To the Editor:

The billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch don’t live in North Carolina. One resides in New York City, the other in Kansas. So they can’t vote here.

But what they’re doing to North Carolina has vastly more impact than any two votes.

They’re taking our forthcoming election into their deep pockets, already having spent as much as $5 million through their front organization, Americans for Prosperity, to weaken and defeat our U.S. senator Kay Hagan.

In a sane world, there would be no difference between an illegal vote and outside campaign money. One would be as criminal as the other.

But this is the asylum to which the Supreme Court has condemned us.

The only election abuse that the Republicans in Raleigh care about is the voter fraud that doesn’t exist. They’re simply delighted with the Kochs’ big bucks.

For misplaced priorities, that recalls the Washington policeman who should have been guarding President Lincoln the night he was shot. To show he had been on duty after all, he turned up at headquarters the next morning with a streetwalker he had arrested.

Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., has been hurt in the polls by an assault that is massive and murderous. By some reckoning, she is the number one target nationwide of these ruthless right-wingers, who have spent an estimated $20 million with the election still nearly a year away.

How much of it comes from the Koch bullies themselves and how much from others can’t be discerned. The details are concealed in an ingenious web of money laundering.

The pretense is that their money barrage is about issues, not candidates. It is a distinction without a difference. The ads belabor Obamacare and Democrats like Hagan who have supported it.

Why would these petrochemical billionaires care so much about Obamacare?   

For one thing, they’re afraid that the kinks will be worked out and the American people will eventually see Obamacare as the most decent thing since Social Security and Medicare — and would credit the Democrats for it. The Kochs don’t like Democrats.

For another, the Kochs are just plain mean. They hate government. Their father was a founder of the John Birch Society, and the fruit didn’t fall far from the tree.

Lastly, it serves the purposes of the plutocracy that the Kochs epitomize to keep the American people in thrall to their employers for health care. Obamacare gives Americans the option to change jobs or strike out for themselves without putting their family’s health in peril. It sets them free from the plantation and the company store.

If the Kochs win, we will have replaced government of, by and for the people with government of, by and for billionaires.

The subversive Citizens United of four years ago can’t be undone soon enough. For now, we can only hope that the good people of North Carolina — and elsewhere — will see through the Koch propaganda campaign to the reasons behind it.

Kay Hagan deserves our votes. The Kochs don’t.

Martin A. Dyckman

Waynesville