US midterm election: Battle of the billionaires

The votes have been cast, the polls have closed, the Democrats managed to keep the Senate and the Republicans have retaken the House. But behind the voting booth curtain is more than a ballot.

The 2010 Midterm Elections were the most expensive in history, and that trend isn’t changing. From the Koch brothers to Viacom, News Corp. to General Electric, the battle for the future of America is between big corporations and media conglomerates.“You have various tentacles of Wall Street. You have a left wing group, you can say that’s Jeff Immelt and General Electric and NBC, MSNBC and their group, and they’re pro-Obama, you can see every night with Keith Olbermann, and then on the right we have Rupert Murdoch and the reactionaries and there you have FOX News,” said Webster Tarpley, author and investigative journalist. “Wall Street’s going to win no matter which one of these win, because there’s no anti-wall street interest that’s going to get traction from either one of them.”David Koch surpassed Mayor Michael Bloomberg to become the wealthiest New Yorker last year, with an annual income of $21.5 billion. Koch is widely known to be the financier of the Tea Party, yet the group bills itself as a purely grassroots movement.“That’s their popular front, so to speak. Just like the Communist Party had its popular front, the corporations, knowing that they can’t be out front because people don’t like a lot of these big corporations, and so the camouflage is they give the tea partiers certain deceptive information and therefore they continue to work their will behind the scenes,” said Ralph Nader, four time US presidential candidate.For its part, Viacom, the billion-dollar parent company of MTV and Comedy Central, gave President Obama a commercial-free hour-long town hall across its networks, just two weeks before the midterm elections. They also televised all three hours of Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity October 30, and have brought Obama on the Daily Show before the 2008 elections and the 2010 midterms.“Jon Stewart is just one. There’s just such an imbalance between Jon Stewart and the liberal media, and the conservatives have FOX, we have one,” said Emily Miller, senior editor of Human Events. “There may be one or two wealthy conservatives trying to put their finger in the dike of this liberal media agenda, but no matter what there’s going to be CBS, NBC, MSNBC and CNN leftward leaning.”The recent election results create a major political realignment, said radio host Alex Jones.He argued that the Koch brothers and other corporate interest have worked to co-op the Tea Party, but there are those in the movement who oppose corporate money and involvement.“That’s the real Tea Party,” Jones said. “It’s an oversimplification to say that the entire Tea Party is financed by News Corp. and the Koch brothers. But it’s true they have attempted to co-op it and control it.”Many Republican politicians who have attached themselves to the Tea Party are in fact funded by major corporations, but the grassroots portion of the movement is not.“More than just having one group of corporations behind Republicans and another group behind Democrats, they just hedge their bets. In fact, most of these corporations are financial all the groups so they are beholden to them and so that they can control them,” said Jones.Voters came out in droves for Obama in 2008, this time they came to the polls for Republicans, leading to the largest landslide for one party in over 70 years.Republicans are trying to co-op the Tea Party; the President will be forced to work with Republican leaders, which may lead to gridlock.“If they [Republicans] don’t deliver, they’re going to be out,” he added.Jones argued that the Tea Party movement is one of the best we have seen in over 75 years.“This is the beginning of the end of these special corporate interests who have been sucking the federal purse dry,” he said.Issues surrounding the Federal Reserve, gun rights, immigration, border control and related topics are important to the Tea Party and will now be addressed, Jones believes.“There’s a huge awakening conduited through mainline conservatives who are waking up,” he said. “The beginning of the end of the globalists is here.”In the past elections focused on the rich people battling over power, this time the grassroots was a dominate force in the election.“People are angry and they are not going to get conned,” said Jones. “Mainline Democrats are out. Establishment Republicans are out. This is the beginning of one of the biggest political realignments in modern western history. I believe it’s the beginning of the second American Revolution!”