This post originally appeared at Speak Out California

Much is finally being written about the money behind the candidates as well as the initiatives these days. Finally I say because money buys word-smithing and that buys people’s hearts and minds. Not that the ideas propelling the candidates and ballot measures couldn’t do that on their merits, but it’s the money that motivates these self-serving people/corporations. Money pays for the glib sound-bites that become the message and the PR firms that then shape the opinions and alas, the votes of an often unsuspecting electorate.

With all the money being poured into our elections this year, and the misdirection of the voters, it is not hard to understand that the Republicans are poised to recoup most, if not all of their lost gains from the 2008 election that catapulted Barack Obama and the Democrats into power. What IS hard to understand, is how the American people are looking to these very same people, with the very same ideas that put our communities, our state, our nation and even the world on the brink of economic disaster.

I was confounded again today, listening to Mitt Romney, of all people, disparaging the Democrats view of economics; if Romney and his buddies had had their way, the world would have collapsed into depression after the Bush policies of less oversight, greater private enterprise without accountability and all the other disastrous approaches to prosperity and opportunity that accompanied the Gingrich, Bush and Cheney years. One disaster after another:

• Iraq
• Wall Street
• Housing collapse
• High unemployment
• Out-sourcing jobs to China and Asia
• Huge deficits
• Afghanistan
• Guantanemo and the loss of civil liberties.

The list truly goes on and on, yet with the incredible chutzpah of arrogant, wealthy, deceitful, expediency-driven people like Mitt and the Koch brothers, we’re seeing the resurrection of the failed policies that President Obama so aptly expressed as the “guys who drove the car into the ditch”. As he pointed out, now they’re asking for the keys back. What the President was slow in realizing (or maybe does now), is that there may be enough Americans willing to do just that!

Back to the Koch Boys ……. these multi-gazillionaires born into extraordinary privilege, with no moral compass, have dumped millions into California for purposes of realizing their libertarian, polluting, anti-worker dispositions to assure that their climate threatening, dirty air creating industries continue to pollute our air and risk the future of our health and our planet. They’ve found a willing ally, it seems, in Carly Fiorina—who probably wishes she could be them—if only she knew how.  (See Fiorina’s billionaire backers in today’s LA Times.)

While a recent study named Koch Industries one of the top 10 air polluters in the United States, and they have been cited by organizations that monitor employment practices as “m>one of the most ruthless exporters of American manufacturing jobs to foreign countries”, Carly earned the distinction of being one of the country’s top twenty WORST CEO’s of all time. So they do have a lot in common–and are in sync on both opposing our critically important model air-quality legislation which also creates hundreds of thousands of green jobs for Californians (many of which have already begun) and in off-shoring American jobs.

It is important in politics to go beyond the rhetoric to who is funding what and why. Once the fluff and hype is dissected, the real story of a ballot measure or candidate’s expected behavior can be identified. With all the polling, focus-groups and testing of “messages”, the public tends to be inundated with language designed to bamboozle, not educate. This makes following the money trail all the more important.

In the case of the Koch Brothers, their millions have been funding the “tea party” and major Republican candidates nationwide. They’ve also put millions into Yes on Prop 23, along with two Texas oil companies that believe they should be able to force us to breathe dirty air.

While truth has never been of concern to the Libertarian, filthy air producing Koch boys (I will not make any comment about any possible racism or bigotry they may have inherited from their father who was one of the original members of the John Birch Society), they have gotten solidly behind Carly and Prop 23. Those facts, alone, should be enough to make sure we say NO to both Fiorina and Prop. 23. While they may have tons of money, once you follow it, you see that it leads straight into a self-serving stew of pollution and greed.

We can do better— a lot better!

There’s a name that’s becoming as ubiquitous in dirty oil politics  as Coke cans are in greasy spoons. And it’s pronounced like the soft drink, but spelled Koch. Koch-heads now on the radar include Carly Fiorina, the Tea Party and Proposition 23.

There’s a name  that’s becoming as ubiquitous in dirty oil politics as Coke cans are in greasy spoons. And it’s pronounced like the soft drink, but spelled Koch.

The New Yorker definitively exposed the gas and oil tycoons known as the Koch brothers. But who are the latest Koch-heads to wear the brand with pride?

•   Carly Fiorina

•   The Tea Party

•   The Proposition 23 campaign

Fiorina: The California Senate candidate recently aligned herself with the dirty-energy brothers by ramping up her courtship of the Tea Party in Northern California and the Central Valley. She also just gave a  mealymouthed endorsement of Proposition 23, the California ballot initiative aimed at killing the state’s climate-change law, known as AB32.

In return, Fiorina is getting some ka-ching from Koch Industries. The company is listed as a host of a  fund-raiser for her at Republican senatorial campaign headquarters in D.C. tomorrow.

Tea Party: The recent New Yorker exposé by Jane Mayer put David and Charles Koch on the political map by uncovering their early and continued funding of Tea Party organizations. In fact, the piece makes a good case that the Kochs invented the Tea Party movement.

Proposition 23: The Kochs’ $1 million contribution to the Prop 23 campaign aligns with their oil interests, and their ferocious denial of global warming. They’re longtime and usually unnamed funders of the climate-change denial industry, according to a Greenpeace report a few months ago.

All of this helps explain why Tea Partiers were out the other day supporting poor little Valero, the Texas company (and owner of two of California’s dirtiest oil refineries) that’s the top funder of Proposition 23.

So the Koch-heads among us are now visible, even if it isn’t always stamped on their foreheads.

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Posted by Judy Dugan, research director for Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an effective voice for taxpayers and consumers in an era when special interests dominate public discourse, government and politics. Visit us on Facebook and Twitter.