April 25th's Letters to the Editor

Dear Edi­tor,

Yes­ter­day two Repub­li­can County Com­mis­sion­ers and our Repub­li­can State Rep told me oil and gas men pass out money at meet­ings with leg­is­la­tors and the ODNR. One result is elim­i­nat­ing a require­ment that they clean up/repair any dam­age oil drillers and their vehi­cles do. They can just say they’ll try in “good faith” in order to get a permit.

The Koch Broth­ers are pay­ing offi­cials over much of the coun­try to pass leg­is­la­tion to allow gas and oil indus­tries to make money and not clean up after them­selves. Do we value prof­its more than ethics and the envi­ron­ment and democracy?

Jill Grubb, Ben­ning­ton Twp.

A LOOK AT THE KOCH BROTHERS

Voices for Mor­row County, the recently-formed cit­i­zens’ group, watched and dis­cussed the doc­u­men­tary KOCH BROTHERS EXPOSED at a meet­ing April 17. Charles and David Koch, of Koch Indus­tries, inher­ited an oil com­pany from their father, Fred Koch. He made his mil­lions sell­ing oil exper­tise to Stalin back in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Later he sup­ported the John Birch Soci­ety, called Eisen­hower a com­mu­nist, and said the civil rights move­ment was communist.

Koch Indus­tries are now involved in oil, gas, paper, forestry, plas­tics, and ranch­ing, among other things, and have sub­sidiaries world­wide. Accord­ing to Bloomberg News, they have been sup­ply­ing petro­chem­i­cal equip­ment to Iran, get­ting around the US ban on trad­ing with Iran by using their subsidiaries.

A third Koch brother, Bill, blew the whis­tle on his broth­ers, claim­ing they put money ahead of every­thing else. They are among the top ten pol­luters in Amer­ica. In an effort to remove any reg­u­la­tions that would keep them from pol­lut­ing, they meet semi­an­nu­ally to dis­cuss strate­gies and cre­ate a script for the offen­sive. Supreme Court Jus­tices Scalia and Thomas have attended these meet­ings, as has U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor.

Repeat­ing the word “social­ism” over and over (and you can hear leg­is­la­tors and talk show hosts doing this) is one of their strategies.

Another rep­e­ti­tion is “raise the retire­ment age,” claim­ing Social Secu­rity is “actu­ar­i­ally bank­rupt.” It is not. It has 32 years of full fund­ing left and could be extended if they raised the cap on tax­able income. The doc­u­men­tary makes the point that many work­ers are phys­i­cally worn out by 65, if not before, and should not be forced to work until they are 70.

The Koch broth­ers help fund many right-wing groups, includ­ing the CATO Insti­tute, Mer­ca­tus, and Her­itage Foun­da­tion; in 34 states they’ve given over $5 mil­lion to Amer­i­cans for Pros­per­ity (AFP). This group is opposed to pub­lic edu­ca­tion and sup­ported school board can­di­dates in North Car­olina, where their goal was to reseg­re­gate schools. In Wake County, NC, cit­i­zens were so appalled at the move back­ward and effort to limit oppor­tu­nity for all that they protested and prac­ticed civil dis­obe­di­ence, were arrested, and even­tu­ally voted out the AFP school board mem­bers, thus sav­ing their thriv­ing schools.

Dozens of uni­ver­si­ties are now hav­ing pro­grams bought for them by Koch Broth­ers, who then influ­ence the pro­fes­sors, what they teach, and what mate­ri­als they use. There’s also a push to put cli­mate change deniers in pub­lic schools. Their pur­pose? To be allowed to con­tinue pol­lut­ing and rak­ing in prof­its. Too bad about our air, water and land. Even EPA is com­pro­mised. Under­staffed and under funded, it can­not keep up with all the cases brought to its atten­tion. Fur­ther­more, gov­er­nors and leg­is­la­tors who receive con­tri­bu­tions from Koch-funded PACs have staffed EPA with oil indus­try people.

These two men and their bil­lions are behind the attempts to destroy unions (they can pay work­ers less if that hap­pens and not worry about work­ing con­di­tions) and cur­tail vot­ing rights (shut out the poor, the dis­ad­van­taged, the hand­i­capped, the elderly) by new ID laws, lim­ited early vot­ing, and reduced oppor­tu­ni­ties for voter registration.

They are bril­liant and can afford expen­sive lawyers and leg­is­la­tors. Their assault on our nation is many-pointed and insid­i­ous, cloaked in feel-good words that have lit­tle to do with their actual intent.

In the dis­cus­sion fol­low­ing the movie, atten­dees dis­cussed how many of these things were hap­pen­ing in Ohio. We also addressed the Koch’s “debunk­ing” of the doc­u­men­tary, a “debunk­ing” that did not address most of the issues raised and mis­rep­re­sented what peo­ple had said about the pol­lu­tion from the Geor­gia Pacific Plant in Cros­sett, Alabama. In that area, toxic efflu­via from the plant is chan­neled in open ditches where poorer peo­ple live. The jump in deaths and ill­nesses in the area might just be a coin­ci­dence, but the pol­lu­tion float­ing down the ditches and send­ing up fumes was def­i­nitely real.

We all know of good busi­nesses that have man­aged to do well with­out unleash­ing dev­as­tat­ing envi­ron­men­tal impacts. This doc­u­men­tary con­fronts the peren­nial prob­lem of how to bal­ance job cre­ation with pollution-promoting cor­po­rate prof­its. Would the jobs go away if the com­pa­nies were not allowed to pump pol­lu­tants into our air and water? Sub­mit­ted by Jill Grubb.

Posted by Randa Wagner on Apr 25 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.