Koch Brothers are mad at Rachel Maddow

Here's the latest on the Koch brothers. They've gotten their feelings hurt.

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Millionaires get richer, hiring drops. Where are the jobs being created?

Here is an excellent short video giving the facts of job creation in America that is (NOT)being created by giving tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires. The video then goes into the political implications - with a quick dig at the inside the beltway inhabitants of America's version of Versailles.

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Tea Party exposed!

The authors of the study on Religion in government and published American Grace have found who the tea partiers used to be. The results are somewhat surprising.

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Whoever has been advertising (Koch brothers and the FOX News Network) for the tea party has been selling a lie.

The destruction of Medicare is just one step in the libertarian Republican effort to destroy America

Republicans are lying to the public about Medicare. Lyin' Ryan wants to shut down Medicare and turn the people who need health care over to private insurance who would be paid to pay for the health care. Take a look at the facts as Paul Krugman lays them out.

...we don’t have a Medicare problem, we have a health care cost problem. And Medicare actually does a better job of controlling costs than private insurers — not remotely good enough, but better.

If you look at Medicare in isolation, the cost rise looks terrible, because it is:

Source.

But it looks a bit different if you look at private insurance, too:

If Medicare costs had risen as fast as private insurance premiums, it would cost around 40 percent more than it does. If private insurers had done as well as Medicare at controlling costs, insurance would be a lot cheaper.

It’s a mystery why anyone claims that shifting more people into private insurance is a good idea. Actually, no, it isn’t a mystery; it’s an outrage.

Digby points out the logic of the situation :

Imagine if people over 50 had been allowed to buy into Medicare as was proposed during the Health Care debate. They would have been paying into the system as they already are and also paying for their current insurance. And they would have been getting their care from the less costly system at a time when they are starting to have health problems.

In fact, imagine if everyone were in the less costly system.

So why do the Republicans want so badly to destroy Medicare and hand over the tax money paid to the federal government for health care to the private insurers? It's simply not cost effective. The reason is that the 'low-tax low-government benefits libertarians' have taken over the business Republicans.

Remember Grover Norquist who runs the group Americans for Tax Reform which demands that every Republican sign a no new taxes pledge? Americans for Tax Reform is funded by The uberwealthy libertarian brothers David H and Charles G. Koch who funded the libertarian think tank the CATO Institute. They are sons of Fred C. Koch and inherited their wealth from him, proving again that children who inherit great wealth usually spend their lives defending their inheritance to the detriment of the society they live in. Fred Koch was one of the founders of the hate group the John Birch Society.

Back to David Koch, This is the kind of antisocial crap he pulls.

It's not just the Koch's, but they are the most obvious right now. It is wealthy people who are either libertarian or are using the libertarian philosophy to gain political power.

These people have hated the New Deal since the 1930's and they continue even now to work to destroy it. We are right now in a major political battle with the wealthy aristocratic-wannabees.

We are in a world-wide war between the plutocrats and the networked people

Why are we seeing people's demonstrations taking on plutocratic governments from Tunisia to Madison, Wisconsin? Jon Taplin offers his explanation. It is quite compelling.

On October 14, 2008 I gave a speech at USC called "America 3.0 and The Interregnum". In it I argued that we were entering a global phase of extreme turbulence in which the bottom-up forces of a networked world battled the top-down hierarchies of centralized power. As the Italian philosopher Gramsci had noted,"The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms." Although this upheaval was accelerated by the global financial crisis that I had been warning of since December of 2007, it was not caused by the crisis. It was rather a symptom of a technological revolution initiated with U.S. Defense department funding as early as 1958. We came to call this the Internet.

I am not a techno-utopian who believes that the mere existence of a globally networked culture will allow "the new to be born". In fact, as John Palfrey points out, dying regimes will do their best to use Internet surveillance to hold on to power.

The leaders of many states, like China, Vietnam, and Uzbekistan, have proven able to use the Internet to restrict online discussion and to put people into jail for what they do using the network. We should resist the urge to cheer the triumph of pro-Western democracy fueled by widespread Internet access and usage. The contest for control of the Internet is only just beginning.


What I do believe is that the sources of leadership innovation and change in the next decade will be the bottom-up networked culture, rather than centralized hierarchies dictating how people should organize their polities. This is why the events in Wisconsin are as important as the events in Tripoli. As the historian Joseph Ellis wrote, "The main story line of American History, cast Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in the lead roles of a dramatic contest between the forces of Democracy and the forces of Aristocracy (plutocracy)." The Punk'd phone call between Governor Scott Walker and what he perceived to be his aristocratic patron, David Koch, revealed the truth of Ellis's maxim. Like Hamilton, who he so admires, Koch is only interested in restoring the primacy of the plutocracy. His assault on the forces of democracy has three phases. First, by funding the Citizens United court case successfully, he freed the forces of the plutocracy to completely dominate political speech. Second, as Paymaster to governors like Scott Walker and John Kasich he is directly attacking the rights of workers to form unions and collectively bargain. By breaking the unions he eliminates the one institutional source of political money that might counter the plutocrats lock on campaign finance.

The final phase of Koch's plutocratic assault on democracy will come in the years to follow if he is successful in Wisconsin. We will return to an age of radical deregulation.

The plutocrats are primarily the people with great amounts of money together with their hirelings in government and in large corporations. As the Wall Street Banks (who make their money both by investing the funds of the plutocrats and by exploiting the people who are not wealthy and who do not understand financial exploitation methods like usury) know very well, they get their money by making financial deals, not by creating jobs that make life better for average workers. David Koch is one of many, and almost all of them in America are working to attack the American middle class and destroy it.

The Great Recession is the direct result of their efforts to free banks from government regulation so that banks would be free to create money without any limitation. (This is where the money supply comes from, not from the government.) The financial collapse is the direct result of that freeing up of banks and the growth of the shadow banking system outside of all regulation. Banks cannot be allowed to operate except under tight regulation and great transparency if we want a stable economy. Similarly, the plutocrats cannot be allowed to free themselves from taxation to support the government because it is the existence of government that creates their wealth and protects their privilege of using that wealth.

Madison Wisconsin is America's entry into the battle of the middle class around the world to take and keep control of their world.

Some background on the Wisconsin attack on unions

As described yesterday, Wisconsin governor Walker is essentially put into the governor's office by the Koch brothers. Much of the funding came from Koch Industries. Immediately upon taking office in January of this year Walker and the Wisconsin Republicans passed tax breaks for the corporations and for the wealthy that converted a projected government surplus into a fiscal deficit. Next Walker declared a fiscal emergency and demanded that the government employee unions accept decertification and effective emasculation through a proposed law that prevents them from negotiating with the state on pay or benefits. It's perfectly clear that the actions aimed at the public worker unions are nothing more than a union-busting tactics.

Walker is representing Koch Industries which provided the money that got him elected governor. Koch Industries is famously anti-union, having gone so far as the declare that they will shut down any business they operate that is unionized.

The Koch brothers own the second largest privately owned company in the United States. What we do not yet know is how much of the money that swept into Wisconsin politics last year was unleashed by the Supreme Court's recent made up law, the Citizen's United decision. What we do know is that at least two of the US Supreme Court Justices who enacted the Citizen's United decision have been meeting with the Koch brothers at their recent meeting of millionaires in Palm Springs. The likelihood that the Justices were colluding with the Koch brothers in fund-raising for a conservative anti-union program is very strong.

The attacks on unions by the conservatives have been building in recent years. It's not just the unions themselves, though. It's the fact that unions are one of the pillars of the Democratic Party. The conservatives have been able to destroy ACORN because it was so successful at getting minority voters to register and get out the vote was an earlier success of the conservatives in removing the institutional support behind the Democratic Party. The Koch Brothers - Governor Walker attack on unions in Wisconsin is one more effort in the same direction to make the conservatives politically dominant in American politics. It is very likely that the five Catholic US Supreme Court Justices are complicit in the political attack.

Politically this is an attack on the American people by the big money families and by the heads of large corporations.

America's right wing oligarchs confer

The wealthy American oligarchs who are making war on the American middle class and working class are conducting in a coordination meeting to plan out how to use the Citizen's United decision to flood the American political scene with well-funded right wing candidates. The meeting is being conducted by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

Here are a few of the attendees according to Think Progress:

• Richard DeVos, billionaire cofounder of Amway
  
• Diane Hendricks, billionaire widow of Ken Hendricks who founded Abc Supply which has become the largest U.S. wholesaler of roofing, siding, windows and gutter supplies.
  
• Herman Cain, founder of Godfather's Pizza
  
• Ken Langone , an investment banker and founder of Home Depot
  
  
• Ronald Erickson, CEO of Holiday Companies, a Minnesota based petroleum retail and wholesale convenience business with operations in twelve states across the Upper Midwest and Alaska
  

Think Progress also links to this listing of attendees at the Koch Brothers conference in 2010.

Remember, these are the people that Wall Street banks exist to cater to. These people and the Wall Street banks between them have been directly responsible for outsourcing most of American middle class jobs in the last half century. They have also centralized the banks and set them up to be free of usury laws so that the banks can gouge the middle class. This same group with their Wall Street Bankers is also primarily responsible for the policies that created what Ben Bernanke has called the greatest financial disaster ever. We know this disaster today as the Great Recession.

It is my opinion that American troops remain in the middle east today because the wars there support the excessively bloated Pentagon budget which pumps up the investment returns these individuals get. They and the oil companies had a similar reason to urge George Bush to invade Iraq. (There were other reasons, but these were at or near the top of the list.)

Now they are gathering together to determine how the Citizen's United decision by the Supreme Court will permit them to secretly leverage the use of their money in American politics to make themselves even richer at the expense of the Middle and working classes.

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Addendum 5:06 PM
While the above addresses the effect that money and great wealth is having on American politics, Kevin Drum last Friday blogged on how much effect FOX News was having on elections. In summary, FOX seems to be having only a slight effect on actual votes, but it has had a massive effect on setting the American political agenda.

Notice that Glenn Beck from FOX is attending the Koch brothers convention, too. He and FOX as a whole are a major elements in the Oligarch's propaganda army.