During the 2000 recount in Florida, a bunch of Republican operatives staged a “spontaneous” riot at the Miami-Dade County polling place in order to stop election workers from counting lawfully cast votes. Among those who were bussed into the state was one
Roger Pyle , suspect number one from the infamous lineup above. At the time he was an aid to then Congressman Tom Delay (R). Note his outraged expression. The democratic principle, handed down from our Founders and codified in our Constitution, of “one man, one vote” clearly alarmed this American, who had a hankering for the old fashioned rule by divine mandate which Tom Paine excoriated so articulately in
Common Sense .
Most wise men, in their private sentiments, have ever treated hereditary right with contempt; yet it is one of those evils, which when once established is not easily removed; many submit from fear, others from superstition, and the more powerful part shares with the king the plunder of the rest.
Tom Paine Common Sense
http://www.bartleby.com/133/2.htmlThe Brooks Brother Rioters belonged to that last class of men. They intended to share the plunder of our country. According to a follow up piece done by the Washington Post in 2005, Pyle went on to become director of federal affairs at
Koch Industries .
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31074-2005Jan23.htmlKoch Industries is the largest privately owned company in the U.S. The family made its money from oil. It patriarch founded the John Birch Society. The current owners fund a variety of conservative projects and think tanks. They also like to pollute with impunity. On the eve of the 2000 presidential election, the EPA was all over them.
During the months leading up to the 2000 presidential elections, the company faced even more liability, in the form of a 97-count federal indictment charging it with concealing illegal releases of 91 metric tons of benzene, a known carcinogen, from its refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas.
Snip
If convicted, the company faced fines of up to $352 million, plus possible jail time for company executives. After George W. Bush became president, however, the U.S. Justice Department dropped 88 of the charges. Two days before the trial, John Ashcroft settled for a plea bargain, in which Koch pled guilty to falsifying documents. All major charges were dropped, and Koch and Ashcroft settled the lawsuit for a fraction of that amount.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Koch_IndustriesInstall a monarch and share in the plunder. It is no wonder that Koch Industries rewarded several of the Brooks Brother Rioters for their part in overturning the popular vote in 2000 presidential election--in effect plunging us back to the year 1775. Another of the anti-vote counting rioters,
Matt Schlapp suspect number 6, also went on to work for Koch.
Now, the Koch family has its fingers in another “spontaneous grassroots” movement of the Astroturf variety—only this time they claim to embrace the democratic principles which they rejected so ardently (some might say, so illegally) eight years ago. According to Think Progress, the anti-Obama, anti-Tax, anti-Health Care “Tea Parties” that are being held across the country this year are secretly being funded by the Kochs:
Despite these attempts to make the “movement” appear organic, the principle organizers of the local events are actually the lobbyist-run think tanks Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works. The two groups are heavily staffed and well funded, and are providing all the logistical and public relations work necessary for planning coast-to-coast protests.
snip
Americans for Prosperity is run by Tim Phillips, who was Ralph Reed’s former partner in the lobbying firm Century Strategies. The group is funded by Koch family foundations — a family whose wealth is derived from the oil industry. Indeed Americans for Prosperity has coordinated pro-drilling ‘grassroots‘ events around the country.
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/09/lobbyists-planning-teaparties/The corporate interests which created the Tea Parties seek to portray certain duties which the voters assigned to the federal government last fall---such as health care reform, a clean environment, energy self sufficiency--- as un-American. They do this by claiming that the taxes which will be used to pay for these voter mandates are un-American. However, those who did not sleep through American History will remember that the Boston Tea Party was staged to protest
taxation without representation . It was not a protest of taxes, per say. The Founders of our country were not opposed to taxation, otherwise they would not have included the part of the Constitution which empowers the federal government to impose taxes.
Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states…
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.articlei.html#section1Read
The Rights of Man and you will find that Tom Paine objected to taxes levied by the powerful to line their pockets and to fund foreign wars (which also benefited the rich and powerful). You know, Bush Jr. style taxes. About social spending he wrote:
Civil government does not exist in executions; but in making such provision for the instruction of youth and the support of age, as to exclude, as much as possible, profligacy from the one and despair from the other. Instead of this, the resources of a country are lavished upon kings, upon courts, upon hirelings, impostors and prostitutes; and even the poor themselves, with all their wants upon them, are compelled to support the fraud that oppresses them.
Why is it that scarcely any are executed but the poor? The fact is a proof, among other things, of a wretchedness in their condition. Bred up without morals, and cast upon the world without a prospect, they are the exposed sacrifice of vice and legal barbarity. The millions that are superfluously wasted upon governments are more than sufficient to reform those evils, and to benefit the condition of every man in a nation, not included within the purlieus of a court. This I hope to make appear in the progress of this work.
http://www.ushistory.org/Paine/rights/c2-051.htmThe organizers of the Tea Parties like to style themselves as American patriots. This is bullshit. They are corporate lackeys who objected to representative rule in 2000 and they object to representative rule in 2009. When they decry “taxes” what they are really objecting to is the alleviation of sickness and poverty---which keep the people powerless and the powerful wealthy.
The quote which follows may or may not be correctly attributed. It certainly reflects the philosophy of groups like the ones Koch Industries finances.
Capital must protect itself in every way...Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible. When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principle men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd.
-J.P. Morgan
Bush Jr. was selected to drive up the deficit, plunge the nation into war, send us into depression and increase wealth disparity. The folks who broke the law to put him into the White House in 2000 will stop at nothing to keep "the common herd" from undoing the mess they worked so hard to create. They may have lost the election, but they do not intend to lose the class war, even if it means co-opting the very spirit of revolution.
However, if the majority of the American people want to spend their money to improve the public health and clean up the air, anyone who tries to stop them is an enemy of the American system of representative government.
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