[Pops]

http://kochblocked.com/

Sorry, still can't do vids...

[Cid_Yama]

Excellent find. The people are catching on.

[Sixstrings]

I bet Coca-Cola isn't too happy about their logo and feel good jingle associated with the Koch brothers. It's parody so that's fair use but.. sort of unfair to Coke they have nothing to do with the Kochs.

As for the Koch brothers themselves.. I'm a bit suspicious about them being The Big Bad Boogeyman. The Democratic Party itself is rotten to the core with corporatism and Wall Street graft. So now they pick out two guys we can all hate then we're not supposed to question the Dems?

Take a state like West Virginia.. mountaintop-removing and miner abusing Big Coal controls the Dem party in that state. They're just as bad as the Koch brothers, but I guess a scoundrel is ok if he donates to Dems.

[basil_hayden]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Sixstrings', 'I') bet Coca-Cola isn't too happy about their logo and feel good jingle associated with the Koch brothers. It's parody so that's fair use but.. sort of unfair to Coke they have nothing to do with the Kochs.

As for the Koch brothers themselves.. I'm a bit suspicious about them being The Big Bad Boogeyman. The Democratic Party itself is rotten to the core with corporatism and Wall Street graft. So now they pick out two guys we can all hate then we're not supposed to question the Dems?

Take a state like West Virginia.. mountaintop-removing and miner abusing Big Coal controls the Dem party in that state. They're just as bad as the Koch brothers, but I guess a scoundrel is ok if he donates to Dems.

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Sixstrings', 'A')s for the Koch brothers themselves.. I'm a bit suspicious about them being The Big Bad Boogeyman.

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('basil_hayden', 'P')iss off, Big Nose.

[Cid_Yama]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sixstrings', 'T')ake a state like West Virginia.. mountaintop-removing and miner abusing Big Coal controls the Dem party in that state.

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cid_Yama', 'D')o you just make sh*t up and figure it won't be challenged?

[Cid_Yama]

If big Coal 'owned' the state, they wouldn't be doing "whatever it takes" to replace the Democrats with Republicans.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he Koch brothers, whose wealth, when combined, is the fourth highest in the nation, run one of the largest private companies in the country. Koch Industries is involved in industries ranging from oil and gas, refining and chemicals, minerals, fertilizers, forestry, consumer products, polymers and fibers, and ranching. They have operations in 45 states.

The Koch brothers use their considerable wealth to bankroll the right wing, including the Tea Party. This serves the purpose of furthering not only their right-wing ideology but also their bottom line. Koch Industries has a lot to gain from gutting government oversight and electing candidates who oppose government regulation, especially in the oil-and-gas industry.

• Chances are the Koch brothers are part of any recent right-wing attack as of late as they have fought health reform, Wall Street reform, collective bargaining rights, and efforts to curb climate change, to name just a few.

• We have identified at least $85 million the Koch brothers have given to at least 85 right-wing think tanks and advocacy groups over the past decade and a half.

• Their main advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, has chapters in 32 states and spent $45 million in the last election, predominantly to help elect Republicans.

• The Kochs donated directly to 62 of the 87 members of the House GOP freshman class.

• The Koch brothers are active at the state level, spending $5.2 million on candidates and ballot measures in 34 states since 2003. They donated directly to 13 governors that won election last year.

• The Kochs are not going away. In fact, they have already pledged to raise $88 million for the 2012 election and have started scheduling events for potential Republican presidential candidates.

As this report will demonstrate, the Koch brothers’ network works hard to advance a right-wing ideological agenda that helps their businesses reap more profits at the expense of our environment, our economy, and the American middle class.

Understanding how they operate is the first step in countering their efforts to
reshape our nation’s laws to benefit the wealthy even more than they do today.

[rockdoc123]

I know little of American politics but it strikes me the Koch's are being demonized beyond what is reasonable.

http://www.kansascity.com/2011/04/02/2771395/smearing-the-kochs-how-the-game.html

My guess is that through their various companies they have done more for the US economy than the current administration.

[Cid_Yama]

You can't demonize demons. They are the most powerful force of evil in the world today.

Koch Industries multibillionaire Koch brothers bankroll attacks on climate change science and policy
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n order to block proactive government policymaking and keep corporate interests unregulated, libertarian groups have focused a significant part of their efforts on climate change on distorting the science to confuse public opinion, denying the seriousness of the problem, and, most recently, impugning the integrity of the climate science community. The Koch brothers have stepped forward with deep pockets to bankroll such efforts.

Charles and David Koch (pronounced "coke") own Koch Industries, which according to Forbes, is the second largest private company in the United States with estimated 2008 revenues of $100 billion and with 80,000 employees. Its CEO is Charles G. Koch (age 74, residence Wichita, Kansas) (see company biography). David Koch (age 70, residence New York City) is the executive vice-president and a board member (see company biography). According to Forbes (The 400 Richest Americans 2009), the brothers are tied as the 9th richest Americans, with a net worth of $16 billion each.

[Pretorian]

So whats you saying Cid, Dems aren't owned by Wall Street and corporations, or something like that? Am I getting it right? Or they are owned in less evil way?

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rockdoc123', '[')b]I know little of American politics but it strikes me the Koch's are being demonized beyond what is reasonable.

[Cid_Yama]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”

Charles and David became devotees of a radical thinker, Robert LeFevre, who favored the abolition of the state but didn’t like the label “anarchist”; he called himself an “autarchist.” LeFevre liked to say that “government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.” In 1956, he opened an institution called the Freedom School, in Colorado Springs. Brian Doherty, of Reason, told me that “LeFevre was an anarchist figure who won Charles’s heart,” and that the school was “a tiny world of people who thought the New Deal was a horrible mistake.” According to diZerega, Charles supported the school financially, and even gave him money to take classes there.

The Kochs’ subsidization of a pro-corporate movement fulfills, in many ways, the vision laid out in a secret 1971 memo that Lewis Powell, then a Virginia attorney, wrote two months before he was nominated to the Supreme Court. The antiwar movement had turned its anger on defense contractors, such as Dow Chemical, and Ralph Nader was leading a public-interest crusade against corporations. Powell, writing a report for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urged American companies to fight back. The greatest threat to free enterprise, he warned, was not Communism or the New Left but, rather, “respectable elements of society”—intellectuals, journalists, and scientists. To defeat them, he wrote, business leaders needed to wage a long-term, unified campaign to change public opinion.

Charles Koch seems to have approached both business and politics with the deliberation of an engineer. “To bring about social change,” he told Doherty, requires “a strategy” that is “vertically and horizontally integrated,” spanning “from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action.” The project, he admitted, was extremely ambitious. “We have a radical philosophy,” he said.

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cid_Yama', 'T')hey are right-wing social engineering in the manner of George Orwell's 1984. It is a war against America from within. It is a war against the American people.

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]What’s interesting is that many of the anti-Koch groups are working the other side of the same street: they, too, are getting behind-the-scenes money from a billionaire, except that of course their rich dude is a good guy, a man of the left: George Soros.

[Cid_Yama]

The last person who attempted to integrate his society both "vertically and horizontally" “from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action” also started out by attacking the intellectuals, journalists and scientists.

During his time, he was the most powerful force of evil in the world.

We saw where that took us.

[careinke]

From the article posted by Rocdoc.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n some respects, the Kochs make unlikely media villains. From what I read, they blame the Republicans as much as the Democrats for our bloated government. They favor gay marriage, drug legalization, a smaller defense budget and fewer U.S. foreign adventures.

And they seem to be good employers, judging by a piece last week by United Steelworkers Vice President Jon Geenen, who opposed plans for a boycott of Koch products.

The Kochs own Georgia Pacific, and according to Geenen its plants use advanced manufacturing technology, its workers are well-paid and the Kochs have “positive and productive collective bargaining relationships with its unions.”

What you see in the campaign against the Kochs is the left, once again acting out its conceit that its positions automatically define morality. Our billionaire money is good, yours is tainted. On Election Day next year, we’ll get a clue as to whether all this behind-the-scenes skirmishing made much difference in the outcome either way.

Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2011/04/02/27 ... z1N6FvtL2C

[Pops]

You guys are funny, you talk about how bad money is in politics then defend the very guys who backed personhood for corporations and unlimited corporate champaign expenditures without disclosure ...
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'K')och has long sought to expand his influence and the influence of other right-wing plutocrats by funding groups that have chipped away at campaign finance laws and disclosure laws for decades. When the Supreme Court took up the Citizens United case, Koch-funded front groups filed a series of amicus briefs arguing that unlimited corporate money in politics is protected by the First Amendment. For example, the Cato Institute, founded and financed by the Koch brothers, submitted a brief that called for “unfettered” corporate “speech” and the Institute for Justice, founded and financed by David’s brother Charles, submitted a brief claiming that campaign finance laws prohibiting unlimited corporate money “trump the First Amendment.” Koch-funded groups later lobbied aggressively to oppose efforts to provide transparency for the new tidal wave of corporate spending.

[Cid_Yama]

Imagine Adolph Hitler just starting out, but with the wealth of the Koch Brothers.

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Historians always remark, if only we had acted sooner.

The Ministry of Propaganda is already up and running under the new Gobbels, Roger Ayles.

The "think tanks" are already attacking the intellectuals, journalists, and scientists.

The brown shirts are now internet trolls shouting down the critics, disrupting discussion, suppressing dissent, and spreading disinformation.

The time to act is now, not when the jackboot is firmly crushing your windpipe.

If you allow them the time to consolidate their power, it will be too late.