This article from Alternet on the beginnings of the Koch Family fortune in Russia is a must read for those who care about the future of this Country. After learning about Groundswell this week which has been kept secret, you wonder what else is being kept secret by the Koch Bros. They have bought two Supreme Court Justices, Thomas and Scalia, a host of people at Groundswell, Cato, Heritage, Freedom Works, and Americans for Prosperity, they have bought numerous people in the Congress, and through ALEC they are influencing laws across the Country in State Legislatures.
Today the Republican House once again proved they are nothing more then puppets of the Koch Bros when they voted to repeal Obamacare for the 40th time. What a waste of our tax dollars. GOP House shouldn't even show up for work -- just send in their YES votes to defund Obamacare along with the SNAP they left out of the Farm Bill. If that wasn't enough, the House GOP overstepped into the Executive Branch with "Regulations From the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act" which they passed.
Both bills are headed nowhere. The very idea that this group of hard right Republicans in the House don't believe that the President has the right to issue regulations through his cabinet secretaries from the Executive Branch, is ludicrous.
Shows how low the GOP in the House has sunk today. Someone needs to tell them there are three branches and the House is the lower House of Congress - they don't even control the Congress. The House is no longer the people's house but the home of the bought and paid for puppets of the Koch Bros and wealthy donors. Guess the Koch Bros don't like the scrutiny coming from the EPA on their pollution to the environment.
The GOP House cannot even get Appropriation Bills passed by their majority - in fact, some they cannot get out of Committee. Now they are on a five-week recess to spread the lies and mistruths of Groundswell across the Country since that is where they get their talking points. The vast majority of Republicans in the House and Senate forgot a long time ago what they are sent to the Capitol to do - pass bills that help all Americans not just the wealthy.
When you read where the Koch Family money originated that is financing all this hard right takeover of our system of Government, the words out of your mouth are probably like mine which are not fit for print. The more I find out about the Koch's the madder I am getting at the Republican Party for selling out what used to be their principles before social conservatives and the religious right took over. I believe in separating politics and religion but the GOP Chair said that Christians principles are the principles of the Republican Party.
This is another investigative report that actually was done by a website, Alternet, in 2010 that is just now hitting Twitter once again after it came out that Groundswell was Koch originated:
While Congress is on a 5-week recess, we will be searching for more to bring you on what is happening leading up to the 2013 elections this fall in New Jersey and Virginia for Governor and the 2014 Congressional elections with a lot of Governor/state legislatures up for grabs.
Have a safe and happy weekend!
AlterNet / By Yasha Levine
The Roots of Stalin in the Tea Party Movement
The Koch family, America's biggest financial backers of the Tea Party, would not be the billionaires they are today were it not for the godless empire of the USSR.April 16, 2010 |
The Tea Party movement's dirty little secret is that its chief financial backers owe their family fortune to the granddaddy of all their hatred: Stalin's godless empire of the USSR. The secretive oil billionaires of the Koch family, the main supporters of the right-wing groups that orchestrated the Tea Party movement, would not have the means to bankroll their favorite causes had it not been for the pile of money the family made working for the Bolsheviks in the late 1920s and early 1930s, building refineries, training Communist engineers and laying down the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure.
The comrades were good to the Kochs. Today Koch Industries has grown into the second-largest private company in America. With an annual revenue of $100 billion, the company was just $6.3 billion shy of first place in 2008. Ownership is kept strictly in the family, with the company being split roughly between brothers Charles and David Koch, who are worth about $20 billion apiece and are infamous as the largest sponsors of right-wing causes. They bankroll scores of free-market and libertarian think tanks, institutes and advocacy groups. Greenpeace estimates that the Koch family shelled out $25 million from 2005 to 2008 funding the "climate denial machine," which means they outspent Exxon Mobile three to one.
I first learned about the Kochs in February 2009, when my colleague Mark Ames and I were looking into the strange origins of the then-nascent Tea Party movement. Our investigation led us again and again to a handful of right-wing advocacy groups directly tied to the Kochs. We were the first to connect the dots and debunk the Tea Party movement's "grassroots" front, exposing it as billionaire-backed astroturf campaign run by free-market advocacy groups FreedomWorks and Americans For Prosperity, both of which are closely linked to the Koch brothers.
But the Tea Party movement -- and the Koch family's obscene wealth -- go back more than half a century, all the way to grandpa Fredrick C. Koch, one of the founding members of the far-right John Birch Society which was convinced that socialism was taking over America through unions, colored people, Jews, homosexuals, the Kennedys and even Dwight D. Eisenhower.
These days, the Kochs paint themselves as true-believer Libertarians of the Austrian School. Charles Koch, the elder brother who runs the family business in Wichita, Kansas, quotes the wisdom of proto-libertarian "economist" Ludwig von Mises, but also sees himself as an economist in his own right. In 2007, Charles made his contribution to the body of free-market thought with an economic theory he calls "Market-Based Management" (a term he trademarked).
David Koch is the highbrow brother who lives in New York. He ran as the Libertarian party candidate for president in 1980 and says his dream is to "minimize the role of government, to maximize the role of private economy and to maximize personal freedoms." Apparently everyone's a free-market enthusiast at Koch Industries, including its spokeswoman, who recently wrote a letter to the New York Times stating that "it's a historical fact that economic freedom best fosters innovation, environmental protection and improved quality of life in a society." It might be true somewhere for someone, but not for the Kochs -- they owe it all to socialism and totalitarianism.
Here is a better historical fact, one that the Kochs don't like to repeat in public: the family's initial wealth was not created by the harsh, creative forces of unfettered capitalism, but by the grace of the centrally planned economy of the Soviet Union. The Koch family, America's biggest pushers of the free-market Tea Party revolution, would not be the billionaires they are today were it not for the whim of one of Stalin's comrades.
Excerpt: Read More Details at Alternet
Alternet is one of the websites where you find real investigative journalism not the journalism out of the lapdog mainstream media that uses talking points from the various Koch organizations - Groundswell (new one that was secret until recently with Ginni Thomas, SCOTUS wife heavily involved), Heritage, Cato, Freedom Works, Americans for Prosperity, Tea Parties and who knows how many more organizations they have funded.
Alternet is one of the websites where you find real investigative journalism not the journalism out of the lapdog mainstream media that uses talking points from the various Koch organizations - Groundswell (new one that was secret until recently with Ginni Thomas, SCOTUS wife heavily involved), Heritage, Cato, Freedom Works, Americans for Prosperity, Tea Parties and who knows how many more organizations they have funded.
While Congress is on a 5-week recess, we will be searching for more to bring you on what is happening leading up to the 2013 elections this fall in New Jersey and Virginia for Governor and the 2014 Congressional elections with a lot of Governor/state legislatures up for grabs.
Have a safe and happy weekend!
0 comments:
Post a Comment