#David koch

[odinsblog]

Billionaire fossil fuel mogul David Koch died August 23, 2019. Though he will rightfully be remembered for his role in the destruction of the earth, David Koch’s influence went far beyond climate denial. Ronald Reagan may have uttered the famous words, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” back in 1981—but it was David Koch, along with his elder brother Charles and a cabal of other ultrarich individuals, who truly reframed the popular view of government. Once a democratic tool used to shape the country’s future, government became seen as something intrusive and inefficient—indeed, something to be feared.

“While Charles was the mastermind of the social reengineering of the America he envisioned,” said Lisa Graves, co-director of the corporate watchdog group Documented, “David was an enthusiastic lieutenant.”

David Koch was particularly instrumental in legitimizing anti-government ideology—one the GOP now holds as gospel. In 1980, the younger Koch ran as the vice-presidential nominee for the nascent Libertarian Party. And a newly unearthed document shows Koch personally donated more than $2 million to the party—an astounding amount for the time—to promote the Ed Clark–David Koch ticket.

“Few people realize that the anti-American government antecedent to the Tea Party was fomented in the late ’70s with money from Charles and David Koch,” Graves continued. “The Libertarian Party, fueled in part with David’s wealth, pushed hard on the idea that government was the problem and the free market was the solution to everything.”

In fact, according to Graves, “The Koch-funded Libertarian Party helped spur on Ronald Reagan’s anti-government, free-market-solves-all agenda as president.”

Even by contemporary standards, the 1980 Libertarian Party platform was extreme. It called for the abolition of a wide swath of federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Bureau of Land Management, the Federal Election Commission, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Federal Trade Commission, and “all government agencies concerned with transportation.” It railed against campaign finance and consumer protection laws, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, any regulations of the firearm industry (including tear gas), and government intervention in labor negotiations. And the platform demanded the repeal of all taxation, and sought amnesty for those convicted of tax “resistance.”

Koch and his libertarian allies moreover advocated for the repeal of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other social programs. They wanted to abolish federally mandated speed limits. They opposed occupational licensure, antitrust laws, labor laws protecting women and children, and “all controls on wages, prices, rents, profits, production, and interest rates.” And in true libertarian fashion, the platform urged the privatization of all schools (with an end to compulsory education laws), the railroad system, public roads and the national highway system, inland waterways, water distribution systems, public lands, and dam sites.

The Libertarian Party never made much of a splash in the election—though it did garner almost 12 percent of the vote in Alaska—but doing so was never the point. Rather, the Kochs were engaged in a long-term effort to normalize the aforementioned ideas and mainstream them into American politics.

(continue reading)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Daniel Marans at HuffPost:

LANGHORNE, Pa. — In a hotel conference room a little over 20 miles northeast of the Philadelphia venue where the two major parties’ presidential nominees were set to debate hours later, a conservative group was preparing to rally its supporters Tuesday morning behind a Republican candidate locked in a tight battle for Pennsylvania votes. No, the candidate w,as not former President Donald Trump. Americans for Prosperity Action, or AFP Action — a libertarian-leaning conservative group funded by the Koch network of conservative donors — and its Latino outreach arm, Libre Action, were instead holding a canvass kickoff event for Dave McCormick, a former hedge fund manager and Gulf War veteran engaged an uphill battle to unseat U.S. Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.). “We’re fighting for our American dream — the American dream that is slipping away from us,” Jennie Dallas, the Harrisburg-based strategic director of the affiliated Libre Initiative, told the multiracial crowd of staff members and paid canvassers clad in light blue organizers T-shirts. “And we know that David McCormick knows that.”

AFP Action’s Tuesday event in the heart of suburban Bucks County — one of the most contested counties in a critical swing state — offers a window into what a non-Trump-aligned right looks like in 2024. It means waging campaigns more focused on tax cuts and deregulation than on mass deportation or populism, and focusing on Senate and House races with more conventionally conservative candidates. A win for McCormick, who is considered far more of an underdog than GOP Senate challengers in Montana and Ohio, would virtually ensure Republican control of the Senate come November. While Democrats have a 51-49 edge in the chamber now, they are certain to lose West Virginia and their best pickup opportunities are long shots. GOP control of the Senate could prove especially critical for conservatives if Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris defeats Trump in the White House contest, according to Emily Greene, a senior adviser to Americans for Prosperity Action who runs the group’s Pennsylvania operations.

[...] Shaping — and, more recently, surviving — changes in the Republican governing coalition and policy agenda are nothing new for Americans for Prosperity and its political spending arm, AFP Action. But the Koch network — as AFP/AFP Action, The Libre Initiative/Libre Action, and their affiliate partners are often known — now finds itself in an extended period of ideological exile from the highest levels of Republican power. AFP opposes Trump’s trade tariffs, has a much more moderate approach to immigration policy than Trump and, unlike Trump himself, continues to defend the bipartisan sentencing reform bill he signed in 2018. Americans for Prosperity’s surviving founder, the oil and manufacturing billionaire Charles Koch — who co-created the group with his late brother, David Koch — has made his aversion to Trump abundantly clear. AFP Action decided not to endorse a candidate in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, dedicating its federal resources to electing Republicans to Congress. And in June 2023, the Kock network announced that it had raised $70 million to help the Republican Party move away from Trump. When Trump eventually emerged as the Republican presidential nominee this year, despite AFP Action’s $31 million super PAC spending on primary opponent Nikki Haley’s behalf, the group once again pivoted to Congress.

[...] To American progressives, Charles and David Koch were once the country’s chief ideological villains. They bankrolled the tea party movement, which gave birth to a hard-line faction of congressional Republicans committed to obstructing then-President Barack Obama’s policy agenda. But while many rank-and-file tea party activists were actually more concerned about immigration than their budget rhetoric would suggest, and welcomed Trump’s nativist program with open arms, the Kochs — and the cadre of right-wing libertarian activists and intellectuals they cultivated — were not ready to make the jump.

With programs like The Libre Initiative and Libre Action, the Koch network is also betting that appeals to Latino voters’ pocketbooks and interest in upward mobility would be more effective than Trump’s personality-centered populism — regardless of what polling suggests about his inroads with Latino voters. The Libre Initiative has, for example, argued that the Biden administration’s attempts to make it harder to classify workers as independent contractors would “hurt Latino workers,” since half of Latino workers fall under this category. “They’re opening up, and they’re seeing what’s most important to us now is our prosperity,” said Dallas, the strategic director. “It’s about being able to prosper in America.” At the same time, Libre’s moderate rhetoric on immigration, which combines calls for strict border enforcement with support for legalizing Dreamers and other bipartisan reforms, also hearkens back to the time period after Republicans’ loss in the 2012 presidential election, when the GOP began looking at softening its stance on immigration to appeal to more Latino voters.

The Koch Brothers, determined to stay in the GOP apparatus of influence, are focused on the #PASen race in a quest to flip control of the Senate.

[grisha-crows]

“leigh bardugo’s books have no mistakes-“

[nodynasty4us]

From the February 5, 2023 item:

Koch didn't say yet who he plans to back for president. He probably hasn't decided. Most likely he wants to see what the field looks like and who has the best chance to stop Trump. That won't be known for at least half a year, maybe more. It could be a tough call because candidates Koch likes on the economic issues may be anathema on the cultural issues.

Read the rest of the short piece for all the reasons why top Republican donor, libertarian-leaning David Koch is at odds with Trump about nearly everything.

[mientus-com]

mientus lookbook 17 with David Koch

[msclaritea]

Peter Thiel and his Mafia friends financed republicans like Hawley and JD Vance, while snapping up and creating Leftist 'Independent' media and an avalanche of Leftist/Progressive mouthpieces, who it seems helped sink Cuomo in order to install the now Mayor, Eric Adams. The authoritarian flashes he is showing will only get worse for New York if he isn't removed.

[canadianabroadvery]

“ ... I  think too many people on the left have really underestimated Koch’s intelligence and his drive, and also misunderstood his motives. There’s been brilliant work by journalists, really good digging on the money trail and the Koch operations, but much of that writing seems to assume that he is doing this just because it’s going to lower his tax bill or because he wants to evade regulations, personally. I think that really misgauges the man. He is deeply ideological and has been reading almost fanatically for a very long time. I see him as someone who’s quite messianic. He’s compared himself to Martin Luther and his effort being like the Protestant Reformation. When he invested in Buchanan’s center at George Mason University, he said he wanted to “unleash the kind of force that propelled Columbus.” ... “

[frankmweber]

Businessman, statesman or simply madman?

Elon Musk is a billionaire, that’s for sure, but besides being a no doubt shrewd business man, he also seems to be turning into a politician, expressing his opinions about global issues publicly and some of them being rather controversial. The his comments at a summit in Los Angeles in mid-September, that Taiwan was an integral part of China: That may be his opinion and, just as everyone else,…

[psychotrope777]

throwback

[dwindlebunnies]

This reads like an actual tumblr shit post.

[channeledhistory]

Clarence Thomas, Ken Burns, David Koch

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski at ProPublica:

On Jan. 25, 2018, dozens of private jets descended on Palm Springs International Airport. Some of the richest people in the country were arriving for the annual winter donor summit of the Koch network, the political organization founded by libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch. A long weekend of strategizing, relaxation in the California sun and high-dollar fundraising lay ahead. Just after 6 p.m., a Gulfstream G200 jet touched down on the tarmac. One of the Koch network’s most powerful allies was on board: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. During the summit, the justice went to a private dinner for the network’s donors. Thomas has attended Koch donor events at least twice over the years, according to interviews with three former network employees and one major donor. The justice was brought in to speak, staffers said, in the hopes that such access would encourage donors to continue giving. That puts Thomas in the extraordinary position of having served as a fundraising draw for a network that has brought cases before the Supreme Court, including one of the most closely watched of the upcoming term.

Thomas never reported the 2018 flight to Palm Springs on his annual financial disclosure form, an apparent violation of federal law requiring justices to report most gifts. A Koch network spokesperson said the network did not pay for the private jet. Since Thomas didn’t disclose it, it’s not clear who did pay. Thomas’ involvement in the events is part of a yearslong, personal relationship with the Koch brothers that has remained almost entirely out of public view. It developed over years of trips to the Bohemian Grove, a secretive all-men’s retreat in Northern California. Thomas has been a regular at the Grove for two decades, where he stayed in a small camp with real estate billionaire Harlan Crow and the Kochs, according to records and people who’ve spent time with him there. A spokesperson for the Koch network, formally known as Stand Together, did not answer detailed questions about his role at the Palm Springs events but said, “Thomas wasn’t present for fundraising conversations.” “The idea that attending a couple events to promote a book or give dinner remarks, as all the justices do, could somehow be undue influence just doesn’t hold water,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

“All of the sitting Justices and many who came before them have contributed to the national dialogue in speeches, book tours, and social gatherings,” the statement added. “Our events are no different. To claim otherwise is false.” In a series of stories this year, ProPublica reported that Thomas has accepted undisclosed luxury travel from Crow and a coterie of other ultrawealthy men. Crow also purchased Thomas’ mother’s home and paid private school tuition for the child Thomas was raising as his son. Thomas has said little in response. In a statement earlier this year, he said that Crow is a close friend whom he has joined on “family trips.” He has also argued that he was not required to disclose the free vacations. Thomas did not respond to questions for this story. The code of conduct for the federal judiciary lays out rules designed to preserve judges’ impartiality and independence, which it calls “indispensable to justice in our society.” The code specifically prohibits both political activity and participation in fundraising. Judges are advised, for instance, not to “associate themselves” with any group “publicly identified with controversial legal, social, or political positions.” But the code of conduct only applies to the lower courts. At the Supreme Court, justices decide what’s appropriate for themselves.

[...] The Koch network is among the largest and most influential political organizations of the last half century, and it’s underwritten a far-reaching campaign to influence the course of American law. In a case the Supreme Court will hear this coming term, the justices could give the network a historic victory: limiting federal agencies’ power to issue regulations in areas ranging from the environment to labor rights to consumer protection. After shepherding the case to the court, Koch network staff attorneys are now asking the justices to overturn a decades-old precedent. (Thomas used to support the precedent but flipped his position in recent years.) Two years ago, one of the network’s groups was the plaintiff in another Supreme Court case, which was about nonprofits’ ability to keep their donors secret. In that case, Thomas sided with the 6-3 conservative majority in the Koch group’s favor. Charles Koch did not respond to detailed questions for this story. David Koch died in 2019. The Koch network is an overlapping set of nonprofits perhaps best known for its work helping cultivate the Tea Party movement in the Obama years. Recently rebranded as Stand Together, the network includes the powerful Americans for Prosperity Action, which spent over $65 million supporting Republican candidates in the last election cycle. Though Charles Koch is one of the 25 richest people in the world, worth an estimated $64 billion, he raises money from other wealthy people to amplify the network’s reach. The network brought in at least $700 million in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. It has more than 1,000 employees who, on paper, work for different groups.

[...] Many details about Thomas’ role at the summits, including the specifics of his remarks, remain unclear. The network spokesperson declined to answer if Thomas’ appearances were ever tied to a specific initiative or program. Thomas’ appearances were arranged with the help of Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society leader, according to the former senior network employee. “Leonard was the conduit who would get him,” the former employee said. During one summit, Thomas gave a talk with Leo in an interview format, the donor recalled. “Justice Thomas attends events all over the country, as do all the Justices, and I was privileged to join him,” Leo said in a statement in response to questions about the Koch donor events. “All the necessary due diligence was performed to ensure the Justice’s attendance at the events was compliant with all ethics requirements.” While attending the donor events would likely violate the lower courts’ prohibition on fundraising, experts said, the Supreme Court has a narrow internal definition of a fundraiser: an event that raises more money than it costs or where attendees are explicitly asked for money while the event’s happening.

ProPublica once again doing good journalistic deeds by continuing their exposé on ethically-challenged far-right SCOTUS "Justice" Clarence Thomas, this time by revealing his attendance at Koch Bros. donor events.

Read the full story at ProPublica.

[rivage-seulm]

The Mainstream Media Finally Discovers Noam Chomsky: For All the Wrong Reasons

For years, many progressives have complained that the mainstream media (MSM) have ignored perhaps the most insightful political commentator in the western world. I’m referring to Noam Chomsky who in a rare moment of recognition was identified (nearly 45 years ago!) by Time Magazine as “arguably the most important intellectual alive today.” Despite the unaccustomed mainstream kudo, the iconic…

[pussinbootsthehousedown]

AUSTRALIANS WHY AREN'T WE TALKING ABOUT THIS AD THIS IS COMEDY GOLD

[supercalifragipopculturevomit]

Here's to one of the best actors of his generation, the versatile and multilingual king who's been pulling heartstrings for three decades with a variety of roles, faces, and languages... Happy 46th birthday, Daniel Brühl!

p.s. who's your favorite Danny character? Sound off in the comments or the tags—or don't. I'm not your mother. 😋

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Iowa's starvation strategy

I don’t really buy that “the cruelty is the point.” I’m a materialist. Money talks, bullshit walks. When billionaires fund unimaginably cruel policies, I think the cruelty is a tactic, a way to get the turkeys to vote for Christmas. After all, policies that grow the fortune of the 1% at the expense of the rest of us have a natural 99% disapproval rating.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/19/whats-wrong-with-iowa/#replicable-cruelty

So when some monstrous new law or policy comes down the pike, it’s best understood as a way of getting frightened, angry — and often hateful — people to vote for policies that will actively harm them, by claiming that they will harm others — brown and Black people, women, queers, and the “undeserving” poor.

Pro-oligarch policies don’t win democratic support — but policies that inflict harm a ginned-up group of enemies might. Oligarchs need frightened, hateful people to vote for policies that will secure and expand the power of the rich. Cruelty is the tactic. Power is the strategy. The point isn’t cruelty, it’s power:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/25/roe-v-wade-v-abortion/#no-i-in-uterus

But that doesn’t change the fact that the policies are cruel indeed. Take Iowa, whose billionaire-backed far-right legislature is on a tear, a killing spree that includes active collaboration with rapists, through a law that denies abortion care to survivors of rape and forces them to bear and care for their rapists’ babies:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/us/politics/iowa-kamala-harris-abortion.html

The forced birth movement is part of the wider far-right tactic of standing up for imaginary children (e.g. “the unborn,” fictional victims of Hollywood pedo cabals), and utterly abandons real children: poor kids who can’t afford school lunches, kids in cages, kids victimized by youth pastors, kids forced into child labor, etc.

So Iowa isn’t just a forced birth state, it’s a state where children are now to be starved, literally. The state legislature has just authorized an $18m project to kick people off of SNAP (aka food stamps). 270,000 people in Iowa rely on SNAP: elderly people, disabled people, and parents who can’t feed their kids.

Writing in the Washington Post, Kyle Swenson profiles some of these Iowans, like an elderly woman who visited Lisa Spitler’s food pantry for help and said that state officials had told her that she was only eligible for $23/month in assistance:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/04/16/iowa-snap-restrictions-food-stamps/

That’s because Iowa governor KimReynolds signed a bill cutting the additional SNAP aid — federally funded, and free to the state taxpayers of Iowa — that had been made available during the lockdown. Since then, food pantries have been left to paper over the cracks in the system, as Iowans begin to starve.

Before the pandemic, Spitler’s food pantry saw 30 new families a month. Now it’s 100 — and growing. Many of these families have been kicked off of SNAP because they failed to complete useless and confusing paperwork, or did so but missed the short deadlines now imposed by the state. For example, people with permanent disabilities and elderly people who no longer work must continuously file new paperwork confirming that their income hasn’t changed. Their income never changes.

SNAP recipients often work, borrow from relations, and visit food pantries, and still can’t make ends meet, like Amy Cunningham, a 31 year old mother of four in Charlton. She works at a Subway, has tapped her relatives for all they can afford, and relies on her $594/month in SNAP to keep her kids from going hungry. She missed her notice of an annual review and was kicked off the program. Getting kicked off took an instant. Getting reinstated took a starving eternity.

Iowa has a budget surplus of $1.91B. This doesn’t stop ghouls like Iowa House speaker Pat Grassley (a born-rich nepobaby whose grandpa is Senator Chuck Grassley) from claiming that the cuts were a necessity: “[SNAP is] growing within the budget, and are putting pressure on us being able to fund other priorities.”

Grassley’s caucus passed legislation on Jan 30 to kick people off of SNAP if their combined assets, including their work vehicle, total to more than $15,000. SNAP recipients will be subject to invasive means-testing and verification, which will raise the cost of administering SNAP from $2.2m to $18m. Anyone who gets flagged by the system has 10 days to respond or they’ll be kicked off of SNAP.

The state GOP justifies this by claiming that SNAP has an “error rate” of 11.81%. But that “error rate” includes people who were kicked off SNAP erroneously, a circumstance that is much more common than fraud, which is almost nonexistent in SNAP programs. Iowa’s error rate is in line with the national average.

Iowa’s pro-starvation law was authored by a conservative dark-money “think tank” based in Florida: the Opportunity Solutions Project, the lobbying arm of Foundation For Government Accountability, run by Tarren Bragdon, a Maine politician with a knack for getting money from the Koch Network and the DeVos family for projects that punish, humiliate and kill marginalized people. The Iowa bill mirrors provisions passed in Kentucky, Kansas, Wisconsin and elsewhere — and goes beyond them.

The law was wildly unpopular, but it passed anyway. It’s part of the GOP’s push for massive increases in government spending and bureaucracy — but only when those increases go to punishing poor people, policing poor people, jailing poor people, and spying on poor people. It’s truly amazing that the “party of small government” would increase bureaucratic spending to administer SNAP by 800% — and do it with a straight face.

In his essay “The Utopia of Rules,” David Graeber (Rest in Power) described this pathology: just a couple decades ago, the right told us that our biggest threat was Soviet expansion, which would end the “American way of life” and replace it with a dismal world where you spent endless hours filling in pointless forms, endured hunger and substandard housing, and shopped at identical stores that all carried the same goods:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

A society that can’t feed, house and educate its residents is a failed state. America’s inability to do politics without giving corporations a fat and undeserved share is immiserating an ever-larger share of its people. Federally, SNAP is under huge stress, thanks to the “public-private partnership” at the root of a badly needed “digital overhaul” of the program.

Writing for The American Prospect, Luke Goldstein describes how the USDA changed SNAP rules to let people pay with SNAP for groceries ordered online, as a way to deal with the growing problem of food deserts in poor and rural communities:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-04-19-retail-surveils-food-stamp-users/

It’s a good idea — in theory. But it was sabotaged from the start: first, the proposed rule was altered to ban paying for delivery costs with SNAP, meaning that anyone who ordered food online would have to use scarce cash reserves to pay delivery fees. Then, the USDA declined to negotiate discounts on behalf of the 40 million SNAP users. Finally, the SNAP ecommerce rules don’t include any privacy protections, which will be a bonanza for shadowy data-brokers, who’ll mine SNAP recipients’ data to create marketing lists for scammers, predatory lenders, and other bottom-feeder:

https://www.democraticmedia.org/sites/default/files/field/public-files/2020/cdd_snap_report_ff.pdf

The GOP’s best weapon in this war is statistical illiteracy. While racist, sexist and queerphobic policies mean that marginalized people are more likely than white people to be poor, America’s large population of white people — including elderly white people who are the immovable core of the GOP base — means that policies that target poor people inevitably inflict vast harms on the GOP’s most devoted followers.

Getting these turkeys to vote for Christmas is a sound investment for the ultra-rich, who claim a larger share of the American pie every year. The rich may or may not be racist, or sexist, or queerphobic — some of them surely are — but the reason they pour money into campaigns to stoke divisions among working people isn’t because they get off on hatred. The hatred is a tactic. The cruelty is a tactic. The strategic goal is wealth and power.

Tomorrow (Apr 21), I’m speaking in Chicago at the Stigler Center’s Antitrust and Competition Conference. This weekend (Apr 22/23), I’m at the LA Times Festival of Books.

[Image ID: The Iowa state-house. On the right side of the steps is an engraved drawing of Oliver Twist, holding out his porridge bowl. On the left side is the cook, denying him an extra portion. Peeking out from behind the dome is a business-man in a suit with a dollar-sign-emblazoned money-bag for a head.]

Image: Iqkotze (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iowa_State_Capitol_April_2010.jpg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en