These Kochs Aren't For You

An interesting piece in the NY Times on the mysterious disease called Valley Fever the other day.  The news had to do with a court ordering thousands of inmates to be transferred from a couple of California prisons with epidemics of the disease.  The nasty, debilitating and sometimes fatal fungus disease, so far without a cure, is related to hot weather.

The Times story discusses the peculiar genetic factors, the medical mysteries, etc.  But two parts of the story stood out for me.  The first was this:  "Many scientists believe that the uptick in infections is related to changing climate patterns."  Other contributing causes being present, global heating is a factor.

The second has to do with impact. “It destroys lives,” said Dr. Johnson, whose daughter contracted a mild form. “Divorces, lost jobs and bankruptcy are incredibly common, not to mention psychological dislocation.”  Lost jobs and divorces might well result from a debilitating disease that requires a lot of attention.  But bankruptcy--that alone also leads to divorces and psychological problems, and destroys lives.  In combination with debilitating illness, it's a frightening, ugly death spiral.

What do these two observations suggest?  The United States is still one of the few countries in the world that  refuses to face up to the realities of the climate crisis, especially in the political system, and most especially in the federal legislature.  And the United States is possibly the only modern industrial supposedly civilized country where people are forced into poverty and despair because of the cost of medical care.

Which brings us to the Brothers Koch, who more than symbolize the reasons.  In large part, they are the reasons.  The Koch brothers and how they spend their money.

The New Yorker reports that a  two-year study by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University concludes the Kochs have spent some $75 million "tied to climate inaction:"

In its multi-part report, “The Koch Club,” written by Lewis, Eric Holmberg, Alexia Campbell, and Lydia Beyoud, the Workshop found that between 2007 and 2011 the Kochs donated $41.2 million to ninety tax-exempt organizations promoting the ultra-libertarian policies that the brothers favor—policies that are often highly advantageous to their corporate interests. In addition, during this same period they gave $30.5 million to two hundred and twenty-one colleges and universities, often to fund academic programs advocating their worldview. Among the positions embraced by the Kochs are fewer government regulations on business, lower taxes, and skepticism about the causes and impact of climate change.

Climate-change policy directly affects Koch Industries’s bottom line. Koch Industries, according to Environmental Protection Agency statistics cited in the study, is a major source of carbon-dioxide emissions, the kind of pollution that most scientists believe causes global warming."

In the 2010 non-presidential elections alone:

 Koch Industries’s political action committee spent $1.3 million on congressional campaigns that year. When Republicans did take control of the House, a huge block of climate-change opponents was empowered. Fully one hundred and fifty-six members of the House of Representatives that year had signed the “No Climate Tax Pledge.” Of the eighty-five freshmen Republican congressmen elected to the House of Representatives in 2010, seventy-six had signed the No Climate Tax pledge. Fifty-seven of those received campaign contributions from Koch Industries’s political action committee. The study notes that more than half of the House members who signed the pledge in the 112th Congress made statements doubting climate-change science, despite the fact that there is overwhelming scientific consensus on the subject.

This is a heavily financed attempt to influence the political process for generations on the single most important issue to the future of human civilization.

But the Kochs don't stop there.  The United States has been debating ways to provide medical care coverage to its citizens for much of a century, and very specifically in the past decade.  But duly elected members of Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, and a duly elected President signed it, and a duly constituted Supreme Court said it is constitutional.

The Affordable Care Act, which goes some way towards the kind of medical care coverage that the governments of  most other industrial countries provide, so that fewer people will be ruined, impoverished and terrorized on top of serious illness or injury, is the law of the land.

Yet instead of allowing the implementation to proceed so the country can judge whether this is a better system or not, it seems to be the official position of one political party to subvert it.  This effort, which led to the unprecedented, mean-spirited and virtually treasonous threats by Republicans against major league sports who would dare to produce public service announcements explaining the new system, is being led by the Koch brothers, at least financially.

They are currently "pouring millions" into a disinformation campaign to subvert the ACA implementation.  Critics of the health law spent a whopping $400 million on television spots criticizing the law since 2010, over five times the $75 million that the law’s supporters have spent on ads promoting it. Analysts expect $1 billion in expenditures by 2015.