The Koch brothers seem intent on buying their way into creating an official third political party in the United States.
Think of it as something a little to the right of the tea party.
The political network overseen by conservative billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch has budgeted $889 million on the 2016 campaign — an amount that will allow them to operate at the same financial scale as the Democratic and Republican parties, according to The New York Times.
The spending goal, unveiled Monday at the Kochs’ annual winter donor retreat near Palm Springs, Calif., guarantees that the 2016 presidential and congressional elections will be the most expensive in history. Of course, the Kochs support the most conservative of Republicans.
In 2012, the Kochs’ network spent just under $400 million.
That same year, the Republican National Committee and the party’s two congressional campaign committees spent $675 million, according to OpenSecrets.org. The Democratic National Committee and the Democrats’ two congressional campaign committees spent $647 million.
The Kochs’ planned 2016 stake will have commitments from the brothers and roughly 300 other donors the Kochs have recruited over the years. The recruits include the likes of Freedom Partners, Americans for Prosperity and Concerned Veterans for America.
At least five potential presidential candidates were invited to the donor retreat, and four attended: Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas. Jeb Bush was invited, but declined, saying he had a scheduling conflict. Mitt Romney was not invited.
Where do we see this playing out for our region? Look no further than the direct mail pieces and radio spots funded by the Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity-Tennessee. The fliers blanketed the state this week urging residents to tell their state lawmakers to oppose Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam’s Insure Tennessee plan — a market-based effort to extend Medicaid so that the Affordable Care Act can help Tennessee hospitals and taxpayers by insuring 200,000 working Tennesseans — all with money we’ve already paid in federal taxes but our state can’t currently use.
Last year, the same group rallied against the United Auto Workers union vote at Volkswagen, calling out both the union and VW “outsiders” who were trying to “tell us what to do.” This is a right-to-work state, remember, so individual workers can join a union or not — depending on their own mindsets.
And where could the Koch takeover lead nationally? Well, the biggest foreign lease owner in Canada’s oil sands, or tar sands, is not an international oil giant like Exxon Mobil or Royal Dutch Shell. Instead, the biggest non-Canadian leaseholder in the northern Alberta oil sands is a subsidiary of Koch Industries, the privately-owned cornerstone of the Koch brothers’ fortune, according to The Washington Post.
These are the same Koch brothers who support tax cuts for the rich in the already too-loophole-ridden-for-the-rich tax code. Meanwhile, for the first time ever, more than half of U.S. public school students are eligible for free and reduced-price lunches because they live in homes where middle-class, family-of-four incomes of $44,123 a year or less are dropping into poverty. In Tennessee, 58 percent of children are eligible, and in Hamilton County the number is 59 percent. In Georgia, 60 percent of public school children may receive free and reduced-price lunches.
But the Kochs, of course, have other other priorities.
So here’s an important question. Just when, exactly, are Americans going to tire of a couple of billionaires telling us what to do and think? When are we going to tire of a couple of billionaires buying and ensconcing their very own government?
It may be hard to fight the Kochs’ money, but it’s not so hard not to give them ours.
To learn how to boycott the Kochs, check out Kochwatch.org or “sign the pledge” at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/01/1288957/-Sign-the-pledge-Don-t-buy-these-Koch-products. And, according to Forbes, a new app called “buycott” can help us avoid their products, too.
Happy Koch-free shopping.