Kochtopus: Corporate Oil, Tea Party and Mormon Ideology

Note from Suzie-Q:

This is an older article but relevant to what we are seeing at the gas pumps today and the busting of Unions… And, let’s not forget the Tea Party;  guns, God and gold.

Tea Party movement influenced by corporate oil and Mormon ideology

Examiner- Ron Bynum

January 25th, 2010 11:03 am PT

The Tea Party movement’s supporters think they are a grass roots movement, but their ideology of guns, God and gold reeks of the Mormon (LDS) philosophy, and they receive support from big oil in the form of the Koch brothers, owners of the nation’s largest private energy company.

At the Tea Partier’s rallies, there are many placards and signs citing their trust in guns, God, and gold, a mantra that Glen Beck of Fox News uses, and it appears that Beck, a Mormon (convert in 1999), is proselytizing his faith when he uses that phrase.

The brothers Charles and David Koch, of Koch Industries, are major contributors to the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute, and are a major funding source for lobbying groups that deny climate change, and spent more than $8.5 million to stop “cap and trade” because it will cost them big profits. That is the real motivation behind the Tea Party movement, and healthcare reform is a scare tactic and rallying cry to upset ignorant followers and divide the country.

In Modesto, supporters of the Tea Party movement are clueless about the source of their alleged grass roots movement, and believe their liberties are at risk. Many protestors at rallies in the park proclaimed the government would take their guns, restrict their religious freedoms, and increase their taxes. The local gun club posted signs that “Obama’s going to take all your guns away so get them now and don’t register them.”

Religious fanatics claim liberals want to take God out of government and schools, even though God is not allowed in government or schools. Tea Party supporters fervently believe the lies ultra-conservative fear mongers like Sarah Palin and Fox News’ commentators spread, and neo-cons incite Tea Party protestors who remain ignorant of the origins, money, and real brains driving their movement.

It is sad that ignorant, frightened people believe their freedoms are at risk from the legally elected government of the United States. It is also sad these folks who think they are defenders of liberty are really shills for energy companies who will not share their ill-gotten profits with the Tea Party people.

David Koch proclaimed at one event that they are “fighting for the economic freedoms that made our nation the most prosperous society in history.” Koch’s only concern is higher profits earned on the backs of the Tea Party people, and they happily bend over for the shaft as Koch goes to the bank.

In Modesto and around the country, when Tea Party protestors make statements to the media and interviewers, they claim they fight for their liberty, ‘guns, God and gold,’ while they scream NO to affordable health care. They do not know whom the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute or the Koch brothers are, and have no idea the oil industry is pushing their agenda on them in the guise of preserving personal liberty.

Continue reading on Examiner.com: Tea Party movement influenced by corporate oil and Mormon ideology – Modesto Political Issues | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/political-issues-in-modesto/tea-party-movement-influenced-by-corporate-oil-and-mormon-ideology#ixzz1GaHYfp3F

MORE HERE

Read Full Post »

Thanks to Socialized Medicine, Dick Cheney Is Still Alive

Question for the tea party and everyone who voted for tea party Republicans in November: Did you enjoy your purely cosmetic vote to repeal the health care reform law? Personally, I would feel pandered to, and not particularly satisfied with all of that fiscally expensive congressional time being wasted on a vote that meant absolutely nothing. But that’s me.

I mean, you and your peers are obsessively focused on budget deficits and the national debt. Perhaps all of that federal money, all of that federal time and all of those federal resources would have been more effectively spent on something that had a chance of actually happening. Instead, you mandated that your Republican members of the House spend countless dollars on a symbolic exercise in, well, hooey. Nonsense. The political equivalent of pissing into the wind.

Considering that many of us on the progressive side of the political divide supported the health care law in part because it actually reduces the deficit, and considering that many of us on the progressive side of the political divide supported the stimulus and, within it, the largest middle class tax cut in American history, I’m getting a strong idea as to who is more interested in fiscal discipline and who isn’t.

With this meaningless vote, not only have the Republicans proved themselves to be entirely disinterested in reducing the deficit, but they’ve also reinforced their obsession with bumper sticker slogans, self-contradictions and utterly nonsensical political gestures.

Here are two more fantastic examples of how Republicans seriously dislike health care reform, socialized medicine and “government-run” healthcare — that is, until they actually need it.

You may or may not recall a study conducted before the health care reform law was passed by the office of Rep. Anthony Weiner. At the time, 55 Republican members of Congress were enrolled in Medicare, including Senators McCain, McConnell, Kyl, Shelby, Lugar, Inhofe and Grassley. All of whom were opposed to the public option and health care reform.

On the House side, Rep. Weiner’s list includes Peter King, Phil Gingrey, wingnut Virginia Foxx and the godfather of the tea party movement Ron Paul. Seriously, Ron Paul! All 55 members are accepting a form of the public option. Government-run health care. Socialized medicine. I wonder what Ayn Rand would say about Ron Paul accepting Medicare? A program that, more than anything else, will help to bump the national debt from 15 percent of GDP to 35 percent of GDP by 2082. And they claim to be worried about the debt? That’s rich.

Where are the tea party budget hawks — the tri-corned hat reenactors with their misspelled signs and racist voodoo portraits of the president — screeching for Ron Paul to give up his share in American socialism?

Read Full Post »

Angry Voters Choose Government Gridlock, Investigations and Shutdown

There are a variety of explanations for the frustratingly backwards outcome of yesterday’s election.

Clearly Americans were dissatisfied with the objective reality that the Obama administration and the congressional Democrats actually made things better by cutting the deficit by an historic $122 billion; creating upwards of three million new jobs; ending the war in Iraq; passing the largest middle class tax cut in history; and rescuing the economy from the brink of collapse. Not good enough, obviously.

Or did voters simply not know about these accomplishments? That’s entirely possible given the Democratic Party’s uncanny penchant for running away from its successes, while also fumbling very basic add-water-and-serve marketing chores. (And, by the way, adding to the party’s failures to ballyhoo its accomplishments, the progressive movement was systematically out-hustled, out-gunned and outmaneuvered for much of the last two years.)

Of course there’s also the Flailing Rage Factor, which I tend to favor as a reason for yesterday’s outcome more than ignorance or lack of Democratic marketing chops. For two years now, Americans have been incited by fakery and horror stories to the point of being pumped up into a ‘roid raging mob chanting shallow platitudes and bumper sticker zingers — incoherently attacking Speaker Pelosi’s face, and bent out of shape by the fact that there’s not a doddering old white guy stumbling through the West Wing spinning grandfatherly yarns about American mornings and saintly cowboys.

Ultimately, what Americans voted for yesterday was divided government, which admittedly isn’t new in American politics. We typically like the idea of two sides, Congress and the White House, locking horns and ultimately compromising on the important matters of the day.

Unfortunately, this is a “pre-01/20/09” mindset. It’s a mass delusion based on antiquated political attitudes.

The era when Republicans would, at least reluctantly, compromise with a Democratic president is long gone.

What voters unknowingly asked for yesterday was gridlock: immovable, unprecedented, insufferable gridlock of the worst kind, and at the worst time imaginable.

The Republicans have no intention of handing the president any successes. They’ll never in a million years compromise with this White House, or the Senate Democrats for that matter, because any move in that direction will bring down the loud, screechy tweet wrath of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party who will neither accept nor support anyone who appears to be leaning in the direction of the Obama agenda.

Read Full Post »

Who Is Behind The Tea Party Movement?

New York Billionaires Behind The Tea Party Movement

Posted in Liberaland by Alan • August 23, 2010, 3:20 PMET

The myth of the tea party being a grassroots movement takes another hit, as the New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer looks a the Koch brothers, Charles and David, who fund much of the tea party movement (via Glynnis MacNichol).

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. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made David and Charles Koch—who, years ago, bought out two other brothers—among the richest men in America. Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In 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.

Mayer’s article discusses some ugly family roots. Father Fred did business with Stalin, but later came to regret it, and became  one of the original members of the John Birch Society.

He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” he warned. Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech that prefigures the Tea Party’s talk of a secret socialist plot, Koch predicted that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”

Mayer’s piece discusses the links between Fred’s views and those of his sons. Buried deep in the article  is an example of how money trumps everything. David Koch, a prostate cancer survivor, has given generously to cancer research.

Koch’s corporate and political roles, however, may pose conflicts of interest. For example, at the same time that David Koch has been casting himself as a champion in the fight against cancer, Koch Industries has been lobbying to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying formaldehyde, which the company produces in great quantities, as a “known carcinogen” in humans.

SOURCE

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Koch Industries founded Americans for Prosperity, formed as a successor to Citizens for a Sound Economy. Fred Koch co-founded the John Birch Society. In the mid-1970s the Kochs started to fund a network of libertarian organizations including the United States Libertarian Party, for which David ran as the vice presidential nominee in 1980.^[47][48] The Kochs withdrew their financial support of the Libertarian Party after an acrimonious 1983 convention,^[49] but continue to support libertarian institutions independent of the party such as the Cato Institute, and more recently have been major contributers to the Tea Party movement.

To advance the work of the Republican Governors Association, Koch Industries made a $1 million donation to the group in 2010

WIKIPEDIA: MORE INFO ON THE KOCH BROTHERS

Read Full Post »

Glenn Beck Rally Will Be Like Moon Landing, Wright Brothers, & Rosa Parks All Rolled Into One Massive Orgasm Of American History

Glenn Beck Rally Will Be Like Moon Landing, Wright Brothers, & Rosa Parks All Rolled Into One Massive Orgasm Of American History

Huff Post- Jason Linkins Posted: 08-26-10 02:06 PM

Outside of joining the locals in a deep and contented chuckle over the whole “STAY OFF THE GREEN LINE” matter, I’m not sure what there is to say about this coming weekend’s “Glenn Beck Sings A Song Of Myself” rally on the steps of the Lincoln memorial. Weirdly, people only seemed to get terribly concerned about how it will be held on the same day of Martin Luther King’s historic March On Washington this week, despite the fact that this has been known from the get-go. I’d have never imagined this was necessary, but on the off-chance that you’re confused about whether Glenn Beck and Martin Luther King are the same person, here’s some exhaustive research from Media Matters demonstrating this is not the case.

As Dave Weigel points out, it might be more worthwhile to be upset about “the b.s. way [Beck]’s selling” the rally. Not that this breaks with any of Beck’s established traditions! But, as Politico‘s Ken Vogel reported, what’s noteworthy is that Beck’s fameball act is starting to irk some of his nominal allies, spurring some skepticism of his motives:

The rally and Beck’s increasing political forays have made him an object of suspicion among some conservatives, even as they acknowledge his influence and potential importance as a spokesman.
“The conservative movement is still split on Glenn and whether he’s doing it for himself or doing it for the movement,” said Erick Erickson, founder of the influential conservative blog Red State. Erickson said he’s offered his assistance to Team Beck in his political exploits, which in the past year have included a high-profile battle with the White House, the creation of a network of perhaps hundreds of political groups, and the keynote speech at a major conservative political conference. “Until that question is resolved, I think you’re going to see some groups hesitant to go all in with him.”

Some tea party leaders have rejected Beck’s requests to help with the rally because of concern over his inflammatory rhetoric and fear that he was seeking to leverage their organizational know-how and grass-roots credibility for his own financial benefit, providing little in return.

“They wouldn’t even give us a booth,” said a leader of a tea party-related group that rejected Beck’s entreaties. “I resented their presumption that a relatively small organization like ours would use our connections to promote an event where Glenn Beck and FreedomWorks are featured, and we get no recognition at all. No thanks.”

Well, Beck’s insanely melodramatic video promotion of the rally, replete with Goldline scamflackery and nutlog comparisons to Rosa Parks, the Wright Brothers, and the moon landing, isn’t going to do anything to tamp down that nascent skepticism:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Read Full Post »

The Noxious Transformation Of The Conservative Movement Into A Rabid Fringe

Days of Rage — The Noxious Transformation of the Conservative Movement into a Rabid Fringe

Crusading to restore a holy social order, Tea Partiers have promoted disorder. Claiming to protect democracy, they smashed windows of elected representatives.

Nation Books / By Max Blumenthal

August 10, 2010 |

Editor’s Note: The following is the new epilogue from Max Blumenthal’s book, Republic Gomorrah, now out in paperback (Basic/Nation Books, 2009).

“He will tell you that he wants a strong authority to take from him the crushing responsibility of thinking for himself. Since the Republic is weak, he is led to break the law out of love for obedience. But is it really strong authority that he wishes? In reality he demands rigorous order for others, and for himself disorder without responsibility.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, “Anti-Semite and Jew”

I am not sure when I first detected the noxious fumes that would envelop the conservative movement in the Obama era. It might have been early on, in April 2009, when I visited a series of gun shows in rural California and Nevada. Perusing tables piled high with high-caliber semi-automatic weapons and chatting with anyone in my vicinity, I heard urgent warnings of mass roundups, concentration camps, and a socialist government in Washington. “These people that are purchasing these guns are people that are worried about what’s going on in this country,” a gun dealer told me outside a show in Reno. “Good luck Obama,” a young gun enthusiast remarked to me. “We outnumber him 100 to 1.” At this time, the Tea Party movement had not even registered on the national media’s radar.

MORE HERE

Read Full Post »

Southern Strategist Sarah Palin Denies the Southern Strategy

During her honeymoon speech at the Republican National Convention in 2008, Sarah Palin echoed a jab at Barack Obama that had been lurking around in Republican circles for most of that year. Earlier at the convention, Rudy Giuliani famously brought it up through his gigantically-toothy grin and childish giggling. But it was Sarah Palin who would get most of the credit for it.

I’m referring here to the emphasis on President Obama’s service as an urban community organizer. Clearly, this was a Southern Strategy-style racial dog whistle — a way of underscoring the president’s ethnicity, his race and his association with scary inner-city black people.

It’s worth mentioning again the Lee Atwater quote regarding the functional language of the Southern Strategy. Suffice to say, Atwater made it perfectly clear that Republican political tactics included (and still do) exploiting race — winning white votes by demonizing blacks. And the way to play this game in the modern age was to use code language. Dog whistles, because overt racial language would too easily “back fire.”

At the time, Atwater suggested the exploitation of issues like tax cuts or states rights with the implication that the Republican Party supported the preservation of white dominance. (Not surprisingly, tax cuts and states rights dominate the 2010 political discourse.) And the demagoguing of issues like welfare, affirmative action or Medicaid would underscore, to predisposed white voters, the fallacious notion of lazy black freeloaders horking white jobs and white tax dollars and not contributing anything to society other than crime.

And there was Sarah Palin in her prime time debut mocking the president’s early career as a community organizer — the implication being that the president was a product of black culture and not “real Americans.” Combine this with the ongoing emphasis on the president’s “spread the wealth around” remark to Joe the Plummer — the Republicans very obviously playing the “welfare queen” dog whistle here. And we all remember how Sarah Palin went “rogue” and fueled the Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim-terrorist myth (part of early Birther lore) by repeatedly telling her rabid white audiences that the president “palled around with terrorists.”

Sarah Palin is and was a Southern Strategist.

Read Full Post »

A Republican Sabotage?

Tuesday morning on CNBC, the spazzy white guys in lower Manhattan were debating how the administration and Congress can best repair the economy, and mainly the jobless numbers. At one point, Rick Santelli, the hyperkinetic shoutcaster and instigator of the tea party movement, began to flail around, waving his arms above his head while yelling, “Stop spending! Stop spending! Stop spending!”

And contrary to accusations from one of the other spazzy white panelists, Santelli insisted he wasn’t calling for more tax cuts. Just a freeze in government spending. Somehow.

Fine. Show us another time in American history when a spending freeze — and a spending freeze alone — jump-started an economic recovery following a deep recession and high unemployment. Show us. Where in the world is Santelli getting this?

It doesn’t really matter from which hole Santelli’s latest television meltdown was extricated. Suffice to say, there is no historical precedent for any such thing. In fact, the often-referenced spending cuts of 1937 caused the opposite effect: a backslide in the economic recovery during the Great Depression. Oh, sorry. There we go again — referencing actual “history” instead of just screeching incongruous, contradictory and unsubstantiated nonsense, which seems to be the accepted style of discourse these days.

Santelli’s rant is just another performance in a broader strategy by the Republicans and tea party movement to deliberately sabotage the economic recovery. Not unlike Santelli’s “stop spending” idea, this is a strategy which also, to the best of my knowledge, has no historical precedent. For the first time ever — and this is worth repeating — one of the two major political parties in America is sabotaging a delicate economic recovery for the sake of humiliating the president and his party, and subsequently recapturing a political majority.

More than a year ago, Rush Limbaugh both predicted this and set the table for it to occur. They want the president to fail, and now it’s clear that they’re willing to take the economic recovery down in order to make it so. Is there any doubt who leads the Republican Party?

Read Full Post »

Republicans Demand a Government Takeover and Bailout of the Oil Spill

The words “government takeover” were originally injected into the discourse by Frank Luntz in the early stages of the health care reform process and have been repeated in the pejorative sense by Republicans across the board.

Despite the fact that thousands of Americans die every month from a lack of affordable health insurance, the Republicans have argued that the government isn’t allowed to “takeover” the industry. It goes without saying that the president wasn’t proposing any such thing and, in fact, publicly denounced single-payer health insurance, but okay. The Republicans truly believe the health care reform bill is socialism and a total takeover of the industry. It’s not.

Likewise, the Republicans and tea party people have been screeching about the bailouts. They insist that the banks and financial institutions (and GM) should have been allowed to fail, rather than receiving emergency loans from the government in order to, at the time, prevent the American economy from being dragged down along with these institutions had they not been hoisted with an infusion of cash.

Speaking of which, the Republicans also loudly opposed the recovery bill, which included, as a total dollar amount, the biggest middle class tax cut in American history as well as a considerable amount of funding for the states. Yet the Republicans, once again, screeched about state’s rights and tried to block the funding.

In his response to the president’s first address to a joint session of Congress, Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana famously mocked such obviously hilarious things as volcano monitoring in the recovery bill. Volcanoes? Why should we monitor those?

The dominant centerpiece to all of this outrage has been the Republican idea that the states and the free market should be left alone to deal with problems and crises on its own without “socialist” — or even “communist” depending on which AM radio station you listen to — interference from big government and our America-hating president. No government takeovers. Freedom! Liberty! And no stupid volcano thingees also.

Americans dying from a lack of health insurance? Too bad. No government takeover. The economy about to sink into a second Great Depression? Too bad. No government takeover. The Earth growing warmer due to the burning of fossil fuels? Too bad. No government takeover.

That is until last month.

Read Full Post »

Rand Paul Underscores The Tea Party’s Connection To Race

I’ll take Rand Paul at his word. He’s opposed to racial discrimination.

However, he obviously supports allowing businesses to engage in racial discrimination with impunity. Evidently, if the government says it’s against the law to run a whites-only business, this is a bridge too far for Rand Paul.

Congratulations, Republicans. The man you chose to run for the vacant U.S. Senate seat from Kentucky and the man who delivered the highest profile political victory for the tea party movement has turned out to have some very twisted ideas about civil rights and race.

On the Rachel Maddow Show last night, Paul suffered an epic meltdown — more or less admitting that he doesn’t support the Americans with Disabilities Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which “prohibits discrimination by covered employers on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” In other words, Paul implied that the First Amendment allows any business to be “white-only” if it chooses and the government isn’t allowed to interfere.

But he’s against racial discrimination. He said so.

Rand Paul’s extremist position on the Civil Right Act underscores a major flaw in libertarian ideology, and it further cements the connection between the tea party movement and race.

Libertarianism, which both Ron and Rand Paul famously embrace, suggests the free market is a significant and vital component of liberty. Private businesses are capable of accomplishing everything, and government can’t interfere or regulate those businesses in any way. The free market will police itself. Just leave it be.

Private industry can pave roads, educate children, put out fires and protect our streets from drunk drivers. It can shuttle our kids to corporate schools and back, it can provide clean water to our homes and they can guarantee our meat and vegetables aren’t contaminated with diseases. And by the way, in a nation that’s 70 percent white, private businesses can choose to do all of these things for white people only. Private businesses can provide everything we need, but only offer those services to white people.

And these businesses, according to libertarian ideology, can form monopolies if they want to. As we’re all painfully aware from the health care debate, monopolies occur even in our current government-regulated system. Imagine what would happen in a totally unregulated free market.

So, in Rand Paul’s utopia, not only can Woolworth’s prevent black people from sitting at its soda stand if it wants to, but a private, free market police corporation can set up shop in a community, buy up any competing police corporations and announce that it no longer serves black people or Jewish people or Hispanic people or gay people — any minority segment of the population.

Read Full Post »