The freedom to be trapped in traffic

From Robert Whitcomb's  "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

"Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.''

-- Ambrose Bierce

That America is increasingly a plutocracy and not a democracy might be suggested by a story in The New York Times headlined “How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country.’’ The story details how the Koch lobbying group Americans for Prosperity has been working to block efforts around to address gridlock and air pollution. The Koches, who inherited their company, Koch Industries, from daddy use highly sophisticated data-analysis tools to sow fear, misunderstanding and confusion about projects they don’t like.

The Times story focuses on Nashville, whose voters, after an intense propaganda campaign by the Kochs, turned down a $5.4 billion public-transit program that polling before the Kochs arrived had been expected to easily win because the Music City is choking on car traffic and air pollution.

Good mass transit reduces traffic, boosts economic  development and reduces air pollution. (I’d add warily it also helps to address man-made global warming but most Republicans don’t seem to believe in that. After all, what do 97 percent of scientists know?) It’s no accident that the richest U.S. cities – New York, Boston, etc., have dense (if far from perfect!) mass-transit systems.

Koch servant Tori Venable, who runs Americans for Prosperity, came up with an intriguing remark on why the car culture should continue dominant in crowded cities: “If someone has the freedom to go where they want, do what they want, they’re not going to choose to public transit.’’ Eh? Millions of people take mass transit every day because they want the freedom to nap, to read, to brood, and to avoid being hit by the idiot weaving in and out of lanes while texting.

Among the assorted inane things that Koch-connected people say about public   transit  came from Randal O’Toole,  of the Cato Institute, who said “Why would anybody ride transit when they can get a ride at their door within a minute that will drop them off at the door where they want to go?’’

Well, how about those folks who don’t want to be trapped in traffic, which ride-hailing services such as Lyft and Uber are making much worse in many downtowns.  Buses, trolleys and light rail take cars off the roads. And what about poor people who can’t afford to pay ride-hailing services (which jack up their prices substantially at job-commuting times)?

Rarely do the Koch Brothers act for any other reasons than economic self-interest, e.g.,- promoting wide-open immigration to keep wages low and tax cuts focused on the very rich. So consider that Koch Industries is a big producer of gasoline and asphalt and makes a variety of automotive parts. The more  that people drive, the richer these billionaires become. To read The Times piece, please hit this link.

Of course, the Kochs can fly over the traffic in their helicopters.

Jill Richardson: The Koch-led billionaires' conspiracy against democracy

The Koch brothers are oil magnates and billionaire GOP funders.

They believe that their great wealth entitles them to rule over the many. For decades, they’ve been running a surreptitious assault on the rules that protect the majority of us from their abuse. From whacking our voting rights to busting unions, their intent is nothing less than to pull a coup on democracy, installing a government of, by, and for the superrich.

They’ve enlisted a secretive cadre of other billionaires who share their extreme kleptocratic belief that 1) the property rights of the rich are more important than the people’s political rights, 2) that majority rule is not a good form of governing, and 3) that the “Makers” (as the billionaires dub themselves) should be able to overrule collective actions of the lower classes (whom they call “Takers”).

They’ve created a complex, sophisticated web of right-wing front groups that have already corporatized a slew of our most basic laws and institutions, and they’ve gained a chokehold on nearly every level of government (including our courts and whole states, such as  Wisconsin, North Carolina and Texas). They’ve essentially taken over the Republican Party.

Even more shocking than the arrogance of this unprecedented power grab by the conspiracy of billionaires is its quiet success.

The Koch Coup crept up on us because it abhorred publicity and couched each move as an independent effort by a separate group. Then the conspirators backed the Supreme Court’s outrageous 2010 Citizens United decision, decreeing that unlimited corporate spending is allowed because it’s “free speech.” Only then did Americans begin waking up to the reality that the Kochs were making an assault on democracy itself.

To learn more, check out the extensive Koch web files at the Center for Media and Democracy: www.exposedbycmd.org/koch/.

Jill Richardson is an OtherWords.org columnist.

Free speech and big money at colleges

On  the Wellesley College campus.

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

Colleges should afford a very wide range of speakers the opportunity to express their views, be they left, right or other. So on the face of it, a program at elite Wellesley College, in Massachusetts, called the Freedom Project sounds fine. The programs bring “libertarian’’ and conservative speakers to the beautiful campus, with the idea of offsetting the generally liberal views of students and teachers there.

But the program is funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, a right-wing group aimed at promoting the views of the current version of the Republican Party. Charles Koch, of course, is a member of the billionaire Koch Brothers, who inherited their sprawling business from their father and are leading members of the plutocracy now running the country. They are, not surprisingly, obsessed with tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation.

Conflicts of interest abound. For example, reports The Boston Globe, Wellesley sociology Prof. Thomas Cushman, who has been running the Freedom Project there but is stepping down, said he wouldn’t invite The New Yorker’s famous investigative writer Jane Mayer  to speak because he didn’t like her book  about the Kochs, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.

To read The Globe’s story, please hit this link.

But the Wellesley Freedom Project has invited Alex Epstein, author The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, which the Kochs, who have huge stakes in the fossil-fuel industry, not surprisingly have recommended to their donors.

Better if colleges assiduously avoid relationships with big foundations and businesses that want to pick speakers for propaganda reasons. But that also means that college administrations and faculties have a duty to ensure that students can hear a very wide range of views on their campuses and that they punish students and faculty who try to prevent speakers from making their arguments. Too many colleges have been weak on free speech, which should be enshrined in academia.

And to have foreign propaganda  and surveillance outlets on campus, such as the Chinese government-run Confucius Institutes at, among other places, Bryant University and the University of Rhode Island, is utterly inappropriate.

Jim Hightower: In secret, plutocrats keep trying to subvert U.S. democracy

The Broadmoor Hotel and Resort, in Colorado Springs, a favorite meeting place for the very rich.

Via OtherWords.org

Charles and David Koch — the billionaire oil men (who inherited their  huge diversified company from their father) who’ve financed a vast network of right-wing advocacy groups — have stayed out of the national limelight recently. But they’re still trying to supplant American democracy with their laissez-fairyland plutocracy.

In fact, in late June, they held a meeting of the Koch Boys Billionaires Club, gathering about 400 other uber-wealthy rascals to plot some political high jinks for next year’s elections.

The club meets every year at some luxury hideaway, and its attendees have to pay $100,000 each just to get in. But participants are also expected to give generously to the brothers’ goal of spending $400 million to buy a slew of congress critters, governors, and others in 2018.

This year, the group gathered in Colorado Springs at the ultra-lux Broadmoor Hotel and Resort, owned by the brothers’ billionaire pal and right-wing co-conspirator, Phillip Anschutz.

Among the recent political triumphs that these elites celebrated in the Broadmoor’s posh ballroom was the defeat this year of a Colorado tax hike to fix the state’s crumbling roads.

After all, who needs adequate roads, when you can arrive in private jets?

This attitude of the Kochs’ privileged cohorts explains why the public is shut out of these candid sessions. A staffer for the Koch confab hailed such no-tax, no-roads policies as a “renaissance of freedom.” For the privileged, that is — the freedom to prosper at the expense of everyone else.

Indeed, their agenda includes killing such working class needs as the minimum wage and Social Security, and privatizing everything from health care to public education. This self-absorbed cabal of spoiled plutocratic brats intends to abandon our nation’s core democratic principle of “We’re all in this together.”

If they kill that uniting concept, they kill America itself.

Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also the editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. 

Chris Powell: Sex slavery, Democrats, government as a business

"La Grande Odalisque''  (1814) by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Sensing a winning issue, Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy used his last debate with his Republican rival Tom Foley to lecture Foley about the name of his yacht, Odalisque, a name derived from the Turkish word for concubine, though it has evolved to include portraiture of the naked female form.

"You have a daughter," Malloy harrumphed at Foley. "Do you really think it's appropriate to have a boat named after a sex slave?"

Foley, a very rich businessman, insisted that his aim in naming the yacht had been to evoke art, not lust, and he cited the works of the French painters Matisse and Ingres. At last the campaign had come upon a subject about which Foley knew something -- just not one involving public policy or likely to make him seem like a man of the people.

But if Foley had known less about art and more about Connecticut he might have turned the tables on the governor, whom of course, won the election. For in one respect sex slavery is actually state government policy, fervently supported by the Democratic Party's most fearsome ideologues.

It happens when abortions result from the sex slavery of minors.

This rationalization of sex slavery was first noticed in 2007 when a West Hartford man was charged with harboring and using as a sex slave a 15-year-old girl who had run away from her home in Bloomfield. Having impregnated the girl, the man sent her to an abortion clinic, where the pregnancy was terminated with no serious questions about the girl's circumstances or about her parents or guardian, with the girl returning to her sex slavemaster. Those who remarked that the case argued for legislation to require parental notification for abortions on minors were denounced as Neanderthals.

A similar case became public in Coventry, Conn., last year with the arrest of the fire chief, who was having frequent sex with a cadet member of the department when she was 15 and impregnated her when she was 16. As a matter of law it was all rape, even at 16, since the girl, as a cadet, was under the chief's authority. The chief also arranged for the girl's abortion without anyone being the wiser. In this case Connecticut's lack of a parental -notification law concealed not only the sustained sexual exploitation of a minor but also an abuse of official power that itself had been specifically criminalized. But this time the horrible circumstances were taken for granted.

For in Connecticut a boat that might have been named after a sex slave is purported to be a political scandal, an affront to the dignity of women generally and children particularly, but sex slavery for children is considered preferable to requiring an inquiry into the rape of minors when abortions are to be performed on them.

* * *

The rhetoric of the recent election campaign in Connecticut was full of the cliche that government should be run more like a business. But that's exactly the problem -- that government in Connecticut already operates like a business, primarily to make money for itself in a monopoly environment rather than to uphold a social obligation and perform a public service.

Student test scores and the explosion in the need for remedial courses show that education has been declining even as its cost is always rising.

A half-century of poverty policy hasn't elevated the poor to self-sufficiency but instead has created and sustained a vicious cycle of dependence and degradation in which nearly half the state's children now grow up without fathers.

Criminal-justice policy serves mainly to give a third of the state's young black and Hispanic men criminal records that leave them unskilled and largely unemployable for most of their lives.

But education, poverty, and criminal justice are the major employment agencies of government, providing livelihoods with great salaries, benefits and pensions to tens of thousands of people regardless of the results of their businesses, results that are never audited but are infinitely more damaging than anything from which the infamous Koch Brothers make their money.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, based in Manchester, Conn.