Recent Reviews
The Cagneys
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
Something to Sing About (1937)
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
A Lion Is In the Streets (1953)
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
Never Steal Anything Small (1959)
Shake Hands With the Devil (1959)
Monday January 25, 2016
Where the Koch Family Fortune Began
From Jane Mayer's book, “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” Chapter 1:
In late 1938, as World War II approached and Hitler's aims were unmistakable, [Fred Koch] wrote admiringly about fascism in Germany, and elsewhere, drawing an invidious comparison with America under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.
“Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. Koch added, “The laboring people in those countries are proportionately much better off than they are any place else in the world. When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.” ...
Fred Koch's willingness to work with the Soviets and the Nazis was a major factor in creating the Koch family's early fortune.
Staliln and Hitler. If you'd invented it, you couldn't have come up with two worse sources of wealth. I'm shocked, shocked that this isn't a regular piece of conversation in the “liberal media.”
Fred Koch is, of course, the father of Charles and David Koch, who have been the big money and philosophical attitude behind right-wing intransigence and attacks against the Obama administration from Day One. Expect more excerpts.