If I Had To Choose Between Donald Trump and the Kochs,

there is no doubt Trump would be picked every single time. The Koch brothers, or at least Charles, the main ringleader, are all upset because another billionaire not in their league is actually gaining traction among voters.

You would know after reading Sons of Wichita and Dark Money these guys are totally off their rockers batshit crazy. They rail and rail against the "government," but under Obama, they have literally tripled "their" fortunes. I think, however, they are truly threatened by one of their own social class.

Of course, the right has always hated the Rockefellers, the Roosevelts, and the Kennedys because they were all "traitors to their class." They knew that their interests would be served if there was a viable middle class. Trump, despite all of his yammering, is no raving wingnut. He is not a true believer like the brainwashed Kochs and their handmaidens like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, or the gone-and-forgotten Scott Walker.

Pass the popcorn, please:

"They are always very hesitant to get involved in a primary but I think if they were going to do it this would be the time because they just hate the guy,” said a donor who attended the Koch network’s winter retreat, held over the weekend at a luxury resort near the foothills of Palm Springs’s Coachella Valley.

I am sure the feeling is mutual.

More About the Kochs

Jane Mayer has a new book out about how the right-wing billionaires are having undue influence on our government. This NPR interview focuses on the Kochs:



I don't know if Mayer has anything new about them that wasn't already covered in the excellent Sons of Wichita. Regardless, her book, which just came out, might be worth looking into.

link

More Proof Things Go Rancid With Koch

Journalist David Corn got hold of a "confidential" document somebody left lying around at a recent Koch brothers-run Palm Springs conference, which had included billionaires and corporate flacks in attendance.

This list came from a conference held just last week. Of course the secret conference had as its goal ways to fuck over the American people even more in order to further enrich themselves.

The more than 40 donors courted by the Kochs include hedge fund and private-equity billionaires, real estate tycoons, and executives of top corporations, including Jockey International and TRT Holdings, owner of Omni Hotels and Gold's Gym. A number of them have never been identified as members of the Koch donor network, including Schnatter, one of the more prominent names on the list. An outspoken opponent of the Affordable Care Act, he is a longtime Republican donor who hosted a fundraiser for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. The document notes that the pizza mogul was scheduled to meet with Ryan Stowers, the director of higher education at the Charles G. Koch Foundation. (Schnatter did not respond to requests for comment.)

These people shouldn't be called "conservatives" since they don't wish to conserve anything. They are outright fascists.

Frankenstein: Version 2013

It looks like the Koch brothers are trying to distance themselves from the fascist movement they created and funded all of these years.

Despite pleas from outfits like the Chamber of Commerce to stop the movement toward default, the Tea Party idiots continue on their reckless course. Whether Obama sells the country down the river to appease these idiots remains to be seen.

It would be funny in a way if the country did default, the economy completely tanked, and the Kochs and their ilk went completely broke.

Snip:

Like others in the business community, the Kochs appear to believe that the push to defund Obamacare is a doomed and destructive distraction and that the Republican-led House should refocus on fiscal issues. A bigger fiscal deal is the goal House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan pushed in a pair of op-eds Wednesday. But it's adamantly opposed by many conservative activists who still see defunding as achievable, and who see the threat of default not as a looming calamity but as a politically motivated ruse. It's this insistence that Obamacare be gutted at all costs, backed by the archconservative faction in the House, that's keeping the shutdown from ending.

The bigger picture here is the continuing splintering of the mainline GOP from its restive, angry base. Many in the Republican establishment hailed the Tea Party when it seemed like merely a source of grassroots enthusiasm for GOP politicians. But now it has turned on them, and even the Koch brothers find they are powerless to stop it.

Sedition is What This Is

There is no other word to describe the shutdown in D.C., not to mention the possibility of the government defaulting.

The Kochs, of course, are behind this shit:

The current budget brinkmanship is just the latest development in a well-financed, broad-based assault on the health law, Mr. Obama’s signature legislative initiative. Groups like Tea Party Patriots, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks are all immersed in the fight, as is Club for Growth, a business-backed nonprofit organization. Some, like Generation Opportunity and Young Americans for Liberty, both aimed at young adults, are upstarts. Heritage Action is new, too, founded in 2010 to advance the policy prescriptions of its sister group, the Heritage Foundation.

The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort. A group linked to the Kochs, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, disbursed more than $200 million last year to nonprofit organizations involved in the fight. Included was $5 million to Generation Opportunity, which created a buzz last month with an Internet advertisement showing a menacing Uncle Sam figure popping up between a woman’s legs during a gynecological exam.

When are those two going to be charged with sedition against the United States? They are as anti-American as anybody can get.

From a local point of view, my representative Greg Walden is probably cooked for telling the truth.

Or maybe not. The district is almost as wingnutty as the second congressional district in Nevada.

The Tea Party is Nothing But a Front Group

for a group of seditious billionaire horses' asses, and I don't like to insult horses' asses with that remark.

These fascists learned a lot from the old Soviets and their front groups. Now that they own the politicians in D.C. and state legislatures, they don't need any riff-raff as followers.

Now these billionaires are very close to destroy the country altogether after they nearly destroyed the economy with this shutdown shit.

That's why the number of actual Tea Party "activists" has declined so quickly from the heady days of 2010. Now that the Kochs and their allies and can buy their own lawmakers, they don't really need any more of those spunky "activists" dressed in tri-corner hats or people to harass liberal politicians like they did back in 2009 and 2010. They can now count on people like Pete Sessions and Ted Cruz to do their bidding on Capitol Hill. Both received ample campaign donations from groups like the Club for Growth and Koch Industries.

And right now, those bought politicians are towing the "Billionaire Party" line to a tee. They've shut down the government in what seems to be an attempt to sabotage Obamacare and prevent the media from informing Americans about how to use its insurance exchanges.

The Kochs and Their Ilk Belong in Prison for Sedition

I am NOT joking about this. They are evil beyond belief, and they do NOT care about this country at all.

The biggest problem with this shutdown shit is Obama because Obama CANNOT be trusted to do the right thing. I fear him even more than the Kochs because he has repeatedly try to make nice with these criminals, these fascists, and you can't make nice with them.

Reich:

Their game plan is to not just to take over the Republican Party. It's to take over America. The showdown over the budget and the debt ceiling is a prelude to 2016, when they plan to run Texas Senator Ted Cruz for President. (Cruz, if you haven't noticed, is busily establishing his creds as the biggest flamer in Washington -- orchestrating not only the current extortion but also the purge of reasonable Republicans from the GOP.) Obama and the Democrats must not give in. They shouldn't even negotiate with extortionists. As I learned the hard way, giving in to bullies just encourages them to escalate their demands. The president gave in at the end of 2011 when Republican bullies threatened to go over the fiscal cliff and take the rest of the nation with them. At that time they demanded spending cuts. Now they want to repeal a law they detest. If we give in again, what's next? A coup d'etat?

Too Much Money and Too Much Free Time

The Kochs are dangerous to this country for those reasons alone. They really are committing sedition against the United States with their extremist agenda:

An Arlington, Va.-based conservative group, whose existence until now was unknown to almost everyone in politics, raised and spent $250 million in 2012 to shape political and policy debate nationwide.

The group, Freedom Partners, and its president, Marc Short, serve as an outlet for the ideas and funds of the mysterious Koch brothers, cutting checks as large as $63 million to groups promoting conservative causes, according to an IRS document to be filed shortly.

I have mentioned before they aren't alone in their destructive agenda. It seems almost the entire billionaire/Wall Street class in this country are hellbent on destroying it because of their unchecked, sociopathic greed.

The Faces of Evil

This long piece doesn't actually say anything people who have looked into the Kochs don't already know. Their crackpot influence is EVERYWHERE, and I would argue since the two are batshit crazy and are among those who own the Libertarian and Republican parties, they have also influenced the Democratic Party as well.

These parasites, and that is what they are, are killing the American body politic with their insane political beliefs. They literally don't want to pay for anything at all but want even more for themselves. They are desciples of Ayn Rand's weird ideas which she formulated as a result of her having had some kind of developmental disorder (believed to be Asperger or something similar). These jerkwads are "worth" upwards of 50 billion EACH. They got it through inheritance, through outright theft of wages and salaries of employees, and through bribing politicians.

The most shocking part of the article, though, is mention of the fact there are now some 1,400 billionaires worldwide. This class of superrich exists as a direct result of economic policies designed to decimate and destroy working and middle class people and through outright theft against the people who actually create the wealth, the workers, by gutting their wages and salaries.

I can remember a mere 40 years ago there were only three or four billionaires in the entire WORLD. Forty years ago, you could actually name all of the billionaires in the world because there were so few of them. Let's see, there was H.L. Hunt, J. Paul Getty, (possibly) Howard Hughes, and Ross Perot. That was it. Even taking inflation into account, one cannot deny the rise of a parasitical class in the world whose numbers have greatly increased. It coincides with the rise of neoliberal, Friedmanite policies designed to destroy the working and middle class to create a parasitical class of superrich.

Anybody who thinks there isn't a class war by the few against everybody else hasn't been paying attention.

Too Much Money and Too Much Time on Their Hands

This is what happens when our wonderful Congress and presidents allow even more redistribution of wealth to the very top of the economic heap instead of taxing them to the hilt. These people create "foundations" that are nothing more than lobbying arms, and they turn around and buy the media to further their attempts to buy opinion.

The Koch brothers aren't the only ones who are doing it, but I am so sick of them I can hardly see:

Other than financing a few fringe libertarian publications, the Kochs have mostly avoided media investments. Now, Koch Industries, the sprawling private company of which Charles G. Koch serves as chairman and chief executive, is exploring a bid to buy the Tribune Company’s eight regional newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant.

By early May, the Tribune Company is expected to send financial data to serious suitors in what will be among the largest sales of newspapers by circulation in the country. Koch Industries is among those interested, said several people with direct knowledge of the sale who spoke on the condition they not be named. Tribune emerged from bankruptcy on Dec. 31 and has hired JPMorgan Chase and Evercore Partners to sell its print properties.

The media keep calling these guys "libertarian," but in truth they are actually fascist.

All Koched Up

Those Koch brothers are trying to destroy America in order to save it for them to plunder:

The Kochs think government is an obstacle to making money that should be removed, said Jim Steele, who with Don Barlett just released “The Betrayal of the American Dream.” The book accuses the “ruling elite” — including the Kochs — of impoverishing the American middle class by pushing initiatives such as deregulation, outsourcing and balanced budgets to enrich themselves.

The Kochs have spent more than three decades building a vast, sophisticated network of think tanks, university researchers and citizen groups to advocate for limited government, lower taxes and limited regulation.

“We feel that the views of the foundations that they support … have been really instrumental in undermining the economic well-being of the middle class,” Steele said. Free markets to the Kochs mean freedom to make money, Steele said.

“I think they view government as an intrusion in their liberty to make money,” he said. “Any government regulation is seen as an intrusion that would interfere with that process.”

Steele said the Kochs are using money they gleaned from lower taxes on dividends and on the wealthy to finance a disinformation campaign against Obama.

I've got to get that Barlett and Steele book. I'd about bet Bain and Mitt are in there because they are representative of what has happened to this country in the past thirty years.

The Kochs are pretty rotten, as we all know, but it's those who are less well-known, like Peter G. Peterson, who are downright evil because they are taken seriously by the idiots in Washington, including Obama.

Documentary of the Week

In case you missed it, Robert Greenwald's movie about the Koch brothers: