Andrew Cuomo Took More Than Double The Koch Money That Scott Walker Took

Buried in this National Journal piece on why progressives are starting to revolt against Tea Party Governor Cuomo is this doozy:

Several Democrats who spoke privately to National Journal lamented that Cuomo accepted $87,000 in campaign contributions from David Koch and his wife during the 2010 cycle—more than double the $34,000 that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker took. Cuomo has also accepted donations from John Catsimatidis, de Blasio's Republican opponent. And he earned praise and money from Home Depot cofounder Ken Langone, a major GOP donor who started the group Republicans for Cuomo. (Langone recently caught flak for comparing progressives to Nazis.)

The Langone connection and the friendliness with Catsimatidis I knew about - the $87,000 in Koch cash in 2010 I did not know about.

A while back I used to call Cuomo "Tea Party Governor Cuomo" before I changed it to "Sheriff Andy" when he started the Moreland Commission to allegedly "clean up Albany" (and we've seen how far that's gone, with Preet Bharara having to take over the Moreland Commission investigations because Andy shut the whole thing down in a move of political expediency.)

But with the news that Cuomo took more than double the Koch money that Tea Party Governor Scott Walker took, I think I may have to go back to calling Sheriff Andy 'Tea Party Governor Cuomo" - not as a pejorative so much as an accurate description of who he is, where he gets his money from and why he pushes the policies he does.

Only Two Donors To The "Pro-Lhota" SuperPAC

Well, well. The pro-Lhota "super PAC" has not taken in a single donation beyond the Koch family ones already known http://t.co/lgW7T8o64n
— Chris Bragg (@ChrisBragg1) September 20, 2013

Each Koch Brother gave $145,000.

Total funds raised for the pro-Lhota superPAC - $290,000.

Someone else notes that the deadline for filing was 9/16, so there may be more donations then are currently listed.

Still, not looking like the plutocrats are ready to jump into this thing and spend a ton on Lhota just yet.

I bet those blowout polls hurt his fundraising.

He's going to need to slim that 43 percentage point lead a bit before the Bloomberg-types are ready to jump into this.

Why These Blowout Polls Between Lhota And De Blasio Can Become Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Two polls out this week showing Bill de Blasio beating his GOP opponent Joe Lhota by 41% and 43% respectively.

We have almost seven weeks to go before the election and and a lot can happen in that time for Lhota to turn this race around.

The problem for him, however, is that if he doesn't turn the race around sooner - like in the next three weeks - and have some polls come in showing him substantially narrowing the gap between himself and de Blasio, the big money donors who might ordinarily jump into the race with outside expenditures that supplement Lhota's campaign won't bother.

Billionaires like the Koch Brothers didn't become billionaires by throwing their money away on losing causes and they'll find somewhere else to put their political donations if they think Lhota doesn't have a shot.

As Azi Paybarah wrote at Politicker:

Poll findings themselves may have a detrimental impact on Lhota's candidacy, by depressing his ability to raise money for his campaign, and motivate donors to fund independent expenditure groups which can spend unlimited amounts of money attacking his opponents and promoting his candidacy.

That's the danger here for Lhota.

Add the polling issues to the self-inflicted "mall cops" crack Lhota made that pissed off the Port Authority cops and their families and the toll hike he levied on Staten Islanders that has him struggling in what should be a slam dunk win for him in New York's most Republican-friendly borough and you have Joe Lhota having a very deep hole to climb out of to make this race competitive.

He'll never get out of that hole if the big money donors shun him or decide not to spend unlimited amounts attacking de Blasio.

Eli Broad In Market For L.A. Times

Buried in this NY Times story about the Koch Brothers looking to buy a bunch of newspapers owned by the Tribune company, including the L.A. Times, is this:

At this early stage, the thinking inside the Tribune Company, the people close to the deal said, is that Koch Industries could prove the most appealing buyer. Others interested, including a group of wealthy Los Angeles residents led by the billionaire Eli Broad and Ronald W. Burkle, both prominent Democratic donors, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, would prefer to buy only The Los Angeles Times. 

The Tribune Company has signaled it prefers to sell all eight papers and their back-office operations as a bundle. (Tribune, a $7 billion media company that also owns 23 television stations, could also decide to keep the papers if they do not attract a high enough offer.) 

...

Koch Industries’ main competitor for The Los Angeles Times is a group of mostly Democratic local residents. In the 2012 political cycle, Mr. Broad gave $477,800, either directly or through his foundation, to Democratic candidates and causes, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. 

Mr. Burkle has long championed labor unions. President Bill Clinton served as an adviser to Mr. Burkle’s money management firm, Yucaipa Companies, which in 2012 gave $107,500 to Democrats and related causes. The group also includes Austin Beutner, a Democratic candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, and an investment banker who co-founded Evercore Partners. 

“This will be a bipartisan group,” Mr. Beutner said. “It’s not about ideology, it’s about a civic interest.” (The Los Angeles consortium is expected to also include Andrew Cherng, founder of the Panda Express Chinese restaurant chain and a Republican.) 

“It’s a frightening scenario when a free press is actually a bought and paid-for press and it can happen on both sides,” said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

So the pro-corporate education reform/anti-union L.A. Times could soon be sold to either the pro-corporate education reform/anti-union Koch Brothers or the pro-corporate education reform/anti-union consortium of "Democratic" investors led by Eli Broad or the pro-corporate education reform/anti-union Rupert Murdoch.

Gotta love how the NY Times article writer frames this as some red/blue dichotomy between the Kochs, Murdoch and the Broad consortium when the reality is, these groups have very similar neo-liberal agendas

It seems no matter whether the current owners of the L.A. Times continue to hold onto the paper or the Kochs buy it along with the other Tribune properties or the Broad consortium buys it or Rupert Murdoch snatches it up for his Amplify/newspaper division, the agenda at the paper will remain the same - pro-education reform, anti-teacher and anti-union.

Isn't it great to live in an oligarchy?

New York Number One in Income Inequity

All right - WE'RE NUMBER ONE!!!:

Within its borders and around the world, New York is known for its contrasts -- urban grid and Adirondack expanse, hard-charging finance and farm life, the very rich and the crushingly poor.

That last divide can be seen once again in U.S. Census data that concludes the Empire State has the highest level of income inequality in the nation. The census employs a statistical tool known as the Gini coefficient, which measures inequality of distribution -- in this case, income.

Taken from 2009 surveys, the findings were recently compiled by the financial website 24/7 Wall Street.

Used by economists and statisticians to measure income inequality, the Gini coefficient is scaled to run from 0 to 1, with 1 being the highest level of inequality.

It starts by taking the pool of money in a given state or nation and creating an imaginary model in which everyone has an equal share, set at 0. That share-and-share-alike model is then plotted against the real distribution of income. (In Census surveys, household income above $200,000 is the highest bracket offered to respondents.)

New York rates a 0.502 on that scale, followed by Connecticut at 0.480 and Texas at 0.474.

This latest sign of the sharp gaps between rich and poor in the state was no surprise to those involved in public policy. "There are lots of people with very high incomes, and lots of people with very low incomes," said Algernon Austin, a sociologist at the Economic Policy Institute, which has done similar studies looking at individual metropolitan areas.

...

Here are the top two states ranked by the inequality of income:

1. New York

Median income: $50,216 (22nd highest)

Households earning $200,000 or more: 6.15 percent (5th highest)

Population living below poverty line: 14.20 percent (25th highest)

2. Connecticut

Median income: $63,851 (highest in the U.S.)

Households earning $200,000 or more: 7.87 percent (highest)

Population living below poverty line: 9.40 percent (4th lowest)

Listen, consumerist culture is near collapse. Income disparity is growing, it is the largest it has been since the Gilded Age, the middle class is disappearing, the working class is growing larger and larger, job security has all but disappeared and long-term unemployment is a reality of life for a lot of people.

The oligarchs of our society - including Sarah Palin's favorite socialist, Barack Obama - blame the income inequity, the disappearance of the middle class, and the long-term unemployment problem on public education and teachers.

But that is NOT who and what has caused the problem.

The problem, plain and simple, has been caused by globalization and a capitalist society that privileges the predatory bankers, brokers and hedge fund traders over everybody else.

Until people go and TAKE BACK BY FORCE what the hedge fund criminals are STEALING every day, until people go and FORCE the corporate politicians from Scott Walker to Mitch Daniels to Rick Scott to Little Andy Cuomo to Barack Obama to stop shilling for the top 1%, until people force General Electric to STOP forcing employees to take pay and benefit cuts while it rakes in more money than ever, THIS WILL NOT STOP.

The oligarchs, the bankers, the hedge fund criminals and the politicians they own will NOT stop grabbing more and more until they are AFRAID that if they continue, they will be destroyed.

Power and money does not cede power and money willingly.

It must be forced to do so.

We can start this process by boycotting the industries that promote some of the worst policies.

Start with Brawny, Northern Tissue and other products made by the Koch Brothers.

Move on to General Electric and all the products and services they provide.

Buy less, consume less, spend less, debt less.

As Arlo once said about something else, if one person does this, they'll think you're sick, and if two people do it, they'll think you're a couple, but if a whole bunch of people do it, they'll think it's a movement.

And it can be.

The Anti-Consumerist/Anti-Oligarchy Movement.

In four part harmony, of course.

It's time to take back by force the power that the oligarchs have seized over the last thirty years (and especially the last ten.)

Their oligarchy CANNOT exist if nobody buys the shit they make.

Four Republicans In Wisconsin Now Face Recall Over Anti-Union Bill

This is, quite literally, historic:

More than enough signatures have been collected in an effort to recall the fourth Republican state senator in Wisconsin, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reports.

Republicans just under a week for their signatures to trigger recall elections against Democratic senators. They have not yet submitted any.

Greg Sargent: "Here's what this means. Presuming all four elections take place -- which they all but certainly will, given the massive amounts of sigantures gathered in all four cases -- Dems will have matched the amount of recalls triggered in the state's whole previous history in less than a year."

Scott Walker, the Koch Brothers and their allies in both the Republican and Democratic Parties (and there are Dems on the payroll too - see Cuomo, Little Andy, for example) think they've won the union-busting battle.

We'll see.

When the recall effort garners four recall elections, matching the number of recalls in the state's history, in less than a year, there's clearly a lot of anger out there.

The Significance Of The Walker Prank Call

Nice to see the Wisconsin governor exposed as the union-busting, corporate shill that he is.

I think the Washington Post's Ezra Klein gets the significance of the call right:

Gonzo journalist Ian Murphy noticed one of Wisconsin's Senate Democrats complaining that Gov. Scott Walker was impossible to reach on the phone. So Murphy came up with a prank call: He posed as right-wing financier David Koch and called Walker's receptionist. Shortly thereafter, he was on the phone with the governor himself. You can listen to the conversation here -- though the site seems overloaded by the traffic -- or read Adam Weinstein's summary here. Walker's office has confirmed the call was real.

...

if the transcript of the conversation is unexceptional, the fact of it is lethal. The state's Democratic senators can't get Walker on the phone, but someone can call the governor's front desk, identify themselves as David Koch, and then speak with both the governor and his chief of staff? That's where you see the access and power that major corporations and wealthy contributors will have in a Walker administration, and why so many in Wisconsin are reluctant to see the only major interest group representing workers taken out of the game.

The critique many conservatives have made of public-sector unions is that they both negotiate with and fund politicians. It's a conflict of interest. Well, so too do corporations, and wealthy individuals. That's why Murphy -- posing as Koch -- was able to get through to Walker so quickly. And it shows what Walker is really interested in here: He is not opposed, in principle, to powerful interest groups having the ear of the politicians they depend on, and who depend on them. He just wants those interest groups to be the conservative interest groups that fund him, and that he depends on.

Ostensibly billionaire David Koch is on the phone calling for Governor Walker?

Walker's on the line in seconds saying "Yes, master, what do you need me to do?"

It's like some twisted cartoon supervillain thing - only it's real and the supervillains - Koch and Walker - are real too.

Seriously, here is some of the transcript:

Koch: We’ll back you any way we can. What we were thinking about the crowd was, uh, was planting some troublemakers.

Walker: You know, well, the only problem with that —because we thought about that. The problem—the, my only gut reaction to that is right now the lawmakers I’ve talked to have just completely had it with them, the public is not really fond of this […]

Walker: [...] I went on “Morning Joe” this morning. I like it because I just like being combative with those guys, but, uh. You know they’re off the deep end.

Koch: Joe—Joe’s a good guy. He’s one of us.

Walker: Yeah, he’s all right. He was fair to me…[bashes NY Senator Chuck Schumer, who was also on the program.]

Koch: Beautiful; beautiful. You gotta love that Mika Brzezinski; she’s a real piece of ass.

Walker: Oh yeah.

Thanks for suggesting crowd plants, Dave, but we've already thought of that and decided against because if we get caught, the public is going to go apeshit.

Ah, yes, the old dirty tricks - beautiful...just beautiful!

Gee, listening to this transcript sort of reminds of some of these transcripts.

And then how about Walker getting all teary-eyed and emotional about Reagan firing the air traffic controllers?

The most beautiful moment in Reagan's presidency.

Not that we didn't know this wasn't about the budget at all, that it was just about ideology and busting the unions, but the transcript and tape of the Walker phone call bares that for all to see.