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"Mr. Koch has written (with Brian Hooks) a new book, “Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World,”" Can it get any more cynical than this?

• chub500 6y ago
  Forgive my asking - what's cynical about this title? Should we not believe in people? Is the world not top-down oriented? Sorry - just confused.
  • extra88 6y ago
    Why should anyone believe an oligarch, who has been the embodiment of top-down influence, wants "the people" to direct how society operates? His version of "bottom-up" is heavily funding astroturf campaigns as well as more populist groups through which he can control what they do.
  • Pirgo 6y ago
    Well obviously it's not title per se, but title in relation to the authors of the book.
  • meowing 6y ago
    Koch has spent a fortune on destabilizing public infrastructure in midwest cities. If he "believed in people", he could show it by not tearing down public transit systems which disenfranchises poorer people.
    • qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
      Is public transit bottom up? I'd say just the opposite.
      • brbrodude 6y ago
        Maybe it's a more complex matter? How about if people at the bottom were not continuously smacked by rich libertarian assholes and had a chance of having freedom of leisure, education, movement & all that good stuff that can make a citizen, who then is able to participate in decision making progress instead of being treated as animals for being poor? Feels bottom-up to me.
      • 8note 6y ago
        Id say it is. It's the local government chosen by the people deciding the infrastructure, rather than big car and oil companies controlled by a small group of oligarchs
  • Barrin92 6y ago
    As the article points out the Koch's themselves, running a 100+ billion dollar empire, were quite happy buying themselves into the highest echelons of power, spreading their beliefs from the top down Mr. Koch and his late brother David seeded the political landscape with conservative and libertarian ideas, then built an infrastructure to nurture them. Koch-aligned ventures fund more than 1,000 faculty members at more than 200 universities, helped bankroll think tanks such as the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, and supported the American Legislative Exchange Council (a nonpartisan organization of similarly minded state legislators) to write bills that were introduced and championed by Republican state lawmakers across the country. You know what would really decentralise the country and create a bottom-up utopia? If no single entity had the resources the Kochs has. But in the world of the Kochs privately funded authoritarianism does not count.
  • simlevesque 6y ago
    He spent hubdreds of millions of dollar doing the exact opposite. You know what they say, put your money where your mouth is. He's lying in plain sight.
• xyst 6y ago
  Mr. Koch just doesn't want people to desecrate his family grave when he finally bites the dust. I don't buy it for a second that he has truly changed. He will die rich while the rest of us try to clean up the mess he and his brother created.