans for America that has betrayed an interest in converting veterans’ pensions to something like 401(k)s.

And this Americans for Prosperity keeps its nose deeply in the state’s legislative races to help forge a majority of Republicans.

Then these rookie Arkansas Republicans traipse to conferences of the Kochs’ American Legislative Exchange Council, to which anti-government business interests make tax-deductible contributions so they can get this ALEC group to write deregulation and tax-cut bills in their self-interest.

Then ALEC hands out these bills to pliable Koch-beholden legislative tyros from backwoods places like Arkansas.

I’ll say one good thing about the Kochs: Their Americans for Prosperity stayed blessedly neutral on the private-option form of Medicaid expansion in the just-completed fiscal session.

Americans for Prosperity thought Republicans would merely make political trouble for themselves by blocking the private option now,rather than presumably doing so in a fuller policy context next year-presumably with more Koch-delivered Republican legislators, indeed, a Koch-delivered Republican governor.

So the Kochs’ interest was longer-term political strategy. Of course. What else would it be?

Things go worse with Koch, a point advanced last week by ProPublica, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit doing investigative journalism.

It reported its extensive probe into the vast Kochian political advocacy empire and found that the Kochs have forged a new frontier in evasion of accountability in their myriad organizations.

ProPublica reported that the Kochs don’t set up standard donor-veiled nonprofits so much as they set up trusts and nonprofit limited-liability corporations, often organized in Delaware for secrecy advantages.

It reported that tax lawyers speculated that the purpose was to erect a secondary level of anonymity for donors and to allow the Kochs to move money and oversight stealthily from one group to another. That would be helpful to the consolidated Koch cause in case some think tank or advocacy group got infested with employees inclined to think for themselves.

That once happened at the Cato Institute where some staff members dared to behave as agents of an independent conservative think tank and not as agents of the Kochs’ electoral interests.

Beyond that, ProPublica said the Kochs also rely on nonprofit corporations from which they spin off “disregarded entities” that can’t be traced for donors or activity. That’s because their records are cloaked within the nonprofit corporations from which they’re spun.

For example: If you didn’t want to give money to the Concerned Veterans for America because the donation might be traced and the group was starting to get some occasional negative publicity, then you could give the money instead to the offshoot known as a “disregarded entity.”

Thus you could hide behind not one facade, but two facades.

So to conclude: Arkansas seems much closer to becoming Kochville than Sorosville. Thus local journalistic emphasis should be directed accordingly.

Apostscript: Koch Industries gave a direct contribution to Mark Pryor. The industrial corporation itself is the least of the Kochian political empire.

Anyway, the contribution might have been merely cover-a few thousand dollars to give Tom Cotton defenders a counter charge.

Should Pryor have taken the money? Considering what he’s up against-why not?

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.