The Orange County Register became the frontlines of the Koch PR war today after it published two opposing op-eds.
The first, “Kochs resist an overbearing government holding America back,” was authored by Koch donor Gavin Herbert. Apparently listening to the Freedom Partners’ call, Herbert does his best to “shift attention away” from the brothers’ hypocrisy… by stepping in his own.
In his op-ed, Herbert argues that the government’s overbearing regulations hurt businesses:
Today, federal red tape costs businesses roughly one dollar of every 10 created in the economy, or nearly $2 trillion in total. The American Action Forum estimates that more than $550 billion in regulatory costs have been added since President Obama took office in 2009.
My own company struggled under the weight of over-regulation in recent years. We developed eye-care products from our founding in 1950 until we sold the company this year. (Our most famous product was Botox, which we initially developed to help treat eye disorders.) Fortunately, this industry was not over-regulated when we set up shop. Yet federal and state demands on our business have grown by leaps and bounds since then.
But the company he co-founded, Allergen, has made millions through government contracts. According to USASpending.gov, Allergan Incorporated, Allergan USA Incorporated, and Allergan Sales, LLC, combined to receive 1,039 federal government contracts with a total value of $12,107,702.
If that wasn’t enough to undermine Herbert’s defense of the Kochs, there’s a second op-ed talking about the brothers in today’s Orange County Register. It’s unlikely they’re excited about this one, though.
Columnist Jennifer Muir’s piece, “Kochs’ disingenous attack on cronyism,” is a wonderfully scathing review of the Kochs’ attempt to fool Americans into believing that they really do just have America’s best interest in mind.
And now, according to news reports, the brothers are trying to hide their agenda behind a completely false façade of advancing civil rights and ending corporate welfare and cronyism. And they promote the notion that their ideology is analogous to the American Revolution, the anti-slavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement or the civil rights movement, as Charles Koch told the Washington Post.
Americans aren’t that gullible. For decades the Register has been an opponent of crony capitalism and an advocate for transparency, as have most right-thinking Americans.
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So here are some highlights of the Kochs’ record that you may not hear them talking about: They lobby politicians to cut income taxes for the wealthy, roll back and eliminate environmental regulations that protect our air and water (so they can amass even more wealth for themselves), slash Medicare and eliminate Social Security.
Civil rights champions like MLK, Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez did not live the lives they led, dedicated to equal rights and opportunities for all Americans, so that the Koch brothers could exploit their legacies to advance the cause of greed and exclusion. And that’s the real message that emanated from the Koch brothers’ Summer Seminar.
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.