“The KB-Party Of Plutocratic Rule”: Welcome To What The Supreme Court Wrought
Shouldn’t America have at least one major party that isn’t beholden to the corporate elite?
Well don’t look now, but such a party has recently popped up, raring to roar into the 2016 presidential race. Called the KB-Party, it has the funding, political network, and expertise needed to bypass the establishment’s control of the election system. But don’t rush to sign up: KB stands for Koch Brothers.
Yes, Charlie and David — the multimillionaire, far-out, right-wing industrial barons who already own several congresscritters, governors, political think tanks, PR outfits, academics, astroturf campaign machines, front groups, etc. — now have the equivalent of their very own private political party. And their party is not beholden to the corporate elite, since it is the elite. The Koch boys have rallied roughly 300 like-minded, super-rich corporate oligarchs to their brotherhood of plutocrats, and this clique is intent on purchasing a president and congressional majority to impose their version of corporate rule over America.
Won’t that be awfully pricey, you ask? Ha — that’s not a question that acquisitive billionaires ever ask. For starters, at a secretive retreat in January for KB-Party funders, the 300 barons ponied up some $900 million for the campaign they are launching. That’s nearly $200 million more than the combined expenditures of the Republican and Democratic parties in last year’s elections, and it’s way more than either of those parties will have for 2016.
This means that in our nation of 350 million people, a cabal of only 300 of America’s wealthiest, self-serving corporatists will wield predominant power over the elections. This tiny club will have the wherewithal to narrow the choice of candidates presented to the rest of us, the range of policy ideas that are proposed to voters, the overall tone of the campaign year, and — most important — the governing agenda of those who get elected.
The KB-Party of Plutocratic Rule is brought to you by the Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United edict. After the Court’s 2010 democracy-mugging decree that corporations would henceforth be allowed to dump unlimited amounts of their shareholders’ money into our election campaigns, a guy named Larry sent a hot email to me that perfectly summed up what had just been done to us: “Big money has plucked our eagle!”
The black-robed corporatists’ freakish Citizens United ruling has already let the KB-Party amass their unprecedented electioneering fund, setting them up as the Godfathers of Tea Party Republicanism. Supposedly proud candidates for governor, Congress and even such presidential wannabes as Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker are shamelessly scurrying to the money throne to kiss the Koch ring, do a song and dance, grovel, and pledge fealty to the brotherhood’s extremist plutocratic agenda.
But big money is plucking our eagle not only because it corrupts candidates, but also because it is used to deny crucial information to voters and greatly diminish their participation in what has become a farce. First of all, the biggest chunk of cash spent by the KB-Party will go right into a mindboggling squall of television ads, none of which will explain who they’re for and why. Rather, they will be nauseatingly negative attack ads, brimming with optical trickery and outright lies to trash the candidates they’re against. Worse, voters will not even be informed that the garbage they’re watching is paid for by the Koch cabal, since another little favor the Supreme Court granted to the corporate plutocrats is that they can run secret campaigns, using their front groups as screens to keep voters from knowing what special interests are behind the ads — and why.
We saw the impact of secret, unrestricted corporate money in last year’s midterm elections. It produced a blight of negativity, a failure of the system to address the people’s real needs, an upchuck factor that kept nearly two-thirds of the people from voting, and a rising alienation of the many from the political process and government owned by the few. The Koch machine spent about $400 million to get those results. This time, they’ll spend more than twice that.
To help ban the corporate cash that’s clogging America’s democratic process and killing our people’s right to self-government, go to www.DemocracyIsForPeople.org.
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, February 25, 2015
“Scott Walker’s Koch Angle”: A Visceral Bond Forged By Americans For Prosperity
One reason Jeb Bush probably won’t raise all the money in 2016 is the existence of very large conservative donor networks that exist beyond the familiar clubby atmosphere of the former 2004 W. rain-makers who seem to dominate “Establishment” circles. The largest and most conspicuous, of course, is the Koch Donor Network, which reportedly aims at raising $900 million towards placing a special friend in the White House.
It’s not clear at this point if the Kochs and their allies intend to spend much of that money during the nomination contest. But if they do, reports Bloomberg Politics‘ Julie Bykowicz, Scott Walker’s probably first in line to become the beneficiary.
Charles Koch, she says, is personally very fond of Rand Paul, but he’s not, as events at the Koch Donor Network’s annual Palm Springs gathering this year indicated, very popular in KochWorld write large. But these folk have a visceral bond with Walker that was forged by Americans for Prosperity’s very direct involvement in his political career, even before his first election as governor:
On a sunny Saturday in September 2009, with Wisconsin in the throes of Tea Party fervor, conservative starlet Michelle Malkin fired up a crowd of thousands at a lakefront park in Milwaukee with rhetoric about White House czars and union thugs and the “culture of dependency that they have rammed down our throats.”
Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, a Republican candidate for governor, casually attired in a red University of Wisconsin Badgers sweatshirt, stepped to the podium to amplify the message. “We’re going to take back our government,” he shouted, jabbing the air with a finger. The attendees whooped and clapped. “We’ve done it here, we can do it in Wisconsin and, by God, we’re going to do it all across America.”
In a way, the event was Scott Walker’s graduation to the political major leagues. The audience had been delivered up by Americans for Prosperity, a Tea Party organizing group founded by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire energy executives whose fortune helps shape Republican politics.
The connection became even more intense during the initial wave of demonstrations against Walker’s proposals to eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees:
Walker began battling with public employees soon after he was elected, submitting a budget in February 2011 that cut public pensions and sharply limited the collective bargaining rights of many state employees. Koch reinforcements quickly arrived.
A bus caravan of Walker’s friends at Americans for Prosperity disgorged thousands of supporters, carrying signs saying “Your Gravy Train Is Over … Welcome to the Recession” and “Sorry We’re Late Scott. We Work for a Living” into the mass of union activists gathered at the steps of the capitol. It all played out for a cable network audience, with pundits pointing to Walker as the new tip of the spear in a long Republican fight against the labor unions that have helped elect Democrats over the decades.
The AFP’s support wasn’t just a big pep rally. After the governor won the budget battle and his opponents began their effort to recall him, the group deployed hundreds of volunteers to knock on doors and call into voters’ homes to spread Walker’s message that his pension cuts and union reforms were helping solve the state’s budget crisis. The group bought television and digital ads echoing the “It’s Working!” theme—a phrase Walker also frequently used.
Nobody knows right now if these connections will pay off big for Walker in a highly contested nomination battle with so many different players. But he’s certainly got the emotional connection to the money people, and if he can continue to burnish his “electability” credentials, the money spigots will almost certainly be opened for him.
By Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, TheWashington Post, February 17, 2015
“A Walk Down Memory Lane On Republican Obstruction”: A Consciously Thought-Out Strategy To Create Dysfunction
For some of us its pretty galling to hear Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggest that the way to end dysfunction in Washington is for President Obama to move to the “middle,” or to have to listen to a Republican presidential candidate opine about the lack of “adult conversations” in D.C.
For the record, here’s a little walk down memory lane of Republicans talking publicly about their strategy for obstruction:
1993 – Bill Kristol writes a memo outlining a strategy for Republicans on President Clinton’s health care reform proposal.
Faced with forceful objections in the past, the [Clinton] Administration has generally preferred to bargain and compromise with Congress so as to achieve any victory it can. But health care is not, in fact, just another Clinton domestic policy. And the conventional political strategies Republicans have used in the past are inadequate to the task of defeating the Clinton plan outright. That must be our goal…
Simple, green-eyeshades criticism of the plan…is fine so far as it goes. But in the current climate, such opposition only wins concessions, not surrender…
Any Republican urge to negotiate a “least bad” compromise with the Democrats, and thereby gain momentary public credit for helping the president “do something” about health care, should also be resisted.
2003 – Governor Deval Patrick recalls Grover Norquist’s comments on plans for a “permanent Republican majority.”
At our 25th college reunion in 2003, Grover Norquist — the brain and able spokesman for the radical right — and I, along with other classmates who had been in public or political life, participated in a lively panel discussion about politics. During his presentation, Norquist explained why he believed that there would be a permanent Republican majority in America.
One person interrupted, as I recall, and said, “C’mon, Grover, surely one day a Democrat will win the White House.”
Norquist immediately replied: “We will make it so that a Democrat cannot govern as a Democrat.”
2009 – As Michael Grunwald reported, these two ideas coalesced into a Republican plan on how to respond to the election of President Barack Obama.
…the Republican plot to obstruct President Obama before he even took office, including secret meetings led by House GOP whip Eric Cantor (in December 2008) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (in early January 2009) in which they laid out their daring (though cynical and political) no-honeymoon strategy of all-out resistance to a popular President-elect during an economic emergency. “If he was for it,” former Ohio Senator George Voinovich explained, “we had to be against it.”
2010 – Having implemented that plan in response to President Obama’s proposal to reform health care, former speech-writer for President George W. Bush – David Frum – is ejected from the party for writing this:
At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994…
Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.
Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan…Too late now. They are all the law.
2011 – Former Republican Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren explains the strategy.
A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.
So let’s be clear…this was a consciously thought-out strategy by Republicans to create dysfunction in Congress that never fit the “both sides do it” meme embraced by much of the media.
As I’ve pointed out before, President Obama has engaged a lot of different strategies to deal with this obstruction that have each had various amounts of success at different times. But as we head into the next presidential election, we’re likely to hear a lot about how Washington doesn’t work.
That will be the big challenge for the Democratic nominee in 2016. I only wish it was possible for them to take Paul Waldman’s advice.
So imagine if a candidate in the general election, or a president in his inaugural speech, said, “This is my program. I realize that the folks in the other party don’t like it. There may be a few places where we can compromise, and if so, that would be terrific. But I’m going to treat the voters like adults and tell them that I’m not expecting a whole lot of cooperation. I’m going to fight for what I promised to do when I ran, and if you don’t like the results, you can turn me out in four years.”
That would at least be honest, and nobody would be disappointed when the result is partisan fighting.
Of course he’s right when he says that would be honest. The question is…are American voters ready for honesty?
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, February 1, 2015
“It’s Not Him, Republicans, It’s You”: Mitt Romney Isn’t Running, But His Specter Still Haunts The GOP
I’ll have to admit that I’m a bit surprised Mitt Romney decided not to run for president, given the man’s almost superhuman optimism and persistence. But according to various reports, the torrent of criticism Romney received when he made it clear he was considering a run had a real impact on his final decision, even though in his statement he talked about his faith in “one of our next generation of Republican leaders” (take that, Jeb!) to win back the White House.
The Republican consensus was obviously that Romney represented failure, and they need something different if they are to win in 2016. But maybe Mitt Romney isn’t the problem. It’s not him, Republicans. It’s you.
Nobody would ever claim Romney was anything like a perfect candidate. His background as a private equity titan was particularly fertile ground for Democratic attacks painting him as the representative of the economic elite, and he had a colorful way of reinforcing that impression again and again, particularly with the “47 percent” remark.
But I actually think that if he had decided to run, he would have had a better chance than anyone of getting the Republican nomination. Every GOP primary campaign for the last half-century has begun with an obvious front-runner, and every one of those early front-runners got the nomination. Romney would have been that front-runner, as reluctant as many in the party were about his candidacy. In recent GOP races, the winner hasn’t been the one who defeated his opponents, just the one who outlasted them, as one chucklehead after another became the flavor of the month and then self-immolated (remember when Herman Cain led the primary polls in 2012?). Romney could certainly have stuck around until the end.
But now the 2016 race is truly a free-for-all, with no obvious leader. And if the only lesson Republicans take from 2012 is not to nominate a CEO (sorry, Carly Fiorina), they’ll make the same mistakes all over again.
Consider that “47 percent” remark. It made for a vivid illustration of arguments Democrats were already making, but Mitt Romney was hardly the first Republican to say it. The basic idea underlying it had been repeated endlessly on conservative talk radio and by other Republican politicians for years. If it hadn’t been caught on tape, the attacks from Democrats would have been the same, and the outcome would have been the same. Another example: when Republicans exploded with joy after Barack Obama’s “you didn’t build that” remark, Romney didn’t have to convince them to make it a huge issue; they all thought it would be a silver bullet that would take the president down, and they were all flummoxed when it didn’t. They couldn’t imagine that voters wouldn’t punish Obama for an (alleged) criticism of business owners, because they forgot that most Americans work for somebody else.
The prevailing attitude in GOP circles is that Romney failed because he was the wrong messenger. Yet almost every contender is preparing to offer voters the same policy agenda that Romney did. They may be saying now that they’ll talk about wage stagnation and inequality, but when you ask them what they’re going to do about it, their answer is the same as it has always been: cut taxes and cut regulation. It’s going to be awfully hard to convince voters that they’ve had a real change of heart. And anyone who deviates from Republican orthodoxy is already finding themselves on the defensive (as Jeb Bush is for his less-than-total enthusiasm for deportations).
It isn’t surprising that the party’s diagnosis of what went wrong in the last couple of elections won’t extend to the policies they’re offering the public; those positions are rooted in sincere ideological beliefs, and changing them would be hard. But even without Mitt Romney in the race, it looks like Republicans are going to offer a program of Romneyism. They could find themselves facing voters at a time when the economy is doing well overall, and they’re particularly ill-suited to address the structural problems that keep people anxious — two strikes against them. A fresh face is unlikely to solve that problem.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 30, 2015
“In The Same Situation”: Mitt Romney Isn’t Running In 2016. Now What?
Three weeks after throwing the early competition for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination into chaos by announcing that he was “seriously considering” joining the race, Mitt Romney announced on Friday morning that he would not launch a third bid for the White House.
“After putting considerable thought into making another run for president, I’ve decided it is best to give other leaders in the party the opportunity to become our next nominee,” Romney told a group of staffers and supporters.
Romney’s decision was probably a good one; although he led most of his Republican rivals in the polls, that advantage was largely built on name recognition. The vulnerabilities that sank him in the 2012 general election still exist, and the conservatives who will play an outsized role in picking the 2016 nominee still distrust him. Furthermore, Romney’s plan to rebrand himself as an anti-poverty warrior would have been tough to buy, due to his longstanding reputation for flip-flopping (and his flat acknowledgement in 2012 that “I’m not concerned about the very poor”).
There are some obvious winners in the wake of his decision: Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker will now be able to compete for the moderate-leaning, pro-business Republicans who have long favored Romney. The former Massachusetts’ governor’s staffers and donor base will now be up for grabs as well.
But Republicans still find themselves in the same situation they were in before Romney ever floated a third run: with a crowded, unsettled field.
A Public Policy Polling survey released Friday illustrates the tumultuous state of the race. It polled the Republican field both with and without Romney, and found that his staying on the sidelines leaves the GOP in a free-for-all fight for the nomination. With Romney’s supporters reallocated to their second choices, Bush leads the field with 21 percent. Former surgeon-turned-Tea Party activist Ben Carson trails with 16 percent, followed by Walker at 14 percent, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee at 12 percent, and Texas senator Ted Cruz at 10 percent.
In other words, it’s anyone’s game.
Republicans do have some incentive to figure things out sooner rather than later, however. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton appears unlikely to face a serious primary challenge, leaving her free to coast and raise money as the Republicans batter each other in their primary contests. While there’s a compelling case to be made that tough primaries make stronger candidates, that’s a scenario that Republicans would still clearly rather avoid.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, January 30, 2015
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