Chris Moody of Yahoo News reports on a viral video featuring a team of crony-capitalist superheroes, The Kronies:

The story is told from the perspective of the bad guys — the Kronies themselves — a coalition of characters from the darker corners of America’s political system. Our universe of anti-heroes includes Kaptain Korn, who represents big agriculture, Ariel Stryker, the symbolic stand-in for the military-industrial complex, Parts and Labor, who keeps business protected from competition and Bankor, the master of moral hazard. With help from Big-G, the Kronies use their influence and power to gain access to the G-Force, or — as everyone else calls it — the federal government.

And it turns out that the video was financed by, not too surprisingly, libertarian philanthropists. The creator of the video, John Papola, CEO of the Austin-based video company Emergent Order, delves into the project’s cleverness with Moody:

In an interview with Yahoo News, Papola, a veteran of Viacom properties Spike TV, Nickelodeon and MTV Animation, described the videos as “Captain Planet without the Malthusian economics and without the earnest ‘save the world’ schlock.”
The Kronies’ message has a wide appeal that can blur traditional political boundaries, he said. It taps into that tiny island of agreement between the tea party right and the Elizabeth Warren left that rails against cronyism and the dominance of major corporations. Said Papola: “I think Noam Chomsky and I can basically wrap arms and sing the same tune on this.”

As the conservative new media strategist Patrick Ruffini recently observed, the left has done an excellent job of framing its ideological objectives as a matter of common sense, and so he has argued that the right ought to do the same. Papola gets it, and his benefactors seem to get it as well.