Joe Romm over at thinkprogress has nice little quiz about who said a bunch of quotes, Charles Koch or Al Capone. It's amazing how little some things change over time.
Here's the quiz, who said it?
1) I have devoted most of my life to understanding the principles that enable people to improve their lives [yet I am] the almost daily target of … attacks.
2) I have spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time, and all I get is abuse, the existence of a hunted man.
3) If we want to restore a free society and create greater well-being and opportunity for all Americans, we have no choice but to fight for those principles. I have been doing so for more than 50 years [but] it was only in the past decade that I realized the need to also engage in the political process.
4) You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.
Answers and more below the fold.
Quotes 1 and 3 are Charles Koch in his umpteenth head-exploding Wall Street Journal op-ed, “I’m Fighting to Restore a Free Society.” Quotes 2 and 4 are Al Capone.
And here is some more.
Here’s another quote:
"This American system of ours … call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you like, gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it."
Oh, wait, that’s not Koch in the WSJ, it’s Al Capone again. Go figure!
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For a good discussions of this, see this report on how Koch Industries makes their money, which points out:
– The dirty secret of Koch Industries is its birth under the centrally-planned Soviet Union. Fred Koch, the founder of the company and father of David and Charles, helped construct fifteen oil refineries for Joseph Stalin before expanding the business in the United States.
- As Yasha Levine has reported, Koch exploits a number of government programs for profit….
- Koch Industries won massive government contracts using their close relationship with the Bush administration….
You get the point, but go read it, it's worth the read.
Al Capone corrupted Chicago politics and law enforcement so much, it took people from outside of Chicago to straighten the mess out. The Supreme Court has now paved the road for Oligarchs like the Kochs to corrupt the U.S. government, but there's nobody from the outside that's going to come save us, it's all up to us.