You may not have heard of the Koch brothers, but they figure hugely in all of our lives, nevertheless. They are immensely wealthy: Their “combined fortune of roughly $50 billion is exceeded only by that of Bill Gates.” You have heard of the Tea Party? Well, the Koch brothers and the Tea Party go way back, though the brothers have tried to obfuscate the relationship.

This has worked well for the Kochs because it is their practice to work through “independent” organizations, most notably “Americans for Prosperity” which functions to “educate Tea Party activists on policy details, and to give them ‘next-step training’ after their rallies, so that their political energy could be channeled ‘more effectively’.” (New Yorker article, p. 4)

The foregoing quote comes from a lengthy and well-documented article by Jane Mayer and published in “The New Yorker” in August, 30, 2010. As reportage goes, it is a tour de force, especially considering the lengths Charles and David Koch go to in covering their tracks. The details Mayer provides leave the reader stunned as the realization sinks in regarding the extent to which the brothers use their immense wealth to buy influence and avoid the penalties that others are subject to for such crimes as environmental pollution and evading governmental regulations.

The Koch brothers consider themselves libertarians, though the extent to which they would go to exempt themselves from any laws or regulations makes Ron Paul look like a moderate by comparison. They have a particular contempt for environmental regulations, and Koch Industries has been named one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. It seems logical that their involvement in the gas and oil industries is a factor in their donating untold millions of dollars to fighting legislation related to climate change.

The truth can sting. Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of law breaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.” (Mayer, page 3)

How do they figure so largely in our lives? The health care debate is one example. Working through lobbyists and organizations such as Americans for Prosperity, the brothers had an enormously destructive effect on President Obama’s agenda. Rallies in the summer of 2009 “were pivotal in undermining Obama’s agenda….Republicans who might otherwise have worked constructively with Obama” drew back. “As the first anniversary of Obama’s election approached, David Koch came to the Washington area to attend a triumphant Americans for Prosperity gathering….Not a single Republican senator was working with the Administration on health care, or much else.” (Mayer, page 18)

After all this, you may be wondering what the “fair share” in the title is all about. This phrase was used by Charles Koch after “The Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs accused Koch Oil of scheming to steal $31 million of crude oil from Native Americans. Although the company claimed it was accidental, a former executive in this operation said Charles Koch had known about it and had responded to the overages by saying, “I want my fair share, and that’s all of it.”

A very few people, call them oligarchs, have the idea that they can buy (or steal) anything they want. They don’t think laws apply to them. But they tend to squirm when the spotlight of public opinion shines on them. Like the video KONY 2012 that may aid in the capture of the terrorist Joseph Kony, there is the expectation that a new film, “Koch Brothers Exposed” will create reluctance on the part of our legislators to continue to do the bidding of these monsters. We will see!

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What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…

Click here to vote for President Obama’s American Jobs Act

There’s a dirty word circulating in the highest financial circles, but it can’t be counteracted by your mom washing out your mouth with soap. The word is “financialization,” and the title of this article is no exaggeration. The phenomenon, to be brief, is responsible for the declining position of America’s 99%.

For an excellent treatment of this critical issue, I direct your attention to a five-part series by William Lazonick, professor at UMass, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, and a leading expert on the business corporation, along with journalist Ken Jacobson and AlterNet’s Lynn Parramore. For a shorter survey, read on.

As economists tend to do, their definition of financialization doesn’t reveal much to an ordinary person. But here’s a fairly simple one: “financialization is understood to mean the vastly expanded role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of domestic and international economies.” In other words, it’s all about the bottom line.

Economists have used this word for some 50 years, and some even thought it might be a good thing. But financialization has borne a crop of evil fruit that has already transformed our nation. Outsourcing manufacturing to third-world countries? Check. Real estate bubble? Check. Trade imbalances? Check. Sovereign debt crisis? Check. Mass layoffs? Check. Decreased investment in production? Check. And so forth.

For those in the upper financial strata, it is quite a different matter. Financialization resulted in increased shareholder value, higher dividends and stock buybacks, and decisions based purely on profits. “Wall Street changed the way it made its money. Investment banks turned their focus from supporting long-term corporate investment in productive assets to trading corporate securities in search of higher yields. The great casino was taking form.”

To give some context, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney operated within this milieu. He owned a private investment equity firm that bought other businesses which he reconfigured or dismantled. Some became successful. Some failed. But Romney made a fortune.

The long-term effects of financialization are far from benign. Economists and sociologists have studied and written about its effects worldwide. “Sociological and political interpretation have also been made. In his 2006 book, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, American writer and commentator Kevin Phillips presented financialization as “a process whereby financial services, broadly construed, take over the dominant economic, cultural, and political role in a national economy.”

Philips considers that the financialization of the U.S. economy follows the same pattern that marked the beginning of the decline of Habsburg Spain in the 16th century, the Dutch trading empire in the 18th century, and the British Empire in the 19th century.” It is noteworthy to observe that in each instance, the economies ended in collapse.

Our economy has not collapsed yet. If we could understand how we got into this mess, we could figure a way out of it. It will require some radical restructuring of our thinking and our behavior. But when we consider the stakes, we must be open to finding the remedy. Our overview will continue.

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What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…

Click here to vote for President Obama’s American Jobs Act

It’s nothing new, in an election year, to hear politicians promise the sky, but what we are hearing this year takes the cake! Maybe it’s the malign influence of all those PAC’s—increasing the stakes and raising the hype—but seriously, can any rational person believe Newt Gingrich, for example, when he promises, if elected, $2.50 gas?

Putting aside both hope and reason, let’s examine the facts.

First of all, understand that the price of oil is regulated by the world economy. Even the oil we produce domestically is subject to global influences. CNN Senior Writer Steve Hargreaves puts it this way: “While increased oil and gas drilling in the United States may create good-paying jobs, reduce reliance on foreign oil and lower the trade deficit, it will have hardly any impact on gas and oil prices.”

Yes, we could increase our output by drilling in our coastal waters, but these are the very areas now closed to drilling because of possible environmental consequences. The “natives” who live in these coastal areas are not keen to allow such drilling to take place. Nobody has forgotten the damage caused by the explosion of the Deep Water Horizon off Louisiana in April, 2010.

Final decisions have yet to be made about the construction of the 1,700 mile long Keystone XL Pipeline from Canada to the Texas coast. The oil in this case is the “dirty” (and environmentally costly) tar sands product, which would probably be directed through the Ogallala Aquifer, the source of clean, abundant water for eight western states. (For an overview of this subject, see “The Lures (and Lies) of Jobs, Jobs, Jobs”)

A fact that seems new, puzzling, and strange to Americans is that as the world oil supply rises, so does the price per barrel. This feels like a personal affront—things aren’t supposed to work this way! Well, deal with it, America! This is the New World Order as it relates to global oil supplies.

China and India, with their increasing consumption, are putting pressure on a non-renewable supply. We really are going to have to get with the “all-of-the-above” strategies if we mean to maintain our quality of life.

In addition to promising plenty of oil to go around, three of the Republican presidential candidates (excepting, of course, Ron Paul) are falling all over each other projecting hawkish attitudes toward the chaos in the Middle East (read Iran, Syria, and Israel). This is a closely related subject, but it deserves a clean sheet of paper. Look to Part II to read about the “Guns.”

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What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…