I haven’t read Assrocket in a couple of years, and that was obviously a good decision. I think he’s either a hopeless idiot or he thinks his audience is hopelessly dumb. Today he discusses the left’s semi-coordinated efforts to raise awareness about the Koch Brothers and to make them pay a price for their political advocacy. But what reason does he give his readers for why the left is doing this?
The most extraordinary story in the news these days is the all-out assault that the Left is mounting against Charles and David Koch and their company, Koch Enterprises. A day doesn’t go buy–hardly an hour goes by–without some new attack being launched against these two lonely libertarians.
Why? Simply because they are rich–their company is one of the best-run and most successful in the world–and conservative.
The left is not going after the Koch Brothers because they are rich and they are not going after them because their company is well-run. Hinderaker is simply wrong. And when you start out an analytic piece with a stupid inaccurate premise, you are not likely to recover.
Understand, the Left has nothing against rich people participating in politics. Most rich people who are politically active are liberals, and the Democratic Party gets much more of its support from the wealthy than the GOP. George Soros is only the most famous of a battalion of sugar daddies who fund every left-wing cause. But the Left wants a monopoly. They want wealthy people to be barred from political participation unless they toe the liberal line. Hence their increasingly vicious attacks on the Koch brothers; they are trying to make an example of them.
It’s really an astonishing sets of assertions. Most rich people who are politically active are obviously Republicans, as we know from personal experience. Meanwhile, politically active teachers, nurses, pipefitters, community organizers, and college students are overwhelmingly Democrats (or, in the Republican lexicon: “socialists”). The Republicans unanimously opposed raising taxes on the wealthiest two percent of earners which would have done more to balance the budget than all their attacks on public broadcasting and public unions and planned parenthood, and NASA. The Republicans were nearly unanimous in opposing the Wall Street reforms which imposed some consequences on the rich for destroying the economy. And the Republicans just used the debate over the Continuing Resolution to pass one anti-environmental amendment after another, which only benefits rich business owners who want to send pollution into our rivers and our atmosphere.
You can’t really understand anything about American politics if you don’t understand that the Republican Party is a party that represents business owners’ interests while the Democratic Party is more inclined to represent workers’ interests. The Democrats do an imperfect job in large part because representing people of modest means doesn’t bring in the same amount of money as representing rich people. The Dems have to rely on superior organization, and unions are a part of that. But the Dems can also be co-opted, as it lessens the financial disadvantage (see DLC).
I don’t think the parties should be totally binary. Democrats should not see business owners as antagonists and Republicans shouldn’t ignore the plight of working people. Especially the president, regardless of party, needs to bridge the differences between the parties a bit. But it’s still the basic structure of American politics: workers’ party vs. business’s party. If you don’t get that, you understand nothing.
The Koch Brothers are major polluters. Most people do not benefit from environmental degradation. The Koch Brothers do. The left opposes the Koch Brothers because their business activities make the world a worse place and their political activities are effective and lead to unhappy political outcomes for our country. It’s as simple as that.
Also, too, Citizen’s United means that the Koch Brothers, in the form of a corporation, can spend unlimited funds on elections, drowning out all our little donations and all our little voices. Only a combined, collective effort of little people has any chance of balancing that out. Assrocket should explains this stuff to his readers.
