They who have everything are spending billions – it might even add up to trillions – to defeat President Obama. Why? What’s really at stake here? Surely it’s not just some closely held belief like the sanctity of the embryo or the infallibility of the free market? In my decades as a reporter, I found the underlying motive of political initiatives was usually money.
In the case of the infamous Koch brothers, the underlying reason for their hatred of the president is – at least in part – his commitment to green energy. The Kochs own a coal and oil empire and don’t relish the prospect of alternative energy muscling in on their market. Furthermore, they want to be free to pollute at will and ravage the landscape as they please.
They also have a pecuniary motive for trying to wipe out trade unions. Without unions there would be no one to stop them from exploiting and endangering the miners who work for them.
Sure, they a lso have a fanatical commitment to Libertarianism. But if you look closer you can see they’re driven by greed not just ideology.
It’s not so easy to discover the motives of the other billionaires and multinational corporations that have been freed by the Supreme Court to invest as much as they want in this year’s election campaigns. The court has given them a cloak of secrecy to shield them from our prying eyes.
But common sense should supply the answer.
Nobody spends that kind of money without hoping for a return on their investment. Believe me, these billionaires and corporate giants aren’t opening their treasuries because of their views on abortion, contraception or same sex marriage. That kind of posturing is just theater designed to distract and divide voters.
There’s a prize at stake here. And it has to be worth trillions to justify the kind of investment that’s being made.
I can’t say for sure what it is. It could be some kind of new world order in which the very rich would reign supreme over the rest of us. But I have no hard evidence to support that suspicion.
All I know is that with those who have everything aligned against Obama, the president is the only hope for those of us who have nothing.
