Billionaires Against You

Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute, Columbia University, sat down with Laurence O'Donnell of MSNBC to talk about how billionaires like the Koch brothers are working hard to avoid environmental responsibility and to crush working Americans who are union members:

O’DONNELL: And why would the Kochs care about a little union question in a state like Wisconsin?

SACHS: Well what they’re doing, they have business in Wisconsin. They have polluting industries all over this country. They have bought up all the Congress on the Energy Committees in the House and the Senate on the Republican side to make sure we never do anything about the coal industry, about oil, about our dependence on imported oil, on climate.

They have bought everything they can in politics. They’re making sure they never have to pay a tax, they never have to do any environmental control.
. . .

O’DONNELL: Now in a lot of the discussion that I’ve listened to over the last year about public education in this country, there seems to be a rather relentless, conscious and sometimes subconscious attack on teachers’ unions. Teachers are the problems. The scores aren’t going up because of the teachers. It seems like they’ve isolated the teachers as the reason why the schools are the way they are. It seems to me that we’ve got some kind of political spillover from that dialog into the anti-union talk that we hear now.

SACHS: Well that dialog itself is a gimmick. It’s trying to find a cheap way to take a social crisis that we have in this country and find someone to blame. You have poor kids that can’t make it right now and so blame the teachers, not blame the poverty, not blame the neighborhoods, not blame the inability of mothers to provide a decent day care for their children, that their children get decent preschool.

So this is part of the same story actually which is we’re crushing the middle class in the country and then the rich who want to pay no taxes are doing everything they can to blame the poor and it’s out of control. It’s spiraling out of control.

Check out the whole video.