How a Koch Brothers 'Business League' Spent $236 Million to Frame the Debate

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/13-0


Charles Koch (AP Photo/Topeka Capital-Journal, Mike Burley)


“There is looming up a new and dark power.… The accumulation of individual wealth seems to be greater than it ever has been since the downfall of the Roman Empire. And the enterprises of the country are aggregating vast corporate combinations of unexampled capital, boldly marching, not for economic conquests only but for political power.”

So said Edward Ryan, the populist jurist of the mid-nineteenth century whose rage at the corruption of democracy by the wealthy and their corporations inspired generations of progressives and populists to try to constrain “the money power.”

Ryan’s warning, delivered in 1873, described the politics of the twenty-first century more accurately than most of the reporting by today’s pliant contemporary media.

“For the first time really in our politics, money is taking the field as an organized power,” he explained. “It is unscrupulous, arrogant and overbearing.”

But it is not proud.

No matter what the billionaire Koch brothers and their operatives say.