The Octopus

In 1901 Frank Norris wrote a famous novel with this title about the many ways the railroads inserted their tentacles to control California. Today we have the Koch brothers doing the same on a national scale. Let us look at a few of those tentacles.

Global warming tentacle: The April 4, 2011 issue of the Los Angeles Times reports on a study funded by the Kochs to cast doubt on the reality of global warming. The scheme was to throw doubt on the statistics that support global warming. This, because they knew they could not refute the evidence. A team of physicists, including one Nobel Laureate, engineers, one statistician, a graduate student, and one climatologist was assembled. Unfortunately for the Kochs, at the end of their analysis the team found themselves in substantial agreement with the work they had set out to debunk. It is evident that the report was not done in the interest of science, but rather in the interest of the Kochs, because, unlike a genuine scientific report, it did not undergo peer review prior to publication. In this regard, the Koch's team was like the Utah scientists who asserted they had created cold atomic fusion. This was shown to be false once it was subject to review by competent scientists.

Science and the integrity it has introduced into human affairs in its relatively short time is one of mankind's most precious possessions. Traducing it is a fundamentally heinous act. The Kochs sought to corrupt it for their venal purposes, much as Stalin corrupted the science of genetics by imposing Lysenko's anti-Mendelian theories on Soviet agriculture because it agreed with Soviet political views. The evidence on global warming is there. It continues to accumulate. We can no longer avoid many of its consequences. In the face of this dire threat to our species we have the Kochs trying to delay even further any attempts to deal with the consequences. The enormity of what the Kochs are doing can be grasped by reading Lester Brown's new book "World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse" or "The Great Disruption" by Paul Gilding. Both authors make it clear we have passed the tipping point. The question is not can we avoid the consequences, but how can we deal with the consequences if we are to survive.

The Kochs need to be continuously vilified for what they are attempting to do. They are neither just mistaken business men nor are they ordinary crooks; they are political con men using the billions our laws allowed them to accumulate to the great harm of this nation and this world.

The attack on human well-being tentacle: The Kochs want no employer except the private sector and they want that sector unhindered by any laws stipulating how the workers should be treated or compensated. They are now bent on denying pensions to public employees. They want rampant insecurity to guarantee them the cheapest labor pool possible. This is evident from their funding of Wisconsin's Governor Walker and his immediate post-election attack on public unions even though this was not a feature of his campaign.

The war against the working class tentacle: Rick Santelli, a prominent commentator on CNBC, has a regular financial broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Stock Exchange. On one occasion he launched into a rant against President Obama's effort to provide some assistance to people at risk of losing their home through mortgage default. Santelli's rant about the unfairness of such use of taxpayer funds brought the trading to a halt as the assembled stock brokers took up the demand that there be no assistance for people they considered too dumb or negligent to have incurred mortgages they could not afford and that others, especially including themselves, should not be expected to bail them out through federal assistance. With the massive bailouts of the bankers who caused the recession in full view, Santelli and these stock brokers had the colossal gall to seek denial of any assistance to the victims. From this rant and this response of the financial community, the Tea Party was born with the quick fiscal support of the Kochs. One of the sickest signs of cultural corruption in this country is a populist political party born on the floor of a stock exchange able to elect senators and representatives on its first try.

The Supreme Court tentacle: With disastrous effect on our democracy the Supreme Court recently declared corporations to be persons with the right to directly fund political candidates without any acknowledgement of their doing so. Two of the Justices, Scalia and Thomas, have been regular attendees at the Koch's twice yearly conferences focused on furthering the Far Right agenda. This transparent effort to not just weaken government, but to make it an agent of the wealthy now has Grover Norquist, the anti-tax, anti-government lobbying powerhouse of the Far Right now declaring that any increase in government revenue should be considered a tax.

As Norris' novel led to the breakup of the railroad holding company and its monopoly, so we need to seek and vigorously promote suitable taxing of the obscene wealth that the Kochs represent so that it can no longer pose the threat to our democracy and to its people that it does.

A special note: Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films have produced a short video on the Koch brothers. It may be seen at http://kochbrothersexposed.com/kochmansions/ Interestingly, it uses the octopus as the video's logo.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Brave New Films have produced a short video on the continuing efforts of the Koch brothers to destroy Social Security. The video may be seen at http://kochbrothersexposed.com/socialsecurity/

Bob Newhard

Beyond Good and Evil, With Apologies to Friedrich Nietzsche

The language of good and evil stops short of considering the facts. Long before the appearance of good and evil, mankind had to deal with survival. Because mankind has been successful in meeting the challenges of survival, at least for many people, we, using our brains and captive to our emotions, created cultural artifacts such as the morality of good and evil. However, with the prospect of irreversible damage to our species and much other life on this planet, we must again make survival a priority.

One need only contemplate the amount of human energy and natural resources consumed in our conflicts over cultural, religious and other value issues or the sheer will to dominate, to see the dissonance between values and the facts of survival. This is especially glaring when one compares them to the energy and resources expended on threats to our survival, e.g. global warming, massive food and water shortages and pandemics.

A paradigm for much of what is going on in this world because of the failure to look beyond values to reality may be found in the small country of Yemen. What began as a protest by the people for greater representation and a government focused on their needs has now been hijacked by the rivalry between two tribes that has now killed hundreds and continues to do so. This is happening in a country that UNESCO says is one of the poorest on the planet, with 40% living below the poverty line and suffering from severe water shortages, fuel shortages to deliver water by tanker trucks and by rapidly rising food prices.

This is not so different from Defense Secretary Robert Gates' recent trip around the world visiting many American military installations and foreign countries declaring that America must and will remain strong in Asia and elsewhere to protect its access to global resources and markets. Our well-being requires control of a substantial portion of the planet? Why? Sweden and other small Scandinavian countries have a higher standard of living than we do and have no such pretensions. Do I smell the odious stench of corporate profit demands in the pronouncements of Gates? His comments were intended to reassure America's allies and especially to warn China, which is now the focus of Pentagon war planning. Shall we now return to the "evil yellow peril" of the 19^th century? Will we again talk about evil empires while our planetary home suffers the ravages of our over population and over consumption? Will we now engage in an extremely wasteful global competition and perhaps a global conflict? Will we demand of our government a halt to this idiocy? Or once again will we be led down the path of good and evil, killing wantonly and understanding nothing?

If we are to think productively and act appropriately we will have to continually focus on human survival and what it requires of us, not on others and what they have done and are doing wrong. The language of good and evil is a linguistic trap that goes nowhere except to a polarized world. It cannot lead to insights or deal with the complexity of human nature. Additionally, it is easily manipulated because the terms are so emotionally loaded. Witness how Ronald Reagan used it to describe the Soviet State as an evil empire, despite the fact that it had transformed a quasi-feudal society into a major technical power, and was the major reason the Nazis were defeated and put the first satellite into orbit in a little over seventy years. Did not we try to kill it in its cradle with our invasion of 1918-1919? Was it a tyranny? Was it brutal in perusing its ends? Did its citizens, in the main, have a high regard for it? Yes, it was all of these and more, but Reagan, the ideologue, would sum it all up with the word "Evil." In this he differed not a bit from the Ayatollah Khomeini who called the United States "the Great Satan."

In all of this I am aware that, if carried too far, humans can peruse the facts at great harm to others as the Nazi human experimentation projects and the science practiced by Doctor Mengele demonstrate. Nothing was done here that humans have not done to other animals, which is why Sam Harris insists that the so-called value of human life, so easily dismissed in war and ideological differences, be extended to all sentient life. This observation points to the fact that while values are necessary to some extent they are usually prejudiced in the interest of those promoting them, e.g. the value of human life. This alone should be enough to keep us on our guard when we hear of the politics of values.

In any event, we live in a time when the values entertained by humans and their institutions pose a far greater threat to our continued existence than does a robust pursuit of the facts. T. S. Eliot supposed we would end with a whimper not a bang. I suggest we may end a badly confused species, never having understood itself sufficiently to distinguish between its own creations and those of thee plant it inhabits, unless by something unforeseen allows us to get a grip on our collective selves.

Bob Newhard