David Koch

One of the brothers Koch, David, has shuffled off this mortal coil, and the pious few looking at his passing may well think he is making it tough for camels passing through needles.  As part of the Brothers Koch, he presided over a corporate empire that did its pinching best to wrest control from the purses of public accountability in the US republic.  At his death, he was the eleventh richest person on the planet, on par with his dominant brother, Charles.

Fifty Years after rhapsodic auguries of the acid-informed era involving the coming “Woodstock Nation,” the US citizenry — convulsed by violence, strung out on all the wrong drugs, and with the Rolling Stones still touring — stumble in mortification through the grim phantasmagoria of the United States Of Altamont. What a long, strange, bad (Nixonian in its dour, paranoid cultural and political aura; Reagan/Clinton/Obama in noxious, neoliberal fantasy; Bush/Trump in cresting tsunamis of raging stupid) trip it has been.

Multibillionaires Charles and David Koch want nothing less than to supplant America’s core democratic principle of majority rule — the will of The People — with their core plutocratic principle of inviolable property rights, also known as domination by the wealthy minority. Their notion is that “property” (accumulated wealth and the means to get it) is sacrosanct and cannot be restricted by the pesky majority for the Common Good.

After running out of time during our discussion on the Vietnam War and the Ken Burns documentary, Michael Swanson and I recorded this short extra. We talk about the South Vietnamese community that settled in Washington DC during and after the war, China and Vietnam’s economic competition, CIA agent Donald Gregg and his connection to DC Madame Henry Vinson, and Bank of America’s funding of Ken Burns.

(ZH) — While publicly polarizing average-joe America at every opportunity, it appears the ‘elites’ are having a blast ‘together’ behind the scenes…
As Politico reports…

George Mason University students pose by the George Mason statue on campus in Fairfax, Va. George Mason University, a public school outside the nation’s capital, has quietly become a conservative powerhouse in economics and law, a reputation built in part with tens of millions of dollars a year from billionaire Republican donor Charles Koch. (AP/Jacquelyn Martin)

While most Americans – Trump supporters and detractors alike – have realized that the President’s campaign promise to “drain the swamp” is unlikely to happen, a new analysis from the watchdog group Public Citizen has made it official. According to the group’s new report, titled “Corporate Executives Swamp the White House,” Trump has met with at least 190 corporate executives since his inauguration. Since becoming President-Elect, that figure jumps to 224.

For decades, the Koch Brothers have funded a massive propaganda operation to disparage what democracy can do when a society pulls together and to glorify a “greed is good” narrative promising great benefits if capitalism reigns free. But the results have been good only for a privileged few, as Michael Winship describes. By Michael Winship…

The subject of Craig Rosebraugh’s new documentary Greedy Lying Bastards is the billion dollar climate denial industry, which he blames for the failure of the global community to agree a new international climate treaty.