Saturday, May 05, 2012

freedom of speech




This spurious exercise in character assassination by association is funded by the Heartland Institute, a right-wing agitprop mill which spread a lot of Philip Morris's propaganda back in the days when the tobacco giant was disputing the science which documented the health hazards of second-hand smoke.

The Institute keeps its sources of funding secret, but Exxon-Mobil is known to have kicked in at least $800,000 between '98 and '05, and the omnipresent shadow of the Koch Brothers is discernible in the deep background.

Lots of information on this creepy organization and the creeps whose water they carry is in the Wikipedia article, s.v. Heartland Institute. I know of no other individual piece of evidence as telling as this particular history to support the charge that reactionary ideology in the US today is completely driven by big bucks.

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