GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain is a vessel for the dangerous political and economic ideas of billionaires Charles and David Koch, who use distraction and political manipulation to suit their own profit-driven ends, Stanley Crouch writes in his Daily News column. A continued reliance on oil is just one of their goals, he writes.
If the worlds of fake magic and serious hustling awarded grand prizes, the infamous billionaires Charles and David Koch would easily take the prize. Their use of distraction and manipulation to suit their own purely profit-driven ends is a supreme version of what is known as “the long con.”
Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and others have mistaken “pizza candidate” Herman Cain — whose burlesque routine of a GOP campaign is being indirectly underwritten by the Kochs — as “a satirical candidacy,” but I believe things are much more serious than that. They have made Cain into “a brother from another mother,” as he calls himself. Indeed, he is the vessel for their dangerous political and economic ideas.
Those ideas include a continued reliance on oil — one of the big moneymakers for the behemoth Koch Industries, about which little is known. It also means that solar energy will continue to be vilified. Republicans are still making a big stink about the $535 million loan guarantee to failed California solar panel manufacturer Solyndra, and you can bet the oil-slick Koch brothers are loving every minute of this tempest in a teapot.
And while the Republican contenders for their party’s presidential nomination knock President Obama for not being tough enough on Iran, it turns out that the Koch brothers were just fine doing business there — that is, until someone found out about it. According to a Bloomberg Markets investigation, Koch Industries “has sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism.”
Read Stanley Crouch's complete column at the Daily News.