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Yes, even more on how the Republican Party American Taliban and their corporate hoods are making the attempt to usurp the United States government, and you also.
Original Article by kalich for Progressive Policy Zone
Everybody's favorite progressive weekly, The Nation, just released a leaked internal "election packet" from—you guessed it—Koch Industries. This packet included many "helpful items," including (for most Koch employees) a list of who to vote for in the November 2010 election. Also enclosed was a large amount of corporate propaganda, extolling the virtues of a free-market system, & enumerating the ways in which Koch Industries is entangled in a struggle for liberty against Big Government. Courtesy to the pro-businessCitizens United Supreme Court ruling, all this is possible. In fact, the cover memo from David Robertson, COO, sort of acknowledges this, noting that for the very first time, all 50,000 US employees would receive this propaganda. Below the fold, I try to break down some of the propaganda, drawing upon both the Kochs' disinformation and the revealing companion article in The Nation co-written by Mark Ames and Mike Elk.
The Cogs of a Corporate Propaganda Machine
And the facts are that the overwhelming majority of the American people will be much worse off if government overspending is allowed to bankrupt the country.
On the cover of Discovery, the quarterly newsletter produced by Koch Industries, an editorial makes a claim that is, in essence, wrong. Again we see a classic example of the false neoliberal assertion that government spending is bad butting its head into political discourse. (As an earlier, particularly well-thought-out Nation article noted, the government cannot run out of money, since it is the sole creator of its currency. Therefore, we should not be concerned about ballooning deficits, nor should we be so scared as to have to borrow billions of dollars from other countries.)
After a page of letters exalting the Koch Empire for "what [it] is doing for all Americans," and some corporate updates from around the world, we find the gears of the Koch propaganda machine. In a piece entitled "What's a business to do?", 'real world' examples (from Koch Industries' own companies) develop the idea that private business is unequivocally better than the government, because its usage of resources apparently does not create value. To me, the most striking proposal in this editorial is that minimum wage laws distort the labor market, therefore "[causing] unemployment." Where is the logic behind this? In the last part of this article, the unnamed author claims Americans who are critical of the "out-of-control government of the United States are being shouted down" by those in power. He then states,
Too many government elites think they know what's best for citizens and ignore the wishes of the citizens themselves.
Unfortunately, (s)he does not provide an example of this. But I can, although I'm sure it wouldn't appear in Discovery: what about the recent Medicare proposal in the Ryan budget? An overwhelming majority of Americans are firmly opposed to turning Medicare into a voucher system, but yet the Koch-funded politicians in D.C. are ignoring "the wishes of the citizens themselves." I'll bet that most of the employees of Koch Industries would not support these politicians if they voted for privatization of Medicare.
The most bizarre part of the newsletter is an editorial by Charles Koch: a history lesson in which Koch grades presidents of the past. He gives a solid A+ to both Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge; to Hoover, he gives a failing mark. It is strange that these Great Depression-era presidents are given different markings. It is fairly well-known that Harding and Coolidge's policies of lower taxes coupled with union-busting and an overall "free-market romp" were the among the many factors that caused the Great Depression, according to Ames. It seems that Koch likes them simply because they lowered corporate taxes—exactly what the far-right and the candidates endorsed by Koch in the mailing are now proposing.
Panacea
Thanks to the Citizens United ruling, a corporation like Koch Industries can now impose its political will upon all employees (whereas before, only management could share among themselves endorsed candidates). The solution is to get the Department of Justice to purse a reversal of the Supreme Court decision. Until that happens, employees of any company can be coerced into supporting candidates who may be in favor of helping out Big Business, but certainly not helping them.
Download the leaked mailing. Read it over. What are your thoughts about this?
Originally posted to Progressive Policy Zone on Wed Apr 20, 2011
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