America Hating Conservative Koch Brothers Puts Over 4 Million Americans in Danger

America Hating Conservative Koch Brothers Puts Over 4 Million Americans in Danger

Recent Greenpeace analysis of lobbying disclosure records reveals that since 2005, Koch Industries has hired more lobbyists than Dow and Dupont to fight legislation that could protect over 100 million Americans from what national security experts say is a catastrophic risk from the bulk storage of poison gasses at dangerous chemical facilities such as oil refineries, chemical manufacturing facilities, and water treatment plants. Koch lobbyists even outnumber those at trade associations including the Chamber of Commerce and American Petroleum Institute. Only the American Chemistry Council deployed more.

In 2010 Koch Industries and the billionaire brothers who run it were first exposed as a major funder of front groups spreading denial of global warming in a Greenpeace report, which sparked an expose in the New Yorker. Since then, the brothers have been further exposed as a key backer of efforts to roll back environmental, labor, and health protections at the state and federal levels. Through enormous campaign contributions, an army of lobbyists, and funding of think tanks and front groups, David and Charles Koch push their agenda of a world in which their company can operate without regard for the risks they pose to communities, workers, or our environment.

Today, in a new expose, Greenpeace has shown how Koch Industries has quietly played a key role in blocking yet another effort to protect workers and vulnerable communities - comprehensive chemical security legislation. The Report is called "Toxic Koch: Keeping Americans at risk of a Poison Gas Disaster."

Since before the September 11, 2001 attacks, security experts have warned of the catastrophic risk that nearly every major American city faces from the bulk storage of poison gasses at dangerous chemical facilities such as oil refineries, chemical manufacturing facilities, and water treatment plants. Nevertheless, ten years later, thousands of facilities still put more than 100 million Americans at risk of a chemical disaster. According to the company's own reports to the EPA, Koch Industries and its subsidiaries Invista, Flint Hills, and Georgia Pacific operate 57 dangerous chemical facilities in the United States that together put 4.4 million people at risk.

But wait a minute these people run a business and employy people shouldn't they be able to do anything they want. In America we punish people who hurt other people, especially killers. The Koch brothers and their philsophy of conservatism says that killing some people is OK in the name of unregulated capitalism. Running a safe business might mean the Koch brothers might be worth 800 or 950 million instead of being billionaires. So not in the name of business or capitalism, but in the name of greed let them kill some Americans. Regular Americans would prefer the kind of good capitalism where greedy bastards like the Koch brothers make a few dollars less.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) Puppet on a String Pushes Radical Group's Policies To Turn Texas Universities Into Businesses

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) Puppet on a String Pushes Radical Group's Policies To Turn Texas Universities Into Businesses

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R), a potential presidential candidate, has been quietly pushing initiatives that would transform the state’s public university system into a business-style model driven by “efficiency and profitability,” The Washington Post reported today. The reforms Perry is seeking to implement are favored by one of his top campaign donors and the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), an affiliate of the American Legislative Exchange Council.

ALEC is a conservative public policy organization that often drafts model legislation for use in state legislatures across the country, and Republicans in several states have used its model legislation directly.

Perry’s push to turn the university system into profit-driven business centers began in 2008 with a higher-education summit led by oilman Jeff Sandefer — a long-time Perry family friend, a consistent top contributor to his campaigns and a TPPF board member. The proposals, based on “Seven Breakthrough Solutions” offered by TPPF, including measuring professors as “profit or loss centers,” separating research and teachers budgets to avoid wasting time on “esoteric, unproductive research” and basing professor pay, in part, on anonymous student evaluations. Perry’s alma mater, in fact, has already begun implementing some of these policies, the Post reports:

The initiative stayed pretty much under the radar until last fall, when it became public that Perry’s alma mater, Texas A&M University, had compiled a spreadsheet ranking faculty members according to whether they were earning their keep or costing the school money. The university already had rankled professors with a program that paid bonuses based on anonymous student evaluations.

Both ALEC and TPPF have established a close working relationship with Perry, donating around $2 million and $1.5 million, respectively, to his campaigns. Perry, who accepted ALEC’s highest award last August and spoke at its December conference, has benefited “far and away the most of any candidate” from its corporate donations. In turn, he donates the proceeds from his latest book to TPPF, which he describes as “a quality outlet.” Since becoming governor, Perry has appointed three TPPF board members to high-profile positions and can count on TPPF’s president as his former Deputy General Counsel and Policy Director.

But while Perry follows the legislative outline provided for him by ALEC and TPPF, higher education leaders have criticized the policies roundly. Distinguished Texas A&M alumni, the American Association of Universities (AAU), the chair of the state Senate Higher Education Committee, and other higher education groups urged Texas A&M and Perry to resist the “ill-conceived reforms,” and AAU president Robert Berdahl, a former president of the University of Texas-Austin, called the reforms “a crazy set of proposals.” Upon receiving a letter from Berdahl asking him to reconsider the policies, Texas A&M Chancellor Michael D. McKinney — Perry’s former chief of staff — threw it in the trash.

The perils of running higher education like a business, meanwhile, are well-known. The nation’s for-profit college system — which targets efficiency and profits the way Perry hopes Texas’ universities will — is rife with fraud and abuse of students, promising quick degrees and quality job opportunities at low prices. In reality, they more often leave students with “crushing debt and bleak job prospects,” hardly the situation one finds in the current Texas university system, which is regarded as one of the nation’s top statewide university systems.

Like so many modern conservative puppet politicians, Perry has no ideas of his own, he is a tool for shadowy organizations like ALEC who write the agenda and Perry sells it to the publc like modern snake oil. Just like the old snake oil the new snake oil promises to cure everything. In reality it just makes everything it touches worse.

Remember Wisconsin governor Scott Walkers' attack on basic worker rights. Like several other radical conservative governors that legislation was pushed by the notorious ant-American Koch brothers and ALEC.