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Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

wsj.com

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Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#281

Post by chmod600 »

CameronNemo wrote: post #221
chmod600 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The supreme court partisanship is overstated. It's brought out all the time as though the sky is falling, but typically when the court is tilted, side-switching magically appears. Roberts, Gorsuch, Kennedy, O'Connor and Souter all switched sides on major issues. Conservatives switch sides a lot more often, but perhaps because the court has been tilted towards Republican nominees.

>typically when the court is tilted, side-switching magically appears For people like me, I don't care what "side" a justice is on. The justices literally choose which cases they accept... Of course there will be some debate on them. What I find absolutely horrid is that the courts are packed with nominees hand selected by a group of US senators who not only cannot represent the majority of the US population/citizenr…

"Packed" is a loaded term in the context of the courts. I assume you just mean there are a lot of Republican apointees.

Part of the job of the Senate is to represent the minority. They typically aren't the starting place for major legislation, but often slow down or heavily amend it.

You could argue that the minority should have no power at all, I suppose. Democrats used a similar argument to remove the judicial filibuster, which was a great idea right until they became the minority in the Senate.

That's really the big lesson that people never seem to learn about democracy: you'll be in the minority at some point, so get protections/obstacles in place while you're in the majority, or you'll regret it sooner than you think.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#282

Post by tehjoker »

andrewmg wrote: post #133
tehjoker wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FedSoc has a well known reputation for being a nice civic organization for the legal profession and also endorsing the most radical right wing supreme court nominees. Without the broad acceptance by the legal community, it wouldn't be as effective.

While we might disagree over who's a "radical right wing" nominee, it's indisputable that the Federalist Society hasn't endorsed any nominee for any position.

According to this article, FedSoc produces lists of acceptable nominees. That sounds a lot like an endorsement to me.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/01/how-the-federali...

From the Federalist Society website:

" Law schools and the legal profession are currently strongly dominated by a form of orthodox liberal ideology which advocates a centralized and uniform society. While some members of the academic community have dissented from these views, by and large they are taught simultaneously with (and indeed as if they were) the law.

    The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order.  It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.  The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities.

    This entails reordering priorities within the legal system to place a premium on individual liberty, traditional values, and the rule of law.  It also requires restoring the recognition of the importance of these norms among lawyers, judges, law students and professors.  In working to achieve these goals, the Society has created a conservative and libertarian intellectual network that extends to all levels of the legal community."
https://fedsoc.org/about-us#Background

This text at least implies that such lists produced will be candidates favorable to libertarian or conservative ideologists.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#283

Post by freshhawk »

aazaa wrote: post #191

The article would have been improved by giving some insight into what changed his mind. You don't just go from what he and his brother have done to the US to: > Boy, did we screw up! Without an inkling as to how or why they screwed up, there's no way to gauge what, if any, change to expect.

Journalists have to leave this kind of thing mostly implied for ethical reasons if nothing else.

The answer is clearly: because his research showed that this particular messaging (this story and the book) was the most advantageous to his political goals. If any part of it was literally meaningful then it would have the explanations you noticed were missing.

But you don't call out a Kock brother on his weak sauce image management in the WSJ, you just promote his book, do what you're told, and avoid making that kind of enemy.

He's got fairly conservative and finance friendly Democrats to influence right now and taking his money can't be too much of a public scandal.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#284

Post by freshhawk »

tedivm wrote: post #256
iSnow wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article isn't about BigTech. That's pure Whataboutism.

It also conflates donations from employees with that of their employers. There's a big difference between a billionaire like Koch individually spending hundreds of millions of dollars to block climate change, and thousands of individual tech employees donating small amounts of money towards their favorite causes and politicians.

Exactly, one is 2 individuals purchasing policies in an undemocratic fashion and another is a subset of a particular upper class group purchasing policies in an undemocratic fashion.

It's like comparing the weight of a pound of bricks to a pound of feathers.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#285

Post by shard »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #264
blfr wrote: post #27

The US seems to be in the middle of another realignment, like in the 60s. The Democratic party is consolidating its support from the big corporations, while the Republican party is making inroads with the working class.

You mean the white working class. And no one in their right mind thinks that the Republican party is less corporatist than the Democratic party. With the CARES Act, the Trump administration fought to keep secret which businesses received money. Come to find out, multinational and conglomerate entities like Ruth Chris' Steakhouse received funds.

According to polls, Trump had been making inroads into black and Latino communities as well, with approval rising from 2016 to 2020 from 5% to 9% in black communities and rising from 28% to 44% in Latino communities.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#286

Post by freshhawk »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #9
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #4

Apologies if this is covered in the article, which I can't get to, but what is he doing to make amends? Or is this just empty, placatory words?

Cynically I just think he wants to play ball with the Biden administration now that they’re talking a big talk about working with republicans.

It's real politics though, it's not cynical to not be a complete rube.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#287

Post by freshhawk »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #206
blfr wrote: post #27

The US seems to be in the middle of another realignment, like in the 60s. The Democratic party is consolidating its support from the big corporations, while the Republican party is making inroads with the working class.

a solid 35-40% of the Democratic Party is explicitly anti-corporate, remember occupy wall-street and the success of Bernie Sanders? Remember Warren calling for breaking up big tech? Even Biden and Obama frequently deployed (light) anti-corporate rhetoric in their campaigns and presidency. Trump is a billionaire and a defender of the corporate class. His entire administration consists of ex-corporate wall-street types…

That's the portion of the Democratic party that lost the fight for control, has nowhere to go in a two party system and can be completely ignored.

See: the makeup of Bidens cabinet, which is a republicans-from-10-years-ago's dream.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#288

Post by sudosysgen »

nicetryguy wrote: post #280
sudosysgen wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The relative stability you want in the next four year, if it comes, will come at the cost of something even worse after. If you want not to have Trumps anymore, you need to get rid of the factors that lead to Trump happening, and that's not going to be done calmly given the opposition of the DNC and other established interests. As a non-american, the best shot you had of establishing long-term stability was Bernie Sa…

Bernie's numbers were huge and dominating with people under 40. It will take a decade or two, but, i think Gen Z and Millenials will finally usher in more progressive change in the Democratic party.

I share your hope. That being said, my cynicism says that a decade or two might be too late, and that the Democratic party might try to exploit the ratchet effect to neuter any left wing candidate, as is the interest of their donors.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#289

Post by heurist »

iso1210 wrote: post #70
barry-cotter wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t true. To take the US tax system as an example it’s much more progressive than the flat tax starter you’re describing, where all income is taxed at the same rate. This does not stop inequality. > In 2016, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers—those with adjusted gross incomes (AGI) below $40,078—earned 11.6 percent of total AGI. However, this group of taxpayers paid just 3 percent of all income taxes in 2016.…

In a 2007 interview, Buffett explained that he took a survey of his employees and compared their tax rates to his. All told, he found that while he paid a total tax rate of 17.7%, the average tax rate for people in his office was 32.9%. .... So why is it that Buffett himself doesn't pay more tax? It's because the bulk of his income comes from dividends and long-term capital gains, which are taxed at a much lower rate…

Supposedly if dividends and capital gains were taxed at the same rate as personal income, capital would just go to countries where it's taxed at a lower rate. Supposedly.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#290

Post by CryptoPunk »

aniro wrote: post #258
pjc50 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I posted last time this came up, the problem to him is that the Tea Party they backed went out of their control. They wanted a nice biddable anti-government party. They got chaos. They've not come to Jesus on global warming, they're upset they lost.

Exactly. They whipped the mob into a frenzy with lies and bullshit so they could use its power to get what they wanted. Then they lost control of it. It is the loss of control they regret, not whipping it up in the first place.

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