The Kochtopus

Jane Mayer has an excellent -- and very disturbing -- article in the New Yorker on the Koch brothers, who have invested vast sums of money in opposing climate change legislation, environmental regulation, health care reform, and pretty much anything President Obama is trying to do. I found it hard to read, but it really shows what we're up against.

They run Koch Industries, an energy firm. They're worth $35 billion. And they're putting lots of money into fighting anything remotely progressive. Plus they micromanage the groups that they give money to, to make sure they spend it "right."

If you, like me, can't believe it when people call Obama a socialist, or wonder what's driving the Tea Party or why the absolute lies told by the right have so much currency, here's part of the explanation.

I find this scarier than Fox News. But I'm glad Jane Mayer is writing about them, because shining a bright light on people like this is about the only way I can think of to fight them.

The Marq'ssan Cycle and Jane Mayer's The Dark Side

I've just finished reading Jane Mayer's The Dark Side, which chronicles the torture and other excesses of Bush's so called war on terror. And once again, I am overwhelmed by how well Timmi Duchamp nailed such horrendous actions and the people who committed them in the Marq'ssan Cycle.

My reaction to the book -- which I've documented in cross posts on In This Moment and Open Salon -- is that we need to prosecute all the people responsible for these actions.

I don't advocate this for partisan political reasons, but for a more basic reason, one Timmi also gets at in her series: We need to uncover the truth, and look at it carefully, so that in the future we won't commit -- or allow -- excesses like these.

In Tsunami, Martha Greenglass, dealing with a scandal within the Free Zone, says,

One of the things the Marq'ssan have made me see is that until humans begin to scrutinize their mistakes and learn from and remember them, nothing will significantly change.
Many of us here today would like to "settle" this matter and lay it to rest. Which is to say we want to satisfy our consciences or desires -- depending on which "side" of the issue we are positioned -- and then go on as though nothing had happened.

And that's the key point, to uncover the facts about the horrors committed in our name, figure out how we allowed them to happen, and learn how to do things differently. We need to know the truth.

Right now, criminal prosecution is our best tool to uncover the truth, though Congressional investigations could also be useful. But these can't be witchhunts, or efforts to cover up the matter with a few show trials that make these actions look like aberrations. We must understand what happened, and why so many let it happen, or it will come back to haunt us again and again.