To see the scope of Charles and David Koch's invisible reach into modern American life, and their influence in modern - and future - American political life especially, requires a wide lens. And you have to stand pretty far back to get it all in the picture.
Couple of weeks ago I posted a note called "Who is Howard Rich? He's buying your government:" http://www.dailykos.com/.... In it, I mentioned Rich's involvement with the National Libertarian Party, based at the time in San Francisco. Rich fell out with the party leadership in the early 1980s. In that post, I noted that I'd perused Libertarian Party newsletters which have been catalogued online at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Alabama.
Since then, as I've Googled `til I'm dizzy to find out who might be helping Rich bankroll his long march through the Midwestern and Western states, pushing his initiatives for TABOR and regulatory takings, I've been pulled back to those Libertarian newsletters at the Mises Institute. In them is documented a relationship that I believe is key to Rich's long-term agenda. So tonight, let's let various sources of information introduce you to Charles and David Koch.
Let me tell you a little story about an Idaho Republican who looked at the Republican candidates running in the party primary for mayor of Boise in 2003 and decided that one of them, a fella named Chuck Winder, wasn't quite, well, he wasn't quite Republican enough. Apparently a party registration didn't satisfy. So this Republican, who will go unnamed for a good two years, made himself the purity judge, purity jury, and purity executioner in the case of candidate Winder. Here's what he did:
"I ordered and I paid for" telephone calls to Republican voters of Boise on the night before the election, he admitted this year. At the time, though, his automated phone message identified itself to voters as "Citizens for Trustworthy Government." Trustworthy, heh heh. That'll become funny to you in a minute. What did these cloak-of-darkness callers tell voters?
Partly in response to royal shackles on people of England and the colonies then, America's founding fathers adopted government by representative democracy. In drafting state constitutions, young state governments adopted the same premises of representative government. It works like this: Through the popular vote we elect representatives to our local, state and federal offices (with the exception of the presidency, in which case we elect electors, but that's beside the point and not directly relative to this conversation). Those we elect to represent us are given a range of responsibilities, duties, privileges and powers.
Arguably the biggest responsibilities at each level of government are (1) the disbursement of public dollars, (2) the process of deciding which priorities, in what order, represent our collective essential obligations and institutions, and (3) the assessment of taxes, fees or levies to meet the needs of those priorities of the people and their state.
Gather `round, sisters and brethren: I have been to the Main Stream of Media and I bring back news. For months, and longer, a stalwart few of us have been peering through a glass darkly to map Howard Rich's reach into our states and our lives, but we've largely been alone, unaided, unsheltered, unprotected by our pedigreed kin in the world of national commercial journalism. Small papers or regional outlets have seen flickers of light reflected in bits of Rich's nationwide web, but not many statewide or national newspapers have shone their light on Howard Rich by name. Closest anyone has come so far was the Wall Street Journal, and its light slipped right through the web's silky strands, seeing only the mask of the man and not the man himself. Friends, that is changing.
Meanwhile, one of Rich's gab-happy friends spilled the beans willingly to a reporter in Boise, Idaho, `bout his buddy's penchant for writing checks willy-nilly for causes like TABOR. You will NOT want to miss this. But FIRST:
So, do Howard Rich's stealth campaigns to enact Taxpayer Bill of Rights ballot initiatives in various states represent (a) plans to "cripple state spending for health care, schools and other social needs," and attempts to "strangle the ability of citizens to confront new challenges or cope with many of the existing responsibilities of government" or (b) "the most exciting opportunity in my lifetime for you the taxpayer to finally take control and begin to put more money in your pockets for you and your families"? It appears that the answer depends on who you ask, and whether or not they have at their disposal real, objective economic data or just the talking points supplied by Rich's lieutenants in the states. Today's news provides us a case study.
If friends and family are in the mood for a popcorn movie - the sort where an unstoppable zombie is stalking teenagers with a machete, or a murder mystery wherein the three main characters are the corpse, the detective and the concerned party who is also obviously the bad guy/girl - they usually don't invite me to watch it with them anymore. I'm pragmatic, I find lame silliness among all the sharp shadows and cello-y score, and I've never held back pointing out to the ditzy co-ed or the lunkhead, "Look out, he's in the room, and he's got his machete!"
See, there's always a guy with a mask. And my first impulse is to let the folks around me know which one it is, so they can see the silliness right along with me. And so it is with Howard Rich, today's masked man. Unfortunately, the farce he's selling us isn't entertainment, it's really real, and it's really scary.
None other than the Wall Street Journal itself has weighed in on Howard Rich's effort to enshrine his brand of Libertarian policy in various states through ballot initiatives, though the WSJ's designated hitter on the topic, Chris Cooper, took pains to avoid mentioning Rich by name. Not everyone is so careful to protect Rich from scrutiny, though: this week, stalwart journalist Steve Law of the Statesman Journal, Ed Walsh of the Oregonian and columnist Ross Shealy of The State newspaper in South Carolina have all fingered Rich as the don behind the coordinated campaign to artificially limit the growth of states' economies by limiting the power of legislatures to write their own state budgets. I know it's a rhetorical question, but why won't the eminence grises of the Wall Street Journal do the same?
In a bad dream, I suddenly became aware that I no longer owned a stake in my own government - and I'm an American citizen in America, mind you - and in wandering from person to person, looking for answers, I found a smiling, balding and bespectacled man holding a receipt in his hand. I asked what the receipt was for. He said he'd just bought my government from me and my doe-eyed fellow Americans - at a bargain, he bragged. I asked who he was; he introduced himself as Howard Rich.
Only after spending part of today doing the most basic Google searching you can do, I have developed a keener understanding of just what a nightmare that is. Howard Rich has three things going for him: He's ultra-rich, he understands how to manipulate public policy through initiatives and ballot referenda, and he knows that you and I are largely oblivious to the machinations of the nickel-plated Napoleons who make up his inner circle.
Pastor in church said yesterday that the devil never sleeps, he's everywhere, he's operating from the boiler room to the board room. Something about that rings in my head today as I catch up on weekend readings from the West Coast, about developments on the TABOR front, petition-driving and signature-gathering and whatnot. Time after time this morning, I've tripped over a pattern of organization names that appear to swirl like dust motes around one figure in shadows, a man named Howard Rich. It reminds me of an Al Pacino line in "The Devil's Advocate"; when his son deduces that Pacino's character is the Devil himself and calls him on it, Pacino shrugs and says, "I have so many names."
In Oregon, proponents of a so-called Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) ballot initiative apparently hired a signature-gathering company - I can't yet determine whether it is National Voter Outreach but it may have been a company called Democracy Direct instead - and this company hired, as one of its paid signature gatherers, a man named Gregory Moser, who also goes by the name Ronald Phillip. What makes this interesting? Moser/Phillip was convicted in 2002 for forgery, served six months in prison, then was tried and convicted the same year for felony identity theft, netting himself another 26 months probation!
Monday was a bleak day for Susan Johnson's National Voter Outreach of Ludington, Michigan, with a judge in Missouri ruling in favor of the Secretary of State's disqualification of TABOR petitions, AND an Oklahoma State Supreme Court referee issuing a similar recommendation on NVO's TABOR petitions in Oklahoma City. With twin strikes against her company reverberating through America's heartland, it's not surprising that Johnson couldn't be reached for comment.
NOTE: Just a short while ago, Cole County (Missouri) District Court Judge Richard Callahan issued a ruling in this nasty affair. The news is at the bottom of the page.
National Voter Outreach, the mercenary signature-gathering company whose employees function as ground troops for right-wing causes, acknowledges that it didn't comply with Missouri law in submitting so-called Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) petitions to Secretary of State Robin Carnahan's office on the May 7 deadline. But despite having at least 37 days to comply with the law, NVO President Susan Johnson says she and her 1,100 signature-gatherers couldn't comply in that time because of "harassment and assaults" and "threats" from police officers and fire department personnel across the Show Me State. So Johnson and her patron, TABOR advocate Patrick Tuohey of Kansas City, have asked Cole County Circuit Judge Richard Callahan to ignore the law (!) and require Carnahan to reverse her order disqualifying the ballot petitions.
What a week. An attorney-turned-activist in Montana has turned the tables on a nebulous network of well-heeled out-of-staters, filing a quartet of complaints alleging - you guessed it - money laundering and campaign finance violations, among other things. In Missouri, firemen and policemen are being attacked in court filings by the good folks at National Voter Outreach (which is located a safe distance away, in Ludington, Michigan). And on the quiet streets of Lincoln, Nebraska, just outside the Hy-Vee, a convicted murderer from Florida - now working as an honest signature-gatherer for spending cap initiatives - assaulted an educator who opposed the spending-cap scam.
If you live in Missouri, California, Oregon, Michigan, Maine, Montana or Nebraska, you may want to brush up on your awareness of National Voter Outreach, a right-wing signature-gathering company that pays gatherers sometimes $3 per signature to get their clients' initiatives on the ballot. An Oklahoma grand jury has issued indictments to NVO employees for lying to circumvent state signature-gathering laws. In testimony before a grand jury in Oklahoma City, one of the indictees outlined NVOs activities in a handful of other states, where NVO continues to operate at this very moment.
Who in Montana -- or somewhere else -- would be hiding behind laws that shield a nonprofit group's books to send more than $600,000 to ballot campaigns in California, Nebraska and elsewhere? Is a political action committee there being used as a right-wing tool to launder and funnel money across the country, the same as Tom DeLay's TRMPAC is accused of doing in Texas? And what does Trevis Butcher, a conservative political activist in Montana, have to do with it?
This is priceless. Ken Blackwell's ONLY big idea to improve public education in Ohio was delivered to him on a silver platter by Patrick Byrne, a man who once served as CEO of Fechheimer Brothers in Cincinnati.
Never heard of Byrne or Fechheimer Brothers? The Houston Chronicle has. In September 1998, it reported on labor disputes between Byrne and workers at Fechheimer's only non-union uniform plant in San Antonio, Texas. The Chronicle said the plant was littered with dead rats, mosquitoes and other insects, and that workers - mostly Hispanic women who were paid $5.30 an hour and had no health insurance - had to bring their own toilet paper to work. Nice.
After taking a slam from Rod Paige and Chester Finn on his 65% deception gimmick, Ken Blackwell may be muzzling his wife, Rosa, who happens to be the superintendent of the Cincinnati Public Schools. State Sen. Teresa Fedor of Toledo - who is only the ranking member on the Ohio Senate Education Committee - said last week that Ken's ONLY big idea in education would have a "disastrous" effect on Ohio public schools. Hmm... since there are 35,600 students in the Cincinnati Public Schools, Ken's ONLY big idea on education would likely dump a big truckload of problems in the lap of his wife as she tries to do her job.
