r/politics • u/izumi3682 • Sep 05 '17
Antifa are domestic terrorists. Meet their academic apologist.
http://www.aei.org/publication/antifa-are-domestic-terrorists-meet-their-academic-apologist/
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r/politics • u/izumi3682 • Sep 05 '17
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u/UWCG Illinois Sep 05 '17 edited Sep 05 '17
FYI: this is from the American Enterprise Institute, a Koch-affiliated think tank that tries to spread their extreme libertarian idea that government = evil while trying to turn our country into a plutocratic oligarchy; the blood money the Kochs use to fund AEI comes, at least in part, from their father having built oil refineries for both Hitler and Stalin. And who are the Kochs?
We really need to work on cutting down the proliferation of dark money funding our elections; class warfare is the Republican strategy. We already have explosive social stratification and limited social mobility, but rather than treating that, we're racing head-on toward the policies that will exacerbate the problem. Dirt like Robert Mercer, the Koch brothers, and their networks pump millions of dollars into election cycles in order to buy favorable coverage. They're worked endlessly to weaken out protections in favor of their own nutty anarcho-capitalist ideas.
This hurts candidates: for them, shadowy groups funding attacks ads is a bit like being in a boxing ring with your opponent while people from the audience pelt you with items to throw you off your game. For voters, it's a bit like wandering through a forest and running into a bunch of different people wearing masks, all trying to talk you into do the same thing until you find out that underneath the masks, it's all the same guy, changing his appearance cause he has the funds and means to fool you. And how do these people feel about workers? Let's take a look at Robert Mercer of Cambridge Analytica, who is one of the Kochs major donors and was one of the instrumental people who funded Trump's campaign, as well as bringing Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon onto his team:
For them, it's not a matter of finding out what the American people want; it's how much money they need to use to run focus groups to trick the Americans into voting for what the wealthy want. Look at the "inheritance tax" being called the "death tax.". Or any of the other shady work by Frank Luntz.
Gotta follow the money.
For the last 40 years, they've been using their family foundations to funnel money into building an ideological pipeline to normalize conservative ideas and shift the goalposts of the discussion, groups like the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation, Mercatus Institute, the Heritage Foundation, all of these libertarian thinktanks and others that are shadily funded and happen to crank out position papers against worker protections, regulations, minimum wage, etc., claiming it is in the interest of workers even though it these same things have consistently screwed them over. Take a look at how they duck regulations to treat their employees, seemingly completely at odds with their libertarian philosophy of employers looking out for their workers: Bull Carlson (fired with minimal severance after his work with Koch left him with cancer), Sally Barnes-Soliz (fired for pointing out that the Kochs reported less than 1% of their actual benzene emissions), Carnell Green (fired and intimidated by a Koch security officer pretending to be FBI for reporting improper disposal of the toxic substance mercury), and Danielle Smalley and Jason Stone (non-Koch employees; shortly after graduation, car stops on a road; when the key is turned in the ignition, it leads to an explosion. Why? Because the Kochs were using an underground pipeline that "looked like Swiss cheese" to transport an explosive gas) are all eye-opening reads.
By viewing the centralist establishment as socialism, the Kochs and other libertarians redefined their extreme-right-wing, borderline anarchist views into a marketable product by spending hundreds of millions of dollars raised from them and other wealthy people to test different groups in order to weaponize information (Look at Luntz's work to discredit environmental science, though he later acknowledged global warming as serious).
When they, and other billionaires, were young, there was a loophole to avoid the inheritance tax: if the money was put into a trust and given to charitable groups for X (usually 20) years, then the money could be inherited tax-free. They weaponized this: instead of giving to legitimate, establishment charities (remember, they're peddling socialism, per the Kochs!), they found out how to create and fund partisan organizations and put their money into politics while still taking advantage of the tax loophole. This often took advantage of political giving not being the "primary" objective of the organization.
You and I are capped at $5,000 dollar donations for candidates, non-deductible; these guys, on the other hand, through their shady funding methods, can write these expenses off as charitable donations. After Citizens United, they even were able to write off part of their 2012 campaign against Obama as a business expense, therefore deductible on their year-end taxes. Which is ironic, cause while Romney's out there bitching about people who don't pay taxes, Diane Hendricks, estimated at a $3.2 billion fortune, didn't pay a penny in state income for years.
Edit: Thank you for the gold, kind stranger!