Koch Party Part 2: Covert Operations

Here's more justification for changing the GOP to the Koch Party.

I was asked via email recently the following question:
"...isn't the Koch Industries thing kind of tiny compared to the money unions have funneled to the Dems for over 100 years?"

Here is my response.


100 years? Not sure how much of the American labor force was actually unionized in 1910. The National Labor Relations Act wasn't passed until 1934. I heard more stories today at a family funeral of the "blackjacks" - hired thugs - who were beating up my ancestors and their neighbors in the 20s for trying to unionize as coal miners.

OpenSecrets.org has data on contributions dating back 21 years, to 1989. The "Top Donors / Heavy Hitters" section is very revealing. http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/index.php Many of you will be pleased to see how much money is going to Democrats. Hold that thought. I'm coming back to it in a minute or two.

The following excerpts are from a New Yorker article by Jane Mayer from last August on the Koch boys called "Covert Operations". It's a really, really detailed expose. I can't encourage everyone strongly enough to read the whole thing. Yes, you'll need to turn off Beck and Faux Snooze for 20 minutes or so. Do yourself that favor. Things worth reading and learning about take a little quiet time. This is one of those times.

From (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all)

Only the Kochs know precisely how much they have spent on politics. Public tax records show that between 1998 and 2008 the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than forty-eight million dollars. The Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, which is controlled by Charles Koch and his wife, along with two company employees and an accountant, spent more than twenty-eight million. The David H. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than a hundred and twenty million. Meanwhile, since 1998 Koch Industries has spent more than fifty million dollars on lobbying. Separately, the company’s political-action committee, KochPAC, has donated some eight million dollars to political campaigns, more than eighty per cent of it to Republicans. So far in 2010, Koch Industries leads all other energy companies in political contributions, as it has since 2006. In addition, during the past dozen years the Kochs and other family members have personally spent more than two million dollars on political contributions. In the second quarter of 2010, David Koch was the biggest individual contributor to the Republican Governors Association, with a million-dollar donation. Other gifts by the Kochs may be untraceable; federal tax law permits anonymous personal donations to politically active nonprofit groups.



Adding up just the numbers in the paragraph above is $257million in 10 years. Keep that in mind and go back and look at the data at OpenSecrets.org again. Notice again that that data spans 21 years: 1989 to 2010. Now start adding up the numbers up for yourself on the Top All Time Donors list. Be sure to account for the percentage split of those contributions between Dems and Kochs.

In half the time - 1998 to 2008 - and, again, using just the dollar amounts specified in the above paragraph, which clearly isn't everything, the Kochs outspent the top 8 contributors to the Democratic party combined. Half the time, 8 times the contributions.

Do the effing math.

For anyone ready to screech "What about George Soros?", the article goes on to make this point.

Of course, Democrats give money, too. Their most prominent donor, the financier George Soros, runs a foundation, the Open Society Institute, that has spent as much as a hundred million dollars a year in America. Soros has also made generous private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including Obama’s. But Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued that Soros’s giving is transparent, and that “none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests.” The Kochs have given millions of dollars to nonprofit groups that criticize environmental regulation and support lower taxes for industry. Gus diZerega, the former friend, suggested that the Kochs’ youthful idealism about libertarianism had largely devolved into a rationale for corporate self-interest. He said of Charles, “Perhaps he has confused making money with freedom.”



If you truly care about context and history and facts, then read the whole New Yorker article. The conclusion is inescapable.

You Republicans need to change the name of your party.

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Photograph: RICHARD SCHULMAN/CORBIS

GOP Should Just Go Ahead and Change Name to Koch Party

"In Wisconsin, union leaders agreed to concessions requested by Mr. Walker: to pay nearly 6 percent of their wages for pension costs, up from nearly zero, and double payments for health insurance. At that point, most governors would declare victory and move on. Instead, Mr. Walker has rejected union concessions and won’t even negotiate. His true priority is stripping workers of collective-bargaining rights and reducing their unions to a shell. The unions would no longer be able to raise money to oppose him, as they did in last year’s election, easing the way for future Republicans as well."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/opinion/23wed1.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha211


The Wisconsin governor is dutifully following the Koch GOP playbook: kill unions because members and supporters tend to vote Democratic and, as everyone knows, elected GOP politicians will dutifully do the bidding of wealthy capitalists faster and with greater zeal than the Dems.

It's politics. It really isn't about balancing budgets. That's just a convenient excuse to lie some more but, once again, the math doesn't lie and the unions have already agreed to the $300million in concessions on a $3600million dollar budget shortfall. That's 8.3%, and the union has agreed to it so what's the problem?

Wisconsin, and more broadly labor unions everywhere, are targeted elements of a bigger and broader GOP strategy to.......wait for it.........control more of your lives from corporate boardrooms instead of state capitols. The beauty of the plan is that Charles and David Koch never have to appear in public, never have to defend their policies against their opponents in pre-election debates, and never have to run and win elections. They and their allies in conservative media like Limbaugh and Murdoch have gotten very good at spending relatively small amounts of their fortune to whip into a frenzy people who don't or won't bother with facts.

It's just too bad that there are as many Americans as there are who have bought into and now desperately cling to the biggest lie of all: that they are part of the Koch/GOP grand plan for greater American wealth and prosperity. They're not, except as chattel.

Anyone outside the richest 2% who still believes the lies of the GOP is just carrying their water like a dutiful servant is expected to do. They've been duped into the complete masquerade and utter sham that Republicans are fiscal conservatives interested in doing anything at all to improve the condition of average Americans.

Here are more inconvenient numbers from Gallup.

It's really only a slim majority of Republicans, 54%, who even agree with the idea of taking away collective bargaining rights of state union workers. It should be noted that two-thirds of Independents oppose it, as do two-thirds of all adults nationwide. The key word there is 'adults.' People with the maturity, wisdom, and experience to know right from wrong and to discern fact from fiction.

Put simply, if you agree with breaking state unions you are in the minority. There's a reason for that. Opposing workers is not just bad for them, it's bad for America and the economy. We have no economy without a thriving middle class, and state workers - teachers, firefighters, law enforcement, and even the dreaded "bureaucrats" - are part of that middle class.

You can be mad at me for continuing to say these things, and you can dig your heals in deeper because you hate me for rubbing your noses in the reality of where your party is on issues like this. It won't change the facts: the GOP is pro-business and anti-worker. Always has been.

While I've never been a member of a union and probably never will be, I don't see how America rises to such economic prosperity and prominence post-WWII without unions. I'm proud of the fact that my father provided a middle class life to us in part because he was a union worker. I wonder how many reading this are willing to say the same?

What about all that nostalgia for the post-WWII years to which conservatives always seem to want to "take our country back?"

I seriously doubt that my father and all the other hard-working men and women in the 40s, 50s, and 60s would have been able to own a home and raise kids in a working class (and barely middle class) neighborhood had he had to endure the indignities and oppression that his father, a coal miner at the beginning of the 20th century and at the start of the labor movement, endured. Given the generosity and benevolence of late 19th and early 20th century capitalist, I'm completely comfortable saying that the answer would be no. This country rose to economic prosperity as much on the backs of labor as it did on the business acumen of entrepreneurs and capitalists. It's symbiotic. One cannot exist and thrive without the other.

All the trickling down in the world - then and now - doesn't turn the GOP into a party that even remotely approaches being pro-middle class. Tax cuts for the wealthy are not stimulative. That was proven yet again in 2001, 2003, and 2010. Deregulation only opens up more opportunities for corporations and a select few to rig the system so they prosper with all the rewards and none of the risk. We - the middle class - are left with the economic, environmental, and social bills while the Kochs, Murdochs, Limbaughs, and Becks laugh their way to their overseas bank accounts.

Responding to the Conservative Propaganda Machine

Wake up, America.

Spread the word.

Call out the corporate conservative media...
.....and those you know when they regurgitate the b.s. spouted by Fox, Rush, Savage, and the entire GOP-Tea Party.





Responding to the Conservative Propaganda Machine

"Now more than ever, we need effective governance in the various sectors, including both public and private, to save our country from collapse. Yet what we have is a deep collusion between wealthy corporatists and a significant cabal in government. Their collusion is profoundly anti-democratic and even anti-market (as demonstrated by the devastating impacts of their policies on financial markets in 2008). So what we're getting is a group of financiers who set up communication systems to manipulate public perception and drive boom-crash cycles in the economy to siphon all forms of wealth into their coffers."