Boycotting the Koch brothers

The Koch brothers are one of the major funders of the Tea Party and many of the most right-wing Republican candidates. They are the poster children for the notion that right-wing money has become the force that now controls American politics. For this reason, American progressives have a strong desire to retaliate against the Koch brothers.

One of the best ways to get back at the Koch brothers is to stop buying their products. In order to do that you need to know the companies they own and what things they make. They own Georgia-Pacific, which produces tons of well marketed major consumer paper products, including:

• Brawny paper towels
• Angel soft toilet tissue
• Quilted Northern toilet tissue
• Dixie brand paper plates, bowls, napkins, and cups
• Mardi Gras paper towels
• Sparkle paper towels
• Perfect Touch cups and other paper products
• Publix supermarket household brand paper products
• Mayfair paper napkins, bowls, plates, and tablecloths

The Koch brothers also own a company called Vista, which produces Stainmaster carpet and all fabrics containing Lycra. They also own 44% of Guardian Glass. All of these are products that are
subject to consumer boycotting.

If however you are building a house or know somebody who is you could think about boycotting Georgia-Pacific generally in terms of the building products you decide to use. And if you own a business or have responsibility for purchasing for a business there are other Georgia-Pacific products that you could work hard to avoid, which include commercial grade paper products and the devices used to dispense them. This includes both toilet tissue and paper towels. There are actually lots of choices with all of these types of products and many of them are even better than that Koch brother version of the same product, so there are multiple reasons to move away from Koch products. This type of campaign would do a lot to seriously interfere with their basic business operations because these products are a big part of their empire.

Most of the Koch brothers’ other income streams are hard to boycott as they are not focused around general consumer products. The rest of their business empire involves things like producing and refining gasoline, as well and the operation of pipelines that carry gas and oil, and some farming operations. In these arenas they are not producing their own products and instead are supporting other organizations efforts to create their products or produce their services. Their refineries produce products for lots of different companies and their oil and gas are not marketed under their names and are not able to be separately identified as theirs.

To get additional useful information for boycotting Koch products you should go to this website boycottkochbrothers.com. You will find all the information you need there. By going to this website you can also get information about how to get an app for your cell phone or tablet that will help you avoid their products.

This is well worth the effort and you may find out, as we did, that we were buying many products simply because they were being better marketed. Competing products were in fact much better.

Deficit reduction

I don’t understand why progressive Democrats now consider deficit reduction to be a terrible idea. To me it seems worthwhile, but not the major issue that Republicans make it out to be. I don’t understand why anyone would consider it a good idea to run an economy that spends way more than it takes in every year. Over time, it seems impossible to continue in this way and not a good idea even if you could. I believe it should be possible to argue that deficit reduction is worthwhile without making it the priority that Republicans consider it to be. To argue that it doesn’t matter at all makes no common sense.

Republicans are actually the cause of the current debt situation, which resulted from cutting taxes while starting wars. Thus, Democrats could make the case that they are the ones who have really taken deficit reduction on in a meaningful way. It was Reagan and the Bushes who ran up huge deficits by not paying for their spending. The only recent President who did not run up major deficits was President Clinton. Democrats should try to own this rather than run away from it. Instead, Democrats are acting like deficit reduction is a problem.

No matter how many progressive economists say it, it is still hard for most of us to accept that huge deficits are acceptable. Most of us do not and cannot accept the notion that spending more than we take in every year is a reasonable approach, but that is what most Americans think progressive Democrats believe. The stronger approach would be to recognize that reducing the deficit makes sense, except for when we are trying to recover from a major financial crisis. That is an approach that most people could understand and accept. Even if one can buy the economic argument, most of us would still consider it a problem that China owns most of that debt.

I think that Democrats can and should try to make hay of the fact that Republicans, while whining about deficits, have done nothing to reduce them. In fact they have done a lot to raise them higher, particularly spending money without including that spending in the budget. Not only do they fail to make the agreement to pay for the spending, they also never actually pay for it. Instead, they just continue to start wars while cutting rich people’s taxes.