Charles Koch — This is the one issue where Bernie Sanders is right

As he campaigns for the Democratic nomination for president, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) often sounds like he’s running as much against me as he is the other candidates. I have never met the senator, but I know from listening to him that we disagree on plenty when it comes to public policy.

Even so, I see benefits in searching for common ground and greater civility during this overly negative campaign season. That’s why, in spite of the fact that he often misrepresents where I stand on issues, the senator should know that we do agree on at least one — an issue that resonates with people who feel that hard work and making a contribution will no longer enable them to succeed.

The senator is upset with a political and economic system that is often rigged to help the privileged few at the expense of everyone else, particularly the least advantaged. He believes that we have a two-tiered society that increasingly dooms millions of our fellow citizens to lives of poverty and hopelessness. He thinks many corporations seek and benefit from corporate welfare while ordinary citizens are denied opportunities and a level playing field.

I agree with him.…

The "rigged system" is one of Bernie's key key ledes, so this is significant as a basis from which to start. In my view, it is foundational. It is therefore the starting point of any agreement.

The Washington Post — Opinion
Charles Koch: This is the one issue where Bernie Sanders is right

Charles G. Koch | chairman and chief executive of Koch Industries

Lee Fang — Charles Koch Personally Founded Group Protecting Oil Industry Hand-Outs, Documents Reveal

‘Lifestyles of the Rich Environmentalists,’ produced by a group called the Institute for Energy Research, is a slick web video campaign designed to lampoon Leonardo Dicaprio and will.i.am as hypocrites for supporting action on climate change. The claim is that wealthy celebrities who oppose industrial-scale pollution supposedly shouldn’t fly in airplanes that use fossil fuels. The group, along with its subsidiary, the American Energy Alliance, churns out a steady stream of related content, from Facebook memes criticizing the Environmental Protection Agency, to commercials demanding approval of new oil projects like the Keystone XL, to a series of television campaign advertisements this year attacking Democratic candidates in West Virginia, Colorado, North Carolina and Alaska. On Capitol Hill, IER aggressively opposes any effort to repeal tax breaks afforded to the oil and gas industry. 

Documents obtained by Republic Report reveal for the first time that the group was actually founded by none other than Charles Koch, the petrochemical, manufacturing, and oil refining tycoon…

Republic Report
Charles Koch Personally Founded Group Protecting Oil Industry Hand-Outs, Documents Reveal
Lee Fang

Jay Riestenberg — Seven Disturbing Quotes From the Koch Summit Speeches

Today, The Nation and The Huffington Post published speeches from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and three other GOP Senate candidates, Rep. Tom Cotton (AR), state Sen. Joni Ernst (IA), and Rep. Cory Gardner (CO), at a secretive donor summit hosted in June by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch.

The candidates make the case for overturning Citizens United and getting big money out of politics better than we ever could.

Truthout | Op-Ed

Seven Disturbing Quotes From the Koch Summit Speeches

Jay Riestenberg, Common Cause

Travis Gettys — Charles Koch’s plan to fix the economy: Destroy minimum wage and ‘addictive’ welfare

Same old, same old. Government is the problem, not the solution.

The Raw Story
Charles Koch’s plan to fix the economy: Destroy minimum wage and ‘addictive’ welfare
Travis Gettys

Also Koch Brothers Reach Out To Hispanic Voters

Eric W. Dolan — Billionaire Charles Koch on helping the poor: Eliminate minimum wages

Billionaire Charles Koch on helping the poor: Eliminate minimum wages (via Raw Story )

Charles Koch, the billionaire co-owner of Koch Industries and libertarian financier, thinks poor people would be better off if companies could pay them less than $7.25 per hour. In an interview with the Wichita Eagle, Koch said economic freedom was…

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Joe Romm — Bombshell: Koch-Funded Study Finds ‘Global Warming Is Real’, ‘On The High End’ And ‘Essentially All’ Due To Carbon Pollution

Read it and enjoy the irony.

Read it at Climate Progress
Bombshell: Koch-Funded Study Finds ‘Global Warming Is Real’, ‘On The High End’ And ‘Essentially All’ Due To Carbon Pollution
Joe Romm

Ayn Rand — A Corporate Coup D'Etat on Campus

Gary Weiss, the Wall Street writer who was ahead of his time with his comprehensive chronicle of Wall Street corruption in 2006 (Wall Street Versus America) charts a bold new course this week with the release of Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul.

Thanks to Weiss, the nation might just escape the next wave of Ayn Rand’s radical capitalism and student brainwashing by corporate money vultures fanning out across U.S. campuses.Thanks to the trail paved in Weiss’ book, we did some further digging into the money cartel financing this “spontaneous” outpouring of campus and Tea Party interest in Rand, whose work is regularly considered by top academics to be mediocre and simpleminded.

This cartel has a striking similarity to the network of university economists set up by Big Tobacco in a money for hire scheme from 1983 to the mid 90s to blanket Congress and the media with bogus OpEds and research papers.

While it has been well known that the oil billionaire, Charles Koch, has been funneling tens of millions of dollars through his foundation into economic programs at public universities and mandating approval of faculty and curriculum in some instances, it has not heretofore been reported that a sweeping partnership in these programs has sprung up between Koch and the southern banking giant, BB&T, the latter corporation mandating that Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged is taught  and distributed to students.

Read the rest at CounterPunch

Resurrecting Ayn Rand: Hedge Fund Money Teams Up With Koch & BB&T
by Pam Martens and Russ Martens

(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)

Time for the economics profession to speak out against corporate propaganda in the name of economics.

Yves Smith — Friedrich Hayek Joins Ayn Rand as a Hypocritical User of Medicare

The next time some Austrian schoolers bloviate about about Rand and Hayek direct them to the link below. Most damning of all, hypocrite-in-chief Charles Koch was implicated in getting Hayek "on the dole" in the US even though he lived abroad at the time.

Friedrich Hayek Joins Ayn Rand as a Hypocritical User of Medicare