Apparently, Bloomberg has a massive expose on Koch industries and the lengths they will go to get richer and richer. I’m wondering how all those patriotic teahadists feel about them doing business with Iran.
Interesting
by John Cole| 56 Comments
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything
Baud
They’re too busy booing gay soldiers to notice.
cleek
didn’t bother em when CheneyBurton was doing it.
soonergrunt
They care about as much as they did when Dick Cheney was doing the same thing as head of Haliburton, which is to say that they don’t as long as the Kochs hate the right people.
edit–Cleek was both faster and more economical than I was.
Califlander
IOKIYAR.
Linnaeus
They’re not going to care one bit. The underlying ideology of the Tea Party is brute-force capitalism. Patriotism is the superstructure.
deep cap
It’s really surprising that the class war seems to be including the likes of Bloomberg and Buffett on the side of the 99%. Makes me wonder if they’ll expect mercy when the revolution comes?
JGabriel
John Cole:
When Galtians take the money of evil foreigners, they’re bringing riches to America! Liberals do business with evil foreigners to corrupt America.
QED.
.
reflectionephemeral
As at least three folks have already noted, Republicans won’t care one iota about this.
They don’t care about some faraway country called “Iran,” they care about being Real Americans. Being a Real American means not being liberal, nonwhite, gay, and/or bookish.
Certified Mutant Enemy
IOKIYAR, always.
Also, this isn’t likely to get a lot of play on Fox “News” and talk radio…
singfoom
They’re already rich, so how can one question their motivations or the methods they used to get rich. You see, the amount of money one has speaks to one’s goodness.
The Kochs are billionaires and therefore, they obviously became so through their own blood sweat and tears and therefore they can do no wrong.
As if the teahadists would malign the Kochs for doing anything. They’re just one good idea away from becoming billionaires themselves, if those darn libruls would just stop taxing away their freedom.
Comrade Dread
Something along the lines of:
If there were less government regulation, they wouldn’t be guilty of any illegal actions.
bottyguy
You can’t trust Bloomberg they’re just a bunch of Socialists.
jrg
They’ll just make up some bullshit about Soros or Al Gore or something, declare said bullshit to be at parity with reality, then keep right on trucking.
Carnacki
“I’m wondering how all those patriotic teahadists feel about them doing business with Iran.”
Tax cuts would have solved this.
Hunter Gathers
I expect that fellow billionaire Mike Bloomberg will come to the defense of his plutocratic brethren and claim that his news organization is unfairly attacking these titans of industry who are just trying to make ends meet. Who will stick up for our beleaguered ruling class? Who will show uncommon valor and defend these poor, poor job creators who are just trying to eke out a living from the liberal media? Who, I ask you, who?
Villago Delenda Est
@Baud:
This.
Given that the fortune that the Koch Brothers inherited was made by the dealings of their father with Uncle Joe Stalin, there’s no limit to the doublethink of the teahadists on this count. None.
arguingwithsignposts
It didnt bother them when reagan was doing it.
Social outcast
They’ve been forced to do business in Iran because of Obama’s hostility to business in America. Duh.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@Social outcast:
What were Cheney and Reagan’s excuses?
JGabriel
Bloomberg:
Do the Koch Bros. even mind stories like this? Or do they think, “Good, now prospective compliance officers will know what we expect from our employees.”?
.
Gilles de Rais
So long as they hate blacks and liberals, and are willing to share their money for the cause, they’re good.
Nothing is more important to them than Obama being a one-term president.
Roger Moore
Also, too, it was OK when St. Ronnie of Raygun did deals with Iran. Most of the Teahadists are old enough to remember that one.
Grumpy Code Monkey
They may have done business with Iran, but Obama’s an islamofascist Kenyan Soshulist Negro. Q.E.F.D.
Edit: FYWP!!!
singfoom
@Hunter Gathers: Ah yes, Mr. Bloomberg, who recently opined that it was silly of the Occupy Wall Street protesters to protest people making 40/50K a year on Wall Street. Seems to be a deliberate obtuseness….
Because that’s who they’re protesting against, totally…. /snark It would seem that he has little to do with the operations of the news organization that bears his name. Seems like a good thing.
maya
As already stated by many who have trod this thread before, Repo-Teapo volks won’t care because, you see, father Freddie Koch, after he saw the error of his ways in doing bizniz with Jovial Joe Stalin building him 15 oil refineries, he recanted by doing bizniz with Adorable Adolf with the expectations that AA would take out those 15 refins.
Just like Dick Cheney did bizniz with Iraq and Iran while top dog at Haliburton and then, when VP, invaded one and wanted to bomb the other.
Should make any client country think twice before doing bizniz with any of them. Caveat Repo-Teapo, is the correct term.
Bubblegum Tate
LIBRUL MEDIA BIAS! That’s how they feel about it.
Downpuppy
Ronaldus Magnus came into office on a deal with Iran, and should have been taken out in 1985 over yet another deal with Iran.
It’s been nothing but posturing for 31 years, the stage face of a long working relationship between two right-wing authoritarian regimes that need reliable fake enemies.
Ash Can
Hey, if it’s the Koch brothers doing it, it has to be OK. They’re on our side.
/RWer
Brian R.
@Villago Delenda Est:
Glad to see someone beat me to it.
Personally, I love the irony of a family that made its fortune in checks from the Soviet Union wailing and crying about creeping socia1ism here in America.
Maybe the Kochs’ real complaint is that they didn’t find a way to make money off socia1ism at home like they did off socia1ism abroad?
amk
the teabagger nutz are all ‘blacked out’ already.
richards
I’m sure a bible and a key-shaped cake were involved so its all good.
joes527
@Roger Moore:
FTFY
Maude
@singfoom:
Good point. He doesn’t have anything to do with Bloomberg.com
catclub
@Certified Mutant Enemy: Time travel, same excuse.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brian R.:
The irony here is that their father became a fanatical anti-communist because Joe Stalin was a more ruthless capitalist overlord than he was.
Stalin brought Koch over because Koch invented a revolutionary new oil drilling bit that was rejected in the US because it wasn’t invented by the current oil bidness poobahs. They’d have to share with Koch, you see, and they just don’t play that way. But Uncle Joe was interested. Koch thought he could play the naive Stalin for years, withholding key elements of the technology and the use of it and set himself up a very nice ongoing revenue stream, but Uncle Joe was much more clever than Koch thought he was, and insisted that Uncle Joe would call the shots. This meant that while Koch got a lot of money from Uncle Joe for his expertise, he didn’t get as much as an ongoing monopoly deal would have, and Uncle Joe, after getting what he wanted, showed the parasitical Koch the door.
The rest is history.
joeyess
As long as it pisses off liberals, they’re cool with it.
Judas Escargot
@deep cap:
This is a conflict between the Investor class (e.g. Buffet/Bloomberg) and the Rentier class (e.g. the Kochs, or the elites of the resource extraction states).
To a Rentier, labor is just another resource to be exploited, like a piece of land or a draft animal. The Investor has a somewhat more complex view of labor: It’s a kind of capital, but those are also potential customers.
A Koch brother could care less if you can heat your house, as long as he gets his billion dollar oil contract. Buffet, on the other hand, owns many businesses– and you can’t buy his Pampered Chef or whatever other goods if you are unemployed.
This is all, of course, IMO. But if I’m right about this being a kind of “civil war” between these two different flavors of Galtian overlord, this is what it would look like to us down here on the ground.
Comrade Javamanphil
The Tea Party is a group that believes the world is 6000 years old and that the rising annual global temperature is a clear indicator that the earth is cooling. They’ve got 99 problems, but cognitive dissonance ain’t one of ’em.
Carnacki
@jrg: One of the first comments on the Bloomberg story brought up Soros
EconWatcher
@Judas Escargot:
I believe Warren Buffet may actually have a conscience. Personal factors should not be entirely discounted, although your objective analysis of economic interests is interesting and useful.
Villago Delenda Est
@EconWatcher:
There’s a difference between “self interest” and “enlightened self interest”.
Enlightened self interest seems to be more predicated on looking down the road a tad, like beyond the end of the current fiscal quarter.
4jkb4ia
We have no business invading Iran so it doesn’t matter. /Ron Paul supporter
/professional libertarian. That’s who the Koch brothers have been for years
Completely and hopelessly off topic, and in full knowledge that John can read, PPP has Earl Ray ahead by one point. I guess that does mean something. That and NY-9 are two areas where Democrats should be dominating, and are not.
jonas
If only taxes and regulations on Koch Industries weren’t so burdensome, hardworking executives like David and Charles wouldn’t have to resort to these shennanigans to make an honest buck.
4jkb4ia
More significantly than that they traded with Iran, you have the information in the article that they paid bribes and polluted. That should make anyone think that they are dealing with a morally dubious company and two people who got rich off a morally dubious company. But if your movement is about THE CONSTITUTION and TAKING AMERICA BACK, you don’t rethink the movement. You are glad to have the money but your movement is not about who is giving some of you the money any more than the netroots are about Soros.
4jkb4ia
Judas Escargot:
Also too, Buffett is famous for being a value investor. You look at the intrinsic value of what the company is producing over time and its management and what not. If you look at that, you are not so concerned about fantasies about the government stopping the company from producing even more wealth because you can see the many things out there, like derivatives (Buffett famously said that they were weapons of mass destruction), that are paper wealth.
PurpleGirl
@singfoom: When Bloomberg was first elected mayor he stepped down from the day-to-day running of Bloomberg L.P. He is however, still the major partner in owning the company, around 88%.
ETA: I would not say that Bloomberg is on the side of the 99%. As mayor he has steadfastly refused to consider a transfer tax on financial deals, even in the face of the lagging tax revenues resulting in layoffs in NYC among teachers, aids and other city workers.
DFH no.6
So where are the BJ fascist trolls – jwest, Bender, etc.?
Not here to defend their dark Masters?
Interesting, that.
Villago Delenda Est
@DFH no.6:
Probably waiting for their programming to filter down from wingtard central.
mtraven
Having business dealing with regimes that were as far from libertarian ideals as could be is a long Koch tradition.
neil
Conservatives don’t want Obama to negotiate with Iran. They want to leave that to the private sector.
trollhattan
What’s the subtext here? I think of Bloomberg as reflexively defending big bidnez, warts and all. Is there some infighting going on with the Kochs or have they gone too far for the closeted Republican establishment?
Kyle
If a rich Repuke did it the teatards will support it totally, whether it’s trading with Iran or gunning down orphans for sport.
Origuy
It would be like the Wars of the Roses, when the nobility fought the battles. The peasants tried to stay out of the way and keep their crops from being burned and their stores from being looted.
geg6
St. Ronnie of Raygun had no problem dealing with Iran, why should the Kochheads?
xian
tea party people believe their grassroots PR and don’t acknowledge their puppeteers
moops
Most Tea Party members barely know who a Koch is. They have no clue who is bankrolling them the candidates they love.