Lauren Windsor (who works with me at American Family Voices, and whose show The Undercurrent we sponsor) broke a major new story yesterday on the latest Koch brothers secret meeting, which was held last weekend at a luxury resort in Orange County, CA. Mitch McConnell and Marco Rubio flew out to plot with the billionaires and help them raise, according to a participant in the meeting, a billion dollars to help the Republicans take the Senate in 2014 and beat Hillary Clinton in 2016. Some other Republican politicians joined them as well, including Senate candidates Tom Cotton (who is running against Pryor in Arkansas) and Cory Gardner (who is trying to defeat Udall in Colorado), as well as a top leader of the tea party in the House, Con. Jim Jordan.
The secrecy with which these meetings were conducted was as intense as anything I have ever seen in American political life. From Lauren’s piece:
“According to a source in attendance, Freedom Partners spent more than $870,000, which included large fees to shut down public access to the golf course, the Michael Mina restaurant Stonehill Tavern and Motif Restaurant. Attendees were responsible for their own room charges.
Security was tight from noon on Saturday throughout the remainder of the conference, with checkpoints at every entrance to the resort. At the front gate, security guards and multiple Koch employees brandishing iPads greeted incoming cars. Even more Koch employees, acting as escorts, met guests at the front door. Guests were asked to abide by a no-cell phone policy, and security was in place to enforce that policy at events.
St. Regis Monarch Bay also has residences in adjacent properties as part of the Monarch Bay Club. Owners normally have access to the hotel, but according to one, he was denied access under the pretense that the hotel had been bought out by a group of Obama supporters. (The president had delivered a commencement speech at nearby UC Irvine on Saturday).”
Wow, spending $870,000 to buy out the hotel and shut down everything to anyone not attending the conference? The secrets they were talking about must have been pretty scary. There’s a little bit of irony here: the theme of the conference was “American Courage: Our commitment to a free society”. But apparently not courageous enough to let anyone from the general public get anywhere close, and apparently not free enough to risk anyone outside the inner billionaire circle to come into contact with the plotters inside.
So I would like to know, Senators McConnell and Rubio: what was so secretive about your conversations with the billionaires? While you were discussing how to flood the airwaves with negative ads against Democrats, how much did the Koch’s political agenda of no pollution controls, no minimum wage, and no Social Security get discussed? Congressmen Gardner and Cotton, you were obviously raising money for your campaigns, and hoping your billionaire pals would keep spending tens of millions of dollars in attack ads against your opponents, but while you were locked away in your highly secured meetings, did you talk about how you could help the billionaires escape being taxed and avoid any oversight of their crony business deals?
We can’t let these secretive billionaires with their sleazy agenda for America take our country over. We need to take on the billionaires, expose the lies behind their secretive political slush funds, and take our country back.