Tag: politics

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The Koch/Republican network is taking over state legislatures, closing voting stations in minority areas and purging voters and extreme gerrymandering of districts and disenfranchising voters and imposing onerous Voter ID laws written by Koch front ALEC and changing the rules of governance to make their control permanent and legal. All of this is being carried out by state legislatures the Kochs have funded and directed their network to campaign for who introduce legislation written by Koch front ALEC.

Then they begin passing legislation, written by ALEC, benefiting the Kochs, industrial and environmental deregulation, and tax cuts which coupled with supermajority laws is the cause of the drop in rural healthcare and education funding, stacking the judiciary, and gerrymandering Congress.

Now they’re doing the same thing nationally. Trumps Vice President, cabinet members, and many administration positions are staffed with Koch cronies, more are taking on jobs in various regulatory agencies. And stacking the federal judiciary.

While the Koch network continues apace lobbying for ‘right to work’ laws, opposing Public Transit ballots, and spending 400 million on this years midterms.

They’re not done by a long shot. The Kochs want a Constitutional Convention. They have three items on the agenda for it already:

• Repealing the income tax and estate tax.
• A balanced budget amendment – ensuring all Federal regulatory agencies, the SEC and FDA and EPA and FEC and so on, Department of Education, Social Security and Medicare, and everything else the right have had a bee in their bonnet about since the 1930s is dismantled and shut down or privatised.
• Repealing the 17th Amendment – the right to vote for Senators. It will revert to state appointment. 32 Republican states, that’s 64 Republican Senators. Just three shy of a 2/3 majority. In addition to taking over states and gerrymandering Congress and stacking federal courts.

What else would they wanted added at the convention? With the control they will wield the sky is the limit, I think the “locks and bolts” against popular organising, reversing the changes, the democratic process and enshrining above all else the rights of the propertarian class that James McGill Buchanan, the key inspiration of the Kochs, advised the Pinochet regime on installing in Chiles constitution give a good idea.

In any other country you’d call this a soft coup.

How do you stop this?

You can’t vote them out, the gerrymandering and disenfranchisement ensure their minority has a majority of power.

You fight this in the court and either they’ve stacked them or the judges rule in your favour and they just try again and replace the judges for the next round. If it goes to the federal courts (that they stacked remember) either they rule in their favour or its litigated for so long the courts declare its too late to change.

And what a surprise, Michigan AG Bill Schutte opposed to the ballot initiative to create an independent body to draw districts, and is running for Governor, is another Koch Brothers crony.

Where is the Democratic Party while this goes on? Their biggest concern is avoiding scary words and creating the… BoomerCorps.

So what the hell do you do?

So here’s a genuine question (from a liberal Canadian baffled by American politics): Why? Aren’t the Koch brothers a couple of incredibly wealthy and very old men? I don’t understand why they care so much. They won’t be around much longer and they have more money than they could possibly spend. Why do they want to pay less taxes when it will in no way affect their lifestyle? Why do they care who is in power?

I also don’t understand why the Republicans’ response upon realizing that they are unelectable in an ethically run democracy opt for unethical (verging on illegal) tactics to essentially rig elections in their favour rather than just changing their message so that more people will vote for them. Wouldn’t a fairly won election take far less effort and cost significantly less? Are there Republicans who want to do things ethically or is that simply not a part of being Republican? What about fiscal conservatives who want lower taxes/less spending without all the crazy?

Imnotsureimright

They are extreme ideologues. Its not enough for them to have a 100 billion dollars. They believe they are right and they know best. That taxation is wrong, that public education is wrong, that public transportation is wrong, that climate change is not happening, and doing anything about these things is contrary to the free market.

There might also be a darker motivation.

The Koch Brothers father Fred Koch was a Nazi war profiteer. When he concluded business in Germany in 1938 building oil and aviation fuel refineries for the Luftwaffe he wrote in his diary that he thought only Germany, Italy, and Japan were on the right path. He brought back with him a Nanny who was a member of the Nazi Party to help raise his boys correctly.

In the 1950s he co-founded the John Birch Society. The Birchers believed that School Integration and the Civil Rights Movement were Communist Plots.

Charles Koch worked for the Birchers as a young man, he later worked with Robert LaFevre in founding the Freedom School and Ramparts College. Both had Holocaust Deniers and Neo-Confederates on their faculty.

He later founded Reason Magazine. In its early years it featured Holocaust Deniers and Neo-Confederates as merely historical revisionists challenging the stuffy orthodoxy of academias ivory tower.

By the 1980s he teamed up with James McGill Buchanan. A free market economist considered so extreme people aren’t introduced to him until they’ve read and adhering to Ayn Rand. Together they turned George Mason University into what it is today to produce economists and policy makers that would extol their shared beliefs and carry them out in academia, industry, and government. Many graduates find positions in Koch Industries or the Koch network or sponsored into positions at other colleges.

Buchanan got his start in Virginia in the 1950s in the fight against School Integration, he conceived of Charter Schools as a means of forming an opposition that would be stripped of racist jargon. He was an advisor to the Pinochet regime, helping them construct a Constitution that would be stuffed with “locks and bolts” against democracy and popular participation ensuring an elite minority would be serviced alone.

Now remember the Kochs are ardently opposed to public education, believe in privatisation and charter schools as an alternative, and their actions with state legislatures are instituting the exact same kind of “locks and bolts”.

The Kochs fund the American Enterprise Institute, David sits on its board of directors. Charles Murray the author of the Bell Curve is one of its fellows.

Also teaching at GMU is economist Garrett Jones. His work draws upon that of white supremacist and eugenicist Richard Lynn, and his work has been favourably reviewed by VDARE. Jones has delivered lectures arguing less democracy in the US would lead to better governance.

The Kochs ‘prisoner outreach’ program is overseen by Florida Atlantic University professor Marshall DeRosa, a member of the League of the South.

Assistant Professor Jonathan Anomaly at the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science at the University of Arizona, which has received 1.8 million from the Kochs and 2.6 million from their associates, published an article Public Goods and Education. In it Anomaly discussed the value of exploring links between genetics and IQ of different racial groups, and the value of eugenics. He has also written about the need to replace public education.

They provide funding to Young America’s Foundation that funds those lecture tours featuring Murray, David Horowitz, Ann Coulter, Ted Nugent, Robert Spencer, Milo Yiannopoulos. Ben Shapiro is a new addition. Its board member James B. Taylor is the former president of the National Policy Institute, now run by altright icon Richard Spencer.

Rebel Media in Canada was founded by Ezra Levant – who has previously worked for the Fraser Institute the Kochs main Canadian think tank and before that did his internship at the Charles G. Koch Foundation. Rebel Media is hive of altright activism.

Jordan Peterson started at Rebel Media, and often promotes Koch linked groups.

Stefan Molyneux has associated with Jones, Murray, and the League of the South.

So when you start to really dig into them you find a lot of connections to racism, from the Birchers in the 1950s to ‘racial realists’ and the altright today. All with a consistent narrative that ‘they’ are undermining ‘our’ society.

Which might then lead one to question why it is so many of the policies they advocate for target, marginalise, and limit the rights of minorities.

They won’t be around much longer

I saw an interview with Rupert Murdoch years ago where he spoke about his desire to live to 100. He works out every day with a physical trainer, has his meals catered by a nutritionist, and both are overseen by a doctor. I don’t doubt many others in his class and with his wealth feel the same way.

I also don’t understand why the Republicans’ response upon realizing that they are unelectable in an ethically run democracy opt for unethical

They’re not going to admit their policy ideas are wrong. So the cynical will go for the money, and the true believers will concoct the elaborate fantasies about how liberals and Democrats are funded by George Soros to bus in illegal immigrants.

They work for rich and powerful people who demand their policies be adopted and feel extremely entitled and don’t take no for an answer.

(Sorry for the lack of links, this is a condensation of two other pieces I wrote over on /r/KochWatch and they both have copious citations)