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Things go better with Koch?

Long time readers of this blog know that I haven’t spent a lot of time taking about the Koch brothers or Citizens United. That’s not because campaign financing is not important. It is. I just always assumed, probably incorrectly, that Americans, even the most TV news captured, would eventually see the relationship between the amount of money spent in a campaign and how negative ads were impacting their voting decisions. Unfortunately, we spend so much time hating each other that we don’t see the influence of money.

Like a lot of social psychology that I don’t completely understand, Americans seem to be impressed with money and the authority it conveys even if the people using it to gain political office are predatory, greedy and selfish and not interested in representing anyone but themselves. As for the learned helplessness of “Well, the world is corrupt, there’s nothing we can do about it”, I blame Fox News and the 700 Club.

I just don’t get the Kochs though. The latest news about them is that they are planning to spend an ungodly amount of money in the 2016 election. The number is something like $899 million dollars. That’s almost a billion dollars that could be poured into fledgling biotech startups and put hundreds of scientists back to work discovering new drugs. Or that money could be used to improve our broadband infrastructure or replace rotting bridges. But no, these dudes are going to spend that money attacking and undermining American values.

At first I thought this had something to do with taxes but when you get to the point where you’re going to spend almost a billion on campaigns, why wouldn’t you just pay the taxes? What am I missing here? In attempting to answer that question, Charles Koch made this nonsensical statement:

“Americans have taken an important step in slowing down the march toward collectivism,” Koch said, according to excerpts released over the weekend. “But as many of you know, we don’t rest on our laurels. We are already back at work and hard at it.”

That the hell is he talking about? The US is about the least collectivist nation in the world. We cut our teeth on American mythology of the rugged individualist succeeding beyond anyone’s wildest expectations with no help from anyone. That’s why we attracted so many immigrants throughout the past two centuries. This was the land of opportunity. But I get the feeling that the Kochs won’t be happy until they eliminate sharing in Kindergarten.

Oh, sure, they’d be the first people who would promote private charity but I have seen the holes in private charity. If by collectivism they mean the ability of Americans to unite against the exploitative profit mining of the rich that has undermined everything from education and good roads to health care and a decent salary, then we’ve got a major problem.

I have now come to the conclusion that this is not just about taxes. It’s about the Koch’s just not liking Americans. They’ve gotten just about everything greedy, selfish people could possibly want but now they want to make sure that no one else gets anything at all.

I don’t consider myself an envious person. No, really, I’m not. I don’t care how many houses a person has or how big it is. Money doesn’t equal taste. You’re never going to impress me with your leased BMW. I have a modest house that needs some work and I’m located near the bus line and that’s fine with me. Years of living in New Jersey with my nice salary that only afforded me a meh middle class lifestyle has made me realize that I just don’t need that much stuff to be successful. Meaningful work that I enjoy is much more important than acquiring stuff even if that means I don’t take a yearly cruise.

But I do wonder why it is that people like the Kochs seem so determined to strip away any security we have in our old age. Why is it we have to worry about the post office going out of business? Why do so many people have to live on food stamps and why are the Koch elected officials so determined to cut food stamps off from people who will just end up having to go to a food pantry to meet their caloric requirements? Who made them Gods to decide how much uniting and risk distribution Americans can do to protect themselves?

Don’t tell me this is about the hard upbringing these two had clearing brush from their father’s ranch when they were younger. There are a lot of people whose parents were hard assed, spirit breaking morons who never let their kids have a moment of fun when they were growing up. Most people don’t become predators without consciences who used their money to deprive other people of a sense of security. We now have to consider the possibility that there is something morally and psychologically disturbed with these two people who would prefer that families suffer and sick and hungry children get substandard educations because they don’t want to share the massive fortunes that they can’t possibly live long enough to enjoy.

How ironic is that? They have enough money to buy anything on earth several times over and what they really want to spend their money on is depriving you of your piece of mind. If there’s not a diagnosis in the DSM for that, there should be.

I just don’t get it. In the Kochs we see people who really hate those of us who are not billionaires. They have contempt for us. That makes their activity in campaigns even more disturbing. They’re getting more subtle as well. There will be new ways that they will use that money to influence people in 2016 and most Americans, I fear, will not even know what hit them. Generally, their strategy has been to make Americans hate each other.

Still, the question needs to be asked: why do the Kochs hate us?

8 Responses

  1. We may never know “why”. But it is a least a good first step to realize that they do. And realize that they are willing to spend money and even dip into their own capital without profit in return in order to actualize their hatred for us.

    Realizing that, can we analyze every aspect of their revenue-stream empire and see whether there are parts of it which we can attrit and degrade through targetted extermicotts? ( A “boycott” is meant to change the target’s behavior. An “extermicott” is designed to eliminate the target’s power through eliminating the target’s existence.
    We have to try eliminating the Koch Brother’s monetary and civic power’s existence. Anything less would be uncivilized. And would guarantee our eventual elimination instead).

  2. Just guessing here, but could it be some sort of genetic psychopathy? Their father was a founder of the John Birch Society. Too many of today’s gazillionaires appear to be sociopaths at the least. And the Kochs have more moolah than most of them. Real life James Bond villains…?

  3. I recall an editorial linked on NakedCapitalism daily news links, editorial from economists who claim that the primary motivation of most oligarch/0.1%er is RELATIVE POWER over other people, not absolute profits.

    The theory seems to explain reality. Take the Jan 2013 “Fiscal Cliff”, for instance. Reducing Government spending on anything that helps actual people (e.g. not-the MIC Empire, not Corp. Welfare) in an economy where the other components are weak, this is very likely to hurt company profits, because Consumer demand is so weak. Sure enough, later on I recall Walmart complaining their profits didn’t meet their forecast, etc. Do the oligarchs & their CNBC fellaters not understand Macroeconomics aka Econ 102? Well, if the actual motivation is RELATIVE POWER over people, it makes (psycopathic) sense. Make people less secure, then you have a scared workforce that will tolerate abuse, long hours, crappy pay, etc; and there is the Reserve Army of Unemployed & Underemployed willing to take that (abusive) job. It reminds me of those Mafioso movies, where the jerk Mafiosos enjoy abusing their “soldiers” that work under them, their wife/girlfriends, and regular people, with all those people afraid to protest the abuse for fear of violence.

    I believe the Koch Brothers are similar psychopaths to these fictional Mafioso jerks. BTW all the Kochheadz’ propaganda about “supporting individual liberty” is a Lie-bertarian sick joke.

  4. Unfortunately Americans are not to that point of discomfort at which time they’ll start to pay attention to what the new aristocracy and their priests in Washington are doing to them.

    Since the print and broadcast news media is a subsidiary of Corporate America (yes you, Chris Matthews and Maureen Dowd) the realization will come too late.

    As long as most Americans have credit card that aren’t max out expect no change in voting habits (or lack).

  5. Why? Because you become a billionaire by looking out for Numero Uno, not by being an altruist. That’s true whether your name is Koch, Bloomberg, Omidyar, Buffet, or Soros. They’re all greedy, sociopathic bastards who would slit their own mothers’ throats for spare change.

  6. Now it’s not that Democrats in 2017 will work toward restoring the Middle Class (abandoned by the Third Rail Dems) but that there will be two SCOTUS vacancies to fill.

    • I used to be moved by appeals to “the Supreme Court”. I will still give it due consideration. But I would note that it was the Senate Democrats who gave the Republican Presidents every Roberts, Alito, etc. they ever asked for to be on the Supreme Court. And it was the Senate Democrats who tacitly stood by and accepted the nasty set-up of Anita Hill by the Senate. If the Republicans were the tip of the spear, the Democrats were the rest of the spear on that one.

      So the “Supreme Court” argument has been deweaponised and taken off the table by the Vichy Democrat Party and its Vichy Democrat Senators of today. The Vichy Democrat Senators will give a Republican President whatever Supreme Court justice it wants, and a majority Vichy Democrat Senate would oppose whatever Justice-nominee a Vichy Democrat President would bring up anyway, unless that nominee were pre-accepted by the Republican Senators in any case. So “the Supreme Court” don’t impress me much.

  7. Why do many non-rich USAmericans venerate the rich?

    Why do they keep falling for Koch Bros. propaganda?

    Why are they such Koch suckers? 😉

    Matt Taibbi wrote about this back in 2009.

    (Yeah, Matt Taibbi outed himself as a nasty little prick in 2008, but a stopped clock is right twice a day and all that.)

    http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2009/09/22/the-peasant-mentality-lives-on-in-americ

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