Part I, addressed the invasive and dangerous power and influence of billionaires Charles and David Koch and Rupert Murdoch and their powerful grip on the GOP, especially its tea party wing.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
As we have learned from recent national media reports, barring Fox cable TV "news" of course, self-serving billionaires have invested millions of dollars in a single minded effort to support right wing causes, especially the tea party wing of the Republican party. The main goal of the pervasively powerful corporate potentates is to seek out and find political tools and loyal enablers that will carry their water.
The Republican Party has enthusiastically clicked its heels, while courageously stepping up to selflessly volunteer to serve the potentates of money, power and influence.
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In so doing the GOP also showed its unbridled willingness to throw everyday Americans into the ditch if such abandonment of constituents would better serves the Party's corporate masters.
Cross posted on Texas Kaos.
At least we can now better understand the Republican tools' rationale for their determined obstruction of any legislation that would fuel our economic recovery.
The GOP enabling shills have recently snapped to attention because the puppet masters have given its talking points to lawmakers ranging in rank from Mitch McConnell to John Boehner to half-term governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, and TX Gov. Rick Perry the Secessionist. The billionaire ventriloquists that speak through the voices of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, understandably yearn for a return to the unfettered Wall St. days of W.
H/t to Disarray for the above video.
Earth to the teabaggers. What is good for the Koch boys ain't necessarily good for you.
But Glenn Beck's, Rush Limbaugh's and Sarah Palin's groupies have been distracted day in and day out by the insane ravings of the birthers, deathers, John Birchers while GOP political charlatans continue to ignite fear fests over make believe terrorist baby implants and an Islamic cultural/recreational center in lower Manhattan that has nothing to do with anyone outside of New York City. That and the right's ongoing witch hunt against Hispanics and Republican threats to strip U.S. born children of immigrants of their citizenship status has understandably worked up and confused the teabaggers. It is no wonder that few of them can think rationally with the right wing's lie/hate/fear machine screaming hysterically, day in and day out, 24/7.
What is a Party that is bereft of meaningful ideas and solutions to do? What else? Resort to divisive scorched earth politics.
I guess these are the only solutions left to the Republican Party. Over the past almost two years, not one Republican has come forward with a viable or rational idea or solution to address the problems that ail our country. Except for their desire for ongoing tax cuts for the likes of the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch and the privatization of Social Security, i.e. turn over our hard earned retirement savings to the sharks on Wall St., there is no Republican plan. The scorched earth politics of endless witch hunts, fabricated daily scandals, and its fomenting of mind numbing rage and fear fests is all the GOP has left. If the GOP should win one House in 2010 this is what we will get for the next two years. And it is all we will get. Forget about a new jobs bill. In fact, forget about jobs at all b/c the GOP has no plan whatsoever for new job creation.
The Republican Party has become a profile in cowardice and moral bankruptcy.
The American people are sick and tired of useless, self-serving and vindictive Republican politicians. We are looking for jobs, a stronger economy and solutions for a viable and secure future for our kids. We don't want the Party of Wall Street's sharks to take away our safety net. Nor are we one bit interested in destructive and anti-American crusades against some imaginary evil doer. We've been there done that during the Bill Clinton's Administration and we're not going back there again.
How about a crusade for new job growth instead? How about a witch hunt against health insurance companies that gouge and rip off ailing patients? How about tarring and feathering banks and credit card companies for its irresponsible lending practices that have thrown people out of their homes? How about going after oil companies that destroy our environment?
The sound of chirping crickets continues to be deafening.
In yesterday edition of the New York Times columnist Frank Rich reaffirms and further documents Jane Mayer's extensive article about the the Koch brothers and their exploitation of the Republican Party, especially its tea party wing. Rich reminds us that there have always been powerful corporate potentates that have been fighting Democratic principles and U.S. Presidents from FDR, to JFK to LBJ to Barack Obama. The self-serving and bloated agendas of greed are always the same. Only the players change.
The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party
The fat cats have re-tooled its hate talk rants from the past to serve up at today's tea party rallies.
All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled "Invisible Hands" in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal "socialism" of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our "socialist" president.
Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government "handouts" to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of "a takeover" of America in which Communists would "infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us." That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.
The Koch boys own a piece of Dick Armey, too, one of the renowned creators of the Republican tea party movement.
The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.
When the New Yorker's reporter, Jane Mayer, outed the Koch brothers for their pervasive grip on the GOP, the righty rights try, as they always do, to steer the conversation to George Soros. Of course the Republicans don't get it that Soros gives to liberal causes and agendas that raise his own taxes and those that do not promote his business interests.
The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled "Covert Operations") by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.
This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a "known carcinogen" in humans (which it is).
Sure, let Murdoch and the Koch boys and its tools in the GOP (John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, etc.) dismantle our fundamental safety nets. Apparently the teabaggers have been duped into thinking this is a very good idea.
Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly.
Meet the usual GOP pimped out tools for big money.
Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a "slush fund"; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.
The Koch boys must laugh themselves silly on the way to the bank for they have fooled those they intend to throw under the bus later.
The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the "ground zero mosque." Last week on "Fox and Friends," the Bush administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly terrorism-tainted Saudi prince whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center. But as "The Daily Show" keeps pointing out, these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corporation) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.
Meanwhile the daily grind of FOX pathological ravings continues.
No less a Murdoch factotum than Neil Cavuto slobbered over bin Talal in a Fox Business Channel interview as recently as January, with nary a question about his supposed terrorist ties. Instead, bin Talal praised Obama’s stance on terrorism and even endorsed the Democrats’ goal of universal health insurance. Do any of the Fox-watching protestors at the "ground zero mosque" know that Fox’s profits are flowing to a Obama-sympathizing Saudi billionaire in bed with Murdoch? As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want "to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ " are aiding that funding by watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.
It is no small wonder that many Americans like me consider Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as far more credible sources of information than the blithering idiots over at FOX. And it should come as no surprise to anyone that many if not most of the 20 and 30 year olds go to Comedy Central for news. Maybe they tune into FOX at night for the comedy.
Stay tuned for the next GOP manufactured crusade against some imaginary evil doer. Anyone want to wager a bet on what or who it might be next time? What scandal lurks in the winds?
Oh wait! Someone has just given the answer. The right has produced yet another nut job group of witch hunters. This one is called the dunkers and the sprinklers. The dunkers/sprinklers are to replace the birthers since after two years of their insane ravings no one believes them. The dunkers/sprinklers want to see President Obama's baptismal certificate. If he does not produce it proves that the President is guess what?
Here we go again. For it is the silly season of GOP witch hunts.
The GOP is going to run out of scapegoats and targets for their crusades of fear and hate one of these days.
And it is only a matter of time before the American people figure out that GOP witch hunters are the actual witches.