Money: the Real Grass Roots

by Jim Washburn

I just about have had it up to here with government regulation. I would tell you where “up to here” is except that would entail using a government-standardized unit of measure, and our government isn’t supposed to do that. They’re only supposed to wear wigs or something.

But we have an activist, Negro-led government now, and their overreaching socialist regulations are destroying America.

Just the other day, I got in my Toyota, because I like a car that will accelerate to 120 without coaxing. I thought I’d head down to Sam & Ella’s Eggs R Shit for a nice half-a-billion-egg omelet; then drive 120 mph for a couple of hours til lunch, when I’d tuck into a nice bowl Jumbo Petro Shrimp—if I start vomiting blood I can always see my HMO doctor in six-to-eight weeks, if they don’t drop me first; then I’d drive over to the Eastern seaboard and invest our nation’s future in ephemeral derivatives made out of pixie dust; then maybe drive around making up a little folk song about the 29 miners who died in West Virginia this year; then pop on down to the Gulf Coast to watch another oil rig explode. They give off such a beautiful light.

But to do that, I’d have to drive on a federally-funded highway, and I am so mad right now at the federal government that I could spit, but that would involve drinking water that had been treated to safe government standards, and enough with the fucking regulation already! I’ll drink coal ash slurry if I want to, and I know a number of corporations willing to help me do that, if these damn regulators would get out of the way.

The point to this proposed end-of-summer trip is to highlight the most puzzling aspect of the current political scene: Why is it, at a time of unprecedented hardship resulting from the across-the-board deregulation and unenforced regulations of the Bush years, that tens of thousands of our fellow Americans are protesting in the streets against government regulation?

From our financial meltdown to our now-greasy Gulf of Mexico, reasons abound for why government should resume its role of rule-maker and watchdog over matters that effect the life of our nation. Libertarianism is a quaint notion that could have been an interesting experiment back in a 17th-century agrarian society. When you live in an age where corporations have the power to destroy whole ecosystems, you for sure need a government by and for the people that’s looking out for the people’s interest. What’s the point in “providing for the common defense” if corner-cutting corporations are allowed to cause more damage than al Qaeda ever could?

Yet if you listen to these Tea Party poopers, all our problems stem from our new president’s “socialist” agenda, you know, the agenda that looks to the rest of us like a modest, mainstream effort to keep our society from careening into the Great Depression 2.0 that Bush’s policies made possible.

Did the 13 oil workers die because there was too much regulation? “Get government out of the way, and the free market will police itself,” we’re always told by the righteous right. So here you’re got the oil industry, which is merely the most profitable industry in the history of the world, thanks to unchecked price hikes—no matter what goes wrong, be it a terrorist attack, or their own malfeasance, they find a way to profit from it—which under Bush was also given unprecedented tax breaks and handouts. So what does this cash-gorged industry do? It cuts corners. It skirts safety measures. It gambles with the safety and wellbeing of its employees and of every species living in the Gulf of Mexico. And it really does not give a fuck, because it’s sure it will still be calling the shots for generations to come.

David Koch

You would think that these patriotic Tea Partiers would be going after the oil companies and with a vengeance. Instead, they are doing such a good job of promoting the oil companies’ mantra of deregulation that you’d think the companies had scripted their message for them.

Well, guess what? They pretty much are.

If you haven’t already read it, I very much recommend you give a look at Jane Mayer’s splendid and frightening article in the August 30 New Yorker: “Covert Operations: the Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War Against Obama.”

The article tells the story of Charles and David Koch. With no tools other than hard work and vast inherited wealth, the brothers turned Koch Industries into a privately held powerhouse, owning everything from oil companies to the Brawny paper towels you try to clean oil-soaked pelicans with. The brothers’ combined personal fortunes total over $35 billion, and they are not at all shy about pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the political process to advance their libertarian interests, which coincidentally coincide with their bottom line.

They have funded any number of think tanks and political action groups, including the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Center, Americans for Prosperity, Patients United Now, the Economic Education Trust, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Citizens for the Environment, and other organizations in which the concerned “citizens” pretty much boil down to being Charles and David Koch’s attempt to create an America in which they can pollute and despoil with impunity.

They’re pretty good at that, evidently. During the Clinton administration, their companies were fined hundreds of millions of dollars for indiscriminately dumping tons of carcinogens into the American environment they claim to be concerned about. So they pumped a whole bunch of money as secretly as they could into getting George W. Bush elected. While Bush had claimed to be an environmentalist on the campaign trail, once in office, his policies coincided precisely with the Kochs’ wish list. They’ve also been major funders of the organizations that try to make it appear that global warming and the effects of acid rain aren’t settled science.

Now that they have a less pliable president in office, the Koch brothers are pumping their wealth into the purportedly “grass roots” Tea Party to oppose “regulation” and cow borderline Republican and Blue Dog Democrats into opposing Obama at every turn.

At least they’re not doing it without a sense of humor. Mayer recounts a speech David Koch made at Deerfield Academy on the occasion of him giving them $25 million: “You might ask, ‘How does David Koch happen to have the wealth to be so generous?’ Well, let me tell you a story. It all started when I was a little boy. One day, my father gave me an apple. I soon sold it for five dollars and bought two apples and sold them for ten. Then I bought four apples and sold them for twenty. Well, this went on day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, until my father died and left me three hundred million dollars.”

I like funny guys, but I like them less when they regard the United States as their personal plaything, with all of us schlubs who toil for a living expected to acquiesce. Who cares if all the scientific studies say formaldehyde is a carcinogen; the Koch brothers say it isn’t, and shouldn’t they know, since they make and profit from 2.2 billion pounds of it a year. Guess whose opinion prevailed in Congress?

So now the Tea Party movement, funded by mega billionaires and stirred up by rich guy Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News empire, is determined to “take America back” from the administration lawfully elected by a clear majority of their fellow Americans, the first administration we’ve had in this century that’s trying to look out for all Americans, not just those few who have the billions.

What was it Bob Dylan sang?: Money doesn’t talk, it swears.

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