When the history of Donald Trump’s administration is written, people may point to the appointment of a Koch Brothers operative to a little-known White House position as a turning point in Trump’s evolution from unorthodox Republican candidate to doctrinaire corporate politician. Continue reading
Source: Koch Dark-Money Operative Is Trump’s Liaison to Congress – BillMoyers.com
I’ve been writing about the Koch Brothers and their influence on elections for quite a while.
It all started with Chief Justice John Roberts’ Citizens United decision. Here’s an excerpt from Adam Liptak’s New York Times article on Roberts, which Liptak wrote before the election. Within it are links to Citizens United, as well as the two other cases which have had immense and awful significance for all of us.
He was in the five-justice conservative majorities that decided District of Columbia v. Heller, which established an individual right to own guns; Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which amplified the role of money in politics; and Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the core of the Voting Rights Act.
When I started to be alarmed about the Kochs, I did not and could not know the person who’d be elected as president would use Hitler’s propaganda techniques throughout his campaign, and continue them in the infancy of his presidency.
Goddamn, I really do not like the notion of myself as Cassandra. Of all the mythological characters, she’d be maybe the last I’d choose to be like. (Having written that, I can’t think of any I would choose to be like, and I know mythological characters: my father was a Greek and Latin scholar and perhaps as a consequence I did not have volumes of fairy tales in my child’s bookshelves. I had child’s volumes of Greek myths.)
Poor Cassandra. She had a bad time of it. She rejected having sex with Apollo (does this sound faintly familiar?) and he cursed her with (a) the gift of prophecy and (b) the pisser: no matter what she prophesied, nobody would believe her.
I refuse to be like Cassandra.
I’m glad Bill Moyers journal has taken up the subject of the Koch Bros and their black money influence on our government by highlighting one Koch operative, Marc Short, and his new position with the Republican legislature:
…the candidate Short once wanted to stop [Trump] is now poised to deliver on key elements of the Koch Brothers’ agenda. Trump is appointing oil industry executives and lobbyists to a number of top positions and denies the reality of climate change. His xenophobic and bigoted rhetoric fuels the kind of fear that does great things for gun sales.
Like Freedom Partners, Trump is pushing deregulation. And Trump, together with his congressional allies, is poised to repeal Obamacare.
Recently, the Kochs’ “grass roots” group, Americans for Prosperity, is telling potential donors (with typically hyperbolic capitalization) that the Kochs’ three-part agenda consists of “1. REPEALING OBAMACARE; 2. FIXING OUR BROKEN TAX SYSTEM” — that is, tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy — and, “3. CUTTING FEDERAL SPENDING.”
There you go. Not only did the Kochs buy three Senate seats that were going Democratic, seats that would give the Democrats the Senate majority, they now control the Republican legislature.