Blog

Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who fund a number of extreme right-wing organizations and are major contributors to the tea party and bankrollers for host of anti-worker state ballot initiatives and legislation, now have their sights set on building a major media empire.

They are expected to make a $600 million-plus bid to purchase the Tribune Co. and its eight regional newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel and the Hartford Courant, and more than 20 TV stations like WGN in Chicago and KTLA Channel 5 in Los Angeles.

With the Tribune Co. emerging from bankruptcy, the investment firms that own media conglomerate are seeking buyers.

Journalists, workers and community groups are raising concerns about the possible purchase, and the Kochs turning these independent news outlets into mouthpieces for their extremist agenda.

The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor will rally Tuesday, May 14, outside the offices of Oaktree Capital Management, which has a significant ownership stake in the Tribune Co., along with managing a number of public employee and union pension funds.     (more…)

Lightning’s flashing, winds are howling – and there’s a tempest in the tea party! Why it’s Dick Armey, the blowhard, former-Republican majority leader, corporate lobbyist, Koch brothers’ retainer, and commanding general of the tea party army.

Dick’s always been stormy. In 2002, he had an unpleasant split with his fellow legislative hucksters, Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay, so he spun through Congress’ revolving door right into the K-Street lobbying hustle. In 2004, he became honcho of a Koch-funded corporate front group with the spiffy name of FreedomWorks, an outfit that works by hook and crook to “free” corporations from pollution rules, unions, taxes and other bothers.

Then, in 2009, when angry tea partiers exploded onto the scene, Armey immediately rushed out to co-opt them, diverting their leaders away from the group’s initial fury at Wall Street into a mob frenzy over Obamacare and “big government.” This corporate front man and lifelong Washington insider essentially conscripted the helter-skelter bunch of outsiders into the Republican Party by providing Koch money, FreedomWorks political operatives – and even writing their “Tea Party Manifesto.” Slick! (more…)

Washington has a way of focusing the nation’s attention on tactical games over partisan maneuvers that are symptoms of a few really big problems. But we almost never get to debate or even discuss the big problems because the tactical games overwhelm everything else.

The debate over the fiscal cliff, for example, is really about tactical maneuvers preceding a negotiation about how best to reduce the federal budget deficit. This, in turn, is a fragment of a bigger debate over whether we should be embracing austerity economics and reducing the budget deficit in the next few years or, alternatively, using public spending and investing to grow the economy and increase the number of jobs.

Even this larger debate is just one part of what should be the central debate of our time — why median wages continue to drop and poverty to increase at the same time income and wealth are becoming ever more concentrated at the top, and what should be done to counter the trend.

With a shrinking share of total income and wealth, the middle class and poor simply don’t have the purchasing power to get the economy back on solid footing. (The wealthy don’t spend enough of their income or assets to make up for this shortfall, and they invest their savings wherever around the world they can get the highest return). (more…)

Republicans, the party of the nation’s entitled rich, are holding a knife to the throat of America’s frail recovery.

The GOP sore losers have America up against a wall. Republicans don’t care that the majority of the country voted for a candidate who promised to raise taxes on the rich. Republicans don’t care that an even larger majority – 60 percent – told election day pollsters they wanted those taxes raised. Republicans don’t care about majority-rule democracy at all. They’re demanding ransom – extension of tax cuts for the rich. If Americans don’t submit, Republicans will slash the nation’s economy.

“Back away from your Social Security, your Medicare, your Medicaid,” the Republicans are ordering. The GOP insists those crucial social insurance programs be sacrificed to prevent the entitled rich from once again paying the income tax rates that they did during the boom years of Bill Clinton. The party that lost the Presidency, lost seats in the House and lost seats in the Senate is willing to take down the economy, to eviscerate programs like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Aviation Administration rather than require the entitled rich pull their weight as citizens of the country that enabled them to live lives of unprecedented luxury.

The candidate Republicans chose as their presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, stated the party’s position loud and clear last spring and reiterated it during a phone call last week with his millionaire financiers. Romney told funders in May that he had no intention of “worrying about” 47 percent of Americans who he described as moochers, citizens he slandered with the allegation that they refuse to “take personal responsibility.”

In the phone call last week, Romney claimed that the Americans he referred to as government moochers all voted for President Obama because the Democrat gave them “gifts.” Romney, a quarter-billionaire, described the administration’s plan for partial forgiveness of college loan interest as a “gift” to students. The Republican candidate born into wealth and pampered in private schools characterized as a “gift” the requirement in Obamacare that health insurance companies provide prescription contraceptives without co-payments.

The rich boy said President Obama bought women’s votes for $10 co-pay forgiveness. But for Republicans, it’s never the other way around. Romney and the GOP don’t think they were buying the votes of the rich with their promise to add another 20 percent break on top of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest. (more…)

It’s one week after the election, and I have some friendly advice for every Republican in Congress: Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and renew the production tax credit for wind energy before it expires at the end of the year. Here are five reasons why I’d tell them it’s time to finally get this done:

1. The American people strongly believe we should make clean, renewable energy a priority. And last week’s election results made it clear that it’s the American people you answer to — not the Koch brothers.

2. Speaking of the brothers K… Yes, they and other dirty-energy enthusiasts would love to set wind energy back. But apart from Mitt Romney, polluters were the biggest losers in this election. Ignore them and listen to your real constituents — the voters. (more…)

The Democratic outside group Patriot Majority is targeting the billionaire Koch brothers with a $500,000 cable ad buy, the first step in a multimillion dollar assault on “the greed agenda.”

What do Marie Antoinette and one Bill Koch have in common? If you’d asked me that a few days ago, I’d have answered “Not much.” That is, until yesterday, when I about Bill Koch’s private Western town.

There’s a new town in Colorado. It has about 50 buildings, including a saloon, a church, a jail, a firehouse, a livery and a train station. Soon, it will have a mansion on a hill so the town’s founder can look down on his creation.

But don’t expect to move here — or even to visit.

This town is billionaire Bill Koch’s fascination with the Old West rendered in bricks and mortar. It sits on a 420-acre meadow on his Bear Ranch below the Raggeds Wilderness Area in Gunnison County. It’s an unpopulated, faux Western town that might boggle the mind of anyone who ever had a playhouse. Its full-size buildings come with polished brass and carved-mahogany details and are fronted with board sidewalks and underpinned by a water-treatment system. A locked gate with guards screens who comes and goes.

Koch’s project manager has told county officials that the enclave in the middle of the 6,400-acre Bear Ranch won’t ever be open to the public. It is simply for Koch’s amusement and for that of his family and friends — and historians. It is the ultimate repository for his huge collection of Western memorabilia.

Yeah. This is a guy who really needs another tax break. Koch’s “own private Dodge City” reminded me of something I once read about Marie Antoinette.

Maybe Marie Antoinette never actually said, “Let them eat cake,” but the young queen was infamous for spending extravagantly, while remaining oblivious to the grinding poverty her subjects suffered in the run-up to the French Revolution. Her extravagant dress and and expensive jewels became fodder for public comment and ridicule. But anger at Antoinette probably spiked when the public got word that the queen had an entire Viennese village built on the grounds of Versailles, at considerable expense to French citizens.

The Petit Hameau (The Little Hamlet), or “Le Hameau de la Reine,” was situated in the English-style gardens of the Petit Trianon. Created in 1783, the Petit Hameau was a mock farm area, complete with farmhouse, dairy, and poultry yard – all areas traditionally associated with women.

When visiting this ersatz farm, Marie Antoinette and her attendants would dress as shepherdesses, and play at milking the cows and tending other docile animals. The farmhouse interior was more opulent, featuring all of the luxuries expected by the Queen and her ladies.

The Petit Hameau was part of the landscape of the “natural” English garden, but it was also a reflection of France’s cultural values on the eve of the Revolution. This artificial nature retreat mirrored the moral values associated with natural simplicity and virtue.

…The innocence and simplicity of Marie Antoinette’s amusements did not, however, redeem her in the eyes of those who noted the expenses of her endeavors. And even more than the money spent on the Petit Hameau, the many hours the Queen spent there in the company of other women, outside the sight and supervision of her husband, gave rise to rumors that were not innocent at all.

C’mon. Bill Koch strutting about his very own western town and playing “Gunsmoke,” isn’t that different than Marie Antoinette playing milkmaid.

There are differences, of course. We don’t have royalty here. Not in the strictest sense, at least. But Koch’s wealth does pretty much place him among the top one percent. Let’s put it this way, his net worth of $4 billion makes him no. 81 on Forbes’ list of the 400 wealthiest people in the U.S. That kinda makes Mitt Romney’s paltry $230 million net worth — which puts him among the wealthiest .001 percent — look like chump change. (more…)

The U.S. Constitution guarantees separation of church and state. What this nation needs now is separation of wealth and state.

Without such a protection, Americans stand to lose their democracy. They’ll be ruled instead by an aristocracy of 1 percenters.

That’s the 1 percenters’ plan. To them, it was no more than a perk when the U.S. Supreme Court enabled politicians to open their wallets for unlimited, anonymous campaign contributions. That’s because way before the 2010 Citizens United ruling, 1 percenters were working on a takeover. If the 99 percent don’t stop them soon, don’t establish some sort of separation of wealth and state, then the nation will lose its founding precepts — that all men are created equal and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Aristocracies can ignore the governed.

Already the 1 percenters have been extraordinarily successful. The rich really do enjoy advantages. They’ve succeeded in stuffing Congress with their peers. In America, fewer than 1 percent of all people are millionaires. In Congress, 47 percent are. The median net worth of a U.S. senator in 2010 was $2.56 million.

Those guys haven’t experienced what it’s like to try to pay a mortgage, fix the car and keep food on the table for the average household with a median income of less than $52,000. They’re completely out of touch with the 50 million Americans who don’t have health insurance.

In addition, the 1 percenters implemented a system to influence even those lawmakers who are not millionaires. It’s called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Corporations and the rich, like the billionaire Koch brothers, give ALEC money, which it uses to write “model” legislation, like voter suppression laws. ALEC’s lawmaker members, mostly conservative Republicans, pay dues of $50 a year. ALEC entices them to attend swanky conferences with freebies, like ALEC-paid hotel rooms, ALEC-paid plane rides and God knows what else ALEC-paid. Of course, those aren’t bribes. But the free vacations may incline lawmaker members to introduce ALEC-written legislation.

ALEC is sly. It doesn’t come right out and say its “model” voter identification laws are intended to suppress balloting by Democrats. ALEC contends they’re designed to prevent voter fraud. Within the past two years, 10 states passed these laws.

But in-person voter fraud, the kind these identification laws are supposedly intended to prevent, barely exists. In the dozen years since 2000, only 10 cases occurred in the entire United States, according to a study funded by the Carnegie and Knight foundations. (more…)

I’ve been struck by the baldness of Romney’s repetitive lies about Obama — that Obama ended the work requirement under welfare, for example, or that Obama’s Affordable Care Act cuts $716 billion from Medicare benefits.

The mainstream media along with a half-dozen independent fact-checking organizations and sites have called Romney on these whoppers, but to no avail. He keeps making these assertions.

Every campaign is guilty of exaggerations, embellishments, distortions, and half-truths. But this is another thing altogether. I’ve been directly involved in seven presidential campaigns, and I don’t recall a presidential candidate lying with such audacity, over and over again. Why does he do it, and how can he get away with it?

The obvious answer is such lies are effective. Polls show voters are starting to believe them, especially in swing states where they’re being repeated constantly in media spots financed by Romney’s super PAC or ancillary PACs and so-called “social welfare” organizations (political fronts disguised as charities, such as Karl Rove and the Koch brothers have set up).

Romney’s lying machine is extraordinarily well financed. By August, according to Jane Mayer in her recent New Yorker article, at least 33 billionaires had each donated a quarter of a million dollars or more to groups aiming to defeat Obama — with most of it flooding into attack ads in swing states. (more…)

David Koch is hosting a fundraiser for millionaire Mitt Romney at his Hamptons estate this weekend. What do they want in return for all this fundraising?