DownWithTyranny!: Marco Rubio To Give Keynote Speech For Koch Brothers' New John Birch Society

The Koch family spent a lot of money getting Marco Rubio into office and they're not about to throw it all away just because the teabaggers and Know Nothings they cultivate as their shock troops are upset over some issue-- immigration reform-- the Koch don't even care about. Papa Fred-- a gussied up, old line KKK redneck who struck it rich-- would have cared, but Charles and David only care about money. The Kochs are standing behind Rubio-- with a wall of cash funneled through all their high-flyin' front groups.

Fox News viewers in Florida will see a new commercial in the coming weeks urging them to call Senator Marco Rubio. “Thank him for keeping his promise, and fighting to secure the border,” a narrator says in the ad, which is paid for by the conservative American Action Network.

Another group, Americans for a Conservative Direction, led by former Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and other top Republicans, has been running ads in Iowa lately that implore those watching to “stand with Marco Rubio to end de facto amnesty.”

And when the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the Koch brothers’ political advocacy group, decided to move its signature annual conference outside Washington for the first time, it picked a spot right in Mr. Rubio’s political backyard: Orlando. The keynote speaker? Mr. Rubio. ... Rubio has been attacked at Tea Party rallies (his name elicits boos), on conservative radio (“a piece of garbage,” Glenn Beck called him) and in National Review (“Rubio’s Folly,” declared a recent cover).

Still, running interference on Mr. Rubio’s behalf is fraught with risk for conservative groups, who are going against many in their own base.

“We know that there’s a lot of folks on both sides,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity. “But I think the vast majority of people appreciate the fact that Senator Rubio is doing what he thinks is best for the country. And that he’s doing it in an open and honest way.”

Mr. Phillips declined to discuss any implications for Mr. Rubio and 2016, but said, “We think that he’s got a bright future within the movement, and in whatever he chooses to do down the road.”

And, the Koch family's obsession with transforming America into a John Bircher hellhole is intergeneration and will never end. Investigative journalist Lee Fang has written extensively about the Kochs and their insidious right-wing operations in his new book, The Machine: A field Guide To The Resurgent Right. This is just a tiny portion of a treasure trove of information about one vile plutocratic family working effectively to overthrown democracy in America.

Obama, unlike Roosevelt with Du Pont, waited years before confronting the Koch brothers in the public arena. Rather than taking them on directly, Obama, for a short period during the midterm elections, mocked the Koch-financed group called Americans for Prosperity, saying the name was misleading. The Koch brothers were accused of rampant oil speculation, driving the price of gasoline up for consumers, and their allies in the banking sector of crashing the economy. However, Obama and the Democrats were slow to recognize the political threat, and for some reason, were too timid to explicitly denounce the Koch brothers. The circumstances, of course, were also different. America suffered through a housing market collapse, a financial crisis, and perpetual unemployment as Obama took office, but not an earth-shattering event like the Great Depression. Backlash against the rich never materialized in the same way as it had under Roosevelt, and Obama suffered from the right-wing charge, amplified on Fox News and talk radio, that he was a “socialist.” Maybe Obama thought a confrontation with the Koch brothers would only lend credibility to the belief that he practiced left-wing “class warfare.” In any event, the calculation to largely ignore the Koch brothers only helped them lurk in the shadows, exercising even greater influence.

And the Koch brothers were prepared for battle with Obama unlike any plutocrats of the past. The Du Ponts stumbled awkwardly into forays with Roosevelt and never learned to avoid the press and public scrutiny into their lobbying. More profoundly, the Koch brothers had developed a political strategy perfected by generations of right-wing tycoons-- including their father, the founder of the Koch family conglomerate, Koch Industries. For fifty years, the Koch family plotted, experimented, and financed groups to advance a very right-wing form of conservatism. The tactics employed against Obama had been concocted for many years prior.

The Koch brothers surpassed the influence of any other single wealthy individual or business group because of their holistic approach to, as Charles would say, “advancing liberty.” Organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would fund advertisements and pay insider lobbyists. The Coors family funded conservative think tanks and cultural institutions. John Allison, former CEO of BB&T bank, single-handedly financed an array of professors dedicated to the beliefs of Ayn Rand at major universities. Conservative activists like Grover Norquist convened regular meetings for ideological peers to collaborate. The Koch brothers incorporated all of these tactics, and more. They funded talent to come up with even better strategies and offered to lend money to anything-- movies, internships, ad campaigns, books, social networking websites-- that would “create value” to further the cause.

...As Obama prepared for his inauguration, the Koch family declared political war. In January after the presidential election, Charles proclaimed in a newsletter to his fifty thousand employees that America was quickly arriving at the “greatest loss of liberty and prosperity since the 1930s.” The somber warning noted what he saw as the parallels between Roosevelt’s Keynesian response to the Great Depression and Obama’s calls for fiscal stimulus in light of the financial crisis. He warned against “piling on even more regulations” and new “make-work” government programs modeled after the Roosevelt administration. Charles lectured, “it is markets, not government that can provide the strongest engine for growth, lifting us out of these troubling times.” Many of the programs Roosevelt had started in reaction to the Great Depression persisted for generations, Charles warned. In challenging the new president, Charles appeared to be anointing himself the heir to Irénée Du Pont’s crusade against Franklin Roosevelt, or his own father’s fight against John Kennedy and moderate Republicans. Only this time, Charles hoped to succeed.

And inflaming Charles’s worst fears, Obama gave a bold, progressive speech at his inauguration, making clear his intention to transition to a clean energy economy, to reform the nation’s health care system, and to remake the country’s sagging infrastructure. The financial crisis, Obama said, “reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control.” “The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous,” he added. Billionaires like the Koch brothers took note.

As Obama announced his promise to change America, it seems doubtful that he could have known that among the many entrenched business interests gearing up to lobby against reform, a single ultra-rich family was preparing to fight him across the board. He didn’t even have to look far from where he stood to see their reach. Ironically, INVISTA, a Koch Industries subsidiary, had won the government contract to provide the imperial blue and red carpeting for the inauguration ceremony. The second Obama became president, he was standing atop a Koch product.

Within two days of Obama’s swearing his oath of office, the Koch network sprung into action. A website called NoStimulus.com launched, along with a television advertising campaign, a petition, and a series of media events designed to defeat Obama’s first signature accomplishment, the $800 billion Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as simply the stimulus. In what later blossomed into the Tea Party movement, Koch-funded organizers fanned across the country organizing “Porkulus” rallies decrying government spending and regulations. Koch-supported groups, for instance the Competitive Enterprise Institute and state-based think tanks like the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy, fired off a volley of anti-stimulus press releases, op-eds, and joint events with Republican lawmakers. Koch operatives staged media events with the most vitriolic opponents of the stimulus, like Governor Mark Sanford and Senator Jim DeMint, both from South Carolina.

By early February, as the vote neared, Americans for Prosperity, one of the main Koch-financed front groups, sent a letter to congressional Republicans instructing them to oppose the stimulus, regardless of any amendments or adjustments made to the bill. Indeed, in a bid for bipartisanship, Democrats offered a slimmed-down version of Obama’s proposed stimulus. In order to gain the vote of three Senate Republicans, tax cuts comprised a third of the stimulus.

While the stimulus ultimately passed, the anti-stimulus hysteria helped conservatives shift the national debate from the causes of the financial crisis to issues like the national debt and government waste. More importantly, the right-wing echo chamber, comprised in no small part of dozens of Koch-funded nonprofits, provided cover for every Republican in the House and nearly every Republican in the Senate to vote against the bill.

Sporadic advertising from Koch groups attempted to spark populist outrage. One television spot, which began soon after Obama took office, featured a middle-aged man exclaiming loudly: “Congress should stop wasting our money and start focusing on real problems!” As the disheveled-looking man yelled about the government, text decrying global warming as a “hoax” flashed across the bottom of the screen. The ad didn’t propose an alternative or any solution for that matter; rather it seemed to be crafted simply to stir general outrage. Another Koch ad, which began airing around the same time, showed an actor who said his name was “Carlton, the wealthy eco-hypocrite.” The ad was not a large buy, but the script was a perfect specimen of Koch-funded fake populist outrage:

Hey there, I’m Carlton, the wealthy eco-hypocrite. I inherited my money and attended fancy schools. I own three homes and five cars, but always talk with my rich friends about saving the planet. And I want Congress to spend billions on programs in the name of global warming and green energy. Even if it causes massive unemployment, higher energy bills, and digs people like you even deeper into the recession. Who knows, maybe I’ll even make money off of it!
Of course, the Koch brothers inherited their money, attended elite private schools, and own an array of private jets and vacation homes. Their opposition to addressing global warming had nothing to do with energy prices. In fact, many of the serious plans from Democrats to tackle global warming would have lowered energy prices for the vast majority of Americans, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Denying the threat of global warming only permits the Koch brothers to make vast amounts of money from their pollution-based empire. But the Koch brothers weren’t interested in an honest debate. They wanted to kill attempts to regulate their pollution, and were willing to say or do anything to provoke middle- and lower-income voters to turn against Obama.

Still... Rubio wanted to burnish his credentials with the far, far right before the Koch confab. So he announced this morning that he'd offer the same anti-Choice legislation nationally-- knowing full well it would never get out of committee-- that is tearing Texas, North Carolina and Ohio apart this week. Divisiveness is a win-win for the far right, since those people don't want anything to ever work anyway. Their strategy on the bill-- despite polls showing how unpopular it is-- is that it "might strengthen GOP candidates in the 2014 midterm election."

Rubio’s decision to play a major role in the abortion debate is bound to stir political speculation. He is viewed as a likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

But he’s recently prompted serious criticism by Republicans over his support for the immigration reform bill that passed the Senate last week. His front-and-center role on a key anti-abortion measure is likely to ease concerns about him among GOP voters.