Bloggers Need to Steer Clear of Phony ‘Populist’ Patrick Byrne
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Daily Kos: I want to be clear on something up front. I think hedge funds are a menace and should be outlawed. I think Goldman Sachs is a criminal conspiracy and its whole leadership should be indicted. There are plenty of commentators, like Paul Krugman in the New York Times today and Matt Taibbi in his article in Rolling Stone, that have done great reporting on Goldman and on hedge funds. But what we're seeing is how a really odious character named Patrick Byrne is trying to hijack this issue. In a previous diary I described how Byrne is running a smear campaign from the headquarters of his Utah company Overstock.com, and how other bloggers at Huffington Post and elsewhere had started a "truth squad" to nail him to the wall when he goes after the media. His smear campaign against the media has been chronicled in Fortune magazine by Bethany McLean, who broke the Enron story, and by famous New York Times columnist Joe Nocera.
Byrne's constituency is mainly on the far right, and he is a regular guest on Glenn Beck and Fox News. He is leading big business's hypocritical campaign against the Obama health plan, appearing on Fox to promote the phony view that Obama would place a "tax on small business." He has been fighting hard against the Employee Free Choice Act, and dispatched his deputy Jonathan Johnson to Washington to lobby against the act. At the same time that Byrne has been fighting hard against the EFCA and serving on the board of the far-right Milton Friedman foundation and supporting Ron Paul for president, he has amazingly been winning fans among some bloggers on the left, including Kos diarist Andrew Perez (andrewtna), because of his posturing on Wall Street. Some context on Byrne: He needs no introduction to readers of the Kos. Just click on the Patrick Byrne tag and you can see an unhinged rich guy with a lot of time on his hands and a low opinion of everybody else on the planet.
He's also the biggest money man behind school vouchers. Here is an excerpt from Pat Rusk's Kos diary on how Mr. Charm handled that: “On Election Day earlier this month, Patrick Byrne, the CEO of Overstock.com, and an ardent supporter of private school vouchers, claimed Utah’s vouchers referendum was an IQ test for Utahns – a test we presumably failed when voters rejected the plan by a 24-point margin that Tuesday.” What a tremendous insult to Utahns. We don’t need our IQs assessed by a millionaire businessmen with more of an interest in right-wing politics than in the future of our communities and schools. Here's a test of Patrick Byrne's credibility. IS he telling the truth about that? Can he tell the truth on a little itty-bitty detail like what commenters to a blog say? The answer is no. This is a man who is such a pathological liar that he will lie about something that is right in front of you…Patrick Byrne is amazing. He is a self-discrediting lie machine.
To read more, click here.
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