This was posted this morning, but needs to be seen re: Koch family and newpapers

[tech3149]

http://www.alternet.org/media/being-democracy-hating-corporate-power-defending-newspaper-owner-runs-deep-koch-family?paging=off

Being a Democracy Hating, Corporate Power-Defending Newspaper Owner Runs Deep in the Koch Family

The Kochs and newspapers go waaay back, right back to their grandfather Harry Koch (yep, that’s a real name), who emigrated to America from the Netherlands in 1888 and bought a newspaper in a podunk railroad town in North Texas called Quanah. With the power of the press behind him, ol' Harry Koch went on to make a fortune for himself and his brood by aggressively rah-rahing on behalf of railroad and banking interests, fighting organized labor and savaging New Deal programs.

Harry Koch was born in Holland in 1867 into a wealthy family that owned farmland, ran a linseed oil mill and operated a shipping business that ran sailboats between his seaside hometown of Workum, and Amsterdam. Harry Koch's mother died when he was a child, and his father remarried a much younger woman—the daughter of a local banker—and had seven new kids with her.

Life at home didn’t satisfy young Harry. As soon as he turned 21, he emigrated to the United States, hoping to get in on the railroad boom of the late 19th C.
Real estate speculation was a major part of the railroad racket. Railroad companies had acquired huge tracts of public land for free by government grant, and needed to sell it off as quickly and as profitably as possible. That meant railroads were on the constant lookout for sympathetic newspaper publishers to help promote and sell the countless boom towns that had been planned around railroad platforms all across the nation. The railroad town newspaper publishers' job was to hype up local real estate booms and land grabs, providing an opportunity for railroads to dump their properties on gullible settlers at inflated prices.

Just a taste of the story, you really need to read it all. The Koch's should never be considered an honest source of information and allowing them to own the news any more than they do would be a suicide move.

[okaawhatever]

1. Thx k & R

[midnight]

2. You right. The rest of the story is a must. "Harry Koch raised the "welfare queen" alarm"

Which I'm sure he then promptly set out to legislate against via ALEC....