Wednesday, May 9, 2018

Patience and Secrecy in the Kochs' Complex Conspiracy

Patience and Secrecy in the Kochs' Complex Conspiracy:

"In 1933, a handful of wealthy Wall Streeters were upset that the newly elected president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had dared to tax the rich in order to fund programs to lessen the painful poverty people were experiencing due to the Great Depression. They were so upset that they came up with a ridiculous plan to overthrow Roosevelt and install a military government. Due to their own ineptitude and hubris, their plan failed, and important poverty-busting programs of the New Deal like Social Security, the Works Progress Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority put people to work, pulled them out of desperate poverty and propelled the country into the 20th century.  It's tempting to brush off 1933's bumbling fat cats — we can just picture them cloistered in their posh private club, smoking $100 cigars, grumping about Roosevelt and whispering about hiring a private army to overthrow the whole damn democratic process. However, our nation's common good is constantly under attack from plutocrats, kleptocrats and kakistocrats who want to line their pockets at the expense of workaday Americans.  But while the 1933 plot was hairbrained, their plutocratic intent is no laughing matter. Their presumption of class privilege — the warped idea that their great wealth entitled them to rule over and even impoverish the many — is not unique. The Wall Street Putsch died and was buried in 1934, but it is just one manifestation of a deadly serious social disease that has infected the history of democratic struggles.  And now, that sickness has grown more virulent, confronting us in the form of a complex, sophisticated web of efforts funded by brothers Charles and David Koch and their billionaire buddies who share the same set of extreme, kleptocratic beliefs that guided last century's class-war militants"

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