Charles Koch Hijacks Martin Luther King Jr. To Pitch His Vision For Low-Wage America [View all]

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Charles Koch Hijacks Martin Luther King Jr. To Pitch His Vision For Low-Wage America

by Christina Wilkie at the Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/06/charles-koch-america_n_5655669.html?utm_hp_ref=politics

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But for Koch Industries, the company the Koch brothers inherited from their father and built into a global mega-energy conglomerate, those regulations are costly. Charles Koch complains about how "punitive permitting for large projects creates years of delay, increasing uncertainty and cost. Sometimes projects are canceled and jobs with them."

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This brings the reader to the third part of Koch's plan -- that American kids need to be more willing to toil in menial jobs. "The willingness to work, an essential for success, often has to be taught," Koch writes. He uses as an example that his father made him take dirty jobs at the family's company when he was younger. Of course, he was still a millionaire's son with a millionaire's son's future.

"Most Americans understand that taking a job and sticking with it, no matter how unpleasant or low-paying, is a vital step toward the American dream," he writes. That Koch chooses a word as innocuous as "unpleasant" to describe a bad job is telling. The realities of low-wage work are often far worse than "unpleasant."

Through Koch's personal lens, anything that stands between workers and the specter of imminent hunger, illness or homelessness "undermines people's will to work." This means supplemental nutrition programs, Medicaid and Medicare, the Earned Income Tax Credit and unemployment insurance. Koch believes these programs and others have "created a culture of dependency and hopelessness. This is most unfair to vulnerable citizens who suffer even as we say they are receiving 'benefits.'"




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