There is no question that the Koch brothers, David and
Charles, have given a great deal of money to many different organizations to
promote their libertarian views, though as Jane Mayer says, “it is difficult to
disentangle Charles’s philosophical opposition to regulations from his financial
interest in avoiding them;” Koch industries alone routinely releases some 300
million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a year.
Aside from their environmental excesses and their dumping of
toxic wastes, for which the Koch brothers have been regularly fined, it does
not seem that their spending on political candidates has broken the law, as
dubious as many of their favorite candidates and causes have been. If the problem is with the laws then the laws
should be changed, to which the understandable response is that the laws will
not be changed as long as they benefit the donors to politicians. One of the very few things that Trump has
going for him is that he owes nothing to the Koch brothers and at least some of
his “ideas” – such as higher tariffs and more restricted immigration – are anathema
to the Koch boys, though there is also considerable agreement, such as “the
hoax” of global warming.
How much are voters persuaded by the amount of money spent
by a candidate? Dick DeVos (husband of
our new Secretary of Education) spent $35 million dollars in the 2006 race for
governor of Michigan and still lost. It
seems to me we need better educated citizens, as capable of seeing through
dubious political ads as well as other kinds of advertising. But where will that education come from? Currently most high school and college
graduates learn little about our country and its constitution –ask a college
graduate when the Civil War was, for instance – and are too easily swayed by
demagogues
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