Please take a look at the Koch Brothers’ latest piece of propaganda–quite probably the worst and perhaps most consequential lie ever told in a television commercial, (in the right-hand column, under “From the Right.”) Watch it, and then read on.
“Look around…” it says. “…America is divided.” The title of the commercial is “It’s Time to End the Divide.” The divide? Who created “the Divide?” Who created the government that has virtually eliminated taxes for the rich and given us the largest income inequality in the world and in the history of this country? Did you? Did any of the roughly 300 million Americans who comprise one half of the divide? The Kochs and the other billionaires who gather at their meetings semi-annually to decide which politicians to support. They created the divide and they did it deliberately.
“With government and corporations picking winners and losers….” Who is the government? With 33,000 lobbyists for people like the Kochs, it is the corporations who not only decide winners and losers in business and income, they also, through one of the hundreds of Koch Brothers funded organizations, pick the politicians they support or actively try to defeat. The Kochs have elected a majority of Right Wing Congressmen and Senators and a majority of Right Wing governors, about 30 out of 50. All Republicans. Only one Democrat, as of last reading of the list was a member of the Koch Brothers-founded-and-supported ALEC organization, which basically buys state legislators.
ALEC puts corporate sponsors together with state legislators, takes them on trips to places like Palm Springs, then sets them down and tells them what legislation (which their lawyers actually write) they want to be enacted. That is why your cable bill is so high and why, in so many states, even the local community cannot even start its own Internet, even though they could easily do it and do it cheaper and make it faster. They write laws to prohibit anti-pollution regulations, for example. Which is why in the ALEC-owned, Republican state of Michigan a governor can substitute his own person instead of the elected representative of the people in any community, change direction, and, as happened, poison them with lead and toxic-tainted water.
But it goes on…”…(showing obvious poverty and unemployment scenes)…rigging the system against the People, creating a two-tiered society, with policies that fail our most vulnerable,dooming our poor to an unjust cycle of incarceration, stacking the deck against businesses that don’t get subsidies and tax breaks….(then an image of Abraham Lincoln)” These people are astonishing. THEY are the ones creating inequality, poverty and electing former Segregationists, White Supremacists, former KKK members to both state legislatures and Congress, using exactly these kinds of techniques. When the Fascists in Italy and the Nazis in Germany wanted to take over their governments, they were not the majorities. They did it by persuading the populations of those two countries that the inactivity, nothing being done, (which they had created by obstructing every piece of reasonable legislation) was the fault of the system, the current method of government, and more could be done in Trump-like fashion. This is the entire purpose of these commercials.
This brings us to Trump. Why don’t the Republican hierarchy like Trump? Is it his insulting manner? Well, have you seen any of the racist materials put out by the Right Wing Republicans or listened to any of the radio time from Rush Limbaugh or the banned-from-visiting-Britain, MichaeL Savage? Have you ever heard of Sarah Palin or Ann Coulter? So…no…it isn’t Trump’s language. It is just one thing. He is not beholden to other billionaires who have bought their candidates until now. He is a fellow billionaire, so many of his policies are my-way-or-the-highway, just as are theirs. But they have spent billions buying up Neo-Fascist politicians. They have a huge investment in controlling this country. And they are well on their way to doing so.
Now comes Trump. He starts talking about inequality even though he knows nothing–zero–about it. And when the hicks in Alabama who are finally waking up to the fact that the Koch Brothers have been buying politicians to play on their fears of blacks and their religious superstitions to elect people like those they have, like the Walmart-clerk mentality of most Republican congressmen, they see Trump as saying good things and…hey…he isn’t preaching to us to drop our beers and leave the NASCAR monotony early as those heathen Democrats want us to do. We can vote for our stuff and still not have to think or change our diets. This is Trump. He foils the Kochs because he has found a way to something one might call Trump-Populist-Stupid. And he is ruining all their well funded plans for the future.
And that does bring us to the future. All the bull shit in these commercials will work for the Kochs, even though they are peeing their pants about Trump. He is a billionaire. He’s not going to do anything for the people. Even the revered and populist sounding gentleman, and he is a gentle man, does very little for the People except find and support good companies here in the U.S., which, in itself, and to be fair, like the Koch Brothers, offers good wages and benefits families. This is perhaps, paradoxically, the best thing that billionaires can do, and the Kochs, Trump and Buffett all do it and do it pretty well. But there is a difference.
Buffett is not trying to do away with Social Security. The Kochs are. Buffett wants wage improvements for both society and for economic development. The Kochs have given hundreds of millions through Pacs and organizations like Americans for Prosperity to elect anti-union and right-to-work governors to keep workers at low wages by lying about how right-to-work will create more jobs. Sometimes it does because minimum-wage companies can flourish in states where wages are lower and people are therefore poorer. But those poor people cannot pay property taxes and therefore cannot fund good schools (which is why they are all the statistically worst educated in the country) or fund hospitals and roads. Society needs taxes to create decent public infrastructure to grow with each new era.
So are the Kochs evil? What we do know is that what they discuss in these commercials are the very things that their policies have created. So, what should we think of very rich people…unbelievably rich, by the way…who say they want to fix these things but clearly in their actions want to not only perpetuate them, but to hide the fact that they are. Once again, unfortunately, the best examples of people who have done this in the past were Fascists. Using propaganda to make the Jews the scapegoats as these people are using the poor as scapegoats. And then producing commercials like these to lie about it. Producing commercials saying that someone else….some isolated government and corporations (but not theirs)…are causing these problems and maintaining that they want to help.
They spend hundreds of millions a year…a drop in the bucket if you are worth 44,000-million (that’s what $44 billion actually is)…to buy up time in hundreds of universities around the country to have some shill make the same kinds of arguments for them that they make in these commercials. They founded the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Mercatus Center and literally hundreds of organizations that fall under the aegis known as the Tea Party.
So, what to do? Spread the word. Read about the Koch Brothers. Read about their organizations. Read about ALEC. Prepare to elect and work to elect every Democrat you can find. In a Neo-Fascist party like the Republican Party, there is only obedience or exile. They vote in a bloc. Only with majority Democratic rule in the House and Senate can we break the cycle of Koch-funded obstruction and show the People what good government can do …and has done prior to Reagan… for them.
