I admire this guy for fighting back, but Koch’s a hell of a drug:
The Cato Institute’s president, Edward Crane, released a statement responding to the lawsuit filed yesterday by billionaires Charles and David Koch, calling the move “an attempt at a hostile takeover.”
Crane accuses Charles Koch of attempting to “transform Cato from an independent, nonpartisan research organization into a political entity that might better support his partisan agenda,” and vowed to keep the think tank “an independent, nonpartisan research organization.”
replicnt6
I think that ship has sailed already.
capt
“transform Cato from an independent, nonpartisan research organization into a political entity that might better support his partisan agenda,”
Um, too late – in my opinion. I have followed CATO for years and they have always been very partisan.
butler
Is this not the free market at work? Should not money trump all other factors, Mr. Crane?
gnomedad
Time for some cartoonist to do these guys up as Lenin vs. Trotsky.
The Ancient Randonneur
Heh. How long before Crane sings “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”
Soonergrunt
Apparently Mr. Crane thinks it’s the year right after the founding of the CATO institute, because it’s been a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Enterprises for as long as I can remember.
There hasn’t been an actual Libertarian thought out of that “think tank” for as long as I’ve been politically conscious.
barkleyg
replicnt6 – March 2, 2012 | 12:13 pm · Link
“I think that ship has sailed already.” Early bird gets
Now, if this was RedState, and Soros the subject, the sentence would also say:
TomG
I’m surprised he’s still president there. He founded the Cato Institute and was apparently very active in the 1970s in Libertarian circles. Wiki says that Charles Koch helped him fund the Cato Institute in the first place so …..yeah. Ship has sailed.
GregB
Let the inter-Republican/winger terror continue apace.
Wait till the Koch boys figure out how much money they can make manufacturing guillotines.
In other news, one of Limbaugh’s advertisers just bailed out on him.
amk
pot/kettle but at least it is doing it openly. I will take it if hurts the bastid brothers even in a small way.
barkleyg
The Ancient Randonneur – March 2, 2012 | 12:18 pm · Link
Heh. How long before Crane sings “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”
Right after he plays THIS Song:
and PLAY it LOUD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbD5v2xijqw
LISTEN to the lyrics!
Brachiator
Isn’t this a contradiction in terms?
I love this “hostile takeover” of Cato stuff. Man, Karma is working overtime with the Schadenfreude this week.
John of Indiana
“non-partisan”? Cato?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Marc
I’m just hoping that there is a way that all of them can lose.
eyelessgame
@butler: This.
JoshA
This all stemmed from the 4th founder dying. Crane wants to honor that founder’s request to transfer his 25% share of CATO to his widow. The Kochs want that 25% share split between them.
In other words, yes, the Kochs do want a ‘death tax’ of 100%, they just want it payable to them.
Sophia
I just skimmed the pleading (gold stars to the Kochs for defeating any potential diversity jurisdiction with a mail box in JoCo KS) and I’d be curious to see if Crane has any remotely decent argument to defend his position. I don’t think this will hurt the Kochs at all. I don’t even see the potential for fun with discovery.
eta: That’s amusing, JoshA, but inaccurate. The Kochs are willing to pay the $16 the shares are worth into the estate of the decedent.
Martin
@butler: Indeed.
jah
Let’s not forget the proper nomenclature for this institution: The Cato Institute, originally founded as The Charles Koch Foundation.
Zifnab
“Yeah, I took his money. But I didn’t think he’d actually ask me to suck his d~.”
I can’t wait to hear the stirring reprimand from Koch-funded Reason Magazine as to why Koch-funded Cato Institute is getting out of line. Any other Koch-funded organizations out there that’ll pile on? Peter Peterson foundation, maybe?
eemom
Koooooch Is The Drug….
Kane
First they came for the partisan political research organizations…
Kenn
Dude, seriously, safari is NOT a mobile browser.
geg6
@gnomedad:
This, this, this. Jeebus, it’s just like my Soviet history class in undergrad.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Zifnab:
the quote that sums it up. LOL
c u n d gulag
Now this them there’s pure f*cking comedy gold!”:
“Crane accuses Charles Koch of attempting to “transform Cato from an independent, nonpartisan research organization into a political entity that might better support his partisan agenda,” and vowed to keep the think tank “an independent, nonpartisan research organization.”
What?
Just because some other pimp offers that girl you’ve been pimping more money, doesn’t all of a sudden transform her from your significant other and turn her into into a hooker.
She was already a whore.*
*My heartfelt apologies in advance to hookers, whores, and all sexual workers.
You all provide a more useful and wholesome service than Cato ever did.
And with a lot less disease, too.
Cargo
I wonder how many times he practiced saying “independent and nonpartisan” without cracking up.
kindness
Crane’s protestations will look silly when the Koch’s pull their funding. I mean, they may be ‘independent’ but as I understand it the Koch’s still give them 3/4 of their donor dollars….I can only hope this happens.
Couldn’t happen to a shittier grifting organization.
Catsy
Yet another reason to loathe Mitt Romney: he made my commute hell this morning. Apparently he’s making a stop at some community center in Bellevue from roughly 7am to 11am, and managed to snarl traffic on Bel-Red something fierce.
There were what looked like a few hundred people up and down the sidewalk in line, and some toolbox pacing back and forth by them with insane signs and placards like a picture of Obama with a Hitler mustache. I wish I’d been able to get a shot, but I was driving.
HG Hay
Splitter!
amk
cato catfight…
Poopyman
Yeah! Or at least taken a picture. (/rimshot)
Mark B
Cato–even the Heritage Foundation thinks they’re a joke.
Mark B
Another slogan for Cato: “Good thinktanks don’t, but I do.”
wrb
I hope Mr. Crane didn’t like working there.
jl
@Mark B: If the Heritage foundation thinks that the CATO (formerly Charles Koch) foundation is a joke, it would be because CATO (fCKf) is not partisan enough, and does too much original ‘research’. Heritage is into efficiency (why do your own work when you can cut and paste) and a well defined mission statement (at least implicitly partisan spin on everything). In the think tank world, Heritage is what you would call a ‘repackager’.
Trinity
SITE ISSUE: Very odd. Via Google Chrome (PC) this post comes up in mobile format. Main site does not seem to have this issue, only this post.
trollhattan
@Mark B:
A Cato-Heritage fight–I can’t imagine a better live-action edition of an Escher drawing.
Also, too, Taibbi on Breitbart. Feel the bartmentum!
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/andrew-breitbart-death-of-a-douche-20120301
PeakVT
What cracks me up about this is that I can’t see what the Kochs could possibly object to. Crapto is as anti-regulation and anti-tax as any other right-wing propaganda tank. Perhaps Kochs object to the occasional mumblings about civil liberties from some of the staffers, but that’s necessary to maintain the organization’s libertarian cred. If they get rid of those little outbursts then the organization really has no use, as other right-wing propaganda shops already produce plenty of anti-tax and anti-regulation bullshit.
piratedan
@Mark B: so Cato went from singing “Come a little bit closer, I’m all alone and the night is so long” to lamenting “you’re no good, you’re no good, you’re no good, baby you’re no good”.
Berial
@Trinity: It happens to me on one of my home PCs running chrome all the time. Have no idea why. Other PCs running chrome don’t seem to have the problem.
trollhattan
@Trinity:
Ghost in the machine. Has been happening to me in FF and on a Kindle, but not in IE. Makes commenting unpossible.
JR
A couple of things – without reading many comments above.
First, The Koch brothers are trying to take a widow’s inheritance away from her in order to take control of Cato institute. It takes a special kind of evil to steal from widows without the resources to fight back.
Second, when did the Cato group become non-partisan?
Third, is Cato pronounced kate-o or cat-o?
Forth, is Koch pronounced cock, coke, or thief? ;-)
Poopyman
@Trinity: Happened to me too an hour or so ago when I deleted my cookies. I grabbed an old post out of History and things have been fine since.
Running IE8 at the moment.
Martin
@JR:
That’s not fair. If the widow didn’t want to be on the losing end of an existential battle with a pair of billionaires, then it’s her own fucking fault for not being a billionaire herself. Christ, do we need to give handouts to everyone in this country? What happened to working hard? It’s not the Koch’s fault that she’s lazy.
Schlemizel
@Trinity:
Its a site issue has nothing to do with your browser type. its sporadic & random.
So Cato will capitulate or be defunded & replaced with some new cleverly named stink tank. The evil just goes on & on. Whats the name of that movie where the evil spirit jumps from person to person? Sort of like that.
Schlemizel
I’m still not clear on how there can be a share price for a non-proft stink tank. Do they pay dividends? What are they really fighting over?
Poopyman
@JR:
Cato has been non-partisan for as long as we’ve been at war with Eastasia.
Well, it could also be pronounced caht-o, also too. But I think most people pronounce it “assholes”.
Well, in the original German it actually sorta falls midway between “cock” and “coke”. A longish short “o”, if you will. I think it’s now been Americanized to “assholes”.
Martin
Shit. Media reporting that Obama caught calling sluts from White House phones.
Someone power up the Issa.
Dave S.
Shorter Crane: Hey, let go of my fig leaf!
Poopyman
@Martin: Jeez, the first thing I thought when I saw this was “What the hell did Obama call her?”
My mind …. I’ll let y’all know when/if I find it.
Cermet
@jl: In the think tank world, Heritage is what you would call a
‘repackager’fudge packer.Edited for clarity
PeakVT
@Schlemizel: Steve in an earlier thread said that Kansas, where Cato is legally based, allows for a shareholder-style of nonprofit incorporation. The Cato shares have the same value as when they were created, however. The real fight is over control.
Martin
@Poopyman:
Breitbart is dead. Nature abhors a vacuum. I’m just doing what must be done.
uptown
@Trinity:
Been seeing that mobile site (Opera) quite a bit lately when using www. Switching to the non-www gets rid of it.
Mark B
@jl: Yeah, I’m familiar with Heritage, having once taken a seminar with the execrable Marvin Olasky, who was renowned as the creator of Bush’s free government money to churches program, otherwise known as … I can’t remember. Olasky was, at that time, a complete failure as an academic, really sloppy and a crappy writer, but he used his fellowship at Heritage to glom onto the faculty at a state university and use his seminars to recruit students into his really scary splinter church.
In my opinion, there’s not a dime’s difference between Heritage and Cato. They’re both propaganda outlets with a PR branch that tries to convince people that they have something to do with policy research.
Silver
Yeah, but what does Radley Balko think?
I mean, when he’s not busy doing great work on law enforcement abuses, he occasionally comes over here to defend Cato and proclaim that he, like Megan McArdle, is totally immune to Koch money and influence. Unlike Megan McArdle, however, I’d actually like to hear his point of view on this.
Hopefully his google alert is up to the minute and not daily…I can’t wait around all day, I’m not being patronized by a billionaire.
catclub
@trollhattan: excise “www.”
from the url and it is fixed (tedious, but it worked for me), or also comment. Not sure which is the effective change.
Brachiator
@JR:
I’m pretty sure that one of the first training exercises in the Evil Plutocrat’s School involves cheating widows out of their inheritance.
Those who accomplish it most seamlessly are awarded the Bernie Madoff Medal, with Clusters.
Someguy
I know it’s all lies but you have to admit Crane is doing a good job of rat fucking the anti-Koch narrative here.
trollhattan
@Mark B:
Back in the Dubya borrow-and-spend, yeehaw! orgy days I would occasionally amuse myself with googling “balanced budget amendment.” Always, the first place it popped up was Cato’s website, where moldered a white paper on this “badly needed amendment.”
Never found any evidence of it from the other suspects and to that point, I also can’t recall Bush or Cheney speaking to an adoring crowd from a Cato lecturn, while it seemed as though they were always yakking it up at Heritage or AEI when they weren’t addressing the military.
Don’t really have a point, other than it seemed during Dubya’s reign that Cato wasn’t in the kewhl kidz klub. Today, there’s not a millimeter of gap among any of them.
trollhattan
@catclub:
Merci–will try when I’m back on my FF machine!
JoshA
@Sophia: Oh wow, they’re willing to pay all of $16 to go from 50% control to 75% control of CATO? And the widow has to accept that deal and isn’t allowed to decline or ask for a better price? That seems TOTALLY fair.
Similarly, when a robber takes your TV, its cool if he leaves you an amount he considers enough for it.
I’m assuming you were serious, if you were just making fun of the Kochs for saying they’d pay $16 you need a snark tag or something.
Bubblegum Tate
@Mark B:
Heritage, Cato, and AEI are all the same thing: Whorehouses that employ people who will write exactly what they’re told to write in order to “prove” the wingnut talking point du jour.
MTiffany
So, this is just staged-bs designed to rehabilitate Cato’s indie cred with The Villagers. And they’re using the judicial branch of government to do it. Now that is some virtuoso grifting right there…
burnspbesq
@JR:
You should have read more. In particular, you should have read Sophia’s comment. Shareholders are allowed to enter into agreements restricting transfer of their shares. When Cato was founded, the shareholders agreed that on the death of a shareholder, the estate was required to offer the shares back to the corporation, and if the corporation chose not to buy, the other shareholders could buy them pro rata. All that’s happening here is that Charles Koch is trying to enforce his rights under the agreement.
Your Snidely Whiplash narrative Would be great if true, but it’s a Fig Newton of your imagination.
jl
@Mark B: I will say that the measurement scale required for analysis of these places must be very precisely calibrated.
burnspbesq
@Poopyman:
Haven’t you heard? We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Jackie
They’ve done this before. When their partner (in crime) J Howard Marshall died with Anna Nicole Smith as his widow, they litigated for years to prevent her from becoming part owner in their empire. Trust from a former insider that they carry a big litigation stick and will throw as much money as they have to get what they want–kind of like the kid with the rich Dad who will have a temper tantrum until Junior gets what he wants irrespective of what is fair and was agreed to previously. And they want the Cato Institute. Gawd help their adversaries–unless someone comes to their rescue, they will crush them with legal fees.
marina
@Poopyman, you made me laugh, thank you!
Crane was smarm incarnate. Also a close personal friend of George W.
burnspbesq
@JoshA:
It is totally fair. The agreement binds all of the shareholders equally. If Charles Koch had died, the surviving shareholders would be entitled to buy his shares for the same $16 price. The risk was and is symmetrical, and there is no evidence that any of the parties to the agreement didn’t fully understand what they were agreeing to.
Grow up, willya?
Eric
god bless you for the rick james reference
Brachiator
@Martin:
The visual graphic between Andrea Mitchell and Sandra Fluke says it all: War on Women’s Health. Conservatives can’t win on this one. Fortunately, they are probably too stupid to realize it.
Sophia
@JoshA:
Nope. Completely serious. Good arguments don’t require lies to support them. There’s plenty of evidence that the Koch bros are assholes, no need to invent any. In this case, I assume you started speaking from a place of ignorance, but the above response is meandering into willfully ignorant promotion of falsehoods. I *really* hate it when anybody does that, especially someone on my side.
burnspesq explains it at comment 67. By agreement of the original shareholders, the only valid transfer of shares is first tendering back to the corporation at the original price ($1 a share) and if the corporation declines to repurchase then the shares have to be offered to the remaining shareholders pro-rata, meaning that the Koch bros would be entitled to a minimum of 66%. Assuming Crane has a fiver in his pocket, he could easily retain 1/3 control of the corp.
Judging by Crane’s press release he probably has some sketchy argument justifying the refusal of the corp to repurchase the shares (i.e. giving more control to the Kochs would diminish the purpose of the organization), but no decent argument at all as to why the shares aren’t offered to the other shareholders per the agreement. I’m highly doubtful there is a decent argument that Crane’s widow owns the shares herself or that the estate has any choice but to tender them to the corporation, which it so far has refused to do.
What the Kochs are doing here is perfectly legal, not abusive at all, and actually, probably not even that complicated. This isn’t going to be some epic litigation battle. It’s a simple contract matter.
eta: why isn’t my block quote working? :( Also, note to self, save commenting time by waiting 30 minutes to see if burnspesq has explained it. Refresh!
Brachiator
@Sophia:
Forbes has a good article that gets to the heart of the matter. It’s all about control:
The piece also includes a fun graphic on the connections of various people and organizations to other Koch properties: “Nancy Mitchell Pfotenhauer, former lobbyist for Koch Industries, is on the Cato board, as is Kevin Gentry, vice president of the Charles Koch’s charitable foundation. Four members of the Cato board, including David Koch, have links to another libertarian nonprofit, the Reason Foundation.”
Things don’t always go better with Koch.
JoshA
@Sophia:
The Kochs say that they have the right to buy the Niskanen shares for $16. The sole surviving non-Koch shareholder, Mr. Niskanen’s widow, and CATO itself disagree. While you may see Crane’s press release as weak sauce, that hardly settles the ownership issue as a matter of law.
But I never said “what they’re doing is illegal” I said “what they’re doing is unfair.” You seem to think that the statement “the Kochs has a legal right to do X” is indistinguishable from “it is fair for the Kochs do to X.” I, ah, disagree. There’s a lot of things that are legal, but still an unfair thing to do. Trying to jack a widow out of stock shares for less than $20 when they clearly have a greater value now qualifies as such, even if a court were to find they have the legal right to do it.
PurpleGirl
@PeakVT: It’s a disagreement between members of the Board about how to handle dispersing shares of stock after one of the founders died.
PeakVT
@PurpleGirl: Right, but why do they care? Cato produces perfectly fine libertarian-looking bullshit as it is. Are they afraid Mrs. Niskanen is going to change the direction of the organization?
JR in WVa
@Martin: Good snark, Martin.
Sophia
@JoshA:
Ok then. I’ll record you in the mendacious column. If you cared about the truth or fairness, you would educate yourself about the facts of the case. You obviously prefer to invent your own facts, which, last time I checked, doesn’t really support truth or fairness over the long haul.
By design, from the very beginning, shares in the Cato Institute were not meant to represent or accrue significant monetary value. A dollar a share in. A dollar a share out. Painting this situation as exploitation of a widow is beyond weak sauce… it’s unadulterated bullshit.
eta: the widow is not a shareholder, her husband’s estate holds the share. And Crane also holds a share. So…”[t]he sole surviving non-Koch shareholder” is also inaccurate.
Sophia
@Brachiator:
Sorry to be a nag on a dead thread, but again… I hate to see my allies make stupid arguments. Of course it is about control. And it’s a fight the Koch bros are going to win, rightly, based on the rule of law. Practically speaking, it’s not like Cato was some awesome repository of non-partisan research so I’m a bit confused that people can even pretend to feel a sense of potential loss for Cato becoming even more openly partisan.
Blurr
@Sophia:
How is this inaccurate? Crane is the only living non-Koch shareholder.
Sophia
@Blurr: In an unusual turn of events, use of the Oxford comma confuses me. I thought he was saying that the widow was the sole-surviving shareholder. I read this:
as a list of two, not three. Describing the widow as the shareholder. Woops!