A World On Koch

Their name is the Koch brothers, pronounced "Coke." And so there are endless puns to make about them, as on the sign above, taken by this Kos diarist at a unity with unions rally in Harrisburg, PA.

The Koch brothers--fossil fuel billionaires-- have emerged from the shadows as major funders behind two of the master narratives in U.S. politics and policy: that the Climate Crisis is a fraud, and that America can't afford effective government.

Though they remain the puppetmasters, their covert operations aren't totally secret. Their war on Obama was exposed in the New Yorker, their emergence at the heart of Republican politics in the LA Times, the attempts of Common Cause to "uncloak the Kochs" were reported, their specific puppet-mastering in Wisconsin is exposed in Salon, and Think Progress collected evidence of their demanding and living off government subsidies and bailouts while corrupting government and subverting environmental regulation.

And all the while that the Koch brothers fund Climate Crisis deniers, their industries are--surprise surprise--major carbon polluters.

All the money they pour into candidates, officeholders, front organizations, etc. has had a mighty influence in shifting the political dialogue to their terms. They've managed to convince just about everyone to talk about government debt and deficits, and then about cuts that penalize the poor and the middle class, while continuing to prevent huge corporations and the uber-rich from paying fair taxes, and continuing huge subsidies to fossil fuel giants--as the GOPer House did this week, in continuing federal subsidies to the oil industry, which has made a trillion dollars in profits in the past decade.

All this despite repeated exposure of the facts about government deficits, and the overwhelming support among Americans for taxing the obscenely wealthy. This is the power of money without conscience, of narrow business-interest greed without consciousness, and of cowardice in pricey suits by their minions. What the Kochs are doing to the future of the Climate Crisis world is pretty obvious, but what they are doing specifically to America is also to deeply wound our ability to respond to even the effects of the Climate Crisis.

Some may want to buy the world a Coke. But these Kochs are buying the destruction of the world by what they're selling. And as long as we buy that, we're buying in to what they are doing.