To most Americans living in the North, Brown vs. the board of education was a ruling to end segregated schools—nothing more, nothing less.
End of story.
To many in the South, Brown represented much more.
At a minimum, the federal courts could no longer be counted on to defer reflexively to states’ rights arguments. More concerning was the likelihood that the high court would be more willing to intervene when presented with compelling evidence that a state action was in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection” under the law.
States’ rights, in effect, were yielding in preeminence to individual rights.
CARRY ME BACK
In Virginia at the time, it was easy to imagine how a court might now rule, if presented with evidence of the state of Virginia’s archaic labor relations, its measures to suppress voting, or its efforts to buttress the power of reactionary rural whites by under-representing the moderate voters of the cities and suburbs of Northern Virginia. Federal meddling could rise to levels once unimaginable.
To many whites, this decision meant that Northern liberals were going to tell the South how to run their society, and tax property owners more for improvements such as electricity.
To counter this, the University of Virginia created a school with a political agenda to maintain Southern rights, headed by James McGill Buchanan, who, along with his team, was the main founder of the Koch brothers and other billionaires with a similar philosophy game plan of how to go about getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, and other new Deal Programs. The Koch’s discovered Buchanan in the early 1970s.
Although this began many decades ago, it wasn’t until the early 21st century that most of us began to sense that something extraordinarily troubling had somehow entered American politics.
Several GOP-controlled state legislatures inflicted flesh-wounding cuts in public education,
while rushing through laws to enable unregulated charter schools and provide tax subsidies for private education.
In Wisconsin, North Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Iowa, these same GOP-controlled legislatures also took aim at state universities and colleges, which had long been integral components of state economic development efforts—and bipartisan sources of pride. Chancellors who dared to resist their agenda were summarily removed.
Then came a surge of synchronized proposals to suppress voter turnout.
In 2011 and 2012, legislators in 41 states introduced more than 180 bills to restrict who could vote and how.
Most of these bills were aimed at low-income, minority, young people and the less mobile elderly.
THE CLOT THICKENS
When the Kochs and their minions could not prevent the passage of the Affordable Care act,
they shut down the government for sixteen days in 2013 in an attempt to defund it.
Numerous independent observers described such stonewalling, vicious partisanship, and attempts to bring the normal functioning of government to a halt as “unprecedented.”
When the Republicans would not agree to conduct hearings to consider the president’s nominee to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant after Justice Antonin Scalia died in early 2016, even the usually reticent Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas spoke out. “At some point,” he told the Heritage Foundation, (a conservative think tank), “we are going to have to recognize that we are destroying our institutions."
All of these actions and more not listed above were part of a well-planned and well-coordinated national campaign, some of it promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which keeps its elected members a secret. It was producing hundreds of “model laws” each year for Republican legislators to enact in their states—and nearly 20% were enacted. There were laws to devastate labor unions, rewrite tax codes, undo environmental protections, privatize public resources, and require police to take action against undocumented immigrants.
In 2010, the brilliant investigative journalist Jane Mayer alerted Americans to the fact that two billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch, had poured more than a hundred million dollars into a “war against Obama.”
She went on to research and document how the Kochs and other ultra rich right-wing donors were providing vast quantities of “dark money” (political spending that, by law, had become untraceable).
(Read
"Dark Money"...a fine book)
After the Koch brothers saw what the small Virginia school was doing, they went on to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on institutions to create operatives to infiltrate government and other institutions with their anti-democratic ideas, such as the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth, the State Policy Network, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Tax Foundation, the Reason Foundation, the Leadership Institute, and more, to say nothing of the Charles Koch Foundation and Koch Industries itself. Others were being hired and trained here to transform legal understanding and practice on matters from health policy to gun rights to public sector employment.
Still others were taking what they learned here to advise leading Republicans and their staffs, from Virginia governors to presidential candidates. The current vice president, Mike Pence, a case in point, has worked with many of these organizations over the years and regurgitates their agenda.
Very early on, Buchanan and the Koch brothers realized that the American people would not support their plans, so to win they had to work behind the scenes and lie about what they really wanted:
no rules,
no regulations,
stopping taxation of wealthy individuals and their corporate entities,
and a weak government whose only function was the maintenance of social order
with themselves at the top.
They viewed taxation to advance social justice, improve the standard of living, or the common good as a mob attempt to take by force what the takers had no moral right to: the fruits of another person’s efforts. It began with individuals, powerless on their own, who had figured out that if they joined together, they could use their strength in numbers to move government officials to hear their concerns and act upon them.
Charles Koch did not just become a convert to the ultra-predatory capitalist radical right.
He is the sole reason why this movement alters the trajectory of the United States in ways that are profoundly disturbing.
Charles Koch made his money the good ol' fashioned way.
He inherited it.
He multiplied the earnings of the corporation he inherited by a factor of at least 1,000 entirely by corrupting politicians and even judges to do things which maximize his profits. Case in Point -
Paul Ryan.
The Kochs spent 20 million dollars getting and keeping him elected.
They gave him 500 thousand dollars just days after the Tax gift bill for the wealthy passed...even though he was no longer running for anything and stepping down in 2018.
Americans for Tax Fairness estimates that the Kochs and their conglomerate Koch Industries will get $840 million and $1.4 billion in income tax breaks each year after congress pushed their bill through.
That's a return on investment of at least 4,100 percent on the $20 million they spent to pass the law.
They are laughing at you America.
You have been fleeced and you are chumps to the Kochs.
You are only useful as an organ farm for the Kochs to harvest.
After 2008, Koch libertarians began to call themselves conservatives, knowing full well that the last thing they wanted was to conserve, they want destruction...but saw strategic advantages in doing so. A similar cynicism ruled Koch’s decision to bankroll the religious right, and men like Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed mobilized white evangelicals for political action on their behalf.
These religious hucksters were happy to sell Koch economics to their flocks—above all, opposition to public schooling and calls for reliance on family provision or charity in place of government assistance. The Koch team also learned how to leverage wider corporate backing.
The Koch team’s most important stealth move, and the one that proved most critical to success, was to wrest control over the machinery of the Republican Party, beginning in the late 1990s and with sharply escalating determination after 2008. From there it was just a short step to lay claim to being the true representatives of the party, declaring all others Republicans in name only. But while these radicals of the right operate within the Republican Party and use that party as a delivery vehicle, make no mistake about it: the cadre’s loyalty is not to the Grand Old Party or its traditions or standard-bearers. Their loyalty is to their revolutionary cause.
The new men in the wings respect only compliance; if they fail to get it, they respond with swift vengeance. The cadre targets for removal any old-time Republicans deemed a problem, throwing big money into their next primary race to unseat them.
U.S. senator Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania, one of the first longtime Republicans to lose his seat for his failure to obey, referred to those who undermined him as “cannibals” who seek “the end of governing as we know it.” Others learned from experience how to survive. The Reagan Republican and six-term U.S. senator Orrin Hatch of Utah exploded after being targeted by a challenger from his own party in 2012: “These people are not conservatives. They’re not Republicans. They’re radical libertarians. . . . I despise these people.” He was right that they were not what they said they were, but the scare taught him to stop bucking and comply to keep his job. And, of course, there is John Boehner, the former House Speaker, who in 2015 finally gave up and walked out, calling one of the leaders of this cause inside the Capitol, Ted Cruz, “Lucifer in the flesh”.
Our trouble in grasping what has happened comes, in part, from our inherited way of seeing the political divide. Americans have been told for so long, from so many quarters, that political debate can be broken down into conservative versus liberal, pro-market versus pro-government, Republican versus Democrat, that it is hard to recognize that something more insidious is afoot, a shrewd long game blocked from our sight by these stale classifications. So not having words to fit what Republicans have become, we assume that what we are seeing is just very ugly partisanship, perhaps made worse by social media. But it is more than that. The Republican Party is now in the control of a hypnotized cult for whom compromise is a dirty word.
Their cause, they say, is liberty. But by that they mean the insulation of private property rights from the reach of government—and the takeover of what was long public (schools, prisons, western lands, and much more) by corporations, a system that would radically reduce the freedom and quality of life of the many.
The Koch libertarian network had so much money and power at its disposal as the primary season began that every single Republican presidential front-runner was bowing to its agenda. Not a one would admit that climate change was a real problem or that guns weren’t as good as God.
Every one of them attacked public education and teachers’ unions and advocated more charter schools and public subsidies for religious schools. All called for radical changes in taxation and government spending. Each one claimed that Social Security and Medicare were in mortal crisis and that individual retirement and health savings accounts, presumably to be invested with Wall Street firms, were the best solution. They didn't back Trump...the authoritarian pussy grabbing was not Koch style. But they owned outright every other candidate in the GOP race.
Koch showed up at Trump tower election night though.
For Trump, the presidency is not only about power and rampant narcissism. It’s also part of his brand, sold to
foreign diplomats and
domestic suck-ups alike at the
Trump International Hotel, to would-be investors in
properties belonging to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to Chinese consumers of his daughter’s fashion brands,onymous
Ivanka Tru the epmp lines. And don’t forget members of and visitors to his golf clubs. There’s
hush money and
hacked emails and
oligarch pals and all manner of stuff emitting noxious odors. The preceding list barely scratches the surface. But without the Koch brothers, who virtually own the Republican legislature, Trump could not remain in power.
Despite their love of the libertarian faith, the Kochs have thrown in with a tainted authoritarian because it’s working for them.
It’s won them a
tax bill that
starves government and issues a
windfall to the wealthy.
It’s won them the administration’s policy of
removing two regulations for every new one that’s implemented. (The brothers’ conglomerate, Koch Industries, is a
famous polluter.) It’s won them a promise to open up more, even sacred, public lands for mineral and fossil fuel extraction.
We’ll probably never know the scope of the sprawl of the Koch network of interlocking nonprofit organizations, thanks to the unleashing of dark money in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010
Citizens United decision—you know, the “money is speech” case that allows nonprofit groups to conceal the names of their donors. That dark money is pretty much paying for the perpetuation of Donald Trump’s corruption of the presidency and the U.S. Constitution. Because if the Kochs wanted Trump gone, they could put a bug in a few congressional ears about articles of impeachment. Yet they don’t. They may even feed their youthful ward, Paul Ryan, to the Trumpian beast that Congress has become.
In the end, it seems, there is no real division between the authoritarian and the neo-libertarian Kochs. Stronger than those differences is their mutual commitment to one unifying principle:
greed.
Summary
It is unlikely that the United States can find its way back from the corruption epitomized by the Trump administration without addressing the corrosive effect of the dark money unleashed by the Supreme Court.
Democrats would be wise to shine a light on the corruption represented by Trump and his congressional supporters. It’s time to revive legislation that would turn off the dark-money spigot.
The very life of the constitution as well as democracy depends on it.
Are the right-wing billionaire neo libertarians a “fifth column”?
Is what we are dealing with merely a social movement of the right whose radical ideas must eventually face public scrutiny and rise or fall on their merits? No.
This is the story of something quite different, something never before seen in American history.
I use these words quite hesitantly and carefully—
it is a fifth-column assault on American democratic governance.
The term “fifth column” has been applied to stealth supporters of an enemy who assist by engaging in propaganda and sabotage to prepare the way for its conquest.
A movement that knows it can never win majority support is not a classic social movement.
Their hostile takeover maneuvers very much like a fifth column, operating in a highly calculated fashion, more akin to an occupying force than to an open group engaged in the usual give-and-take of politics. The size of this force is enormous. The social scientists who have led scholars in researching the Koch network write that it “operates on the scale of a national U.S. political party” and employs more than three times as many people as the Republican committees had on their payrolls in 2015.
This points to another characteristic associated with a fifth column: the tactic of overwhelming the normal political process with schemes to disrupt its functioning. Indeed, this massive and well-funded force is turning the party it has occupied toward ends that most Americans and even Republican voters do not want, such as the privatization of Social Security, Medicare, and education.
What this cause really seeks is a return to oligarchy, to a world in which both economic and effective political power are to be concentrated in the hands of a few. It would like to reinstate the kind of political economy that prevailed in America at the opening of the 20th century, when the mass disfranchisement of voters and the legal treatment of labor unions as illegitimate enabled large corporations and wealthy individuals to dominate Congress and most state governments alike, and to feel secure that the nation’s courts would not interfere with their reign.
The American people have used their power to do many significant things that required tax revenues: provide public education, develop manufacturing, build roads and bridges, create land-grant universities, protect the safety of food and drugs, enable workers to speak as one through unions, prevent old-age poverty, fight discrimination, assure the right to vote, and clean up our air and water, to name a few. These are achievements in which most citizens have taken pride.That may all be a bit of nostalgia now.
Make no mistake, while lots of American Robber Barons have skeletons in the family closet.
Charles and David Koch, are in a league of their own.
The father of these famous rightwing billionaires was Fred Koch, who started his fortune with $500,000 received from Stalin for his assistance constructing 15 oil refineries in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. A couple of years later, his company, Winkler-Koch, helped the Nazis complete
their third-largest oil refinery. The facility produced hundreds of thousands of gallons of high-octane fuel for the Luftwaffe, until it was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1944.
In 1938, the patriarch wrote that “the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy and Japan”. To make sure his children got the right ideas, he hired a German nanny. The nanny was such a fervent Nazi that when France fell in 1940, she resigned and returned to Germany. After that, Fred became the main disciplinarian, whipping his children with belts and tree branches.
Twenty years after collaborating with the Nazis, Fred Koch had lost none of his love for extremism. In 1958, he was one of the 11 original members of the John Birch Society, an organization which accused scores of prominent Americans, including President Dwight Eisenhower, of communist sympathies.
In 1960, Koch revealed his racism writing: “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America.”
He strongly supported the movement to impeach chief justice Earl Warren, after the supreme court voted to desegregate public schools in Brown v Board of Education.
His sons became Birchers too
Yes, the Kochs have a vision for America.
Enslaving it and raping it. What the Kochs and other post truth American "Robber Barons" are doing here is also being done in most of our allies democracies. Oligarchs are destroying the fabric of democracy through disinformation, promoting hate, fear, and nativism. They are all using similar corrupting methods.
It's time to wake up from this nightmare folks. If we can't stop the dark money and corrupt manipulation, we deserve to be Koch's chumps. We deserve to be robbed blind by Trump.
Say goodnight Dick.
