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Is there a difference between the Koch brothers and
the Russian oligarchs?
24 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
I think there is a difference because the Kochroaches spent a bag of money and still lost the 2012 elections. They all own lots of politicians but victory is not guaranteed on Kochroach land. 
But he'd like to be if he's not! 
who needs a TV show - Trump's wealth is mostly trumped up in that disgusting rug
... I've never seen a Russian Oligarch's face.
I have, however, seen the Koch Brothers' mugs ... and I'm convinced that I may have developed some kind of disease as a result.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Abramovich
Roman Arkadyevich Abramovich (Russian: Рома́н Арка́дьевич Абрамо́вич, pronounced [rɐˈman ɐrˈkadʲjɪvʲɪt͡ɕ ɐbrɐˈmovʲɪt͡ɕ]; born 24 October 1966) is a Russian businessman and the main owner of the private investment company Millhouse LLC. He is known outside Russia as the owner of Chelsea Football Club, an English Premier League football team.
Abramovich, with an estimated fortune of U.S.$14.6 billion, is currently the 5th richest person in Russia and the 50th richest person in the world, according to the 2012 Forbes list.
Roman Arkadyevich Abramovich (Russian: Рома́н Арка́дьевич Абрамо́вич, pronounced [rɐˈman ɐrˈkadʲjɪvʲɪt͡ɕ ɐbrɐˈmovʲɪt͡ɕ]; born 24 October 1966) is a Russian businessman and the main owner of the private investment company Millhouse LLC. He is known outside Russia as the owner of Chelsea Football Club, an English Premier League football team.
Abramovich, with an estimated fortune of U.S.$14.6 billion, is currently the 5th richest person in Russia and the 50th richest person in the world, according to the 2012 Forbes list.
I rest my case!
I'm betting the FA dropped more than a few hints for Cameron to desist from sanctions in this case.
Remember we had football wars
The Roots of Stalin in the Tea Party Movement
This is a 2010 article written by Yasha Levine for Alternet.com. In it, Levine describes how the foundation of the Koch family fortune was bankrolled by none other than Josef Stalin back in the late 1920's and early 1930's. Charles and David Koch would probably have ended up pumping gas for a living had it not been for the money and industry startup that grandpa Koch received from the Soviet Union after he and his company had been thwarted by post-WWI American energy cartels -- cartels very similar to today's Koch Industries. That's right -- the manufactured "Tea Party" was actually made possible by money and labor extracted from Stalin's countless victims 70 years ago...
http://www.alternet.org/economy/146504/the_roots_of_stalin_in_the_tea_party_movement?page=entire
The Roots of Stalin in the Tea Party Movement
by Yasha Levine
April 17, 2010 |
The Tea Party movement's dirty little secret is that its chief financial backers owe their family fortune to the granddaddy of all their hatred: Stalin's godless empire of the USSR. The secretive oil billionaires of the Koch family, the main supporters of the right-wing groups that orchestrated the Tea Party movement, would not have the means to bankroll their favorite causes had it not been for the pile of money the family made working for the Bolsheviks in the late 1920s and early 1930s, building refineries, training Communist engineers and laying down the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure.
The comrades were good to the Kochs. Today Koch Industries has grown into the second-largest private company in America. With an annual revenue of $100 billion, the company was just $6.3 billion shy of first place in 2008. Ownership is kept strictly in the family, with the company being split roughly between brothers Charles and David Koch, who are worth about $20 billion apiece and are infamous as the largest sponsors of right-wing causes. They bankroll scores of free-market and libertarian think tanks, institutes and advocacy groups. Greenpeace estimates that the Koch family shelled out $25 million from 2005 to 2008 funding the "climate denial machine," which means they outspent Exxon Mobile three to one...
In 1929, after hosting a delegation of Soviet planners in Wichita, Kansas, Winkler and Koch signed a $5 million contract to build 15 refineries in the Soviet Union. According to Oil of Russia, a Russian oil industry trade magazine, the deal made Winkler-Koch into Comrade Stalin's number-one refinery builder. It provided equipment and oversaw construction...
The Soviet oil planners were delighted with Koch's refineries. The communists were so impressed they kept giving Winkler-Koch business and regularly sent Soviet engineers to train in Wichita. It was a sign of growing mutual trust...
to brentspeak:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/101611588
There was only one reply to that thread, and it's worth reading.
I didn't save where I read this other item, but the Koches are quoted employing terms which indicate their long-range methods in the USA are from the Leninist strategy of destabilization. That has been working well, mainly through mainstream media and defunding the government at all levels and privatization.
And then there's the matter of the Koch brothers' mother who served time in prison for her actions as Nazi prison guard. I'd say their heavy handed methods and hubris have a root in their family past. Their insistance on having no restriction on the possession or employment of weaponry domestically, and the distorting of our society to the level of an armed camp or war zone to end democratic government is well on its way. Nazi forces for enforcing their rule domestically evolved from disaffected groups in their society who had been taught to blame others for their misery. Any listen to Rush, Beck and other such demagogues show how that culture is created over time.
Facsists would, as FDR's VP Henry Wallace described it, employ less violent means at first for a fascist takeover here:
"The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence.
His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power...
They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.
Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."
-- U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace, quoted in the New York Times, April 9, 1944
Can we deny that this is what the Koch brothers have done since the 1930s or at least the 1950s? Their takeover will result in violence when they are ready to dispense with any notion of democracy. GOP/ Libertarians/ Tea Bigots despise democracy. They consider it to enable the 'parasites' and to be 'mob rule' as they believe that only a few should rule, and not the majority.
So it all comes around again. Yet we have people who find fault with Obama and the Democrats and don't want to vote in 2014. I wonder how many in Germany indulged themselves with the luxury of believing things would work out and the rug would not be pulled out from under them faster than a wink while they fought with each other. I've come to believe that only love and forgiveness and the desire to understand our differences will unite us to fight this impending evil. Sadly, that is not the DU home page represents most days.
Diclotican wrote a reply about how the Nazis got into power in Germany. There was a split from lack of trust among the factions opposing the Nazis, made up of unionists, socialists, social democrats, christian, etc. that did not allow them to form a majority coalition to take over. That left room for the minority Nazis to form a government and rule all of them, and it was too late then. The Nazis went after them singly and then eliminated all of them.
Think of all of those executive orders that have never been used since they were written since Kennedy and ever after in the hands of a permanent Tea Party (Libertarian, etc.) majority. Which is closer than people think with the way it's being bankrolled by the Koch family. They come at us from all sides, left, right and outlier, and the local level. They want a Constitutional convention called, and they will do it with enough red statehouses as Ryan has said is their purpose on the state level.
The more dissension they can hook us into falling for, and telling us such things as voting doesn't matter, profits them as they with privatization, have built a firm system of patronage that ensures they will be voted for forever.
The Koch brothers would be the ones footing the bill as they are right now for these wackjobs. Grover Nordquist says their plan for governing has been laid out for years and will be enacted when they get their man in the White House. But not to lead, only to sign the legislation that has already been written.
Check out the ALEC laws being enacted in states and championed by Rand Paul and others in Washington, to see what the future holds if the Democratic Party continues to not give any of their leaders the benefit of the doubt on anything or refuses to vote.
BTW, I note some people are questioning how a Nazi or Fascist and a Communist can be the same thing, as they are different economic/governing ideologies. The question is which one no matter what the labels, is acting in a totalitarian way and using authoritarian practices to control the people.
Hitler: concentration camps, oppression of women and of minorities, money going to private hands off slave labor. The guise of it going to the state belies where the money eventually ended up and who survived with it after their wars.
Stalin: concentration camps, oppression of women and of minorities, money going to private hands off slave labor. The guise of it going to the state belies where the money eventually ended up and who survived with it after their wars.
Just my two cents...
This is a 2010 article written by Yasha Levine for Alternet.com. In it, Levine describes how the foundation of the Koch family fortune was bankrolled by none other than Josef Stalin back in the late 1920's and early 1930's. Charles and David Koch would probably have ended up pumping gas for a living had it not been for the money and industry startup that grandpa Koch received from the Soviet Union after he and his company had been thwarted by post-WWI American energy cartels -- cartels very similar to today's Koch Industries. That's right -- the manufactured "Tea Party" was actually made possible by money and labor extracted from Stalin's countless victims 70 years ago...
http://www.alternet.org/economy/146504/the_roots_of_stalin_in_the_tea_party_movement?page=entire
The Roots of Stalin in the Tea Party Movement
by Yasha Levine
April 17, 2010 |
The Tea Party movement's dirty little secret is that its chief financial backers owe their family fortune to the granddaddy of all their hatred: Stalin's godless empire of the USSR. The secretive oil billionaires of the Koch family, the main supporters of the right-wing groups that orchestrated the Tea Party movement, would not have the means to bankroll their favorite causes had it not been for the pile of money the family made working for the Bolsheviks in the late 1920s and early 1930s, building refineries, training Communist engineers and laying down the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure.
The comrades were good to the Kochs. Today Koch Industries has grown into the second-largest private company in America. With an annual revenue of $100 billion, the company was just $6.3 billion shy of first place in 2008. Ownership is kept strictly in the family, with the company being split roughly between brothers Charles and David Koch, who are worth about $20 billion apiece and are infamous as the largest sponsors of right-wing causes. They bankroll scores of free-market and libertarian think tanks, institutes and advocacy groups. Greenpeace estimates that the Koch family shelled out $25 million from 2005 to 2008 funding the "climate denial machine," which means they outspent Exxon Mobile three to one...
In 1929, after hosting a delegation of Soviet planners in Wichita, Kansas, Winkler and Koch signed a $5 million contract to build 15 refineries in the Soviet Union. According to Oil of Russia, a Russian oil industry trade magazine, the deal made Winkler-Koch into Comrade Stalin's number-one refinery builder. It provided equipment and oversaw construction...
The Soviet oil planners were delighted with Koch's refineries. The communists were so impressed they kept giving Winkler-Koch business and regularly sent Soviet engineers to train in Wichita. It was a sign of growing mutual trust...
to brentspeak:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/101611588
There was only one reply to that thread, and it's worth reading.
I didn't save where I read this other item, but the Koches are quoted employing terms which indicate their long-range methods in the USA are from the Leninist strategy of destabilization. That has been working well, mainly through mainstream media and defunding the government at all levels and privatization.
And then there's the matter of the Koch brothers' mother who served time in prison for her actions as Nazi prison guard. I'd say their heavy handed methods and hubris have a root in their family past. Their insistance on having no restriction on the possession or employment of weaponry domestically, and the distorting of our society to the level of an armed camp or war zone to end democratic government is well on its way. Nazi forces for enforcing their rule domestically evolved from disaffected groups in their society who had been taught to blame others for their misery. Any listen to Rush, Beck and other such demagogues show how that culture is created over time.
Facsists would, as FDR's VP Henry Wallace described it, employ less violent means at first for a fascist takeover here:
"The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence.
His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power...
They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.
Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."
-- U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace, quoted in the New York Times, April 9, 1944
Can we deny that this is what the Koch brothers have done since the 1930s or at least the 1950s? Their takeover will result in violence when they are ready to dispense with any notion of democracy. GOP/ Libertarians/ Tea Bigots despise democracy. They consider it to enable the 'parasites' and to be 'mob rule' as they believe that only a few should rule, and not the majority.
So it all comes around again. Yet we have people who find fault with Obama and the Democrats and don't want to vote in 2014. I wonder how many in Germany indulged themselves with the luxury of believing things would work out and the rug would not be pulled out from under them faster than a wink while they fought with each other. I've come to believe that only love and forgiveness and the desire to understand our differences will unite us to fight this impending evil. Sadly, that is not the DU home page represents most days.
Diclotican wrote a reply about how the Nazis got into power in Germany. There was a split from lack of trust among the factions opposing the Nazis, made up of unionists, socialists, social democrats, christian, etc. that did not allow them to form a majority coalition to take over. That left room for the minority Nazis to form a government and rule all of them, and it was too late then. The Nazis went after them singly and then eliminated all of them.
Think of all of those executive orders that have never been used since they were written since Kennedy and ever after in the hands of a permanent Tea Party (Libertarian, etc.) majority. Which is closer than people think with the way it's being bankrolled by the Koch family. They come at us from all sides, left, right and outlier, and the local level. They want a Constitutional convention called, and they will do it with enough red statehouses as Ryan has said is their purpose on the state level.
The more dissension they can hook us into falling for, and telling us such things as voting doesn't matter, profits them as they with privatization, have built a firm system of patronage that ensures they will be voted for forever.
The Koch brothers would be the ones footing the bill as they are right now for these wackjobs. Grover Nordquist says their plan for governing has been laid out for years and will be enacted when they get their man in the White House. But not to lead, only to sign the legislation that has already been written.
Check out the ALEC laws being enacted in states and championed by Rand Paul and others in Washington, to see what the future holds if the Democratic Party continues to not give any of their leaders the benefit of the doubt on anything or refuses to vote.
BTW, I note some people are questioning how a Nazi or Fascist and a Communist can be the same thing, as they are different economic/governing ideologies. The question is which one no matter what the labels, is acting in a totalitarian way and using authoritarian practices to control the people.
Hitler: concentration camps, oppression of women and of minorities, money going to private hands off slave labor. The guise of it going to the state belies where the money eventually ended up and who survived with it after their wars.
Stalin: concentration camps, oppression of women and of minorities, money going to private hands off slave labor. The guise of it going to the state belies where the money eventually ended up and who survived with it after their wars.
Just my two cents...
