The Koch brothers eye the Cato Institute

And, speaking of the 1%, here are excerpts from a column at Salon:

Charles and David Koch, of the famous anti-Obama billionaire Koch brothers, are attempting a sort of hostile takeover of the Cato Institute, one of the most prominent and independent arms of the D.C.-based American libertarian movement. Charles Koch co-founded Cato in the 1970s, but, as Dave Weigel explains, he left the think tank in 1991. David has been a minority partner since then, but the Kochs have largely left Cato to fund its libertarian research...

There are a lot of bloggers and political media people who have worked for/interned at/been paid by Cato, which explains in part why so much has already been written about the battle, but you should wish for an independent Cato Institute even if — maybe especially if — you’re a socialist statist tool (like me). Cato is mostly antiwar, decidedly anti-drug war, and sponsors a lot of good work on civil liberties...

Not that Cato is all good — Cato did already purge the true “liberaltarians” back in 2010, ridding itself of some voices that sought to find more common ground between the left and the libertarian movement — but it’s more honest than AEI or the other industry-funded think tanks/glorified front groups operating in the same intellectual space.