Should Billionairism Be Illegal?

The Koch brothers just cost American taxpayers $24 billion with their two and a half week Republican temper tantrum. They should foot the bill. Ha ha ha… right? That's funny, huh? No, I'm serious. Society must protect itself from dangerous predators and there are no predators in the world-- not in al Qaeda, not in North Korea, not in Iran-- more damaging to America than David and Charles Koch, scions of a European fascist family. A month short of two years ago we posted about the roots of the Koch assault on American Democracy. I encourage you to go back and look at that post. Here's the intro:

The new issue of the Texas Observer digs around in the fetid sewer that is the Koch family background. Yasha Levine's sleuthing helps put in perspective exactly why the Koch's have made themselves the biggest threat to American democracy since Adolph Hitler-- and for many similar-- if not identical-- reasons. To understand why Charles and David Koch are using their billions to assault American democracy-- even teaming up with Iran (the way their father had teamed up with Stalin) to do so-- you have to look back at the history of this demented, hate-filled family. There Levine finds the roots to their antipathy towards democracy, equality, public education, Social Security, organized labor, environmental, consumer and financial protections and the 99%. They've spent hundreds of millions already and plan to spend another $200 million in 2012 electing 1%-ers like Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Scott Brown and other right-wing anti-government sociopaths hellbent on turning back the clock on America. Levine starts with their grandfather a wealthy Dutch-German immigrant who settled in Texas and brought his foreign, hate-filled fascist ideology to his new country, where he tried enforcing it on the people he found here.

That was the Social Security-hating fascist grandfather, Harry Koch, who wrote in the newspaper he bought that "No political system can possibly guarantee either a national economic security or an individual standard of living. Government can guarantee no man a job or a livelihood" even before his two rotten grandsons were spawned. His paper never ceased attacking FDR and the New Deal, slamming "public pensions, regulations, tariffs, unions, muckrakers, labor laws and deficits, and filled its op-ed space with pro-business opinion pieces delivered fresh from New York lobby groups like the American Bankers Association, whose president, R.S. Becht, wrote to assure Quanah readers that there was no need for the government to regulate banks. Industry self-regulation-- or 'voluntary self reform,' as he called it-- would be enough." Sound familiar? If you follow the Kochs and other right-wing billionaires, it;s the same tune they're singing today-- although today they have Fox News and a whole network of Hate Talk Radio to propagate their point of view to the dumbest among us.

After Harry Koch, came Fred, one of the founders and financiers of the profoundly anti-American John Birch Society which is, basically, everything his sons are trying to inflict on America today. A couple of years ago, investigative journalist Lee Fang exposed the Koch family devotion to anti-democracy ideologies. Yesterday Think Progress' Lee Fang posted about how the Koch family was celebrated this week for the major contribution of founding father, Fred-- the financial godfather of the right-wing hate group, the John Birch Society, whose tenets are infused in everything his two degenerate sons are doing to American politics today. "As a founding board member, Fred helped engineer a hysterical wave of attacks on labor, intellectuals, public education, liberal clergy members, and other pillars of society he viewed as a threat. Birchers decried everyone from former President Eisenhower to water utility administrators as pawns in a global communist conspiracy. In the last two years, as the Koch name has become synonymous with right-wing plutocracy in the United States, the Koch family has played down its relation to the Birchers. However, the New American, the official mouthpiece of the John Birch Society, published a piece this morning celebrating Fred and the Koch family’s pivotal role in developing the group:"

Koch warned that American institutions were honeycombed with communist subversives, from labor unions and tax-free foundations to universities and churches. Art and newsprint, radio and television-- all these media had been transmuted into vehicles of communist propaganda. [...] Fred Koch was no fly-by-night pamphleteer. He spent a generous portion of his later years using his wealth and influence to fight the communism he abhorred. He was an early member of the John Birch Society’s National Council, an advisory group to JBS founder Robert Welch. Koch supported a variety of freedom-related causes, all the while continuing to build the company today known as Koch Industries.

The Koch brothers looked more like Nazis back in their formative years, don't you think?

Fang reminds us that the Bircher paean to ole Fred glosses over his record of bigotry. "In a booklet he authored, Fred railed against civil rights leaders, and claimed the movement against racial segregation was a communist plot to use African Americans to destabilize the country. The Koch-funded Birchers held numerous rallies during the ’60s claiming integration would lead to a 'mongrelization' of the races. Although the present-day Koch brothers try to eschew explicit racism, their top Tea Party front group, Americans for Prosperity, is currently pursuing similar racial segregation goals. In North Carolina, the Americans for Prosperity chapter led a campaign to end a highly successful public school integration system."

Because of their ostentatious financing of the Tea Party "movement," the Kochs are in the spotlight today but they are far from the only offspring of American fascists. In fact, as contemptible and reprehensible as their father was, he wasn't technically a traitor (as far as I know.) The same can't be said about J.P. Morgan, the Dulles Brothers, Prescott Bush, the du Pont family, the Rockefellers, the Hunts, the Mellons... obviously the Fords. Remember, Wall Street and corporate America built Hitler's war machine-- and not just because they wanted to make a quick buck... they believed in the fascist doctrines he was espousing. The "biggest names" in America actively sabotaged the war effort while American boys were dying on the battlefields of Europe and Asia. Yeadon makes it clear in Nazi Hydra that "just as the backers of Hitler's were rich industrialists, so were the backers of fascism in the United States" and that, in fact, many of them were the same backers... as the following quote from the New York Times from the Ambassador to Germany, William Dodd shows:

"A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime. On (the ship) a fellow passenger, who is a prominent executive of one of the largest corporations, told me point blank that he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism into America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies.

Certain American industrialist had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there.

Propagandists for the fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions."

As Yeadon makes clear with his careful research, "Americans have never been told the truth about the extent of corporate America's involvement with the Nazis. The media has spoon-fed Americans into believing that only a handful of companies were involved. In reality, more than 300 American corporations were illegally arming Nazi Germany during the war... They could have severed all links with Nazi Germany, but instead chose to continue to support a regime at war with their own country. In doing so, those corporations became willing accomplices to the Holocaust, traitors to their country and guilty of war crimes. The traitors responsible for such actions and crimes should have received justice at the end of a hangman's noose. Sadly, not one American corporation was charged with aiding the Nazis." They all got away scott free-- to fight another day. And we're talking about household names like General Motors, IBM, duPont, Standard Oil, International Harvester, Ford, General Electric, United Fruit, Alcoa... The heart of fascist ideology of the 1930s in Germany, Italy, Spain and here in the U.S.-- and of the far right today-- was corporate rule.

It is the basis for the visceral level of hate for unions, fueled by the corporate elite and their propaganda organizations. There is no better example to illustrate the power of the pro-fascists in the United States, than to compare the plight of the American worker with his counterpart in the rest of the industrial nations. In every category, the American worker comes up short when compared to the workers in other industrial nations. As an example the American worker earns 44% less than his German counterpart and 15% (1994 figures) less than his Japanese counterpart. ... While the average American worker is lucky to receive a two-week vacation his European counterpart enjoys a five-week vacation-- or more-- and a list of benefits that the American worker can only dream about.

Nor is the plight of the worker seeking to unionize much different today than it was in the 1930-40s. There are a myriad of companies today in the United States that provide security for corporate America. In reality, these companies are nothing more than hired thugs and union busters. While the muggings and factory death squads are not as great a threat today, the American worker is still being spied on. However, corporate America has no qualms about murdering union organizers in other countries. A recent report revealed that Coke Cola had hired right wing death squads to murder union organizers in Columbia. The United Steel workers union has filed suit in Miami alleging that Coca-Cola and Panamerican Beverages, its principal bottler in Latin America, waged what union leaders describe as a campaign of terror, using paramilitaries to kill, torture and kidnap union leaders in Columbia.

Marching for the billionaires who paid for their buses:



This weekend the New York Times' Sheryl Gay Stolberg exposed how Koch-financed ALEC groups across the country are doing whatever they can to sabotage the Affordable Care Act rollout. Her focus: Virginia, where "conservative activists are pursuing a hardball campaign as they chart an alternative path to undoing “Obamacare”-- through the states. David Axelrod commented on it Saturday morning in a tweet:

One leading target is Emmett W. Hanger Jr., a Republican state senator from the deeply conservative Shenandoah Valley, who prides himself on “going against the grain.” As chairman of a commission weighing one of the thorniest issues in Virginia politics, whether to expand Medicaid under Mr. Obama’s Affordable Care Act, he is feeling heat from the Republican right. His openness to expansion has aroused the ire of Americans for Prosperity, the conservative advocacy group backed by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch. Dressed in emerald green T-shirts bearing the slogan “Economic Freedom in Action!” its members are waging what the senator calls “an attempt to intimidate me” in Richmond and at home.

They have phoned his constituents, distributed leaflets and knocked on 2,000 doors in his rural district. When the Republican town committee met Monday night in Mr. Hanger’s home county, Augusta, Americans for Prosperity was there.

In Richmond on Tuesday, hundreds of volunteers in green shirts turned out for a commission hearing, bused in by the advocacy group’s field organizers, who provided Subway sandwiches for lunch.

“This has been one of those trench warfare kind of efforts for a year now, and I think it is one of those hidden stories of the whole fight against Obamacare,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity. “It’s not flashy; it’s just in a whole bunch of state capitals and in the districts of a whole lot of state legislators, but it’s such a crucial aspect of the overall long-term effort to roll back Obamacare.”

The state-by-state strategy represents a split from the course pursued by Heritage Action for America and its sister organization, Heritage Foundation, which drove the “defunding Obamacare” movement that led to the recent government shutdown. In an opinion article published Friday by the Wall Street Journal, Jim DeMint, the foundation president, made no apologies. “Obamacare will now be the issue for the next few years,” he wrote.

Expanding Medicaid, a joint federal-state program for the poor, is critical to the law’s goal of covering the nation’s 48 million uninsured. Hospitals and insurers were also counting on more Medicaid patients to make the economics of the law work. For states, the terms seemed attractive: The federal government would pay 100 percent of the cost of new enrollees for the first three years, 90 percent after that.

But in June 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that states could opt out of Medicaid expansion. The ruling opened the door for conservative opponents of the law. Americans for Prosperity, with paid staff members in 34 states, walked through it. So did another group, Tea Party Patriots, which recently gave $20,000 to organizers of a referendum drive to put the question of Medicaid expansion on the Arizona ballot.

Americans for Prosperity has spent millions in states around the country, including Arkansas, Florida, Ohio, Louisiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania, to run the kind of aggressive campaign that it is now waging here in Virginia, where much will depend on the governor’s race. The Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe, who leads in the polls, favors expansion. The Republican candidate, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, is opposed.

So far roughly half the states are moving forward with Medicaid expansion, and an increasing number of Republican governors are expressing interest. Michigan, where Gov. Rick Snyder recently signed Medicaid expansion legislation into law, was “a tough loss,” Mr. Phillips conceded. In Ohio, Gov. John R. Kasich wants to expand. So does Gov. Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania, even though the legislature has already rejected it.

“This is going to be an issue all through 2014 for us,” said Jennifer Stefano, a former television reporter who runs Americans for Prosperity’s Pennsylvania chapter. “I don’t believe this fight is in Washington or ever was. I think this is a street fight. It’s a man to man, so to speak, fight of going door to door.”

…Mr. Hanger is not the only target of Americans for Prosperity. Another Republican commission member, State Senator John C. Watkins, complains that the group, which is not required to disclose its donors, is sending misleading mailings to his constituents.

“They related Medicaid expansion to defeating Obamacare, and they ignore the fact that the Affordable Care Act is the law,” he said. “I think their tactics are very deceptive.”

Too bad when the fascist tactics promulgated by the Republicans to use against Democrats are turned against them by the fascists they themselves spawned. That's how it always happens.