The Koch brothers exert a
web of influence over the government, with tens of millions of dollars being funneled into elections by networks of groups associated with them. These groups, like Americans For Prosperity (AFP), saturate the airwaves with
lies and misleading ads.
The liberal blogosphere has been pushing back very hard on the Koch brothers for quite some time. For the most part, the traditional media has ignored their corrosive influence on the body politic, a status quo the Koch Brothers were happy to live with.
How does one force out a rat that is comfortably hidden in plain view? You ensure that an overwhelmingly bright light is shined on that rat for all to see. That is what Senator Harry Reid did a few weeks ago when he slammed the Koch brothers on the Senate floor.
Follow below for more discussion of that strategy.
Senator Harry Reid is a smart man. He knows that the Koch Brothers are unknown to most Americans. He knew that he needed to elevate the story and that he needed to use the power of his office and position to buttress all of the left-wing blogosphere that had already called out the web of companies doing the Koch brother’s dirty work.
Success has most certainly arrived. Charles Koch just could not take the criticism anymore and he took to the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal to whine in a presumptuously titled piece, I’m Fighting to Restore a Free Society. Anyone in the know likely lost their composure after reading the op-ed.
After consuming the piece, I was compelled to write the following:
After reading the piece one wonders if Charles Koch is living in the reality based world. One wonders if he has begun to believe the lies that his several funded PACs put out to deceive the American population. In that light; here are a few glaring statements that should be rebutted.
The central belief and fatal conceit of the current administration is that you are incapable of running your own life, but those in power are capable of running it for you. This is the essence of big government and collectivism.
… Collectivists (those who stand for government control of the means of production and how people live their lives) promise heaven but deliver hell. For them, the promised end justifies the means.
This is an interesting attack on the Obama administration. While he correctly defines collectivism, there is no instance in which the Obama administration has entered the realm of means of production. What the administration did as a continuation of the Bush administration is used taxpayer resources to save the plutocracy. The Obama administration ensured that those who almost destroyed the world’s economy were able to maintain their position and status. The administration ensured that major corporations like GM did not fail. Their analysis was to tolerate some malfeasance for the better good of the status quo economy.
Had the administration done the absolute right thing, it would have allowed the market to penalize those that destroyed it. At that point the recovery would have been benign collectivism brought on by the failure of a failed plutocratic regime.
Koch's reaction shows that no amount of money can elicit a cohesive message when the message is demonstratively anathema to the vast majority of Americans. He is against the minimum wage. He is anti-regulation. He is anti-Obamacare. And worse, he implies that support of those tenets is anti-freedom.
Ironically, it is fact that if you make more, you have more. Absent regulations, corporations—including his own—pollute the environment and treat employees unfairly for profit maximization. It is fact that millions of Americans are better off with the security, financial and health-wise, provided by Obamacare. No amount of Charles Koch bloviating will change that.
Why did Koch allow Harry Reid to force him out in the open? Reid, who truly understands politics, is in the process of defining the Koch brothers to all the millions of Americans who as yet know nothing about them, let alone their perpetrated evil. Unfortunately for Koch, his lament and rebuttal in the Wall Street Journal will almost surely become the framing document by which he will be justifiably caricatured.
The Koch brothers had better be careful. There are already organizations working on identifying their companies and boycotting them. The continued success of their empire may be inversely proportional to the new notoriety that Harry Reid will gladly and continuously give them.