Democrats can be captured, too

Dear Senator Whitehouse,

I've watched all 33 videos of your extraordinary Youtube series, "The Scheme" (https://lnkd.in/eS69NCHr), focused on the scheme by right-wing donors to capture the Supreme Court, and somewhere between 35-50 out of 164 of your climate change videos, "Time to Wake Up."

I can only repeat what thousands upon thousands have commented on YouTube regarding your passion, leadership and integrity.

But you never turn the light on Democrats*. It is only Republicans who have been corrupted, who have taken the money and returned the wrong vote.

And even though you capture the pathology of the Koch Brothers better than anyone else that I know, I don't think they were part of any of the Senate or House hearings, even though that pathology has had such a profound impact.

I know for a certainty that the Kochs have captured energy policy in the White House, and the same is true for the Department of Energy. Not just when Republicans are in office but also when Democrats are in office. The only difference is that the former is overt and the latter covert.

The following is a clip of David Koch celebrating the destruction of Barack Obama's carbon legislation in 2009.

“Five years ago, my brother Charles and I provided the funds to start Americans for Prosperity. It's beyond my wildest dreams how AFP has grown into this enormous organization.”

In so many of your videos you jump directly from Americans for Prosperity in 2004 to Citizens United in 2010, and god knows the consequences have been so awful that they should block out any other consideration.

But I think it's critical to recognize* that the Koch Brothers started AFP with a very different goal: to destroy the bipartisan consensus that climate change was real and climate policy essential. As you have often mention, both Barack Obama and John McCain campaigned in 2008 with a platform calling for climate action.

Even most fossil fuel companies were prepared for some sort of political action.

It is this consensus that the Kochs mobilized to destroy, this fragile moment when a majority was prepared. That crime seems so much greater than the one so often mentioned and litigated, that fossil fuel companies knew and did nothing.

And with this focus on the Kochs and Americans for Prosperity in 2004, it becomes so much easier to understand how the Koch brothers, coal billionaires and gods on the board of the MIT Corporation for almost 4 decades, joined forces with John Deutch and Ernest Moniz to destroy not so much the science as the safeguards. Fracking was safe and harmless, methane emissions were nothing to worry about.

Deutch and Moniz, and Podesta and Benson and Zuber — these are the democratic faces of Koch objectives. Every single thing they have done is consistent with the Koch mission, which you have articulated so well. It is simply expressed in different terms.

In one of your videos, "Sen. Whitehouse delivers his final Time to Wake Up Climate Speech" (https://youtu.be/fewvUMn1lDI?si=tDbS6QiWDMRmPGm5), you express genuine rage toward Barack Obama for failing to pass climate legislation when all the circumstances were in his favor. You say many things that I didn't know, but I believe you are fundamentally wrong in blaming Obama. I believe he bought the lie that he was told by his energy secretary. And the same goes for Biden in 2020 through the I.R.A.

If Big Oil is allowed to covertly control policy through the Harris administration, as they did through the Obama and Biden administrations, then it is game over for us.

So I am asking you what you have asked others, to let me tell the story of how the Kochs captured the White House. I lived through nearly all of it, though I didn't understand any of it, though now I believe I do.

My hope is that I will present the evidence that will trigger a new round of Senate hearings, this time focused on the Kochs and their capture of MIT, in the hope that that information will produce a report for Vice President Kamala so that she will know who is on her side and who isn't. The Kochs, Big Oil, and the global oil cartel don't care who is in the White House. They just want control. And up til now, they've had it. And the result hasn't just been fossil fuels and booming emissions. We're arrested the transformation from where we are to where we need to be —

Kind thanks,

Ed Carlevale