Our country has always rooted for heroes, but in the last half century we have developed a new kind of hero to make the fans wave the banners harder. This one is a new kind of Robin Hood, a wunderkind who robs the poor to give to the rich. The current heroes of the Right are the Koch brothers David and Charles, a couple of fat, post middle-aged white guys, who sit around all day trying to figure out how they can extract the last piece of gruel from the mouths of hungry children to add it to their already overwhelming stockpile of cash.
These billionaire bums have a team of organizations that they use for their nefarious purposes and one of them is satirically named Americans for Prosperity. What else?
Americas for Prosperity has been very busy lately running ads and organizing opposition against the initial Farm Bill. They claimed it served special interests and powerful corporations, over the American taxpayers. Of course it turns out that the American taxpayers they were referring to were Charles, David and the like, and the special interests were the 47 million poor people who receive food stamps.
But that’s just a start for the super rich pigs. They have been fighting to extract $8 billion from the food stamp program while they fight just as hard to add or continue subsidies for oil and gas companies, many controlled by them, that already make immense profits, amounting to billions every year, which come directly from the taxpayers pockets because of the subsidies they receive that are mandated in this same Farm Bill.
The Farm Bill that they are promoting will include $881 million in mandatory spending for biomass energy, a program that Koch Industries timber subsidiary, Georgia Pacific has used to extract even more government subsidies.
This new Farm Bill promoted by the Koch’s also ensures that the runoff of pesticides and other chemicals running off from forestry sites controlled by operations like Georgia Pacific may not be regulated under the Clean Water act as industrial pollution. What the hell is it if it isn’t industrial pollution? It seems they don’t think this will have any effect on our national rivers and waterways. True justice would be for everyone who backed this piece of ludicrous legislation to have to drink a quart of that sludge every day for the rest of the year. It’s like feeding your infant a vial of Koch. Pun intended.
We can throw around figures and accusations about the Farm Bill all day but the bottom line is that the current bill, which awaits the president’s signature, takes money for food stamps from the working poor while it creates billions of dollars in subsidies for profitable industries owned by already filthy rich slobs like the Koch’s, men who don’t need the money but continue to use it to take food out of the mouths of hungry kids.
But it isn’t just at screwing the poor and using starving people’s money to increase their bank accounts that the Koch’s excel. They have, for many years, been using their great wealth to influence our elections. The same Americans for Prosperity have put together a billion dollar fund, which has then dispersed money to smaller funds, mainly to obscure the money’s origins, that are then used to finance the campaigns of right wing fanatics of the same ken as those who almost destroyed the Republican party in the last few years.
Another billionaire whose BP Capital and TBP investments obviously own a lot of tar sands oil stock is T. Bone Pickins. This column has occasionally agreed with T. Bone, but this time he has come out directly on the side of his wallet, and screw the environment. He quotes Ken Salazar, former Secretary of the Interior who manages to make a couple of the most outrageous statements that we have heard in years; flat out lies that put him in the pockets of the Koch’s and all the other greedy oil-a-garchs.
First Salazar says that building the Keystone pipeline is a win-win. Yeah, if you happen to be a Koch, or some other oil producer. Then he really goes overboard by claiming that the pipeline will enhance the preservation of the Dakota Grasslands. Kind of makes one wonder if Salazar, a former Secretary of the Interior, has ever been to an oil field. I have and I can testify to the fact that no one has ever seen grass in an oil field, only oily mud in which nothing but money grows.
Yeah, Ken. Those leaking pipes will be great for our Mid-western water shed too. Be great if we could tap into it after the pipes are in place and spilling oil into the local wells. Run a pipe directly to your kitchen sink.
Finally Salazar, backed up by Pickins tells us how great the pipeline will be in enhancing our oil consumption. It will really free us from dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Is this guy brute stupid or just an inveterate liar? Is it possible that he doesn’t know that all the oil is destined for China, a fact, about which, Keystone and TransCanada have made no bones.
So here we have a former Secretary of the Interior acting as a butt boy for the oil interests and a billionaire willing to kill the environment just to add a few more bucks to his already overflowing bank accounts.
Isn’t there anyone left in the power structure of this country that still lives by some kind of moral code? Don’t these degenerates have kids or grandchildren; someone, that they care about as much as they care about their money, someone that they want to survive the hell they are creating on earth? It really does make one consider the value of assassins.