Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Remember the Kochtopus? He funded Gov. Walker in Wisconsin

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The Koch brothers gave $1,000,000 to the Republic Governors PAC – and that PAC became Walker’s largest contributor.

The goal is eliminating unions so the Koch brothers have no check on their power and ambition.  They have no need or interest in a healthy middle class.  Serfs will do just fine.

The Koch’s gave themselves 11 billion in bonuses.  Then they laid off workers; guess where?  Wisconsin.

My favorite Koch Brothers Wisconsin shenanigans cartoons are at that link.

For how Kochtopus money is wrapped around Gov. Walker you can read all about it!

To sum it all up Koch brothers fund and bring you Gov. Walker of Wisconsin

If you are silent, who will the union busters and plutocrats bust into serfdom next?   If we do not stand up for, and protect, one another through the democratic process, we become complicit.

I found a poem that I thought applied, but some felt that the references were not appropriate.  Instead, I offer a poem of my own with I hope less historical baggage, but which calls out the same warning, if we put money ahead of humanity, we then place ourselves, our children, and our heritage of democracy at risk:

Beware the Kochtopus

What sly enemy

Whispered

To you this choice

That you have chosen

To revere their corporations and wealth above  people?

Now your children’s future’s lie unprotected,

Wrapped in the greedy coils of the Kochtopus

Strangling the future as it grows.

The hope of their future

Withers, sucked of life and hope

By the endless hunger

of the Kochtopus.

Did no one have the courage to warn you?

Did no one have the valor

To hunt and fight  this monstrous beast?

D.S. Butler

c2011

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Comments

  1. Interestingly this topic was discussed on All Things Considered today. One of the persons on the program pointed out that the elimination of collective bargaining is selective: it is limited to the unions which did not support candidate Walker. Unions which supported Walker are excluded from the legislation.

  2. And in general a worthy post, except for the final parallel to the Nazis, which is outrageous and absurd for many reasons, and enormously weakens the post. It is not technically against our rules, but it certainly disqualifies the post for promotion to the front page.

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    p>The power of corporate money in US politics laid bare.

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    p>More generally, Citizens United is really going to have a huge impact on this country, to the detriment of ordinary Republicans and Democrats alike.

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    p>I reiterate my thesis that Red Mass Group and Blue Mass Group members have far more in common than they do in opposition.

    • And the post promoted to the front page, about the rally, is a direct call for action and more useful.  

      <

      p>As to “the Nazis” many of my relatives were killed by them back in the day.  I grew up in a community where more than 1/2 of my friends parents had numbers on their arms.

      <

      p>There were many discussions as to how a time of economic hardship led many in Germany and France to look the other way as civil and economic liberty was curtailed and ultimately, all liberty was lost.

      <

      p>My own father laid down in front of trucks in Detroit protesting scrap shipments to Japan, telling anyone who would listen that the greed of corporations was selling steel that would come back in their children’s bodies as bullets and schrapnel – for his courage and valor he was arrested.  The corporations got their money, the Japanese got their metal, and that metal indeed came back as bullets and bomb casings.

      <

      p>I do not retreat from my concern that silence in the face of a form of American neofascism is dangerous, and may be deadly to my children’s future.  The same folk who are attacking unions who dared to oppose the Koch brother’s Quisling hate the bill of rights and the 13th and 14th Amendments.  Even as the wishful thinking of my great-grandfather who did not leave when he was urged to do so, because he could not believe that he was in danger doomed him, and his family so wishful thinking as to the danger to our democracy may well place my children’s future at risk here.

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      p>Representative democracy is fragil.  It requires the protection of an informed, vigilant, active electorate to survive.  That is, by the way, part of why I totally support and admire the United Teen push for civics education in schools.

    • Rachel presents many items as facts, just because you agree with her please challenge her facts, not all are right as PolitiFact points out http://www.politifact.com/wisc…

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      p>By the way, this goes for all television journalists, personalities, whatever, who claim to be presenting facts.  They may be, or they may not be, but please do question them for they may be off sometimes.

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      p>Yes, this goes for Rush and Beck whom I cannot listen to anymore (I did watch the clip via Amber’s link and it was informative) as well as other members of the press.  I was taught growing up to listen, take it all in and then think and challenge the ideas.  This has served me mostly in good stead (not so much so in CCD) so continue to do it so I am passing on the PolitiFact item on Rachel as it is important to understand what is on and what is off-base in the report.

  4. Do the Kochs and others of their ilk not realize that serfs don’t spend money on their products?  They glorify capitalism in their rhetoric, but capitalism will fail in favor of feudalism if they get their way.

    • Wisconsin as a plantation to be exploited is what the Kochs would prefer- and their “market” is global.  

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      p>They are social Darwinists.  If you are not strong enough to take them on, you deserve to be exploited.  Forget that they were BORN to millions, of course, and never made anything on their own.

    • Do the Kochs and others of their ilk not realize that serfs don’t spend money on their products?

      How would they realize that, when it isn’t true?

      The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products.

      Even if the serfs don’t buy any of those products directly (which of course they will), nobody in this country who doesn’t grow and make everything they consume fails to support the oil industry.  

      • What I think we need somehow is more education about who owns what and what they do with their products.  Seems social networking can be used to spread the word – don’t buy product x, y, z and go with competitors instead.  We may need to break up some monopolies while we’re at it.

        • So you convince all the progressives and working people to not buy Brawny paper towels and Dixie cups. Are they going to stop buying gasoline, and heating oil, and food brought in on diesel-burning trucks? Do you know which brands of gasoline come from Koch refineries? Is that even a meaningful question?

          • That’s what an effort in education is for, but it seems we have a couple of choices as to how to fight these folks.  We break up this conglomerate that owns so many different industries by legal enforcement, or we commence a massive effort to hit them where it hurts – in the bank account.  Probably the best solution is a combination of those, but SOMETHING has to be done about the Kochs and there outsized power.

            • WE can’t do squat about breaking up conglomerates. That power resides in our government, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the oil industry, and the government shows vanishingly small interest in doing anything of the kind.

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              p>The one about gasoline brands was a trick question – you cannot know which brands come from Koch refineries, because nobody does know. The gasoline supply is a big pool. Until it’s on a Chevron or Texaco truck, it’s all the same, because it’s all mixed together. So you can stop buying ExxonMobil gasoline and deny that company some tiny amount of profit, but as long as you’re buying gasoline at all, you’re giving money to the Koch bros. All the education in the world is not going to change that.

              • Yes, our government HAS been acting in many says like a “wholly-owned subsidiary of the oil industry.”  My wily Dad used to pick where the next Police Action or Intervention would be by where the oil is/was found/comes from and whether they were cooperative enough.

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                p>That is the same Wily Dad who laid down in the streets of Detroit in 1934 and got arrested trying to prevent Detroit scrap from shipping at a profit to the highest bidder – Japan – and coming back in his brother’s bodies.

                • Use that educational power to teach people that the Republicans and the DLC and the corporatist Democrats are harming them, and will continue to harm them. Stop supporting corporate policies like wars.

  5. From the New Yorker article I quoted in my earlier comment:

    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.”
    . . .

    Rob Stein, a Democratic political strategist who has studied the conservative movement’s finances, said that the Kochs are “at the epicenter of the anti-Obama movement. But it’s not just about Obama. They would have done the same to Hillary Clinton. They did the same with Bill Clinton. They are out to destroy progressivism.”

     

    • Koch likes to work in the shadows.

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      p>Ergo – the term Kochtopus.

      <

      p>The Kochs use fronts, and quislings, and a veritable army of “made men” who are financially totally dependent on them.

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      p>The practice “the Big Lie” – if the media says something often enough, the majority believe it.  And the media can be bought to say anything.

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      p>The preferred relationship of the Kochs with the rest of humanity appears to be, “We say jump, they say how high” and I find this so fundamentally offensive that  I cannot understand the willingness of anyone to be their Quislings, and the harm they have done to workers, folks in poor countries with degradation of the environment, even my very preliminary research results nauseate me.

    •  They can spend their money any damn way they want.  These posts look at one and only one aspect of the manner in which they fund causes.  Typical liberal reaction.  With any success in these proceedings, count on them spending much, much more in this regard.  

      • It is true, especially after the Citizen’s United Decision the Kochtopus Krew can spend their money to buy elections, to create false fronts, to corrupt quislings.  How lovely.

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        p>Unless you and I fight to retain democracy, we will lose it for ourselves and our children.

        <

        p>I don’t give a damn whether you call me a liberal, an outlier, or way too uppity to suit oligarchs.  Well behaved women don’t make history.

        <

        p>Tame populations lose their freedoms, their futures, and any rights they once had.

        <

        p>And I do count on the Kochtopus Krew spending much, much more because what they want is power, including power over YOU Christy, though if you are a total synchophant you probably don’t care.

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        p>Koch Industries is also a major polluter  I care about that too – do you?

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        p>A 97 count pollution indictment matters to me, Christy – does it matter to you?  Or do you also think the Kochs should be free to pollute as much as they want to, as well?  The Kochtopus Krew thinks there should be no limits on it at all and it should grow and grow, and swallow up obselete consepts like democracy, constitutional separation of powers, and accountability.

      • Society limits how we can spend our money all the time.

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        p>I can’t bribe public officials.
        I can’t buy drugs.
        I can’t buy sex.
        I can’t buy body parts.
        I can’t buy people.
        I can’t buy child pornography.
        I can’t buy certain weapons.
        I can’t buy certain chemicals.
        I can’t buy certain prescription drugs.

        <

        p>

        <

        p>The Koch brothers present an example of why society may choose to limit expenditures on politics (again).

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