April 6, 2016--With Charity for One

In his Second Inaugural, near the end of America's bitterest and bloodiest war, Abraham Lincoln called for "malice toward none . . . with charity for all."

In more recent years the Koch Brothers called for charity for one. Or two. Them.

Here's how this works thanks to an analysis by Jane Mayer in her important Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right--

Drawing largely on their half-understanding of the work of Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek and the juvenile pieties and simplicities of novelist Ayn Rand, brother Charles, to justify the Kochs' anti-tax, anti-charity views, also cited the 12th century philosopher, Maimonides, by referring to him as saying, "I agree with Maimonides who defined the highest form of charity as dispensing with charity altogether, by enabling your fellow human beings to have the wherewithal to earn their own living."

In other words, do not allow inclinations or pressures to be charitable to interfere with people's motivation to amass unfettered wealth. Charity if unchecked can interfere with the workings of the Market's "invisible hand."

No matter that this is totally untrue. It fits the Kochs' narrative of what to them and their network of big-money activists constitutes a better world.

They also call for the end of all taxation--federal, state, personal, inheritance, corporate, and capital gains--as it too gets in the way of the freest of enterprise.

Foster Freiss, the Wyoming fund manager and Koch ally since the 1980s asserted this blatantly when quoted in Chrystia Freeland's, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich:

He argued that the public benefited more when the wealthy were not taxed because they would use their money to benefit the public more efficiently and effectively than the government. As he put it, left alone and unregulated, they would "self-tax" by contributing to charities.

With a straight face, Freiss wrote--

It's a question--do you believe the government should be taking your money and spending it for you, or do you want to spend it for you? (sic) It's the top 1 percent that probably contributes more to making the world a better place than the 99 percent.

Key to understanding this gibberish is the "probably."

The top 1 percent probably would do so many wonderful things to improve the world. Like fund right-wing think tanks. Like promote the activities of the Tea Party. Like support states in their efforts to gerrymander and suppress voting. Like giving more money to museums that will carve their names in granite than to organizations that are dedicated to assisting the poor.

Have the Kochs ever given anything to God's Love We Deliver, an organization that brings hot meals to the homebound?

Have Freiss and the Kochs contributed any of their cash to rebuild crumbling bridges?

Have they supported any charities that provide healthcare for the indigent?

Is there a homeless shelter named for any of them?

They have not done any of these things.

If they were sincere, rather than merely selfish, to demonstrate that if the government, which they want to phase out, were to eliminate all social programs, including Medicare and Social Security (which they favor) and would eliminate all forms of taxation (which they advocate), to illustrate their generous intentions, if they were allowed to keep all of their money, they would in fact have already done things, again to quote Freiss, "to make the world a better place."

With the exception of some charitable giving to cancer research, I can find few such examples.

Though they have thus far given $64 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

March 28, 2016--The Koch Brothers

For a deeper understanding of our current political culture, I cannot recommend anything more revealing than Jane Mayer's Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.

Much of it focuses on the Koch Brothers, whose combined wealth equals $84 billion, and the organizations that they have stealthily founded and funded. Including the innocuously-named Americans for Prosperity, the Cato and Manhattan Institutes, the Heritage Foundation, and dozens of others off almost everybody's radar screens. And of course, from its inception they provide all kinds of support for the many activities of the Tea Party.

In all of this, they follow in the footsteps of their father, Fred, one of the half dozen or so founders of the ultraconservative John Birch Society, who began to amass his fortune by building oil refineries in Germany for Hitler's Third Reich. He so admired the Fuhrer and Mein Kampf that Father Fred visited with him at least 11 times and spoke effusively about him in the years leading up to World War II.

Of course, this "episode" is not included in official histories of Koch Industries. The timeline for those half dozen years is blank.

What is most interesting and less well known are the things the Kochs would like to see happen to America and our government. The reasons they have spent hundreds of million dollars on these organizations.

To summarize their political agenda in a few words--they would like to see the end of government altogether. Literally.

Not scaled back, not pruned here and there, not just contracted in size with the Commerce Department, Environmental Protection Agency, and of course the Federal Reserve and IRS all eliminated. Kaput.

In their mostly private speeches and writings they call for the elimination of all manifestations of government. They would repeal all of the New Deal, including Social Security and unemployment insurance and all Great Society programs. This means, if they had their way, there would be no Medicare, Medicaid, much less any public accommodation or voting rights legislation.

They would eliminate all public funding for education. This means they would provide no governmental support whatsoever for any kind of schooling, from Head Start to college loans to funded research. They also would get the government out of efforts to reduce segregation or end abuses to voting rights. They not only would dismantle the IRS but would eliminate all forms of federal taxation. And they would strike out all regulations that limit corporate life and especially banking.

At the even further lunatic end of the scale, they would not have any public support for police or fire departments. I assume individuals would have to do their own policing and hire private firefighters.

They would also terminate the CIA and FBI. And unbelievably, even our standing army.

They would amend, actually eliminate the Bill of Rights with the Constitution protecting only one right--the right to own property.

They even call for ending the ban on slavery, claiming that it is an individual's right "to sell himself if he so chooses." They are that perversely, consistently Libertarian.

Like Grover Norquist (whose American's for Tax Reform the Koch's fund), they would like to see government so reduced in size that it could "be drowned in a bathtub."

I know you think I'm making this up. If you do, I urge you to pick up a copy of Dark Money. There's more there. And worse.