Marco Rubio To Give Keynote Speech For Koch Brothers' New John Birch Society

The Koch family spent a lot of money getting Marco Rubio into office and they're not about to throw it all away just because the teabaggers and Know Nothings they cultivate as their shock troops are upset over some issue-- immigration reform-- the Koch don't even care about. Papa Fred-- a gussied up, old line KKK redneck who struck it rich-- would have cared, but Charles and David only care about money. The Kochs are standing behind Rubio-- with a wall of cash funneled through all their high-flyin' front groups.

Fox News viewers in Florida will see a new commercial in the coming weeks urging them to call Senator Marco Rubio. “Thank him for keeping his promise, and fighting to secure the border,” a narrator says in the ad, which is paid for by the conservative American Action Network.

Another group, Americans for a Conservative Direction, led by former Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and other top Republicans, has been running ads in Iowa lately that implore those watching to “stand with Marco Rubio to end de facto amnesty.”

And when the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the Koch brothers’ political advocacy group, decided to move its signature annual conference outside Washington for the first time, it picked a spot right in Mr. Rubio’s political backyard: Orlando. The keynote speaker? Mr. Rubio. ... Rubio has been attacked at Tea Party rallies (his name elicits boos), on conservative radio (“a piece of garbage,” Glenn Beck called him) and in National Review (“Rubio’s Folly,” declared a recent cover).

Still, running interference on Mr. Rubio’s behalf is fraught with risk for conservative groups, who are going against many in their own base.

“We know that there’s a lot of folks on both sides,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity. “But I think the vast majority of people appreciate the fact that Senator Rubio is doing what he thinks is best for the country. And that he’s doing it in an open and honest way.”

Mr. Phillips declined to discuss any implications for Mr. Rubio and 2016, but said, “We think that he’s got a bright future within the movement, and in whatever he chooses to do down the road.”

And, the Koch family's obsession with transforming America into a John Bircher hellhole is intergeneration and will never end. Investigative journalist Lee Fang has written extensively about the Kochs and their insidious right-wing operations in his new book, The Machine: A field Guide To The Resurgent Right. This is just a tiny portion of a treasure trove of information about one vile plutocratic family working effectively to overthrown democracy in America.

Obama, unlike Roosevelt with Du Pont, waited years before confronting the Koch brothers in the public arena. Rather than taking them on directly, Obama, for a short period during the midterm elections, mocked the Koch-financed group called Americans for Prosperity, saying the name was misleading. The Koch brothers were accused of rampant oil speculation, driving the price of gasoline up for consumers, and their allies in the banking sector of crashing the economy. However, Obama and the Democrats were slow to recognize the political threat, and for some reason, were too timid to explicitly denounce the Koch brothers. The circumstances, of course, were also different. America suffered through a housing market collapse, a financial crisis, and perpetual unemployment as Obama took office, but not an earth-shattering event like the Great Depression. Backlash against the rich never materialized in the same way as it had under Roosevelt, and Obama suffered from the right-wing charge, amplified on Fox News and talk radio, that he was a “socialist.” Maybe Obama thought a confrontation with the Koch brothers would only lend credibility to the belief that he practiced left-wing “class warfare.” In any event, the calculation to largely ignore the Koch brothers only helped them lurk in the shadows, exercising even greater influence.

And the Koch brothers were prepared for battle with Obama unlike any plutocrats of the past. The Du Ponts stumbled awkwardly into forays with Roosevelt and never learned to avoid the press and public scrutiny into their lobbying. More profoundly, the Koch brothers had developed a political strategy perfected by generations of right-wing tycoons-- including their father, the founder of the Koch family conglomerate, Koch Industries. For fifty years, the Koch family plotted, experimented, and financed groups to advance a very right-wing form of conservatism. The tactics employed against Obama had been concocted for many years prior.

The Koch brothers surpassed the influence of any other single wealthy individual or business group because of their holistic approach to, as Charles would say, “advancing liberty.” Organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would fund advertisements and pay insider lobbyists. The Coors family funded conservative think tanks and cultural institutions. John Allison, former CEO of BB&T bank, single-handedly financed an array of professors dedicated to the beliefs of Ayn Rand at major universities. Conservative activists like Grover Norquist convened regular meetings for ideological peers to collaborate. The Koch brothers incorporated all of these tactics, and more. They funded talent to come up with even better strategies and offered to lend money to anything-- movies, internships, ad campaigns, books, social networking websites-- that would “create value” to further the cause.

...As Obama prepared for his inauguration, the Koch family declared political war. In January after the presidential election, Charles proclaimed in a newsletter to his fifty thousand employees that America was quickly arriving at the “greatest loss of liberty and prosperity since the 1930s.” The somber warning noted what he saw as the parallels between Roosevelt’s Keynesian response to the Great Depression and Obama’s calls for fiscal stimulus in light of the financial crisis. He warned against “piling on even more regulations” and new “make-work” government programs modeled after the Roosevelt administration. Charles lectured, “it is markets, not government that can provide the strongest engine for growth, lifting us out of these troubling times.” Many of the programs Roosevelt had started in reaction to the Great Depression persisted for generations, Charles warned. In challenging the new president, Charles appeared to be anointing himself the heir to Irénée Du Pont’s crusade against Franklin Roosevelt, or his own father’s fight against John Kennedy and moderate Republicans. Only this time, Charles hoped to succeed.



And inflaming Charles’s worst fears, Obama gave a bold, progressive speech at his inauguration, making clear his intention to transition to a clean energy economy, to reform the nation’s health care system, and to remake the country’s sagging infrastructure. The financial crisis, Obama said, “reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control.” “The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous,” he added. Billionaires like the Koch brothers took note.

As Obama announced his promise to change America, it seems doubtful that he could have known that among the many entrenched business interests gearing up to lobby against reform, a single ultra-rich family was preparing to fight him across the board. He didn’t even have to look far from where he stood to see their reach. Ironically, INVISTA, a Koch Industries subsidiary, had won the government contract to provide the imperial blue and red carpeting for the inauguration ceremony. The second Obama became president, he was standing atop a Koch product.

Within two days of Obama’s swearing his oath of office, the Koch network sprung into action. A website called NoStimulus.com launched, along with a television advertising campaign, a petition, and a series of media events designed to defeat Obama’s first signature accomplishment, the $800 billion Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as simply the stimulus. In what later blossomed into the Tea Party movement, Koch-funded organizers fanned across the country organizing “Porkulus” rallies decrying government spending and regulations. Koch-supported groups, for instance the Competitive Enterprise Institute and state-based think tanks like the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy, fired off a volley of anti-stimulus press releases, op-eds, and joint events with Republican lawmakers. Koch operatives staged media events with the most vitriolic opponents of the stimulus, like Governor Mark Sanford and Senator Jim DeMint, both from South Carolina.

By early February, as the vote neared, Americans for Prosperity, one of the main Koch-financed front groups, sent a letter to congressional Republicans instructing them to oppose the stimulus, regardless of any amendments or adjustments made to the bill. Indeed, in a bid for bipartisanship, Democrats offered a slimmed-down version of Obama’s proposed stimulus. In order to gain the vote of three Senate Republicans, tax cuts comprised a third of the stimulus.

While the stimulus ultimately passed, the anti-stimulus hysteria helped conservatives shift the national debate from the causes of the financial crisis to issues like the national debt and government waste. More importantly, the right-wing echo chamber, comprised in no small part of dozens of Koch-funded nonprofits, provided cover for every Republican in the House and nearly every Republican in the Senate to vote against the bill.

Sporadic advertising from Koch groups attempted to spark populist outrage. One television spot, which began soon after Obama took office, featured a middle-aged man exclaiming loudly: “Congress should stop wasting our money and start focusing on real problems!” As the disheveled-looking man yelled about the government, text decrying global warming as a “hoax” flashed across the bottom of the screen. The ad didn’t propose an alternative or any solution for that matter; rather it seemed to be crafted simply to stir general outrage. Another Koch ad, which began airing around the same time, showed an actor who said his name was “Carlton, the wealthy eco-hypocrite.” The ad was not a large buy, but the script was a perfect specimen of Koch-funded fake populist outrage:

Hey there, I’m Carlton, the wealthy eco-hypocrite. I inherited my money and attended fancy schools. I own three homes and five cars, but always talk with my rich friends about saving the planet. And I want Congress to spend billions on programs in the name of global warming and green energy. Even if it causes massive unemployment, higher energy bills, and digs people like you even deeper into the recession. Who knows, maybe I’ll even make money off of it!

Of course, the Koch brothers inherited their money, attended elite private schools, and own an array of private jets and vacation homes. Their opposition to addressing global warming had nothing to do with energy prices. In fact, many of the serious plans from Democrats to tackle global warming would have lowered energy prices for the vast majority of Americans, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Denying the threat of global warming only permits the Koch brothers to make vast amounts of money from their pollution-based empire. But the Koch brothers weren’t interested in an honest debate. They wanted to kill attempts to regulate their pollution, and were willing to say or do anything to provoke middle- and lower-income voters to turn against Obama.

Still... Rubio wanted to burnish his credentials with the far, far right before the Koch confab. So he announced this morning that he'd offer the same anti-Choice legislation nationally-- knowing full well it would never get out of committee-- that is tearing Texas, North Carolina and Ohio apart this week. Divisiveness is a win-win for the far right, since those people don't want anything to ever work anyway. Their strategy on the bill-- despite polls showing how unpopular it is-- is that it "might strengthen GOP candidates in the 2014 midterm election."

Rubio’s decision to play a major role in the abortion debate is bound to stir political speculation. He is viewed as a likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

But he’s recently prompted serious criticism by Republicans over his support for the immigration reform bill that passed the Senate last week. His front-and-center role on a key anti-abortion measure is likely to ease concerns about him among GOP voters.

Here are part 2 and 3 of that BBC look at the Wall Plot fascist plot to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt that people fear Koch is emulating:

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Court And Spark

When I was 16 I hitchhiked from Brooklyn to Los Angeles so I could stow away on a ship to Tonga. In Brooklyn there had never been anything like the billboard campaigns along Route 66 in state after state in the middle of the country to impeach Earl Warren. Warren was a moderate Republican Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, appointed by President Eisenhower, and Fred Koch, the money behind the virulently anti-American John Birch Society and the father of today's vile Koch brothers, made it his life's work to impeach Earl Warren (as well as Eisenhower and Kennedy). Fred Koch is the evidence that society should confiscate all the wealth of sociopathic individuals who use that wealth to undermine society itself. Lee Fang devotes a whole chapter of his new book, The Machine, to the evil Koch family.

The true story of the Koch family’s dedication to rightwing politics begins back one generation with the father. Fred C. Koch, a hardscrabble Texan of Dutch ancestry, founded the Koch Industries empire and pioneered a strategy for advancing conservatism that was pivotal in shaping the modern American right. He unapologetically attacked his enemies, branding them communists, or worse. He paid for groups to help whip up a grassroots army filled with populist rage against the united Nations, Justice Earl Warren, and President Kennedy. He helped begin the process of evicting moderates from the Republican Party. And he instilled in his sons a philosophy that a proper “American businessman” should “fight like a tiger” when someone tries to “take a few thousand dollars away from him.”

Fred, a racist who detested the civil rights movement, probably could have never imagined a black president of the United States. But Fred laid the groundwork for his sons to try to tear the first one down.

...Because Eisenhower allowed the Panamanian flag to fly over the Panama Canal, Fred surmised that the president was “beginning to surrender” to the “Communist conspiracy.” Fred wrote that “a former Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American affairs told me that certain members of the State Department helped put Castro in power and guide his every move.” Fred believed Democrats, as well as moderate Republicans, were actively enabling Castro, who he called the “Mao Tze-tung of the Western Hemisphere.”

In December of 1958, in the living room of a brick Tudor house in a quiet Indianapolis neighborhood, Fred was summoned for a meeting with eleven other staunch anticommunists who shared his fervent belief that Christian society and free markets were at grave risk of slipping away. Robert Welch, a candy manufacturer who had been financing and authoring a series of pamphlets articulating his anticommunist ideas for half a decade, presided over the special gathering. Welch bellowed that there had been an “800% expansion of Communist membership in [the] last 20 years” and that the recent surge in inflation and “collectivism” was part of a red plot to destroy American civilization. After two full days of nearly uninterrupted lecture, Welch presented his solution: a new organization to fight the left in every corner of America. Named after a Baptist missionary serving as an American soldier, who was reportedly killed by the Chinese in 1946, the John Birch Society was born. Welch wanted to make Birch a martyr and proclaimed him the first American death in the war against communism. The men at the meeting, many of them leaders of the powerful National Association of Manufacturers, agreed they would level the playing field with the communists and commit to “fight dirty.”

Welch parlayed his expertise in marketing candy into a multifaceted strategy for advancing his paranoid anticommunist beliefs. He recorded simple how-to videos, developed a door-to-door strategy for his organizers, and stressed the importance of advertising to his allies. Fred’s wife Mary later remarked that she had always been impressed with Welch and his approach to politics. Welch was a “very intelligent, sharp man, quite an intellectual,” she told the Wichita Eagle.

The Birchers, with plenty of seed money from Fred and his cohorts, spread quickly throughout the nation, hiring field operatives, hosting training sessions, and publishing hundreds of thousands of Welch’s Blue Book of anticommunist theory and monthly newsletters proclaiming new examples of communist infiltration. The Belmont, Massachusetts, headquarters of the Birchers initially hired twenty-eight employees, in addition to many volunteers who labored to fire off $4,000 worth of mail every week. As a founding member of the national John Birch Society Council, Fred served as a liaison to paid coordinators, who in turn worked with volunteer chapter leaders and ordinary members. Under the seemingly benign motto of “Less government, more responsibility,” the Birchers recruited upward of 50,000 people in a massive rollout campaign during the spring of 1961. In the wake of the Kennedy victory and a relatively liberal Republican Party, the Birchers filled a vacuum of conservative leadership.

Through monthly bulletins and taped lectures from Welch, individual members were asked to advance the cause in their local communities. Goals would include tasks such as attending meetings of “Communist fronts” like the ACLU to shout down “disloyal” speakers or to organize “spontaneous” petition gatherings to impeach Earl Warren. Despite their belief that every liberal group in America was truly a front group for communists, the Birchers themselves were obsessed with using dummy organizations to better achieve their agenda. Welch recommended that members assemble various fronts like: TACT (Truth About Civil Turmoil), which connected civil rights groups and African American organizations with communists; TRAIN (To Restore American Independence), a group to mock the united Nations and pacifists; SYLP (Support Your Local Police), a particularly effective recruiting tool after the Watts riots; and MOTOREDE (The Movement to Restore Decency), which lobbied against sex education, birth control, and abortion.

A Bircher-led red scare rekindled McCarthyism in towns across the country. In Amarillo, Texas, the local Bircher leaders, including the mayor and a retired brigadier general, led a campaign to purge a clergyman accused of being a communist sympathizer. They also rid the libraries of “communist” books, which included Pulitzer Prize–winning literature, and punished teachers who had been accused of disloyalty. According to historian Rick Perlstein, Centralia, Missouri, became a “virtual Birch fiefdom; the owner of the factory that employed half the town’s workforce made membership practically a condition for advancement.” In Fred’s hometown Wichita chapter, which included its own paid Birch Society organizer, Time observed that “student members of the society are trained to tell their cell leader of any ‘Communist’ influence noted in classroom lectures; by phone, parents belabor the offending teacher and his principal for apologies and admissions of guilt.”

The rapid rise of the Bircher movement sharply divided the GOP. In early 1961, the national press reported on Welch’s view that Dwight Eisenhower was guilty of “treason,” and that his brother Milton Eisenhower was probably his “boss within the Communist party.” This prompted a harsh rebuke from a group of Republican elders. “It is unbelievable that any sane person would make such accusations,” said North Dakota Republican Milton Young during a speech on the Senate floor. Liberal Republican Senator Thomas Kuchel complained he was being targeted by Birchers in his reelection bid.

However, a faction of Southern lawmakers and Republican politicians found strength in the Bircher brand of conservative populism. Dixiecrat Congressman L. Mendel Rivers of South Carolina extolled the Birchers as a “nation-wide organization of patriotic Americans.” Congressmen John Rousselot and Edgar Hiestand, both California Republicans, were card-carrying Birch Society members. Life reported that Republican defenders of the group believed that the Birchers would serve as a vanguard for the “conservative renaissance in America whose main respectable apostle is Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.”

When I was a schoolboy, the giants on the Supreme Court appointed by FDR were beginning to retire-- Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, William O. Douglas. Truman's, Eisenhower's and Kennedy's appointments weren't as profound, just kind of mainstream. LBJ's last appointment was Thurgood Marshall, a brilliant jurist who was also the first African-American to serve on the Court. Even 75% of Nixon's dreadful conservative appointments were kind of mainstream-- Warren Burger, Harry Blackmun and Lewis Powell-- and it wasn't until his final appointment, the hideous William Rehnquist, that the GOP decided to turn the Supreme Court into an ideological and highly partisan arm of the Republican Party. Rehnquist came to prominence as an Arizona attorney who would work on Election Day trying to prevent Blacks and Hispanics from voting. Reagan made him Chief Justice when Burger retired. The Court started transitioning from a conservative bastion to a reactionary one. Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito are dangerous far right ideologues and corporate whores who work every day of their lives against the interests of ordinary American families. Hopefully when Scalia and Kennedy, each 77 years old and fighting off senility, retire President Hillary Clinton will replace them with more mainstream justices. But, for now, the GOP and corporate America control the Supreme Court, just the way Fred Koch had planned long ago. E.J. Dionne:

We prefer to think of the Supreme Court as an institution apart from politics and above its struggles. In the wake of this week’s decision gutting the heart of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, its actions must now be viewed through the prism of the conservative movement’s five-decade-long quest for power.

Liberals will still win occasional and sometimes partial victories, as they did Wednesday on same-sex marriage. But on issues directly related to political and economic influence, the court’s conservative majority is operating as a political faction, determined to shape a future in which progressives will find themselves at a disadvantage.

...The marriage rulings, however, should not distract from the arrogance of power displayed in the voting rights decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts. His opinion involved little Constitutional analysis. He simply substituted the court’s judgment for Congress’ in deciding which states should be covered under the Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which required voting rules in states with a history of discrimination to be pre-cleared by the Justice Department.

The court instructed Congress to rewrite the law, even though these sophisticated conservatives certainly know how difficult this will be in the current political climate.

Whenever conservatives on the court have had the opportunity to tilt the playing field toward their own side, they have done so. And in other recent cases, the court has weakened the capacity of Americans to take on corporate power. The conservative majority seems determined to bring us back to the Gilded Age of the 1890s.

The voting rights decision should be seen as following a pattern set by the rulings in Bush v. Gore in 2000 and Citizens United in 2010.

Bush v. Gore had the effect of installing the conservatives’ choice in the White House and allowed him to influence the court’s subsequent direction with his appointments of Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.

Citizens United swept aside a tradition going back to the Progressive Era-- and to the Founders’ deep concern over political corruption-- by vastly increasing the power of corporate and monied interests in the electoral sphere.

Tuesday’s Shelby County v. Holder ruling will make it far more difficult for African-Americans to challenge unfair electoral and districting practices. For many states, it will be a Magna Carta to make voting more difficult if they wish to.

The Constitution, through the 14th and 15th Amendments, gives Congress a strong mandate to offer federal redress against discriminatory and regressive actions by state and local governments. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in her scalding but very precise dissent, “a governing political coalition has an incentive to prevent changes in the existing balance of voting power.”

In less diplomatic language, existing majorities may try to fix election laws to make it far more difficult for their opponents to toss them from power in later elections. Republican legislatures around the country passed a spate of voter suppression laws disguised as efforts to guarantee electoral “integrity” for just this purpose.

Recall that when conservatives did not have a clear court majority, they railed against “judicial activism.” Now that they have the capacity to impose their will, many of the same conservatives defend extreme acts of judicial activism by claiming they involve legitimate interpretations of the true meaning of the Constitution.

It is an inconsistency that tells us all we need to know. This is not an argument about what the Constitution says. It is a battle for power. And, despite scattered liberal triumphs, it is a battle that conservatives are winning.

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Can The Koch Brothers Turn The L.A. Times Into The Volkischer Beobachter?

Whenever I go shopping for paper products I bring this handy list along:

Angel Soft® toilet paper
Brawny® paper towels
Quilted Northern® toilet paper
Soft n' Gentle® toilet paper
Dixie® plates, bowls, napkins, & cups
Mardi Gras® napkins and towels
Sparkle® napkins
Vanity Fair® napkins
Zee® Napkins
Georgia-Pacific® paper products, lumber and building products
INVISTA® products
Lycra® products
Stainmaster® Carpet

I stopped buying Quilted Northern and Brawny brands. They're part of the fascist Koch Bros Empire, which has been seeking to overturn democracy in America and spends hundreds of millions of dollars to do so. Now the Koch brothers are trying to buy up a media empire as well, since they claim the right-wing voice in this country isn't loud enough. The NY Times refers to them as "supporters of libertarian causes," rather than as fascists or even just John Birchers, which are much more accurate descriptions. And on Saturday, Amy Chozick at the Times reported on their plans to buy the Tribune Company's eight very influential regional newspapers, including the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel and the Hartford Courant to help propagate their hateful ideology and recruit their puppet candidates.

By early May, the Tribune Company is expected to send financial data to serious suitors in what will be among the largest sales of newspapers by circulation in the country. Koch Industries is among those interested, said several people with direct knowledge of the sale who spoke on the condition they not be named. Tribune emerged from bankruptcy on Dec. 31 and has hired JPMorgan Chase and Evercore Partners to sell its print properties.

The papers, valued at roughly $623 million, would be a financially diminutive deal for Koch Industries, the energy and manufacturing conglomerate based in Wichita, Kan., with annual revenue of about $115 billion.

Politically, however, the papers could serve as a broader platform for the Kochs’ laissez-faire ideas. The Los Angeles Times is the fourth-largest paper in the country, and The Tribune is No. 9, and others are in several battleground states, including two of the largest newspapers in Florida, the Orlando Sentinel and the Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. A deal could include Hoy, the second-largest Spanish-language daily newspaper, which speaks to the pivotal Hispanic demographic.

Like Quilted Northern and all Koch products, all those papers should be completely boycotted if they're taken over to serve the cause of fascism.

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