by Greg Palast
The untold story of the sources of the loot controlled by Paul “The Vulture” Singer, Ken Langone and the Kochs – and why they need to buy the White House.
Hedge fund magnate Paul Singer likes to breakfast on decayed carcasses. What he chews down is sickening, but just as nausea-inducing are his new tablemates: billionaires Ken Langone and the Koch Brothers, Charles and David.
Singer has called together the billionaire boys’ club for the purpose of picking our next president for us. The old-fashioned way of choosing presidents – democracy and counting ballots and all that – has never been a favorite of this pack. I can tell you that from my investigations of each of these gentlemen for The Guardian. When the Statue of Liberty has nightmares, she dreams that these guys will combine to seize America via a cash-and-carry coup d’état.
Welcome to the nightmare. Singer, Langone and the Kochs last month decided to elect Chris Christie for us. The New Jersey governor’s pseudocampaign went belly up before it began. But that’s beside the point. Now that the Supreme Court has effectively ended campaign finance limits and allowed secretive contributions through “corporations,” this new combine of the ultrawealthy should not be viewed as just a political threat to the Democrats, but as a threat to democracy.
Let me give you a rundown from my sulphur-scented files on these men who would be king-makers.
Billionaire 1: Ken Langone
Langone likes to be known as the founder of Home Depot, just your local tool guy in a blue apron with a little bag of screws.
But he was also the man, with his right-wing partners, behind Database Technologies (DBT). It was in my first investigation of Langone in 2000 that I discovered that DBT had created a list of several thousand “felons” – most of them black, all of them innocent, all of them purged from Florida’s voter rolls by DBT’s client, Katherine Harris. And Langone’s company knew exactly what was going on.
What qualifies Langone to pick our president? In his own words: “I’m nuts; I’m rich.”
Billionaires 2 and 3: David and Charles Koch
You think you’ve read all about the billionaire brothers. Well, there’s more:
In 1996, an FBI agent, Richard Elroy, told my team that oil had been pilfered from the Osage Indian reservation in Oklahoma. He and other G-men filmed the filch-theft, say witnesses, personally ordered by Charles Koch. A few barrels here, a few barrels there.
It all added up: to about a billion and a half dollars in looted petroleum, says one expert, a third of the Koch fortune at the time. David and Charles shared in the booty via their private company, Koch Industries.
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