Koch's quiet coup

What do Ryan and Cantor have to hide? It's not like they're the first bright lights of the GOP to speak at one of the Koch Brothers' periodic ultra-exclusive confabs. So why are Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor so secretive about their star turn at the podium of this prestigious event?

Neither Ryan nor Cantor were willing to talk about the appearance, before or after attending, and when a reporter from the NBC affiliate in Albuquerque tried to cover the event where the New Mexico governor was speaking, he was turned away at a checkpoint -- a mile from the resort.

Good to remember while everyone is obsessing about government surveillance that these uber-rich egomaniacs and their bought insider lackeys are hatching plots to take over the world. They may be crackpots but they're not idiots. They answer to nobody. It's no secret their master plan is to fuck the rest of us over so they can have all the things for themselves.

Read More

Koch attacks the messenger

When you're a mega-billionaire you don't need Fox News to shill for you against bad press. Instead, like the Kochs, you make up your own facts and launch individualized smear campaigns against legitimate journalists. Like this guy who wrote about the XL Pipeline.

In a rebuttal posted on its Web site, KochFacts.com, the company asserted that Sassoon’s story “deceives readers” by suggesting that Koch Industries stood to benefit from construction of the Keystone XL pipeline — a denial Sassoon included in his story. KochFacts went on to dismiss Sassoon as a “professional eco-activist” and an “agenda-driven activist.”

It didn’t stop there. The company took out ads on Facebook and via Google featuring a photo of Sassoon with the headline, “David Sassoon’s Deceptions.” The ad’s copy read, “Activist/owner of InsideClimate News misleads readers and asserts outright falsehoods about Koch. Get the full facts on KochFacts.com.”

Not going to link to it but the website is impressive. It's a combination of presenting the material from every wingnut meme that gets passed around in viral emails by your crazy uncle but couched in the language of the well-educated and a collection of articles by their friendly fluffers in BigMedia. For instance this feel-good bit from the WSJ.

As part of their effort to position themselves as a credible alternative to Warren Buffett, the Koch brothers make two promises: We won’t string you along, and we won’t go hostile.

“We get a fair amount of calls,” Dave Robertson, president and chief operating officer of Koch Industries, said in a recent interview at Koch headquarters, an anonymous-looking compound surrounded by farmland on the fringes of Wichita, Kan. “We’d like to get more — and not just from Wall Street. There may be business owners out there who have need for capital for certain things and they’re not connected with the Wall Street bunch. We’d be happy to field those calls…. We feel we have the ability to assess the opportunity and respond very quickly.”

Desperate business owners and Koch's unlimited cash reserves. What could possibly go wrong?

I've always wondered how otherwise seemingly intelligent people could get suckered in by the crackpot con propaganda. Suddenly it becomes clearer...

Read More

Evil overlords

Of all the uber-wealthy crackpots who bought out our government, two stand out from the rest. It couldn't be clearer. The Koch brothers rule our world and their apparent mission is to destroy our planet, and civil society, for their personal profit.

The House of Representatives voted to slash the EPA budget by 27 percent, one of the biggest cuts since President Richard Nixon and the Congress created the agency in 1970. The Senate subsequently modified the severity of these cuts, and the budget was ultimately cut by nearly 16 percent. What is less known is that more than 100 House members - all Republicans, many tea party members - signed a little-known "pledge" (similar to the Grover Norquist no tax increase pledge) backed by the Koch brothers promising to not spend any federal money to fight climate change without an equal amount of tax cuts. Most of the pledge signers received campaign contributions from Charles or David Koch or Koch Industries. The Workshop has tracked the signing of the pledge by 411 current state and federal politicians nationwide (all Republicans except four Democrats and two Independents at the state level). Among them are such prominent state officials as Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II, the Republican nominee for governor in Virginia. The first person to sign the Koch-backed pledge was Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, where Koch Industries is headquartered. Of the 85 conservative Republicans first elected to the House of Representatives in 2010, 76 signed the pledge and, of those, 57 received money from Koch Industries' political action committee. The members of Congress who signed the pledge have also introduced several bills aimed at limiting EPA regulation of greenhouse gas emissions and limiting regulation of the nation's biggest polluters.

Of course you already know the Kochs and their various industries are among the leading polluters of the planet. Nor is this the only way in which they are corrupting the public commons. They're deep into education, medicine and finance as well. It's all part of their master plan to keep the masses sick, poor and stupid. They are not good people and neither are the politicians who sell out to them for criminally paltry sums.

Read More