Rare Interview with David Koch Focuses on Right-Wing Politics, Cancer Research

David Koch
(photo from Kansas City Star)

David Koch, one of the two Koch brothers prominent in American right-wing activism, recently talked with a Palm Beach Post health reporter about two topics of importance to the billionaire industrialist: cancer research and politics. The story was noted in a blog post by Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel political writer Don Walker.

In the interview, Koch makes no bones about his support for Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. The Kansas-based industrialist, whose wealth places him in the Top Ten of the Forbes 400 list, strongly asserts his belief that labor unions are inimical to unfettered free market capitalism. Walker's gutting of most Wisconsin public employee collective bargaining rights was something Koch ardently supported, and continues to support. Koch's political front organization, Americans for Prosperity, has supported Walker with TV commercials and other funded initiatives in the current recall campaign against the Wisconsin governor.

Koch's ideology has family antecedents. His West Texas father, according to the Palm Beach Post article, sold technology to the Russians during the Stalin era. That capability was used to help develop the Communist nation's nuclear capability. Koch père's upset over that development has been cited as a reason why he became a founder of the John Birch Society.

Today, David Koch and his brother Charles are visible tips of the right-wing political iceberg. They proudly welcome supposedly impartial Supreme Court justices, such as Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, to events with a clear political and judicial agenda. Discussions from these meetings are divorced from public scrutiny, a stance more in keeping with Communist government practice than transparent democratic ventures.

Wisconsin Governor
Scott Walker

The Koch interview is a timely one, as the recall campaign against Scott Walker is something of a tossup right now. The vote matters greatly to the unions and to the right-wing. The Walker maneuvers leveraged resentment that it has exploited to political gain far beyond the stated goals of overt limitation of union benefits. Liberals need to face the fact that a considerable portion of Wisconsin's electorate backed Walker's campaign and subsequent efforts to attack and ultimately destroy unions. While the Kochs' and their formidable allies are playing to win, one wonders where Barack Obama is on this debate. The president has never really been friendly with the labor unions he will ultimately need to win the Midwest in the 2012 presidential elections. His silence is even more curious as Obama's power base is Chicago, just a short drive from Wisconsin.

Regardless of the Wisconsin recall campaign's results, the Koch brothers fully intend to pursue their push to drive American political institutions and legal apparatus further to the right. They've just begun to fight.

National Enquirer's Publishers Emerges from Bankruptcy

American Media Incorporated, Florida-based home to the National Enquirer, WWE, and other publications, will emerge from bankruptcy "as early as this week," according to a Palm Beach Post report posted in today's Miami Herald.

The Enquirer is a curious media creature. It specializes in publishing salacious stories about public figures. Its approach involves working the edges of the First Amendment and the dodgy side of human behavior. Its reporters are not exactly "investigative reporters"; rather, they are similar to private detectives unearthing dirt on behalf of divorce clients. In this case, the customer is the Enquirer's readership.

Who reads the Enquirer? Well, millions of Americans do, although it's difficult to envision the publication's subscription list. The Enquirer is an impulse purchase typically done in supermarkets and the endangered species known as the news stand. Many people read it standing on line, killing time in a laundromat, or getting a haircut. I am among them.

The Enquirer and like-minded tabloids have occasionally provided revealing stories that have entered the national dialogue. The articles typically demonstrate a combination of old-fashioned journalistic hustle, pay-to-tell sourcing, and a shameless shaping of fact to drive reader interest. As with its Britsh and other Anglo-Saxon cousins, the Enquirer has always proudly flown journalism's version of the pirate flag. However, unlike Rupert Murdoch's politically slanted slander sheets, the Enquirer is intriguingly nonpartisan. It has broken stories on right-wingers such as Rush Limbaugh's drug addiction and left-wingers such as John Edwards' love child.

The Enquirer is Hollywood's particular bete-noire. Stories about movie stars provide a volatile amalgam of fully founded facts and lurid speculation that provides readers with the feeling of opinionated escape. The American public insatiably devours this information. To feed the public's craving for dirt, the Enquirer is cozy with the hellhound paparazzi that mercilessly track celebrities, relentlessly invade their privacy, and commercially benefit from their exploitation. Agents, publicists, and attorneys have a love and (mostly) hate relationship with the publication's writers, editors, and lawyers. It's not a business for the faint of heart.

During my undergraduate years at the University of Wisconsin, I worked on the student newspaper. One of its editors at that time later joined the Enquirer staff and eventually became a name near the top of its masthead. Given the editor's collegiate years' interest in radical leftist politics, I found his career move a puzzling one. I have never understood his motivation to work, and achieve a sort of success, with a supermarket tabloid. By extension, I don't know why any Enquirer reporter chooses to call "home" the dicey neighborhood where fact, innuendo, and dark motives uneasily co-exist.

Yet, as most journalists would admit, there's something about the hunt for the story that deeply matters to them. It's in every good journalist's blood, from the Pentagon Papers' Neil Sheehan on down. Enquirer reporters fit quite comfortably into that way of being, although they find embarrassing sexcapades more compelling than national policy.

The Enquirer supposedly faces an uncertain commercial future. Analysts cite its declining audience, inability to draw sufficient advertising, and competition from specialized Internet sites and dreadful television programs. We'll see. The psychological phenomena that form the foundation of tabloid success are essential elements of our collective character. They are unlikely to disappear, and neither will the public's desire for a publication that provides a goofy look into our lives' shared, unseemly desires.

However, the Enquirer could be literally killed. In the fall of 2001, an American Media employee died from anthrax delivered to the premises, and the building had to be abandoned for a substantial period of time. The subsequent federal investigation suggested a domestically-based scientist produced the deadly material. The episode remains part of the anthrax scare mystery, in which high profile targets experienced fatal consequences. Not even the Enquirer's top reportorial bloodhounds could find a trail, or enough printable information to pass its editorial and legal team's scrutiny. One wonders why.