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koch network
The Most Dangerous Trump Pick? Jay Bhattacharya
I have to select Jay Bhattacharya (Trump's nominee to take over Francis Collins' former niche as director of The National Institutes of Health) as my absolute favorite monster from among the whole entourage of moral mutants and groveling sycophants. Bhattacharya would not raise your suspicions if he knocked on your door to deliver pamphlets—I would happily take a copy of The Watchtower and Awake from this reassuring man. He would bring a glow of satisfaction to most parents if their daughter brought him home. Hell, he even has ardent fans on the so-called left—the Tucker Carlson fan club comprised of Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, and Matt Taibbi. You can toss Russell Brand in there too. In a game of free association, we casually link Bhattacharya with the issue of free speech—recall that Twitter once censored this honest doctor. Jacobin, in 2020, did a softball interview with one of Bhattacharya's ideological partners, Martin Kulldorff. On the left we sometimes worry more about a killer's rights to free speech than we do about his raised dagger.
Bhattacharya was never about free speech, he was about giving a thunderous voice to the corporate aspiration to kill you for profit.
Free speech has been a distracting shibboleth for many sincere people, even though free speech has little meaning in a media system dominated by cash. The narrative promoted by both fascists and assorted enablers holds that Bhattacharya challenged the powerful forces of the “deep state” and was censored for his courage.
You might recall that the Stanford Professor of medicine coauthored the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) along with Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard. The rightwing Covid-19 gambit enjoyed unlimited oil industry funding and a mandate to assemble tenured prostitutes from academia to bamboozle the public. Jeffrey Tucker of the American Institute for Economic Research—a Koch Network outpost in Great Barrington, Massachusetts with a plump endowment from stock trading—must have had great confidence in the public tendency to skip the fine print. Leading up to, and following the pandemic, Bhattacharya has held fellowships and professional associations with The Hoover Institute, The Epoch Times, Hillsdale College, and The Brownstone Institute. The Brownstone is an Astroturfed organization with a Brooklyn visual motif and an Austin, Texas mailing address.
This Great Barrington Declaration spinoff—yet another brain child of the restlessly promiscuous, Koch affiliated, Jeffrey Tucker—specializes in Covid-19 minimizing, and anti-vax propaganda while dabbling in climate change denial. Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch revealed that the Brownstone is largely funded by dark money. To appreciate Bhattacharya’s mastery of absurdity, consider his statement in this 2022 interview posted at The Hoover Institute's Website:
It's a disaster that it's become a partisan thing. Public health, when it is partisan, is a failed public health.
If there is one essential talent that a fascist henchman needs, it is an utter immunity to self scrutiny, irony, and hypocrisy. I recall that Rudolf Hoss—the infamous commandant at Auschwitz—remarked in his dutifully composed autobiography (requisitioned by his British Jailers, postwar, prior to hanging), that his administration succeeded (I am paraphrasing) due to the cooperation of staff and prisoners alike. He could not wrap his head around the concept of victims and perpetrators having different agendas. They all worked together in a common purpose in Hoss' broken brain. Likewise, Bhattacharya has a Hoss-like inability to imagine that his narrative might be transparently nonsensical—how can a man affiliated with nearly every institution in the Koch Network not be self conscious when complaining of partisan medical narratives?
Bhattacharya's GBD is little more than libertarian rhetoric shaped to the contours of public health. Libertarian public health is a flagrant oxymoron—the task that Bhattacharya will be handed in a fascist oligarchy will be one that he has already done quite brilliantly—get the fuck out of the way and pretend that the mountain of bodies is an offering to the god of freedom.
Libertarian metaphor is wonderfully adaptable, like an elastic pair of stretch pants—one size fits all. Inaction is always in the service of human well-being. The climate regulates itself—"drill baby, drill." Guns need no regulations either, the "good guy with a gun" provides a natural balance. Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff figured out the libertarian essence of the Covid-19 story—the pandemic would fizzle out via the designs of nature (herd immunity!). The mandate for the government public health agencies was to use magic and disappear. And that is what Bhattacharya will do, make healthcare as ephemeral as a slight-of-hand handkerchief. His role is one of absence, abdication, retreat—but ultimately one of corporate fidelity, privatization, and the empowering of insurance companies and other profit-seeking medical companies to feed upon a sickly public.
Herd immunity was the whole tale in the GBD—the entire document can be read by a second grader in 20 seconds, but I can condense it into a three second sentence: Let everyone walk into the pandemic like it was a fourth of July stroll in the park, and, bingo—herd immunity!
There was a tiny bit about "focused protection" for the old and the sick. There was even a suggestion that old folks ought to have their groceries delivered, but not a whisper about who would pay for it. Of course we all know that some 40% of U.S. residents are afflicted with obesity, an enormous risk factor for Covid-19 mortality. We might add in all the smokers, lead- and mercury-poisoned masses, and the generally compromised health of a nation long on high fructose corn syrup and short on medical coverage. What you won't find in the GBD is a word about contact tracing, isolation, support for workers, mask wearing, and equipment for afflicted individuals—you know, the stuff that South Korea did to reduce Covid-19 harms by a factor of five compared to the U.S. Bizarrely, Bhattacharya belatedly renounced “herd immunity” in a Salon interview. WTF? It was all about focused protection he explained.
The deep state censored Bhattacharya, the truth teller, and now he will lead the very agency that suppressed him. The truth is a little more nuanced. Bhattacharya and his fellow medically credentialed whores had a bigger platform than former Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci ever had. With Trump's appointment of Scott Atlas to his Covid-19 Task Force, the GBD nearly became the de facto inspiration for U.S. policy.
According to The Lancet, some 40% of US Covid-19 deaths were preventable—about a half a million deaths could be loosely traced to public recalcitrance regarding pandemic protocol. How many of these victims can be directly traced to the influence of Bhattacharya and the GBD? I can't venture an exact figure, but if you line up all the wicked, unqualified, strange, and misshapen beings who will guide Trump's administration into the stormy seas of fascism, not a single one—not Kash Patel, RFK Jr., Kimberly Guilfoyle, Mike Huckabee, Kari Lake, Jared Kushner, Tulsi Gabbard, or anyone else can be linked to the incalculable measures of suffering that Jay Bhattacharya shepherded into history.
This is how Benjamin Mateus, writing for the World Socialist Web Site described the GBD:
The AIER, a libertarian think-tank, which posits as their aim “a society based on property rights and open markets,” is engaged in a highly reactionary, anti-working-class, and anti-socialist enterprise. The declaration has been partly funded by the right-wing billionaire, Charles Koch, who hosted a private soiree of scientists, economists, and journalists to provide the homicidal declaration a modicum of respectability and formulate herd immunity as a necessary global policy in response to the pandemic.
Derrick Z. Jackson described the GBD as a plan for "herding people to slaughter." If any of you take issue with my favoring Jay Bhattacharya as Trump's most evil selection, when did Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, or Tulsi Gabbard ever herd people to slaughter?
I am not denying that there are other abominable sociopaths who will be vying for crumbs at the master's table. Lee Zeldin and Doug Burgum as heads of the Environmental Protection Agency and Secretary of the Interior respectively, might someday cause more deaths than the piddling few hundred thousand that I have speculatively traced to Bhattacharya. In fact, the wholesale, escalating assassination of the natural world will act in tandem with our disassembled, privatized medical system. You will get to live downstream from an industrial pig slaughterhouse, with no medical insurance, and no funding for public health.
Zeldin, Burgum, and Bhattacharya might be thought of as crossing guards for the grim reaper, or maybe you might prefer to picture them as scare crows, mannequins, or plastic fuck dolls—things that have no inner lives and serve as extensions of our fantasies.
Bhattacharya was never about free speech, he was about giving a thunderous voice to the corporate aspiration to kill you for profit. Bhattacharya whined about school closings but never acknowledged the 6 million U.S. children now potentially ruined by long Covid.
As you read about the fires turning LA into an ash heap, and Trump's plans to drill and frack until the entire globe achieves end-Permian parity, be aware that the styrofoam inhabitants of Trump's administration will do no more to alleviate your misery than so many cardboard boxes sitting in the storage rooms of Amazon. If we want relief we'll have to plan unprecedented acts of resistance.
One last thought—look at the Rorschach blot below and ask yourself...
Is this an image that summons worries about free speech denied, or does this picture remind you that the oil industry owns our future?
Kansas Flat Tax to Deliver $875,000 Windfall to Billionaire Charles Koch
The figure below combines data from the ITEP Tax Microsimulation Model with an off-model analysis performed using data on Mr. Koch’s finances that were reported by Pro Publica and Forbes. According to the ITEP Model, the top 1 percent of earners in Kansas would see far larger tax cuts under this legislation than anyone among the bottom 99 percent of families. The $6,608 average tax cut going to top earners is 57 times larger than the average cut for middle-income earners and 114 times larger than the average cut for the state’s lowest-income residents. But some members of the top 1 percent, almost certainly including Mr. Koch, would receive tax cuts far larger than $6,608.
The ITEP Model analyzes tax impacts across the income scale for all state and local tax types. But the model’s ability to estimate effects at the extreme reaches of the economic scale, particularly at the state level, is limited by IRS restrictions on reporting of top earners’ incomes and deductions. Typically, the highest income group for which we report tax data is the top 1 percent of earners. Supplementing our model data with additional data on the nation’s wealthiest families allows us to offer a fuller picture of tax impacts than the model alone can provide.
Without access to Mr. Koch’s Kansas tax filings, it is not possible to compute his precise tax cut with certainty. But a reasonable estimate can be arrived at using federal tax return data reported by ProPublica.
That reporting indicated that Mr. Koch enjoyed an average federal adjusted gross income of $213 million dollars per year across the six-year period spanning 2013 to 2018, and average federal taxable income of approximately $141 million per year. Adjusting those figures to account for differences in state and federal definitions of taxable income, and growing them in line with recent increases in Mr. Koch’s wealth as reported by Forbes, leads us to conclude that his state taxable income is likely in the vicinity of $194 million today. For somebody with an income at that level, the tax bracket and exemption changes contained in the legislation that recently passed the Kansas legislature would provide a tax cut of roughly $875,000 per year.
Choosing to cut taxes for high-income families in Kansas will inevitably require the state to do less of something else instead, be it fewer teacher pay raises, less frequent infrastructure maintenance, or any number of other reductions in public services.
Mr. Koch could also expect to receive additional sales and property tax cuts under the bill, but those would amount to little more than a rounding error relative to the far larger windfall he would receive from the top income tax rate reduction.
It bears noting that an $875,000 annual tax cut is more than 7,500 times larger than the $116 average tax cut that the middle 20 percent of earners could expect to receive under this legislation. Similar, it is more than 15,000 times larger than the $58 average tax cut that the state’s lowest earners could expect to receive.
Across the country, state revenue and budget outlooks are rapidly becoming less rosy than they have been during the last few years. As surpluses dwindle and some states begin to face shortfalls, the tradeoffs associated with deep tax cutting will become harder to ignore. Choosing to cut taxes for high-income families in Kansas will inevitably require the state to do less of something else instead, be it fewer teacher pay raises, less frequent infrastructure maintenance, or any number of other reductions in public services. Lawmakers should imagine what Kansas could do for its residents with $875,000 a year, and then ask a simple question: is that money better spent on helping our communities thrive, or lining the pockets of a single billionaire?
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