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.

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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...

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The Koch plan for prosperity

Charles Koch studies the problem of poor Americans. He's figured out what's keeping the poor folk down and has come up with what he thinks is a brilliant solution. Eliminating the minimum wage.

But how to convince the working poor that this odious requirement they be paid at least $7.25 a hour is a bad thing? That the real problem is a "culture of dependency" on government mandated fair wages because, as the Buddhists say -- money is suffering? Well, he launched a $200,000 ad campaign for that. Thus says the man with a personal worth of $43 billion:

The Kansas ad does not specifically mention the minimum wage, but it does claim that Americans earning $34,000 a year should count themselves as lucky, because that puts them in the top 1 percent of the world. “That is the power of economic freedom,” the ad concluded.

Said world including billions of people who work for pennies a day in countries where there is no minimum wage.

I imagine the next ad will explain why a living wage is holding our economic growth down because giving the working class more money to spend is never going to increase buyer demand in a consumer based economy.

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Why Americans are so ill informed

A new Gallup survey tells us television is still America's primary news source for current events (55%), leading the Internet, at 21%. Even worse, Fox News and CNN are the market leaders both in viewers and click-bait sensationalism. Accuracy in reporting has never been part of the Fox business model and at this point it's little more than a quaint relic of the past at CNN.

On a related note, MoJo runs the numbers to find just how large a goldmine Citizens United spending has been for BigMedia. Which is leading to new rounds of consolidation.

And it's not just CBS that's riding high thanks to political ad spending. TV stations in battleground states are magnets for ad spending, and they're driving a new wave of consolidation in the broadcast industry, leaving a handful of big media companies well-positioned to reap hundreds of millions during the 2014 midterm elections and, especially, the 2016 presidential race. Just in the past month, the Gannett company bought 20 TV stations for $1.5 billion, and the Tribune Company inked a $2.7 billion deal for 19 stations. Those deals included stations in battleground states.

Meanwhile, SuperPACs ads keep getting slicker and less easy to distinguish from the programming, especially since the disclosure requirements are so dismally inadequate. There are no incentives to get the information right. The big money is in misinformation. This is a problem.

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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.

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Corporate welfare is not social welfare

It seems some diligent (and one assumes large) shareholder of the cigarette megacorporation Reynolds American, forced them to disclose their contributions to various 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofits. They threw slush money into Grover's Americans for Tax Reform, the Koch boys' Americans for Prosperity and a couple of smaller fake "social welfare" groups. Considering these groups were part of a 501(c)(4) scam that spent about "$250 million to promote or attack federal political candidates" we can guess that Reynolds wasn't the only megacorp doing so. In fact, research suggests these 501(c)(4)s have become the preferred method for political donations over PACs precisely because they afford anonymity.

A lot of people are asking how they qualify as social welfare groups when they spend most of their money on political activity but I'm wondering how they can be defined as non-profits. Surely the corporations don't directly profit from them, but all the conservative ones are pushing policies and candidates that directly benefit the corporate bottom line. Nothing they do promotes the general welfare of the majority of the public.

Granted they technically qualify for the designation, but considering the effect of their work benefits only corporate interests, it seems to me they would be more properly defined as vehicles for legalized political bribery.

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I feel the bridge fall under my feet

Austerity maniacs are literally going to kill us. When you have a major political party which is effectively one half (or sometimes more) of our government refusing to spend a red hot penny on the public commons while they bleed our national treasury to wantonly pass out tax breaks to the obscenely wealthy, this is what you get.


[RJ Matson cartoon]

This is not a joke. Cutting government funding for infrastructure projects verges on criminal negligence. Our bridges are falling down and it will only get worse. [via]

...The 607,380 bridges in the U.S. are 42 years old on average, and 1-in-9 are rated “structurally deficient,” according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which advocates more spending on such structures.

The deficit is shrinking. We can borrow our own money for practically nothing. Repairing our critical infrastructure would create jobs, improve the economy and reduce the deficit with increased revenues making the cuts unnecessary. The Republicans ongoing refusal to allow these spending bills to even get to the floor for a vote redefines "death by a thousand cuts" as pure homicide. When we weigh this on the "stupid or evil" scale, the obvious answer is pure evil.

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Austerity kills

Austerity doesn't just kill economies, austerity is literally killing people:

Detailing a decade of research, Oxford University political economist David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor of medicine and an epidemiologist at Stanford University, said their findings show austerity is seriously bad for health.

In a book to be published this week, the researchers say more than 10,000 suicides and up to a million cases of depression have been diagnosed during what they call the "Great Recession" and its accompanying austerity across Europe and North America.

The effects of forced austerity has reached practically genocidal proportions in Greece and if our homegrown austerity maniacs get their heart's desire we won't be far behind in the USA. They've been fraying the edges of the social safety net at the state level since GOPers took over the local legislatures and now with the stupid sequestration cuts, the federal safety net is in danger of falling apart altogether.

Difficult to not to sound like a conspiracy nutcase, but you don't have to be a brain surgeon to figure out if you keep limiting access to food and health care assistance for the poors and olds and kick people into poverty and homelessness, they're going to die sooner. Which of course eliminates the need to spend money taking care of them, the better to give more tax breaks to the wealth holders. Reminds of this classic quote:

"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

Not making any grand accusations, but as the world economy hinges more and more on a relative handful of people making money simply by moving around their money, the blue collar working class is becoming as obsolete at the buggy whip.

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Congress kicks old people, kids and cancer victims to the curb

So our compassionate Congress rescued the frequent fliers from the horrible trauma of waiting too long on the tarmac, (and I assume also saved the private little airports serving the Lear Jets of the wealthy), with the greatest of haste. The Village consensus is "a win for Republicans." Certainly they see it that way. The roar of GOPers gloating over beating Obummer conveniently drowns out the anguished cries of the millions of Americans who are suffering real pain as a result of the GOP's parliamentary trickery. I guess that's how they're able to sleep at night with the full knowledge of their cruelty.

Republicans could end this sequester as quickly as they saved their fellow frequent fliers if they wanted to, by simply abolishing the damnable thing altogether. They won't because those tenacious bastards still see political advantage in sabotaging our economy. Think Progress has 12 stupid spending cuts Republicans refuse to reverse. Starting with effectively eliminating emergency benefits for the long term unemployed. As if the country is just awash with jobs that pay a living wage.

Sadly that's not the most sadistic indiscriminate slashing of funds. Disabled vets and the 80 year old housebound elderly poors who can't cook much less get to a food bank and depend on Meals on Wheels? Tough luck. GOP rules that wasteful spending. And if you need housing vouchers to keep a roof over your head? What's so wrong with a tent in a homeless camp?

Cancer patients being turned away from health care providers? Too bad dying people. Can't afford to keep all of you alive. And independent medical research? Sorry but Big Pharma is not that into finding cures for disease.

Oh and disaster survivors, we gotta cut back on this federal aid thing (unless of course, it's an industrial explosion in Texas). Figure the rest of y'all can do with a billion less.

These big cuts to public safety programs filter down to millions of individual citizens. NYT editorial at the link said it well:

The voiceless people who are the most affected by these cuts can’t afford high-priced lobbyists to get them an exception to the sequester, the way that the agriculture lobby was able to fend off a furlough to meat inspectors, which might have disrupted beef and poultry operations. And what was cut in order to keep those inspectors on the job? About $25 million from a program to provide free school breakfasts.

The sequester also cut Head Start funding. Because it's so much easier for a child born into poverty to lift themselves out of the ghetto when they start life homeless and hungry. [photo via]

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To have and to have-not

I'm late to this but let's never forget for whom the economic recovery tolls:

The U.S. economy has recovered for households with net worth of $500,000 or more, a new study shows. The recession continues for almost everyone else. Wealthy households boosted their net worth by 21.2 percent in the aftermath of the recession, according to the study released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center. The rest of America lost 4.9 percent of household wealth from 2009 to 2011.

Pew attributed the disparity to gains during that period in the stock and bond markets, benefiting affluent households, while the housing market's decline hit others harder. The report underscores the nation's growing income inequality, with the top 13 percent of households recovering their losses from the 18- month recession that ended in June 2009, and the rest of the country continuing to hemorrhage wealth.

Meanwhile our Congress, with astonishing haste, is addressing the very important problem of frequent flyers being forced to wait an extra hour or two in airport bars. I'm hearing they're ready to throw $357 million to the FAA to fix it. No questions asked. Too bad about you poor olds who won't get Meals on Wheels. Wheel your ownself over to the food bank and cook your own damn food. And so sorry hungry poor kids who need free food at school. There's no free rides. Maybe they'll let you six year olds sweep floors and clean bathrooms to earn a cafeteria ticket.

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Sweet charity

I didn't find this at all surprising. Anybody who has ever worked in the restaurant/hospitality industry knows the rich are tightwads. Indeed the richer the are, the stingier they are with tips. So it goes with charitable giving.

One of the most surprising, and perhaps confounding, facts of charity in America is that the people who can least afford to give are the ones who donate the greatest percentage of their income. In 2011, the wealthiest Americans—those with earnings in the top 20 percent—contributed on average 1.3 percent of their income to charity. By comparison, Americans at the base of the income pyramid—those in the bottom 20 percent—donated 3.2 percent of their income. The relative generosity of lower-income Americans is accentuated by the fact that, unlike middle-class and wealthy donors, most of them cannot take advantage of the charitable tax deduction, because they do not itemize deductions on their income-tax returns.

It's not that rich don't donate at all, but they do it mainly for self-interested reasons. Like tax breaks. This is especially true of conservatives. Something that was made perfectly clear after the fiscal cliff farce of 2012 finally concluded and Ari Fleischer tweeted this threat.



The super wealthy also do it for prestige. Billionaires will donate hundreds of millions to museums and universities and other cultural insitutions that cater mainly to their social class to either get things named after them, or to advance academic work that suits their personal agenda. You won't see the Kochs endowing a chair in civil rights studies or labor law. Nor will you likely see the Waltons donating to Planned Parenthood even as Walmart's business practices create the welfare clients who desperately need the affordable health care.

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