Given their strict adherence to the principals of transparent free markets, the Kochs’ secrecy seems hypocritical.
The United States Government has been in a period of orchestrated chaos by Koch's and others since the 2008 elections when the economy tanked following the massive spending during the Bush 43 years. We have never heard so much about a debt ceiling being held hostage until recent years.No wonder President Bush prefers to paint rather than get involved after the economic mess he left for President Obama to clean up. The worst thing that happened to this Country IMHO was the bought and paid for Republicans taking back the House of Representatives in 2010 as it has been nothing but orchestrated chaos made even worse with their obstructionists tactics. It was bad enough with the GOP filibusters in the Senate but the House has made a mockery of governing preferring to be in DC for only 3 days a week.
If you have any doubt who is in charge of today's Republican Party and members of Congress, read about the email the John Bircher/Libertarian leaning Koch Bros' front group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP) sent out. Koch Bros have been working on this for years to take over the GOP by getting hard right Ayn Rand supporting people elected to all levels of Government. Their Dad was a founder of the John Birch Society along with Harry Bradley, the anti-union head of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.
They Kochs and other wealthy donors have finally done it - they have bought themselves a political party, The GOP, and the Republicans in Congress making sure their puppets Boehner and McConnell stay in charge to do their bidding. Boehner should be ashamed to even face the hard working farmers along with the blue collar workers that permeate his district. He wasn't raised like that but it seems greed and power have changed the man into a spineless puppet of the Koch Bros. A lot of that going around the Republican Caucus today as spineless puppets represent the Republican Party in Congress and around the Country.
In an email, Koch brothers’ front group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), sent congratulations to Republicans and their supporters around the country for helping push sequester cuts AFP says are “an important step forward for economic growth.” The email continued, “Americans for Prosperity thanks Speaker John Boehner and House Republicans for standing up to President Obama and making sure the $85 billion in much-needed sequester spending cuts took effect,” and it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Koch brothers and Republicans own the sequester and are giddy at the prospect of a recession and killing millions of jobs. One aspect of sequester cuts little mentioned is that the devastating $85 billion for 2013 is just the beginning of greater domestic spending cuts, devastating effects on anti-poverty programs, Medicare, and without cessation, the end of recovery.
The sequester is a ten year plan that cuts $1.2 trillion across the board, and because they began in March, $85 billion is about 70% of the next nine years of cuts coming in at about $123.88 billion every year. It spells the end of recovery because experts estimate that by the end of 2013, $85 billion in cuts means nearly a million jobs will vanish, and GDP will fall between .7% and 1.7% in the first year alone. Kochs, AFP, teabaggers, and Republicans are celebrating austerity that deliberately tanks the economy, creates massive poverty, and all to avoid closing tax loopholes for the richest people in America. Republicans claimed 2013 sequester cuts would devastate the economy, and yet they are celebrating nine more years of 30% higher cuts, and are a reminder of the damage Willard Romney would have imposed. Romney took time to weigh in on the sequester and accuse the President of campaigning instead of working with Republicans to avert the cuts they were destined to enact.
According to Willard, “The president brings people together, does the deals, does the trades…the president leads, and I don’t see that kind of leadership happening. He’s campaigning.” Romney also suspected President Obama blamed Republicans for rejecting attempts to avert the sequester because “there may be more interest in showing pain in saying, See what the other guys did?” President Obama did attempt to trade, deal, lead, and bring Republicans together, but the sequester was the means Republicans used to impose austerity, and unless Obama agreed to void defense cuts and replace them with more austerity and domestic cuts, the sequester was going forward as part of Republicans’ four-year war on the economy.
(snip)
Republicans won the austerity battle, and Americans will now know what it feels like to live in “socialist Europe” that imposed austerity, massive unemployment, negative growth, double and triple-dip recessions, and no hope for recovery anytime soon. Maybe there were two bits of good news yesterday after all; Willard is not president, and sequester damage in 2013 will be the least for the next ten years. Because if $85 billion is devastating, kills a million jobs, and cuts GDP by a percentage point, then nine years of $123.88 billion each will certainly eviscerate the economy; it was Republicans’ plan all along. It is just tragic, though, that they imposed austerity by injecting two words into every discussion about the economy; deficit reduction. It’s no wonder teabaggers, Republicans, and Americans for Prosperity are celebrating and congratulating each other; they won with two words.
Excerpt: Read More at PoliticususaCongratulating themselves on putting people out of work -- way to go. Now the House Budget Committee wants to restore the cuts to the DoD while social programs continue to suffer. There are some crude terms you could use but in the end suffice it to say they are trying to take care of their other puppet masters Big Defense contractors. How much are the wealthy GOP donors invested in the defense industry? The Republicans in Congress will sacrifice education, benefits to the poor, children, women, seniors, college students to prop up Big Defense because they donate to GOP causes. Just wait until they see the oil, gas, and coal subsidies from the Government start to go away - the screeching will be unbearable from the GOP in Congress as it is another sector that has bought their votes.
This is the worst bunch of Republicans I have seen in my lifetime. I am sure that Abraham Lincoln must be spinning in his grave as he free'd the slaves and now the Koch Bros want to force minorities into segregated schools. Their aim is to make schools private instead of public so they can control the curriculum and make money from private schools. An article after the election in the Dec 24, 2012, issue of Forbes magazine on the Koch Bros goes into in-depth coverage of their plan for reshaping America -- frankly scares me they are close to getting their way.
Koch Bros have taken over The Republican Party and now want to take over America. The voters in 2014 are standing in their way as Democrats, Independents, and Republicans join together to defeat the Koch Brothers and other wealthy Republican donor candidates/incumbents. It is important to know your enemy which is the Koch Bros and their wealthy friends out to protect tax loopholes for themselves on the backs of the middle class and poor who they see no need to help. Ask yourself why you would ever vote for a Republican after reading this article on the Koch Empire. My guess is that you won't!
Here are some excerpts from the article by Daniel Fisher entitled, Inside The Koch Empire: How The Brothers Plan To Reshape America:
The November elections–which David, in a separate interview shortly after the results were finalized, termed “bitterly disappointing”–seem to confirm Charles’ last point. Not even the Koch brothers, who spent tens of millions of dollars during this election cycle (they won’t disclose the exact amount) funding direct political contributions and issue-driven “nonprofits,” could coerce voters to back their candidates. Mitt Romney’s loss was a huge blow to them, both in terms of likely policy outcomes and personal reputation.
But those who think the brothers, older and chastened, will now fade away don’t understand the Kochs. Not a bit. Obama’s victory was just a blip on a master plan measured in decades, not election cycles. “We raised a lot of money and mobilized an awful lot of people, and we lost, plain and simple,” says David. “We’re going to study what worked, what didn’t work, and improve our efforts in the future. We’re not going to roll over and play dead.”
The goal has always been, Charles says, “true democracy,” where people “can run their own lives and choose what they want to buy, choose how to spend their money.” (“Now in our democracy you elect somebody every two to four years and they tell you how to run your life,” he says.) Both Kochs innately understand that–unlike the populist appeal of their fellow midwestern billionaire Warren Buffett and his tax-the-rich advocacy–their message of pure, raw capitalism is a much tougher sell, even among capitalists.
So their revolution has been an evolution, with roots going back half a century to Koch’s first contributions to libertarian causes and Republican candidates. In the mid-1970s their business of changing minds got more formal when Charles cofounded what became the Cato Institute, the first major libertarian think tank. Based in Washington, it has 120 employees devoted to promoting property rights, educational choice and economic freedom. In 1978 the brothers helped found–and still fund–George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, the go-to academy for deregulation; they have funded the Federalist Society, which shapes conservative judicial thinking; the pro-market Heritage Foundation; a California-based center skeptical of human-driven climate change; and many other institutions.
All of these organizations, unknown to 99% of the population, and their common source of support, unknown to most of the rest, have provided the grist for conservative thinking since Reagan. It’s a measure of Koch’s success that 40 years after Richard Nixon was stumping for national health insurance, Paul Ryan’s Ayn Rand-tinged economics are just a little right of center. That the Supreme Court’s conservative majority led by Chief Justice John Roberts has issued a number of pro-property rights, anti-government decisions in recent years that read like they came straight out of a Federalist Society position paper. That when George W. Bush sought a watchdog on regulation costs, he appointed a top Mercatus executive. And none of this was accidental–it just took millions of dollars over decades of time. You can see the same process at work in David’s quest to find a cure for cancer. A prostate cancer survivor like the rest of his brothers, he has given $215 million to fight the disease so far, including $100 million to fund his own research center at MIT.
First, it displays the muscle that comes from having a private company that has no net debt and that spews out cash. Charles spent $6 billion upfront to buy Georgia-Pacific, and rather than satisfy quarterly earnings estimates or dividend-hungry investors, he immediately directed the new division’s cash flow toward paying down the $15 billion in liabilities that it inherited. “Like we should pay dividends and borrow big money?” Charles asks, before answering his own rhetorical question: “That puts the company at risk.”
More critically, it reveals the business roots of their worldview. Koch Industries essentially applies the ideas of Friedrich Hayek to the art of making money. Hayek, the dean of the so-called Austrian School of economists, celebrated the chaos of decentralized decision-making as a way for every individual to decide what’s in his or her best self-interest. So while ownership is concentrated in the hands of two men, Charles–who has had management control since his father designated him as chief executive in 1967–tries to train each of the company’s 60,000 employees to act as if they own the portion of the business they oversee. The Kochs have trademarked their take on Hayek: Market Based Management.
Koch Industries has no centralized pay scale. It doesn’t peg bonuses to firm-wide profitability, and even the salaries of machine operators are often calculated in part on how efficiently they run the processes they oversee. Middle managers can earn far more than their base salary in bonuses, which are determined partly by the long-term return on the capital they invest. Market Based Management dictates that they can earn far more by turning around a faltering business than playing it safe in a consistently profitable one. “We try to evaluate how much value an employee is creating here and reward them accordingly,” says Charles, in an inversion of Marx’s famous equation.
Given their strict adherence to the principals of transparent free markets, the Kochs’ secrecy seems hypocritical. While Charles has never been shy about enunciating his goals, his annual retreats for rich conservatives look from the outside like conspiratorial cabals. While the ACLU joined Koch-affiliated groups like Cato in opposing limits to cash-fueled political speech, as decided in the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United case, conservatives have traditionally touted both unlimited speech and unlimited disclosure. The Kochs’ large-scale efforts to hide their political activities by funneling millions through Americans for Prosperity and other putative charitable organizations–something both sides of the spectrum do, and something widely acknowledged as a blatant end-run around disclosure requirements–don’t seem to jibe with their convictions.
Charles responds that he follows the law and defends anonymous giving as necessary. “We get death threats, threats to blow up our facilities, kill our people, we get Anonymous and other groups trying to crash our IT systems,” he says. “So long as we’re in a society like that, where the President attacks us and we get threats from people in Congress, and this is pushed out and becomes part of the culture–that we are evil, so we need to be destroyed, or killed–then why force people to disclose?”After reading the entire article at Forbes on the Koch's, this one item jumped out at me:
they (Koch's) have funded the Federalist SocietyHow many times have we heard Conservatives tout the Federalist Society and now learn they were started by the Koch Brothers.
The Federalist Society is one of the most powerful and unique organizations in the conservative orbit, describing itself as "a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order." But that simple description doesn't do justice to the influential network the group has built up, in addition to fundamentally changing the way that conservative ideas on the law are discussed and received in mainstream legal circles.
The Federalist Society gained widespread attention in 2007 for the power of its members within the Bush administration Justice Department. Since then, there has been less attention on the group, but according to legal experts, the group is quietly continuing to thrive in an environment where lawmakers and activists are increasingly touting constitutional law as the talk of the day.Is this why Supreme Court Justice Scalia doesn't hesitate to speak at Koch Bros' functions? Food for thought on how many members of this Supreme Court came via recommendations of The Federalist Society to Republican Presidents since the group was founded in 1982 at Yale Law School.
Bottom line of all of this is that the Koch Brothers IMHO pick and choose parts of various economic ideas to chart their course but one thing remains a constant is their desire to take over the Government through their puppets and install their libertarian/John Bircher agenda to the whole Country. Romney was the perfect person for them to pick as he would do anything to have the pomp and circumstance of being President.
We dodged a huge bullet with Romney's defeat now it is time to roll up our sleeves and Take Back the House and Keep the Senate in 2014 along with State Governors and State Houses.
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