August 27,2019
Greg Snyder
One Koch brother is dead. That’s good. But it still leaves the other one alive.
Still leaves Trump as president and he is trying to accomplish the Koch brother agenda of killing off Social Security and Medicare and getting rid of the entire social safety net that Americans have paid into and on which they depend, the Post Office, fair elections, voting rights, the list goes on
still leaves all the libertarian/conservative think tanks doing Koch brother work
still leaves the Koch brother financed “universities” churning out legions of lawyers indocrinated in Koch brother libertarian dogma and trained to do their political work
still leaves Americans for Prosperity and the tea party doing Koch brother work
still leaves ALEC writing Koch brother legislation instead of our elected representatives doing their job and writing legislation themselves, for their constituents, the people who elected them, addressing the needs of the people, not the Koch brother interests
still leaves Koch organizations to continue to attack workers and labor and weaken the middle class and (mom and pop) small to medium sized business
still leaves total Koch control of the entire Republican Party
still leaves Koch industries that are carbon-based, fossil fuels and petrochemical mega corporations churning out their planet-killing poisons and Americans eagerly buying them all up
still leaves the vast fortune that the Koch family will continue to use to manipulate and control national, federal and state politics
still leaves the Koch dynasty intact with a vast fortune
still leaves the country at the mercy of what the Koch brothers want to do with our politics and their continued assault on the world’s climate
Yes, it’s good that one of the Koch brothers died. But nothing else changed and his death really doesn’t matter at all.
The Koch brothers are half of the problem they create. The other half of the problem is us. Americans who buy their products, buy their gas, invest in their stocks, give them more money day in, day out. Accept and acquiesce the political manipulation and gaming of our American democracy, which has turned it into an oligarchy that represents the Koch brothers and the Walton family and the 500+ other billionaires that make up the top 2% of the population. We do nothing to make any changes to this pattern of behavior. And we do nothing to correct and/or counteract the evil empire that the Koch brothers set into place.
We could do a lot about it. We could make a lot of changes and shut down this evil empire even though they have all the money and we don’t.
Would the Koch brother empire be able to continue to exist if it no longer had the republican party to do its work? If ALEC no longer had the ability to advance Koch brother legislation? If all eligible American voters voted? Would the Koch dynasty be able to continue to do its work if it were taxed progressively, aggressively? All of these things are do-able but it would require a democratic Congress and President and a lot of laws that have been made in the last few decades that provide this power to the Koch empire would have to be rescinded.
David Koch is dead. But his evil empire lives on. That could be corrected. But will it ever be corrected? That’s the question we now face.
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