Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Blame the Republicans (But Mostly the Koch Bros)

The Men Behind the Curtain: Charles and David Koch

Voice of the Mountain 

by Shawn K. Inlow


The Mountain wants you to look at the two men pictured above.  You should know them.  They are Charles and David Koch, two billionaire brothers who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps by inheriting their companies from their dad and who are, according to reportage this weekend, almost entirely behind the republican funding and planning for a government shutdown and possible default.

Blame the republicans.  When the market goes tits-up and my pension goes flat and my savings disappear... Blame the republicans and their billionaire paymasters.  It's all right there in black and attributed white.

First, you need to read THIS EYE OPENING PIECE from the weekend New York Times.  It features republicans, in their own words, gunning for this manufactured crisis for months and finally getting what they want.  Read that and then come back and we'll talk, okay?

The Mountain posted yesterday in an uncharacteristic rant where I smelled the rat that is modern republicanism and heard the insipid whack-job Tea Partyism.  I smelled the reek of oil billionaires, but I just couldn't see them until that NYT story pulled back the curtain.  Now there can be no doubt as to who is to blame for the latest crazy republican political gambit.

These people are so desperate to deny President Obama his signature legislative accomplishment (and millions of Americans a shot for once at affordable health insurance) that they would do anything - hurt anyone - spend hundreds of millions of dollars "educating" the public and coercing republican congressmen and running Tea-Party Crazies against that odd, beloved endangered species, the "moderate republican."

There was a day where I could walk a mile with a republican, but those days are coming to an end, largely because the republican party has become a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries.  Let's call it what it is, because it is the most compelling case for what is wrong with government:  Pure Corruption.  Vulgar capitalist takeover of the democracy all dressed up in red-white-and-blue bunting.

Freedom indeed.  This is about owning the government.  And the two men pictured above are the worms at the heart of the apple.  They need to be hunted down and tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail.  Charles and David Koch:  Public Enemies #1.  Can we get a CIA deck of cards with that pair of aces on the front? 

Man.  The Mountain is feeling all militant.  I gotta go take a sedative.  But seriously, someone oughtta go to one of their big parties and get 'em with a cream pie.

What's worse is that The Mountain feels like we all are being used as dupes here.  The issue isn't really the debt.  Obamacare is just a foil for something bigger.  These are just foils so that you and I, decent people, set against each other's throats.
Sneetches: Stars Upon Thars
McBean: "You can't teach a Sneetch!"

It is the Dr. Seuss story of "The Sneetches" and the Koch Bros are Sylvester McMonkey McBean, who emerges at the end of the day with all the money while leaving his bewildered victims changed forever. 


Dr. Seuss had this covered.  And in his loveable way he drew us this picture.


No, there is something much bigger going on and that is the corporate ownership, or freedom from the democracy.



Freedom to do as the Koch Bros please.

Freedom for the Koch Bros to keep all the money.

Freedom for the Koch Bros to do anything they want because they are powerful enough to do it.

This is not about you and me except by the way the vitriolic argument frees the Koch Bros.  THEY are the shit stirrers.  We are just the stick they use to stir the pot.

And I'm not down with this old canard I hear from my friends:  "A pox on both democratic and republican houses!"

Bullshit.  I'm calling bullshit.  Because generally speaking the democrats, even with their problems which I and regular walking around republicans can point to with fervor, want to be helpful.   The republicans want to destroy, deny, negate.  And if republicans won't say it themselves (which many do in the NY Times article above) I do not believe for a moment that the Koch Bros could be that coy.

To my conservative friends.  You have to know that the Koch Bros are sewing the seeds of your discontent.  And by destabilizing that which we've come to depend upon, by corrupting the America we grew up in with their ferocious capitalism, our lives become more precarious.

I'm worried about my savings.  I'm worried about the savages of Wall Street and the wolves of Big Money being left to run wild on my state pension plan.

Listen.  The debt is an issue.  Health care and foreign policy and everything else are legitimate issues that affect our lives.  They do.  But what is going on here, The Mountain feels down to its foothills, is something much bigger.  Much darker.  I invite you to pull back the curtain.

I leave the last word with a good man.  A good journalist.  Have a listen.

1 comment:

  1. Well put and well done Shawn. How can anyone not see this as Republican obstruction of what is good for America.

    ReplyDelete

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