Who Are The Real Enemies of The American People? Hint: It Isn't Oceana, Eurasia Or Even Eastasia

I'll go out on a limb and say what's left of American democracy isn't under threat by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, Robert Mugabe or even Osama bin Laden. I'm sure you've noticed that until about a week ago when he started strafing his own citizens with fighter jets, we were getting along just swimmingly with Muammar Qaddafi and have quite cordial relations with similarly brutal tyrants from high profile allies King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Hu Jintao of China to no less horrific despots like Isayas Afewerki of Eritrea and our dear oil pals Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov of Turkmenistan and Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equitorial Guinea. All a repulsive disreputable lot, but none an especially existential threat to the American way of life. The Koch Brothers, on the other hand, are. They have the wealth-- ill-gotten and untaxed to push a highly reactionary, anti-social vision that insists "that taxes and government regulation are destructive forces and that government generally makes people’s lives worse." They started the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Center, and Americans for Prosperity, which funds and manipulates American teabaggery. They rabidly oppose healthcare, financial regulation, taxes and environmental and consumer protections. When you have billions of dollars and all that it will buy, the law of the jungle works quite well, thank you.

In the week-long battle taking place in Wisconsin over Gov. Scott Walker's attempt to strip state workers of their collective bargaining rights, you'd expect Fox News to be doing what it's done: misreporting the story, mistakenly characterizing a poll supporting public workers to mean its opposite, featuring Glenn Beck painting the protests of union workers as something cooked up by Stalinists. And you might be tempted to think, well, that's just Fox playing to its base of frightened Tea Partiers who prefer a fact-free zone to the more challenging territory of actual news, where the answers are never pat, and the world is a bit more complicated than it seems in the realm of Fox Nation.

You might think it's all about what brings in the advertising dollars for Rupert Murdoch, CEO of Fox's parent company, News Corporation. But it runs much deeper than that, involving key players at the Wall Street Journal, News Corp.'s crown jewel. The informal partnership between billionaire David Koch, whose campaign dollars and astroturf group, Americans for Prosperity, have fomented the Wisconsin crisis, and billionaire Rupert Murdoch, is profoundly ideological-- the ideology being the exponential enrichment of the two men's heirs, all dressed up in the language of libertarianism and free enterprise. Together with his brother, Charles-- also a big donor to right-wing causes-- David Koch runs Koch Industries, the conglomerate that sprang from the oil and gas company founded by his father.

In yesterday's NY Times conected the dots between anti-democratic tendencies bubbling over on the American right and the Koch Brothers in his brilliant essay about the teabaggers demanding that the U.S. government be shut down until they get their way.

[T]he Wisconsin governor’s fawning 20-minute phone conversation with a prankster impersonating the oil billionaire David Koch last week, while entertaining, is merely a footnote. The Koch Industries political action committee did contribute to Walker’s campaign (some $43,000) and did help underwrite Tea Party ads and demonstrations in Madison. But this governor is merely a petty-cash item on the Koch ledger-- as befits the limited favors he can offer Koch’s mammoth, sprawling, Kansas-based industrial interests.

Look to Washington for the bigger story. As the Los Angeles Times recently reported, Koch Industries and its employees form the largest bloc of oil and gas industry donors to members of the new House Energy and Commerce Committee, topping even Exxon Mobil. And what do they get for that largess? As a down payment, the House budget bill not only reduces financing for the Environmental Protection Agency but also prohibits its regulation of greenhouse gases.

Here again, the dollars that will be saved are minute in terms of the federal deficit, but the payoff to Koch interests from a weakened E.P.A. is priceless. The same dynamic is at play in the House’s reduced spending for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Internal Revenue Service. and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (charged with regulation of the esoteric Wall Street derivatives that greased the financial crisis). The reduction in the deficit will be minimal, but the bottom lines for the Kochs and their peers, especially on Wall Street, will swell.

These special interests will stay in the closet next week when the Tea Partiers in the House argue (as the Gingrich cohort once did) that their only agenda is old-fashioned fiscal prudence. The G.O.P. is also banking on the presumption that Obama will bide his time too long, as he did in the protracted health care and tax-cut melees, and allow the Fox News megaphone, not yet in place in ’95, to frame the debate. Listening to the right’s incessant propaganda, you’d never know that the latest Pew survey found that Americans want to increase, not decrease, most areas of federal spending-- and by large margins in the cases of health care and education.

The Kochs and their right-wing political subsidiaries-- whether the Tea Party or political shills like Scott Walker-- are holding pat. They sense weakness, a conflicted agenda, and irresolution from Obama and the Democrats. And why shouldn't they sense that; it's highly accurate. If it weren't, the Kochs would be in prison where they belong for stealing oil from American Indians and from the federal lands and for releasing huge amounts of cancer-causing benzene from a Texas refinery and then trying to cover it up, as well as for running their shady businesses as organized crime pure and simple.

Before you watch the video below, read this excerpt from last July's New York exposé of David Koch, whose father, Freddy, was one of the principle financiers of the John Birch Society, an insidious anti-democratic, anti-American hate group:

Earlier this year, he found himself attacked for being the financial engine of the largely white, largely male, very angry crowds that were gathering in towns across the country-- a few waving overtly racist or menacing anti-Obama signs-- to protest the president’s proposed health-care bill and other issues. Koch denies being directly involved with the tea party--“I’ve never been to a tea-party event. No one representing the tea party has ever even approached me”-- but he and his brother Charles were being accused of supporting the group through an affiliated conservative organization. Rachel Maddow had effectively called Koch the tea party’s puppet master. “The radical press is coming after me and Charles,” he said. “They’re using us as whipping boys.” Burnishing his reputation was no longer his concern; now, it seemed, he needed to save it.