Koch Brothers Run Massive Secretive Campaign Against Obama
Two of the wealthiest men in the country, the Koch brothers, are running a massive behind the scenes campaign against Obama and Democrats. See below.
Jane Mayer blows their cover in a New Yorker article quoted below.
Needless to way our current Supreme Court opened the doors wide with their ridiculous claim that corporations have free speech rights and can contribute whatever to whomever. As I have said repeatedly before we are watching our nation being converted from a democratic republic to an oligarchy run cruelly by the super rich. The Koch brothers are the archetype of this horrendous conversion. No amount of intelligent and caring commentary by Obama and Democrats gets the TV media coverage of Koch run operations under dozens of names. As Jane Mayer suggests the Koch
s have substituted our government for their former ally and then enemy -- Stalin's Soviet Union.
Needless to say such madness can dominate our nation with super wealth -- theirs is something like the second or third largest fortune in the nation -- greed pays off, alas! And perhaps their Tea Party manipulations will, too?
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Covert Operations
by Jane Mayer
Oddly enough, the fiercely capitalist Koch family owes part of its fortune to Joseph Stalin. Fred Koch was the son of a Dutch printer who settled in Texas and ran a weekly newspaper. Fred attended M.I.T., where he earned a degree in chemical engineering. In 1927, he invented a more efficient process for converting oil into gasoline, but, according to family lore, America’s major oil companies regarded him as a threat and shut him out of the industry. Unable to succeed at home, Koch found work in the Soviet Union. In the nineteen-thirties, his company trained Bolshevik engineers and helped Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries. Over time, however, Stalin brutally purged several of Koch’s Soviet colleagues. Koch was deeply affected by the experience, and regretted his collaboration. He returned to the U.S. In the headquarters of his company, Rock Island Oil & Refining, in Wichita, he kept photographs aimed at proving that some of those Soviet refineries had been destroyed in the Second World War. Gus diZerega, a former friend of Charles Koch, recalled, “As the Soviets became a stronger military power, Fred felt a certain amount of guilt at having helped build them up. I think it bothered him a lot.”
In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover. Members considered President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Communist agent. In a self-published broadside, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties.” 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.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=3
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"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent [blind copies]
Jane Mayer blows their cover in a New Yorker article quoted below.
Needless to way our current Supreme Court opened the doors wide with their ridiculous claim that corporations have free speech rights and can contribute whatever to whomever. As I have said repeatedly before we are watching our nation being converted from a democratic republic to an oligarchy run cruelly by the super rich. The Koch brothers are the archetype of this horrendous conversion. No amount of intelligent and caring commentary by Obama and Democrats gets the TV media coverage of Koch run operations under dozens of names. As Jane Mayer suggests the Koch
s have substituted our government for their former ally and then enemy -- Stalin's Soviet Union.
Needless to say such madness can dominate our nation with super wealth -- theirs is something like the second or third largest fortune in the nation -- greed pays off, alas! And perhaps their Tea Party manipulations will, too?
***********************************************
Covert Operations
by Jane Mayer
Oddly enough, the fiercely capitalist Koch family owes part of its fortune to Joseph Stalin. Fred Koch was the son of a Dutch printer who settled in Texas and ran a weekly newspaper. Fred attended M.I.T., where he earned a degree in chemical engineering. In 1927, he invented a more efficient process for converting oil into gasoline, but, according to family lore, America’s major oil companies regarded him as a threat and shut him out of the industry. Unable to succeed at home, Koch found work in the Soviet Union. In the nineteen-thirties, his company trained Bolshevik engineers and helped Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries. Over time, however, Stalin brutally purged several of Koch’s Soviet colleagues. Koch was deeply affected by the experience, and regretted his collaboration. He returned to the U.S. In the headquarters of his company, Rock Island Oil & Refining, in Wichita, he kept photographs aimed at proving that some of those Soviet refineries had been destroyed in the Second World War. Gus diZerega, a former friend of Charles Koch, recalled, “As the Soviets became a stronger military power, Fred felt a certain amount of guilt at having helped build them up. I think it bothered him a lot.”
In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover. Members considered President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Communist agent. In a self-published broadside, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties.” 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.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=3
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent [blind copies]
posted by Ed Kent at 12:12 PM
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