barbos
Contributor
I hate Koch(s) too, but how is all this that relevant?
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ronburgundy
Contributor
I get it just fine, and every day you and other bigots prove what actually underlies your politics.
Trump is making plenty of effort to get re-elected. Every day he promotes xenophobic racism, attacks women's most fundamental human rights, and promotes anti-intellectualism and anti-science in nearly every domain relevant to public policy. Those are what got him elected in 2016 and continue to gain him support.
It also helps him greatly that all his supporters are too dangerously stupid to understand basic economic data that proves that all of the economic gains in the last couple years are carry throughs due to the momentum of gains during the last 5 years of Obama after he stalled and turned around the greatest decline since the depression that occurred under the last GOP president.
As for the impact of Koch's death on 2020, your comment shows laughable ignorance of the basic facts about the nature of culture and social influence. Koch's decades helping to promote these same things has helped damaged the culture in ways that won't magically disappear with his death, but will resonate for decades. Your applying the same dangerous ignorance of behavioral science that leads you conclude that slavery is not a major determinant of today's outcome inequalites, which is rooted in the notion that the effects of 500 years of slavery and another century of denial of basic civil rights up until 50 years ago just magically disappeared the second the second slavery and Jim Crow laws were ended. This is the necessarily assumption behind your and all white supremacists notions that blacks are the cause of their own problems.
Not to mention, Koch not only still has a living brother actively still promoting xenophobia, anti-science, and misogyny, but the institutes, and many other aspects of political infrastructure he created to promote these things, including funding white nationalist professors, are all alive and well, and comfortably funded going forward.
In short, your comment is intellectually identical to claiming that if a person helped to push a boulder off a cliff, then if that person dies, the boulder should just magically disappear or reverse gravity and return to the top.
Bomb#20
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Your ideology isn't the only one that makes the people it infects pick out a minority group and call them parasites and ticks. Do you have any reason for thinking yours is an inch different from those other ideologies, apart from the Labor Theory of Value? Because the Labor Theory of Value is a steaming pile of dingoes' kidneys.
ronburgundy
Contributor
Funding political efforts is not evil in itself. It can just as easily be benevolent and moral. It is particular political efforts that are evil, because politics are just a form of action and particular actions are evil (enriching oneself by causing harm to most of humanity) while other actions are not (trying to reduce the suffering of people who have suffered misfortune). The underlying problem isn't that the Koch's help the party Republicans win, that is a byproduct. The problem is that they promote highly immoral and anti-science beliefs and policies and seek to help anyone who shares these goals to win. It just sadly happens that the GOP has built it's party and political base around these beliefs and policies, which is in turn a reflection on their own immorality.
The efforts of the Koch's that are viewed as immoral are matter of fact and public record. The only room for debate is whether one views efforts to spread objective false anti-science, and pro-white nationalist pseudo history as immoral (which sadly, few Republicans and almost no Trump supporters do).
In stark contrast, the efforts by Soros that are actually matters of factual public record are mostly things viewed by any remotely ethical person as ethical or at minimum well-intentioned. These include funding efforts to protect political dissidenst within communist countries from violent oppression, and promoting an independent scientific community (funding 28,000 scientists) within former communist and Soviet bloc countries where science had been suppressed (in contrast to Koch's admitted efforts to use grants to specific professors to promote a specific dogma). Other efforts include fighting to liberate occupied and oppressed people in Africa and Eastern Europe and fight for basic human rights in the US against fascistic drug laws and end-of-life laws. Virtually none of the accusations against him that would qualify as immoral have any evidence and most have been proven false and lies promoted by the very right wing and alt-right voices that the Koch brothers have helped to fuel and allied with.
So yes, I am judging the ethics of Soros and Koch differently based upon my ethical standards of how their actions cause harm to or help innocent people who've been harmed by either circumstance or active oppression. Your efforts to turn that into a bias against the right, only demonstrate how morally bankrupt the right is that judging people by the most basic and widely accepted empathic standards winds up being biased against the right.
When you put your money in the bank you're basically hiring them to find suitable things to loan it out for. Why should you have to look for such opportunities directly? Leave it to the pros!
Jarhyn
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I very much am not hiring them to invest it. If I was, I daresay I would expect a damn hair more than 2c of profit a year on it.
I am hiring them to hold and abstract transactions with my money. If I could feasibly BAR them from investing or risking it absent my consent, I would. If I could control where it's invested, I would.
Jason Harvestdancer
Contributor
I can't wait for people who rejoice over the death of their political opponents are put in charge of the country's healthcare.
Already happened.
Elixir
Made in America
"I never wished a man dead, until Donald Trump ...”
Seriously. Now I wish he and Moscow Mitch were both dead.
ronburgundy
Contributor
Your repeated attempts to cast opposition to actions that cause material harm and death to countless people as a mere difference in opinion is grossly dishonest. Wishing Koch dead is the moral equivalent of wishing death to a mass murderer still on the loose.
We don't all share your oligarchist ideology that just because a person has the economic power to ensure his crimes against humanity are considered "legal", that it makes them any less heinous or worthy of punishment.
Jason Harvestdancer
Contributor
You only approve of it when they use political power to commit crimes against humanity, not economic power.
If they weren't investing it somehow there would be no profit for them to pay you that 2 cents.
ronburgundy
Contributor
In a country where legal abstractions created to protect wealth are deemed "people" and their are no limits to how they spend their money to control politics, economic power is the only real form of political power.
And show me where anyone on the left or right engages in such crimes against humanity and I will heartily disapprove of it.
blastula
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Hey tough guy, why don't you go their house and call them a tick to their face, in front of their spouse and kids too.
SimpleDon
Veteran Member
Let's see who right about the Koch brothers, the paragons of selfless concern for humanity. According to you.
Yes, David Koch did donate money to cancer research, but only after he had contracted the disease.
He was an early supporter of gay rights, but only after the three brothers, David, Charles, and Bill blackmailed the older brother Fred to sign over his shares in the family company to them or else they would expose his homosexuality, according to a sworn disposition by Bill Koch.
David Koch demonstrated his dedication to humanity as being just the opposite, a grotesquely selfish mentality, during his 1980 vice-presidential campaign on the Libertarian ticket when he ran on abolishing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, welfare benefits, the minimum wage, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Showing a total disregard for the elderly, the disabled, the poor, the sick, and the desire to exploit the environment for resources and to use it as a dumping ground for his waste unfettered by any consideration of the damage being done to the common property in the air that we breathe and the water that we drink. All of this to achieve only one possible end, to satisfy his greed.
He wasn't trying to usher a better political and economic system to benefit all mankind, he was trying to form politics and the economy into a vehicle to make himself much richer than he was. This is a vision he shared with other like-minded oligarchs, the other extremely wealthy not only in the US but around the world. They wanted all of the money, not just more, and a re-establishment of a hereditary aristocracy based on financial capital, not land. They justified this to themselves by telling each other and teaching their children that only the rich can handle money, only the rich know what to do with the money, only the rich invest the money, that governments and the non-rich only waste any money that they get.
To accomplish this massive change to politics and to the economy, the Kochs' founded or funded right-wing think tanks, the CATO Institute, AEI, the Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute, to promote their philosophy, anarcho-capitalism, and to produce an academic sheen for their insatiable greed. The messages they sent out were smaller government, lower taxes, de-fang the unions, deregulate, unquestioning worship of the free market and free trade, open borders, no restrictions on the free flow of capital, strong IP protections - patents and trademarks, the restoration of the gold standard, elimination of all forms of welfare and entitlements, all of these resulting in the suppression of wages and a corresponding increase in profits, deflation instead of inflation, and dramatic increase in inequality throughout the entire society.
They put lipstick on the pig of anarchy and re-branded it as libertarianism, to give whatever thin academic support that the anarchists could supply to the idea that we really don't need a government and that the free market can self-regulate and self-organize if we just banish the government from the economy.
But the true measure of their hubris and their ability to use their money to remake the entire society to satisfy their greed was their early and formative role in the absurdity of climate change denial. David paid for the very first climate denial conference in 1991, at which nearly every argument that we still hear today were first presented to the public, a re-hash of the arguments against tobacco causing lung cancer and supporting the health benefits of the lead in paint and in gasoline that conservatives had been making since the beginning of the twentieth century. At the time, the science behind global warming was accepted by both political parties. The Koch money changed that to where today in the Republican party, to be accepted in the party virtually requires denying the science behind climate change.
This is why we demonize the Koch brothers.
For sources and much more read this and this and finally this. The articles are well sourced, just follow the links in them.
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SimpleDon
Veteran Member
I am probably the only one participating in this discussion board who owns an oil well. And I believe that there are ample reasons to hate on the Koch brothers. I wrote many of them here in a response to Jason who also didn't understand why so many people demonize the Koch brothers. In a nutshell, the world that we see today with its divisive politics and its ever-increasing income and wealth inequality is the world that David Koch wished for forty years ago.