The Koch Brothers Now Own Missouri politicians

The Koch Brothers Now Own Missouri politicians

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The Keystone Pipeline: How much does it cost to buy the US senate, the US House of Representatives, and the man in the White House?

Protestors against the Keystone XL pipeline dressed as referees throw red penalty flags during a rally on Capitol Hill in Washington, Jan. 24, 2012. The utterly corrupt US government, which includes the massively corrupt Koch Brothers wing of the US Supreme Court of Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito, were bought off years and years ago.

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America-split-in-two-five-ugly-extremes-of-inequality

From Buzzflash, “The first step is to learn the facts, and then to get angry and to ask ourselves, as progressives and caring human beings, what we can do about the relentless transfer of wealth to a small group of well-positioned Americans.

$2.13 per hour vs. $3,000,000.00 per hour

Each of the Koch brothers saw his investments grow by $6 billion in one year, which is three million dollars per hour based on a 40-hour ‘work’ week. They used some of the money to try to kill renewable energy standards around the country.” They also purchased a lot of politicians with that money in the form of their annual campaign contributions and political action committee support, which went to such political warriors for the 1 percent as Congressman John Boehner, Senator Orrin Hatch and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. That’s why they own your government, and you don’t.

click on the link below for the rest of the story.

america-split-in-two-five-ugly-extremes-of-inequality

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The Tea Party and the Billionaires and the Brink of Financial Armaggedon

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The Civil War Inside of the Republican Party Commences

The civil war within the Republican Party is on! Leaders of the anti-tax Tea Party are angry with plans by other Republican strategists to tap the party’s wealthy donors and raise money to help “electable” candidates win primary races.

Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for Conservative Victory Project, said in an e-mail today that Republicans lost some Senate races last year and in 2010 because of “undisciplined candidates running bad campaigns.” The new group “seeks to help elect the most conservative candidates in Republican primaries who can win in general elections.” In other words, “stupid Tea Party candidates cost us the senate.”

Leaders of the Tea Party and some other Republican groups opposed to abortion and gay rights (like other Republicans are not) called Texas political strategist Karl Rove, a founder of the victory project, a “fake conservative” who had “declared war” on the Tea Party.

Matt Kibbe, the head of the Koch Brothers “FreedomWorks,” which identifies itself as a “grassroots” Tea Party booster, called the Victory Project strategy, “Orwellian.”

All of this means that the Koch Brothers and other billionaires of the ultra-far-far-far right are now at war with Republicans of the far-far right. Think about this.

Ronald Reagan was to the right, and sometimes a toady of the far right, but nobody in their right mind would call him a far, far right Republican, much less an ultra, far, far, far right guy. The same is true for Barry Goldwater. President Richard Nixon, another Republican conservative, would be considered left to President Obama nowadays. That’s how far right both political parties are nowadays, and all of it means that income will continue to be legislatively redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent.

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Why does the Republican Party need really insane candidates?

Why does the Republican Party leadership keep pushing idiots for political offices? The answer is simple. On the national and state level, it’s a party completely controlled by a slice of the super-rich, and these people are completely out of touch with the rest of the nation.

A small group of billionaires, such as the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson, run the party. These people are rabidly anti-tax, anti-middle class warriors. These billionaires are the big money behind Grover Norquist, and they’re the guys that frighten Republican candidates into submission on the issues, not Norquist.

That’s why fewer and fewer sane and intelligent people are willing to run for national or state political office as Republicans. At the bottom of the barrel, there are plenty of stupid people willing to submit to the whims of these few and further their aspirations in the process. In other words, in the Republican Party, turds rise to the top because the cream flees from the Republican Party container due to the stench of their positions. That’s why we have a speaker of the House that is a former bug killer.

As these billionaires continue to veer more and more to the right for their personal gain, like the destruction of the self-sustaining Social Security Trust (i.e. meaning the privatization of Social Security, which is a code word for profitization of Social Security on behalf of themselves), lower tax rates for the rich that destroy jobs and the economy, etc….

Perhaps a recent article in the Washington Post said it best of the Republican Party, “It’s not just on the ideas side where the center of the GOP is moving. The rise of American Crossroads/Crossroads GPS as well as Americans for Prosperity — and a slew of other conservative-minded outside groups — have made them the major financial players in campaigns. Unlike political party committees, which are limited in the sort of donations they can accept, these outside groups can take unlimited checks from individuals.”

The billionaire money behind those groups are the driving force behind the far right and getting further right political positions and battle plans of the GOP and its candidates. None of these are good for the nation and the middle class.

The Republican Party is controlled insanely greedy billionaires, and that’s why they need to have really insane candidates.

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How the Rich are Destroying the Middle Class and the United States

Since the beginning of the Great Depression, the 99 percent have voted for benefits like Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid. They also supported tax increases to pay for these things. “Remember, the Social Security tax only applies to the first $113,000 of wages – earned income. People like Paris Hilton and Mitt Romney, when they get all their money from capital gains, dividends, and carried interest, don’t pay a penny of Social Security taxes on their millions of income. And the average top CEO in America, with an income of $13.7 million a year, over a million a month, only pays Social Security taxes on his first few days of income every year.”

On the other hand, when the billionaires of the 1 percent extract benefits from the government for themselves, by bribing politicians, they generally don’t pay higher taxes, and they often pay less or none. “The billions in taxpayer subsidies for Big Oil, trillions in bailouts and bonuses for Wall Street bankers, and hundreds of billions for war profiteers are always accompanied by demands for more tax cuts at the top. Otherwise, their paper profits would evaporate and the values of their stocks and bonds would tumble into some dark abyss.

The truth is that the billionaires of the 1 percent aren’t even receiving these benefits by voting for them. “Instead, they always get them through the simple process of buying politicians. For example, Sheldon Adelson spent $150 million in the last election. That’s more than any American spent in any election in American history. Think about this. Adelson spent all that money to give himself the “benefits” of derailing an Obama Justice Department investigation into his casino in China and to get his taxes cut even further.

Billionaires also corrupt democracy to get their benefits through billionaire-funded think tanks, like the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council that writes legislation to benefit Corporate America, and then have Republicans state lawmakers introduce and pass laws in state after state, across the nation.

But despite this very clear reality of who is demanding welfare from our government, it’s still the middle class who are targeted by right-wingers and their viral emails as the selfish “takers.” That’s the reason why the Business Roundtable is saying the best way to fix insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare is to raise the retirement age to 70 and turn Medicare into a voucher program.

America’s fiscal problems are a direct result of the Billionaire Class working behind the scenes of our democracy and stealing massive amounts of wealth for themselves while paying lower taxes than they’ve paid in a half-century. A quarter of all profitable corporations in America pay zero federal taxes. Mitt Romney’s income tax rates top out at 20 percent. When all taxes are added up, sales, property, payroll, excise, etc…, the average middle class person pays a higher tax rate than virtually anybody of the 1 percent.

“If we are concerned about the future of our American democratic republic, the way to preserve it isn’t to protect it from greedy Social Security recipients by pushing the retirement age back to 70. It’s to get money out of government, thus neutering the political power of the Billionaire Class. And that means reversing two core doctrines that the US Supreme Court has created out of thin air (at the request of big business and billionaires): that corporations are people, and that money is speech.”

democracy

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End the Cycle of Dependency for the Koch Brothers and Other Members of the 1 Percent

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Video: The People Who Fund Grover Norquist

Guess who don’t want to see their taxes raised? How about Big Pharma and the Koch Brothers. Guess who is on their payroll? You guessed it right. Grover Norquist. If their taxes rise, then they’ll have less profit to buy more politicians to enact legislation to redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent. That’s what Grover is all about.

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The Corporatocracy vs. Workplace Democracy

Thanks to the Supreme Court, our elections are up for sale to the highest bidder – be it a billionaire casino mogul like Sheldon Adelson or a massive transnational corporation like Koch Industries. Workplace democracy is now on the line more than ever before. Click the link below for the complete story.

the-corporatocracy-vs-workplace-democracy–truthout.orgThe corporate state today is stronger than it’s ever been.

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