Is Our Country for Sale?

By  Dr. Herny Flores, NewsTaco

The title of my column may cause some of you to think I’m being melodramatic but revelations in a recent article in the liberal news magazine The Nation has led me to this conclusion.  It seems that the Koch Brothers are at it again.  Not only are the Kochs putting hundreds of millions into presidential election campaigns, they have now decided to fund efforts to rig the election process.

The Kochs and the Presidential Elections 

Although this may appear as trite and I have already spoken to it in this space, it bears repeating.  [tweet_dis]The Kochs are spending, by some estimates, as much as $1 billion dollars on the 2016 presidential elections.[/tweet_dis]  They will spend a big chunck of that money on the Republican primary and have even conducted interviews with some of the “major candidates” to determine which will be their preferred.  Even if their preferred loses the primary they will then spend even more on the General Election supporting the Republican Party’s chosen candidate. [pullquote][tweet_dis]The Kochs will do anything in their power to insure that the Democratic candidate, probably Hillary Clinton, does not win the White House.[/tweet_dis][/pullquote]The Kochs will do anything in their power to insure that the Democratic candidate, probably Hillary Clinton, does not win the White House.

Rigging the Election Process 

Now it appears that spending a large amount of money on the presidential election is not enough to insure that the Kochs gain control of the American political system.  Just to be sure, hedging their bets I guess, these patriotic Americans are spending a good deal funding a law suit in Texas challenging the manner in which state senate districts are drawn.

United States congressional districts have to meet what is known in constitutional law as the “one man, one vote principle” where every district is exactly equal.  All other districts in the states, house and senate, don’t have to meet such a strict standard and can be drawn with a deviation of a certain percentage.  In Texas the deviation is 10%.

Apparently a ten percent deviation is just too much for the Kochs to stomach so they are funding a suit challenging the deviation saying that it violates the “one man, one vote” principle.  Why do you think the Kochs are concerned about a standard that has passed constitutional scrutiny before?  Why spend millions on a law suit on a process that has gone unchallenged since senatorial districting was introduced in the state of Texas in the 1970s?

The Politics of Redistricting 

It appears that Mr. Edward Blum, the Executive Director of the Project on Fair Representation, has convinced the Kochs that if the Robert’s Majority on the Supreme Court gets this case they will strike down the very foundation of the Voting Rights Act. [pullquote][tweet_dis]The VRA was passed in 1965 to insure that all congressional and state assembly districts were drawn allowing racial minority groups to have the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice, not that of the Koch Brothers.[/tweet_dis][/pullquote]The VRA was passed in 1965 to insure that all congressional and state assembly districts were drawn allowing racial minority groups to have the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice, not that of the Koch Brothers.

Undermining the VRA is high on both Mr. Blum’s and the Koch Brother’s agenda because they both feel that minority voters, Latinos and African Americans specifically, will not support their candidates or those of the Republican Party.  So, spending millions on both their candidates and rigging the election system will give the Kochs the government they spent their ill got gains on.

Why are the Kochs so Concerned about the Election System? 

This is a simple question to answer.  The Kochs have two principle reasons for trying to buy the government.  The first is that they feel that time has eroded the American political system and it has evolved away from what it first was as deemed by the Founding Fathers.  Secondly, the Kochs want a government that will not pass legislation increasing taxes or strengthening environmental protection laws.  You see, the Kochs make so much money they just hate to pay taxes to a government they don’t believe in and they just hate paying more than $600 million dollars annually in pollution penalties.  They know that the people of the United States don’t see eye to eye with them on either issue but they do know that they can buy politicians who do.