The Koch Brothers...Those Little Scalawags!

The Party’s Over
Let me introduce you to the Koch* brothers. Ever hear of them before now? You know how criminals just have to tell somebody how they got away with it only to have “the somebody” snitch? Well, the Koch Brothers just couldn’t keep the secret of how they screw, with the intention of destroying the Democratic Party in general, and Barack Obama in particular.

On May 17th, a black-tie audience at the Metropolitan Opera House applauded as a tall, jovial-looking billionaire took the stage. It was the seventieth annual spring gala of American Ballet Theater, and David H. Koch was being celebrated for his generosity as a member of the board of trustees; he had recently donated $2.5 million toward the company’s upcoming season, and had given many millions before that.

Koch received an award while flanked by two of the gala’s co-chairs, Blaine Trump, in a peach-colored gown, and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, in emerald green. Kennedy’s mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, had been a patron of the ballet and, coincidentally, the previous owner of a Fifth Avenue apartment that Koch had bought, in 1995, and then sold, eleven years later, for thirty-two million dollars, having found it too small.

The gala marked the social ascent of Koch, who, at the age of seventy, has become one of the city’s most prominent philanthropists. In 2008, he donated a hundred million dollars to modernize Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater building, which now bears his name.

He has given twenty million to the American Museum of Natural History, whose dinosaur wing is named for him. This spring, after noticing the decrepit state of the fountains outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Koch pledged at least ten million dollars for their renovation.

He is a trustee of the museum, perhaps the most coveted social prize in the city, and serves on the board of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where, after he donated more than forty million dollars, an endowed chair and a research center were named for him.

One dignitary was conspicuously absent from the gala: the event’s third honorary co-chair, Michelle Obama. Her office said that a scheduling conflict had prevented her from attending.

Yet had the First Lady shared the stage with Koch it might have created an awkward tableau. In Washington, Koch is best known as part of a family that has repeatedly funded stealth attacks on the federal government, and on the Obama Administration in particular.

With his brother Charles, who is seventy-four, David Koch owns virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars.

The company has grown spectacularly since their father, Fred, died, in 1967, and the brothers took charge. The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products.

Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made David and Charles Koch—who, years ago, bought out two other brothers—among the richest men in America. Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation.

These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.”

The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups.

Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

In a statement, Koch Industries said that the Greenpeace report “distorts the environmental record of our companies.” And David Koch, in a recent, admiring article about him in New York, protested that the “radical press” had turned his family into “whipping boys,” and had exaggerated its influence on American politics.

But Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money.

The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”

*By the way, their name is pronounced like the famous cola.

Public-Sector Squeeze

By Max Fraad-Wolff and Richard D. Wolff
t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

Mon. Jan. 31, 2011 – A national campaign is now fully launched to make local, public-sector employees pick up a major share of the costs of the economic crisis.

Years of rising spending and falling revenue have carved a path of destruction through federal, state and local budgets. Deficits and debts have mounted, eroding taxpayer support for government spending in general and for public employees particularly.

In response to deep economic pains in middle-class communities, major efforts are under way, from California to Maine, to balance budgets through major cuts in services, wages, benefits and employment.

Federal, state and local governments are staggering from reduced tax revenues because of unemployment, reduced production, lower investment and the housing collapse.

Washington borrowed huge sums from foreign investors, domestic big business and the rich. These funds went to bail out select businesses and to help (partially and temporarily) broken state and local government budgets.

Because Democrats and Republicans agreed last December to not increase income, estate and capital gains taxes, broken state and local budgets face declining federal support.

This is driving governors, mayors and state legislatures to raise taxes and/or to slash payrolls and programs. Of course, some cutting and tax increases are required. The real social decisions involve what to cut, how much, for whom and whose taxes to increase.

The pressure is on to shift the heavy costs of economic crisis onto the middle- and low-income communities already stung by unemployment, foreclosures, reduced job benefits and rising job insecurity.

The campaign to make the middle- and lower-income Americans pay now focuses on public employees - especially their numbers, incomes and benefits. Battles loom over which state and local job holders get fired, whose pensions/benefits will be reduced and which public services will stop being available.

Politicians will keep silent on the key alternative to deep cuts –-
precisely because it would otherwise be on most citizens' agendas.

That alternative would be to raise the tax share paid by leading firms and the wealthiest 5-10 percent of citizens. In most cases, this means returning to the levels of taxation in the 1980s.

Whatever may be needed in the way of reasonable rationalizations and savings in government budget outlays, we will not exit the continuing economic crisis by massive reductions in public service provision and employment.

Those only further depress the economic conditions and well-being of middle- and lower-income communities. This would be a more and more cruel version of the track we have been on for decades. Sadly, this approach is neither new nor likely to work.

The facts don't support the attacks on public employees. Last year, total state and local employment declined by 407,000 jobs. Figure 1 shows what has happened to public employment in our states and localities over the last half-century.

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Gawd Bless WikiLeaks

Go to “Common Dreams” and read about Julian Assange. Our ace press tried to smear Assange but, to no avail.  Arrested in Sweden, Assange was brought to London on a morals charge. He is on bail with an ankle bracelet to keep him in check. He has restricted movement, like a common criminal, not the hero Assange really is.