This story tells you everything -- and I do mean everything -- you need to know about today's Republican party and those who fund it, pull its strings, and to whose most narrow interests, at the expense of the country's, they're beholden. How empty is their ideology, how little they believe in it except as a ruse to get ill-informed and malleable voters to go along, betraying their own interests. Not to mention their future.
At long last, the Koch brothers and their conservative allies in state government have found a new tax they can support. Naturally it’s a tax on something the country needs: solar energy panels.
For the last few months, the Kochs and other big polluters have been spending heavily to fight incentives for renewable energy, which have been adopted by most states. They particularly dislike state laws that allow homeowners with solar panels to sell power they don’t need back to electric utilities. So they’ve been pushing legislatures to impose a surtax on this increasingly popular practice, hoping to make installing solar panels on houses less attractive.
Oklahoma lawmakers recently approved such a surcharge at the behest of the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative group that often dictates bills to Republican statehouses and receives financing from the utility industry and fossil-fuel producers, including the Kochs...Even anti-tax pledge-demanding Grover Norquist is in on it.
Could it be any more clear? Does anyone not understand what's at stake, and what those guys and the party they carry around in their pocket really care about? What their real priorities are, behind all that anti-tax, pro-America, global-warming-is-a-hoax rhetoric? (Okay, in case you need it spelled out: they care only about their own profits, and give not the slightest shit about anything else.)
The fact that their profits are tied to the fossil fuel industry, and, therefore, that alternative energy is a threat, is all that matters to them. Not the environment. Not the planet. Not the future of you and your kids and grandkids. Has there ever been a more cynical, greedy, amoral, destructive bunch of people? Has there ever been a political party so completely in the thrall of such people, itching to take their money no matter at what cost to everyone else? Has there ever been a bought and paid-for news organization so blatantly committed to deceiving its audience in the service of its masters, caring nothing about truth? About the damage they're causing?
This is today's Republican party. Trying hard to obstruct the path to alternative energy. Other than the fact that it's entirely typical, it's nearly impossible to believe. Seriously. Alternative energy! These "job creators" are actually doing what they can to suppress jobs!! So much for conservative "values."
Anyone who's not directly tied to the fossil fuel industry who votes for them is either happily brainwashed, deliberately distracted into thinking their religion is under attack and gay marriage is more important than the temperature outside, clueless, or just doesn't care.
Will the normal people in that party ever wake up and see what's being done to them? People who actually do care about this country, the future of their kids, and of this planet? People willing to stop and think for a minute, wonder if it's possible, just possible, that they're being taken for a ride. Being deliberately lied to in the service of a handful of very rich and powerful and self-interested men? If this sort of brazen mendacity doesn't do it, what will?
Sadly, the question answers itself: nothing.
[Image source]
