Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Charles & David Koch destroy the world


Billionaires Charles and David Koch are absolutely not afraid to go down in history as the two individuals most responsible for climate change and all the attending weather & oceanic disasters that entails. Their insatiable, pathological greed blinds them to anything in the world except making more money.

As Jane Mayer, New Yorker's scourge of the Koch brothers writes in her article about Mike Pence this week:

One by one, all the things that Trump campaigned on that annoyed the Koch brothers are being thrown overboard. And one by one the Koch brothers’ priorities are moving up the list.” Trump’s populist, nationalist agenda has largely been replaced by the agenda of the corporate right. Trump has made little effort at infrastructure reform, and he abandoned his support for a “border-adjustment tax” after the Koch network spent months campaigning against it, and after Pence and Short discussed it privately with Charles Koch at a meeting in Colorado Springs this summer. Bannon’s proposal to create a higher tax bracket for citizens earning upward of five million dollars was dropped. The Kochs enthusiastically support the White House’s proposed tax-cut package, which, according to most nonpartisan analyses, will disproportionately benefit the super-rich. (The proposed elimination of the estate tax alone would give the Koch brothers’ heirs a windfall of billions of dollars.)

There are no people who embody sociopathic evil more than those two Koch brothers. Every time I read another example of them using the Republican party to rig the system for their own financial gain, I think about that scene in Chinatown where Jake Gittes asks Noah Cross how much more money he needs. Cross says he wants to buy the future. But the future will surely remember the evil done by the Koch brothers and so they are not even buying "the future" for themselves. They are just relentlessly trying to make as much money as they can before they shuffle off this mortal coil. Let's just hope it's not much longer - Charles is 81 and David is 77 -  and that their children are not as monomaniacal about piling up enormously excessive wealth and screwing the whole world to do it.

There are two other Koch brothers - one, William, is also involved in right-wing political organizations but not to the same degree as Charles and David. He appears to be the playboy Koch.

Meanwhile the oldest of the brothers, Frederick, appears to have no political involvement, based on his Wikipedia entry, and fun fact, has an MFA in playwriting from Yale. I don't know if he's ever had any of his work performed, but if you're going to be a playwright, starting out with an inherited fortune is a good way to do it.