Things heated up last Friday after Herman Cain finished his stand up routine at the Kochs’ Americans For Prosperity event in Washington D.C. and the crowd settled in for a late night Ronald Reagan tribute dinner. At least 500 protesters, including a group from Occupy DC, marched on the convention center where the rightwing summit was being held. They surrounded the building, jammed intersections, drummed, chanted and generally did all they could to make AFP’s guests and donors very, very uncomfortable.

It was a chaotic scene. Luckily, a rightwing blogger named Stephen Gutowski was there, ready to collect mpeg evidence of  leftwing criminal aka 1st amendment activity and hand it over to the police. Sadly, the cops didn’t seem to appreciate Stephen’s heroic volunteer-snitching: (more…)

You may have heard positive things about Margin Call, a new bankster suspense drama loosely based on the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers. I just saw the film, and my advice: Don’t waste your time and cash, not unless you want to spend a Jackson and 107 valuable minutes of your life hate-watching poorly scripted/directed banker-propaganda that tries to make you believe that, despite their obvious flaws and all, deep down those Wall Street bankers are complex human beings, just like you and me. Margin Call gives the same bullshit “once in a lifetime event!/never coulda seen it coming!” snowjob that Wall Street’s been laying on us since 2008, swearing that the crash was one of those “Black Swan” events that no one could have possibly predicted. (more…)

Looks like it’s official: Come 2012, California governor Jerry Brown is gonna try to trick voters into approving one of the most brazen water heists in American history. Gov. Brown’s plan would give control over a huge chunk of Northern California’s water supply to a handful of billionaire Central Valley plantation owners and Southern California real estate developers, allowing them to use even more of the state’s over-tapped water supply, a shared public resource, as a private commodity that they can then turn around and sell on the open market for huge easy profits.

(more…)

“I’ve never met either of the Koch brothers, I suspect that like most libertarians, they’d rather avoid the unseemly world of politics as often as possible, where winning generally means forcing other people to bend to your will. (David Koch did run for Vice President on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1980, but on a platform of legalizing drugs and prostitution, and abolishing the FBI and CIA.) They seem more interested in contributing to voluntary, civil society, by promoting ideas … the arts, research, and by fighting particularly pernicious laws like the PATRIOT Act…”

—Radley Balko, “The Koch Brothers’ Right-Wing Conspiracy to Undermine the PATRIOT Act,” Feb. 25, 2011

If the Kochs are so anti-interventionist, then why does a 2005 State Department cable show Charles Koch’s premier libertarian think-tank meddling in the former Soviet Union and circle-jerking with one of the most notorious CIA/State Department front-groups for the American Empire?

The cable is brief, but revealing: Titled “Tajikistan: Freedom House In Strategic Retreat,” the communique was sent from the U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, on November 9, 2005, and notified the folks back home that Freedom House, an infamous CIA/State Department outfit that had been tasked with funding pro-Western opposition movements and seeding regime change across the former Soviet Union, was being booted out of Tajikistan and had no choice but to abandon the NGO front group it had set up in the country. But luckily all was not lost. As the cable explained, the Institute of Humane Studies, a libertarian recruitment and educational organization controlled by Charles Koch since the early 1960s, had come to the rescue, and was ready and willing take over running and funding the Tajik NGO directly.

It would seem the Kochs have been more involved in meddling in the internal affairs of other countries than they and their lackeys lead on… (more…)

The other day The eXiled received an offer to sign up for a free security service called CloudFlare that’s supposed to provide security and reliability. (more…)

Back in April I wrote a couple of articles about how rampant speculation by Koch Industries, Goldman Sachs and other big players in the energy markets has been driving up the price of oil. Immediately, a bunch of freemarket sockpuppets came out of the woodwork and infested our comments section, repeating the same invisible-hand-knows-best bullshit: Speculators are a force of good, not evil; they don’t drive up prices, but in fact help keep them low. Sounds plausible, right?

Well, a few weeks ago Senator Bernie Sanders leaked a small batch of secret energy trading data compiled by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission which showed that in the summer of 2008, when the price of oil was spiking to a record $148 per barrel, the oil commodities market was one giant speculatory cesspool dominated by the largest fraud-ridden banks, investment funds and oil companies in the world, including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, BP and Koch Industries. (more…)

Malcolm Gladwell has described himself as a “conversation starter” who likes to “ask questions” and “follow-up” with more questions. Well, here’s a question for Malcolm Gladwell: When you wrote all those pro-tobacco articles and tobacco industry executives sang your praises, were they paying you to be their shill? Or did you just volunteer to write tobacco-friendly propaganda, out of a sincere belief in the righteousness of their cause?

(more…)