Koch, CHARLES

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CPI

“I’m not doing anything I’m ashamed of,” Charles Koch himself told Forbes last month. “You’ve gotta change the hearts and minds of the people to understand what really makes society fairer and what’s going to change their lives. And it’s not more of this government control.”

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May 2, 2024 rww

• Evan Vorpahl @ True North: True North Issues New Research Report Detailing Who Is Targeting State Courts to Limit Freedoms

True North is issuing a new research report shining a light on those men–Leonard Leo, Dick Uihlein, Charles Koch, and Jeff Yass–and right-wing groups targeting state courts and other levers of power to change the rules and limit our freedoms. This new report also documents how Leo used the Federalist Society to target state supreme courts and the judicial selection process in order to advance his agenda, and more.

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https://truenorthresearch.substack.com/p/how-one-rich-dude-targeted-colleges

4 parts

charles Koch Set His Sights on Funding Who Teaches College StudentsandWhat They Teach

By Caroline Jones and Lisa Graves for True North Research and the BOLD ReThink

Quick Recap.America’s student debt crisis is the partial result of public policy preferences pushed decades ago by free market fundamentalists like Milton Friedman and Charles Koch, as described in ourfirst installment.

Oursecond installment demonstrated how Friedman and Koch advanced an anti-government agenda that has resulted in saddling generations of Americans with student loan debt.

Ourthird installment revealed how Koch’s first non-profit advocated for public universities to cost a lot more for students to attend, embraced student loans to cover higher costs due to slashing public subsidies, and urged corporate colleges.

This week, we detail how Koch sought to capture universities to train brigades of students and scholars in his free market fundamentalism. This includes his attack on the notorious “Powell Memo” for not going far enough to ensure that the corporate view of America is taught at universities and to secure a cadre of academics to attack government (that is, democratic) regulation of corporations.

Koch Attacked Government over Control of What Students Learn and Who Teaches Them — as He Sought that Power through His Wealth

Some of the pamphlets published or reprinted by Charles Koch’s Center for Independent Education (CIE) attack potential methods of “state control” over education made possible by public funding.

Tactics, such as teacher selection and dictating curriculum, are also methods that Koch and his dark money network have sought to implement as part of their efforts to capture education.

One example of the critique of “the state” came from Dr. Benjamin A. Rogge—amember of the Mont Pelerin Society alongwith Charles Koch, Koch’s lieutenant George Pearson, Milton Friedman, and F.A. Hayek. Rogge contributed a piece warning that“[t]o expect those who provide the subsidies to refrain from interfering with the operation of the schools is to make a demonstrably weak assumption." Friedman credited Rogge with organizing the lectures that became the foundation for Friedman’s book Capitalism and Freedom, which attacks the idea of public universities and schools.

Echoing Rogge, Koch’s right-hand man George Pearson also warned against public funding of education asserting that “extensive interference into these critical areas of teacher and textbook selection is cause for deep concern.” For additional information on such attacks on the public interest, see Nancy MacLean’s book, Democracy in Chains, and check out the writings of In the Public Interest.

Charles Koch Wanted to Create a Cadre of Professors to Teach What He Wanted Taught

Elaborating on the tie between education funding and ideological outcomes, Koch himself said in 1974: 

"[T]he development of talent is, or should be, the major point of all these efforts. By talent, I mean those rare, exceptionally capable scholars or communicators willing to dedicate their lives to the cause of individual liberty."

Koch urged business leaders to stop providing general support to universities without requiring the funding promote a corporate agenda of advancing “free market” ideology on campus:

"[W]e should cease financing our own destruction and follow the counsel of David Packard, former Deputy Secretary of Defense, by supporting only those programs, departments or schools that contribute in some way to our individual companies or to the general welfare of our free enterprise system."

In that 1974 speech, which researcher Connor Gibsonhelped uncover, Koch claimed that “business has consciously assisted the government in destroying the free market.” 

This speech was given during the second term of GOP President Richard M. Nixon, a few months before he resigned in disgrace. The Libertarian Party had been launched in 1971 in response to Nixon’s price controls in a period of inflation. Koch-funded groups in the 1970s also denounced new protections for our environment that sought to constrain corporations.

Koch’s 1974 speech was part of a meeting he organized titled “The Anti-Capitalist Mentality” at the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS). IHS was founded in 1961 by F.A. “Baldy” Harper to advance libertarian theories more radically than the Foundation for Economic Education by, for example, calling all taxes “theft,” despite the democratically approved constitutional amendment authorizing income taxes.

Charles Koch began supporting IHS in 1964, and took over IHS in 1973 after Harper died. Koch was a fan of Harper, who had written a piece called “Why Wages Rise” thatKoch said changed his life. In it, Harper claimed that wages rise due to worker productivity, not due to public policy changes like the national minimum wage or negotiations by labor unions. 

Harper’s claim in that pamphlet, which Koch’s CIE later promoted, has been utterly debunked by the reality lived by American workers for years. Wages have indisputably stagnated despite massive increases in worker productivity. That productivity has netted massive payouts to executives and corporate shareholders, while workers’ benefits have been slashed and huge companies increasingly outsource work to contractors with no benefits at all. Despite such abject failure, Harper’s theories live on through Koch’s decades of infusion of cash to IHS as a vehicle for Koch to get right-wing theories about our economy and the role of our government mainstreamed.

At that meeting, Koch also asserted that:

“Anti-capitalist feelings in the United States are probably more virulent today than ever before. Yet the effort to stem this challenge to our traditional economic values have been ineffective. It is crucial that we understand what is happening, why the defensive efforts have floundered, and what approach, if any, would succeed.”

The Powell Memo.Koch also expressly criticized the“Powell Memo,” a blueprint for expanding corporate power in American democracy, which was written by tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

This was before President Richard Nixon named Powell to the U.S. Supreme Court. His confirmation was opposed by the NAACP due to Powell’s role in helping white parents get state funding for private education for their kids to avoid the racial integration ordered by Brown v. Board of Education. (For more details on this point, read Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s series of speeches about Powell, starting with this one. You can also read the documentation from John Conyers’ Senate testimony on behalf of the NAACP against Powell here.)

Powell used his perch on the nation’s highest court to engraft his personal views of corporate “rights” onto constitutional law. (Learn more about the memo here in Charlie Cray’s analysis for Greenpeace in 2011.)

Powell’s memo was secret at the time, until columnist Jack Anderson broke the story about it in September 1972, after Powell was confirmed to the Court. That memo is now infamous for urging new structures to advance corporate power over public policy and throughout American society. It specifically urged leveraging the money controlled by CEOs to reshape higher education, the courts, policymaking, and the media.

Using feverish rhetoric, Powell claimed socialism was spreading and that, in the middle of the Nixon administration, no one in America had less influence in Congress and on public policy than businessmen. That was not true then, and it is even less true now 50 years later.[nice grfx]

Koch and similarly-minded right-wing millionaires, like weapons merchantJohn M. Olin and the foundation in his name and Joseph Coors of the eponymous beer fortune, were allied in spending significant sums on the defense of the free enterprise system. 

Powell’s memo urging CEOs to defend free enterprise also praised his fellow members of the Mt. Pelerin Society Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek, along with the Institute for Humane Studies, for providing solutions to what he calls decades of anti-capitalism in the U.S.

Koch’s Own Blueprint for Creating Cadres at Universities to Advance His Worldview.Here are some additional excerpts from Koch’s speech about the Powell Memo and higher education. (You can read Charles Koch’s full speech on this at True North’s KochDocs.org. Also, check out this modern rejoinder to the Powell Memo.)  

Koch asserted that the business community must first recognize a “fundamental error” of the Powell Memo, which Koch said was the assumption that most in the business community even supported their radical “free market” idea of capitalism and that “there currently exists a free market to be defended and preserved.”

He also made these dramatic assertions (emphasis added):

“First, we have allowed the free market to be blamed for fostering economic crises when, in fact, a free market did not even exist at the times the crisis occurred.”

“Second, we have supported the very institutions from which the attack on free markets emanates. Although much of our support has been involuntary through taxes, we have also contributed voluntarily to colleges and universities on the erroneous assumption that this assistance benefits business and the free enterprise system, even though these institutions encourage extreme hostility to American business.”

“Third, we have accepted the concept that the corporation has a broad social responsibility beyond its duty to its shareholders… Yet the businessman has come to believe that ‘he is defending free enterprise when he claims that he is not concerned ‘merely’ with profit, but also with promoting desirable ‘social’ ends. When the businessman does this, he is in fact preaching pure and unadulterated socialism.”

Koch also discused the mechanisms to get his worldview entrenched at universities, advocating “radical new efforts” (emphasis added):

“As I perceive the situation in which the pro-capitalist businessman finds himself today, there are basically four ways in which he can fight for free enterprise- through education, through the media, by legal challenges, and by political action…”

“[T]he educational route is both the most vital and the most neglected.”

“The important strategic consideration to keep in mind is that any program adopted should be highly leveraged so that we reach those whose influence on others produces a multiplier effect. That is why educational programs are superior to political action, and support of talented free-market scholars is preferable to mass advertising.”

“We desperately need to develop additional talent capable of doing the research and writing that undergird the popularizing of capitalist ideas...While business has sometimes shown an interest in establishing appropriate chairs at universities, there is so little first-rate talent available that this effort has often resulted merely in a shift of one of the few free-market scholars from one university to another.”

”Many things can be done to develop this talent: financing fellowships for graduate students to work under teachers sympathetic to the free market; sponsoring conferences where scholars and students gather to discuss the market economy; arranging publication and distribution of scholarly books; and ensuring that able students can find attractive opportunities as teachers or research scholars. But business must make its funds available for such purposes and use its influence to provide openings. I believe that this long-term, educational approach is absolutely necessary to restore the free enterprise system.”…

“The development of a well financed cadre of sound proponents of the free enterprise philosophy is the most critical need facing us at the moment. And this task is not impractical. As the Powell Memorandum points out, ‘business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late.’ But the system can be restored if business will re-examine itself and undertake radical new efforts to overcome the prevalent anti-capitalist mentality.”

Koch also issued a broad-based attack on progressive public policies, asserting:

The Libertarian Party Emerges and Advances Koch’s Agenda.Nearly a year after this speech, Koch began looking for ways to maximize funding of the new Libertarian Party and by 1976, Koch had become the biggest underwriter of that new political party. It amplified his attacks on funding our government to advance the common good. Indeed, the Libertarian Party took credit for helping to foment tax revolts in the late 1970s (like California’s Prop. 13 and protests in Illinois and elsewhere) that limited state tax revenue and helped put pressure on reducing public subsidies for public universities. 

The Koch-funded Reason magazine and other entities he was bankrolling also helped advance that agenda. His brother, William, later claimed that Charles was using Koch Industries to subsidize his personal politics without the consent of the other major owners of the company, allegations Charles Koch denied. (Learn more about Koch Industries from the researchers at DeSmog Blog.)

However, some libertarians were so concerned with the amount of Charles Koch’s money dominating the movement’s outlets that it was they who dubbed his influence “the Kochtopus.” Democrats only started reckoning with Koch’s growing power three decades later and reprised that moniker, afterJane Mayer’s breakthrough article on the Koch brothers for the New Yorker in 2010. 

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The Cato Institute also pushed for state budget limits and a federal balanced budget amendment. Koch launched Cato with George Pearson and the Libertarian Party’s Ed Crane in the mid-1970s as a rebrand of a foundation Koch created in his own name),

In essence, a growing array of Koch-funded groups started pushing to starve the state and federal governments in a variety of ways, which over many years have led to cuts how much the costs of public universities are subsidized by taxes. These diminished subsidies have helped fuel the rising spiral of student debt. That includes Koch’s Citizens for a Sound Economy, which was launched in the early 1980s and which spawned FreedomWorks and Koch’s Americans for Prosperity, which has opposed student debt relief and more while also pushing for the tax cuts Trump signed in 2017).

David Koch Became One of the Most Influential Politicians to Never Win Office.Charles Koch also found a home-grown agent for his electoral agenda in his brother David, who agreed to fund the Libertarian Party’s bid for the White House in 1980 by running as Vice President. David spentmore than $2 million of David Koch’s own money. That spending was made possible due to a loophole in the Federal Election Campaign Act created by the Supreme Court’s decision in Buckley v. Valeo,litigation that was subsidized in part by the Libertarian Party and its new big donor, Charles Koch.

The fact that the Libertarians would never win their campaign was not the point, nor was it the end of their message. Instead, the Koch-funded Libertarian Partyhelped amplify Ronald Reagan’s attacks on the role of government. The1980 Libertarian platform also built on anti-government sentimentfueled by the anti-tax revolts. The Koch-endorsed platform also pushed for the abolition of more several federal agencies along with the repeal of tax laws. The party’s platform also called for the privatization of all public schools. [pix]

Why Do These Kochian/LibertarianTheories Matter?At the beginning of the 1970s, withstate subsidies covering 65% of college costs in most states, higher education without massive debt was attainable for many low- to middle-income families in the U.S.

After pressures to limit public funding of higher education, federal student loans began togrow rapidly, with loan default ratesspiking in the 1980s. Even as college costs rose and family income stagnated, federal education subsidies didn’t fill the gap—in fact, the inflation adjusted value of the federal Pell grant for low income students actuallydecreased by 12% throughout the 1980s. 

Today, after nearly 50 years of ideological and political maneuverings by Koch and his anti-government allies, public subsidies coverless than 30% of the costs of higher education, in general. Meanwhile, student loan debt in 2020reached $1.56 trillion. 

The student loan debt crisis was not inevitable but it is a product of the kind of selfish public policy choices that have been pushed by Charles Koch in innumerable ways.

In next week’s final installment in this series, we will examine Charles Koch’s growing influence on campuses in the U.S. His agents have leveraged his donations to shape what is taught in universities and career paths for scholars aligned with Koch’s free market fundamentalism. Using many of the same tactics Koch’s lieutenant once warned against, Koch has seemingly exploited university funding gaps he and his allies helped create, and in their own words, now “the network is fully integrated.”

The Shot

This week as Afghanistan fell, one Member of Congress wastouting the Taliban. Really. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) has been touted as a “Champion Woman” by the Koch-funded Independent Women’s Forum (IWF). IWF has also lauded Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, who was temporarily suspended from Twitter forspreading lies about vaccines. For more on Boebert’s claims regarding the January 6th insurrection,check out True North’s timeline here.

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KOCH TUCKER INCUBATOR batasch

http://redgreenandblue.org/2023/03/15/climate-disinformation-daily-caller/

Climate disinformation is what the Daily Caller DOES | Red, Green, and Blue

Red, Green, and Blue

Related · Daily Caller has a fact checker! (But is now run by Koch-trained career disinformer Michael Bastasch) · No, Marc Morano, nobody wants a ' ...

as internal text messages prove what most have long known about Fox News (that it’s a conservative propaganda machine posing as a news outlet), it’s important to remember that these days, Fox is hardly alone. While Murdoch’s Fox and Wall Street Journal are the unquestioned Big Leagues of right-wing disinformation, there’s a whole set of bush league outlets serving as training grounds.

By Climate Denier Roundup

The Tucker Carlson-founded Daily Caller is one of the primary examples of how Fox and the Koch-funded climate change counter-movement are intertwined.

Back when they were mostly Koch-funded, Koch-trained Michael Bastasch was regularly running climate disinformation featuring Koch-funded climate deniers. These days, their funding has diversified a bit thanks to Carlson’s feud with Kochs, though giving the Daily Caller money still appears to increase the odds of the outlet writing favorable content about you.

But Bastasch** returned last year as Managing Editor of the Daily Caller’s non-profit tax dodge foundation, after a stint at Fox News writing for election-lie-spreader Laura Ingraham.

Since his return, we’ve been watching closely to note any changes, and at this point can say it definitely appears that Bastasch is using his position to spread climate disinformation through multiple channels at the Caller, not just the “Big Tent” opinion vertical we noted last week.

In the past, most of the Caller’s climate disinfo would come from just one or two employees who appeared to be tasked with turning press releases from Koch cronies into “news” as their job on the “energy” beat (like Thomas Catenacci, who now works for, you guessed it, Fox News).

But these days, attacks on climate change science, policy, and experts have become a feature of coverage across the website and its various staffers.

It really stood out between 5 and 7 p.m. last Wednesday, when the Daily Caller published a triple-play of climate disinfo: defending a fossil-fuel loving white supremacist, cherry-picking climate change from a US National security assessment, and attacked environmentalists organizing on TikTok to #StopWillow.

The first was from “news and commentary writer” Brianna Lyman, who provided a short write-up framed as criticism of Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), who “accused one of the witnesses of being racist.” Who, you might ask? Well, despite the fact that ‘who/what/where/why/when’ is a basic tenet of journalism, Lyman didn’t identify the person at the center of the House committee meeting, and in fact, described Bush as “criticizing the oil industry before turning her attention toward an unidentified witness.”

Which is an absolutely astonishing thing for a supposed journalist to write, because Congressional hearings are very easy to look up. Alex Epstein, one of the “so-called ‘energy experts’” called by Republicans, is who Rep. Bush called “a philosopher who has previously espoused white supremacist views,” before Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) interjected to try and censor her by calling for the comment to be removed from the Congressional record.

But naming Epstein would require doing actual reporting, and apparently all Lyman did was watch a video clip of the hearing (that she embedded in the story). If you’d like to see what real reporting of the hearing looks like, as opposed to someone running cover for a fellow traveler, Timothy Cama covered it for PoliticoPRO and named Alex Epstein right up front.

Roughly thirty-six minutes after Lyman’s article defending a racist was posted, the Daily ‘whoopsie we keep hiring racists‘ Caller published a piece on the US intelligence community’s Annual Threat Assessment. The headline of “reporter” Micaela Burrow’s coverage? “Intel Community Warns Fight Over Green Energy Tech Will Worsen Global Tensions.”

The 10-paragraph write-up quotes the assessment just twice to justify the story’s thrust that fighting climate change will somehow make the world more dangerous. That’s probably because the 40-page assessment only devotes 2 pages to climate, and then otherwise focuses on a bunch of things that the Daily Caller doesn’t spread disinfo about.

Finally, rounding out a very busy day for the Caller, “Associate Editor” Ailan Evans’ hit piece ran at 6:49, attacking the #StopWillow campaign on TikTok because one of the participating groups is funded by “a Swiss billionaire with a documented history of philanthropy and political donations, primarily to left-wing causes and candidates.” Though it’s dressed up as some sort of scandalous revelation, at no point does Evans attempt to explain how or why this is somehow bad.

But that’s the kind of training you get from the Daily Caller. Both Evans and current Fox Production Assistant Kendall Tietz were 2021 fellows of the Daily Caller’s American Journalism Institute, where they train the next generation of political hacks to pretend to be journalists.

So next time you hear about some bizarre disinformation, rank political propaganda, or shameless defense of racism on Fox News, remember that it’s not an accident, they’retrainedto be that awful. There’s a whole farm league of conservative propaganda shops like the Daily Caller — the frack-backed Daily Wire and Heritage‘s Daily Signal come to mind — and while they’d all oppose a Universal Basic Income as socialism, they’re proof that as long as would-be-journalists are willing to play ball for the highest bidder, they’ll never want for work.

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ref jun 2019

just the other day we talked about how Tucker Carlson questioned who the climate culprits are on his Koch-funded Daily Caller website. So we’re reluctant to go back to that well quite so soon, but a new post on the Caller’s website cannot go without comment.

The story is a clip and rehash of one of Carlson’s recent segments on his Fox News show, in which he attacks Koch Brothers and questions their undue influence over the Republican party. In the clip, Carlson hones in on criticisms that the Koch brothers are libertarian and that their philanthropic aims don’t reflect the wants and needs of everyday Republicans.

yes, you read that correctly. Tucker Carlson, whose Daily Callerwebsite received 84%of its funding from the Kochs in 2016 and close to a million dollars in 2017, railed against the Kochs’ influence. Keep in mind the website with over a thousand Koch stories, few if any of which are anything but bootlicking.

That said, in 2017 Koch money only made up 38% of the Caller’s funding. Its trajectory does seem to be moving away from Koch money as its primary means of support. Perhaps the website really is trying to break free from the Koch’s funding, or at least dilute its funder pool so it’s not quite so obvious that they exist as a propaganda tool for the Kochs’ interests. It launched a subscription program back in April, inviting readers to become a “Daily Caller Patriot” offering access to special content and removing ads. The invitation includes a clip of Carlson talking about his crusade against “big tech” for “censoring” “conservatives” over the little tinsy matter of propagating hate speech that is radicalizing white terrorists.

And that’s a big part of Carlson’s new rant against the Kochs: targeting their upcoming work with the Anti-Defamation League to combat online hate speech. Since we know full well that the Daily Caller has quite a history of “accidentally” propagating white nationalism, perhaps that’s why Carlson is stoking division between himself and his followers and his Koch funders. If they’re anti-hate speech, odds are they’ll follow the lead of all the advertisers who have pulled their support for Carlson’s Fox program.

So maybe this new change in heart in response to the Kochs pulling away from supporting the website, and Carlson is pulling the old “you can’t fire me because I quit.” Back in November of 2018, Washington Post columnist Radley Balko wrote that Koch officials told him that “the Kochs and their foundations more generally find the Daily Caller abhorrent, and feel the same way about Tucker Carlson. One added that he was particularly troubled by the way the site objectives women as clickbait.”

And while the Koch donors Balko spoke to made it clear they saw their investment in the Caller to be aimed at training new journalists with free-market ideology, the lead investigative journalist at the Caller, per Balko, “doesn't inspire confidence.” Balko, who had previously worked with the reporter, Richard Pollack, wrote that Pollack is “a Trump toady” who “doesn't understand libertarianism” and is “a crappy journalist” who “isn't particularly smart.” But Balko conceded that Pollack’s “most marketable skill seems to be the ability to fool people into believing he has marketable skills.”

The same could be said for Tucker Carlson, and maybe the Kochs have finally realized it. Because as a millionaire funded by billionaires, it’s hard to comprehend why else Carlson would turn on his former patrons.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/daily-caller/daily-caller-receiving-money-trump-and-gop-groups-while-its-subsidiary-participates

Daily Caller has been receiving money from President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and other Republican candidates and organizations for email list rentals while its Check Your Fact division participates in Facebook’s fact-checking program.

The Daily Caller is a right-wing publication with a history of promoting false information and hiring or publishing white nationalists and other bigots. In 2019, Facebook began partnering with Check Your Fact for the social media giant’s fact-checking program. Popular Information's Jugg Legum documented in March how the Daily Caller used “its role as a Facebook fact-checker to boost Trump and discredit a mainstream media outlet, Politico.”

Check Your Fact states on its “about us” page that it is “a for-profit subsidiary wholly owned by The Daily Caller, Inc. Majority owners of The Daily Caller, Inc. are co-founder and publisher Neil Patel and co-founder Tucker Carlson. The Daily Caller’s fact-checking team is funded by The Daily Caller’s general news budget, as well as revenue generated through advertising.” (Carlson sold his stake in the Daily Caller last month.)

Will Ragland, the research director for Center for American Progress Action, tweeted today:

After that tweet, Media Matters found that The Daily Caller has sent dozens of sponsored emailssince 2016 that were “paid for by Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint fundraising committee authorized by and composed of Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. and the Republican National Committee.”

The Daily Caller has also received $40,213.75 so far this year from the National Republican Senatorial Committee for list rentals, according to Federal Election Commission records. It has also received $18,171.40 so far this year from the National Republican Congressional Committee for list rentals, according to FEC records.

The Daily Caller has sent numerous other sponsored emails for various Republicans this year. Those emails include Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) reelection campaign; Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) reelection campaign; Bikers for the President political action committee; and the Senate Conservatives Fund.

The Washington Post and the Center for Media and Democracy wrote in 2017 about how The Daily Caller has received money from the Trump campaign for list rentals.

Here are four recent examples of The Daily Caller’s sponsored emails for the Trump Make America Great Again Committee: [screenshots]

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why wd levin turn on him?!

mma 2 23

MARK LEVIN (HOST): The gunman had his prior gun charge dismissed by a George Soros-backed prosecutor in the name of racial equity.

By the way, the amount of death and mayhem that George Soros has created in this country as a result of getting these kinds of phony prosecutors elected is unbelievable.

And I have noticed that none of these news organizations, Maggie Haberman at the New York Slimes, Phillip Bump-y over there, I guess, at the Washington Compostand the rest of these frauds and fools, I noticed that they have no interest whatsoever in looking into this, none. But it's quite newsworthy. None.

And I noticed that George Soros always skates. He's the guy behind the curtain that's helped unleash mayhem and murder and rape in our cities. Why? Because he's the sugar daddy to all these radical left-wing groups that work with the media and work with the Democrat Party. That's why. He now works with Charles Koch, over there at the Koch Foundation.

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https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/guest-words/24209-the-money-trail-ginni-thomas-emails-to-overturn-biden-s-election-leads-to-charles-koch

2020 ELECTION CONSPIRACY - The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Bob Costa of CBS News have unleashed a fury of renewed interest in the work of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Last Thursday, Woodward and Costa set off a political firestorm when they released the contents of emails that Ginni Thomas, wife of the sitting Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, had sent to President Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, in 2020, urging him to overturn the Biden election win and attempting to steer his efforts in that regard.

A total of 29 emails were obtained by Woodward and Costa, with the bulk of the emails occurring in just the month of November 2020, raising questions as to how many more emails are still out there from Thomas to the White House from December 1, 2020 through January 20, 2021 when Biden was sworn in.

Much of the current news debate around the emails is focusing on whether Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from cases involving groups with which his wife is involved and whether the Select Committee should subpoena Ginni Thomas to testify. While those are certainly important issues, what has thus far been ignored is the smoking gun trail that leads directly to the doorstep of billionaire and right-wing Republican political mastermind, Charles Koch, the Chairman, CEO (and majority owner with the heirs of his deceased brother David) of the fossil fuels conglomerate Koch Industries.

Wall Street On Parade has previously documented that at least three of the front groups that fomented the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Trump and that actively solicited thousands of people to turn out for the January 6 event at the Capitol, were funded by Koch Industries or its front groups.

The smoking gun in the Ginni Thomas email thread occurs in an email dated November 10, 2020 when she tells Meadows to “Listen to Rush. Mark Steyn, Bongino, Cleta.” Thomas is clearly referring to conservative commentators Rush Limbaugh, Mark Steyn and Dan Bongino, and lawyer, Cleta Mitchell.

Cleta Mitchell is best known in the Trump election saga as the lawyer who was on the January 2, 2021 call with Donald Trump when he phoned the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, and told him this: “I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.” That call took place two months after the presidential election. (Mitchell stepped down from her long-term employment at law firm Foley & Lardner after her presence on that call made the news cycle.)

But Cleta Mitchell’s relationship with Ginni Thomas dates back at least a decade earlier – and not in a good way.

Cleta Mitchell had filed an amicus briefin the Citizens Unitedcase before the Supreme Court that was decided on January 21, 2010. That case would be the tipping point to allow unlimited sums from corporations – like Koch Industries — in U.S. elections.

Just eight days after Justice Thomas voted in favor of that decision to open the floodgates to corporate money in campaigns, Cleta Mitchell made a move that looked very much like a quid pro quo to Ginni Thomas. Mitchell, then still a partner at Foley & Lardner, filed an application with the Internal Revenue Service to set up a nonprofit called Liberty Central, Inc.on behalf of Ginni Thomas. According to IRS tax filings, Liberty Central received a combined $1.478 million from dark money donors in 2009 and 2010.

On the IRS tax filings for Liberty Central for 2009 and 2010, Ginni (Virginia) Thomas is listed as President and CEO. The 2010 tax filing shows that Ginni Thomas received $120,511 in compensation from Liberty Central that year. She eventually stepped down from an official post at the nonprofit, stating she would serve as a consultant.

Liberty Central had the fingerprints of Charles Koch all over it. Acting as General Counsel in 2010 for Liberty Central was a former lawyer for the Charles G. Koch Foundation, Sarah Field. A former Koch lobbyist, Matt Schlapp, served on the Board of Liberty Central at inception.

Mitchell’s law firm, Foley & Lardner, employed three attorneys working as lobbyists for a Koch Industries affiliate, Koch Companies Public Sector, LLC in Madison, Wisconsin in 2011. The Koch-related lobbyists were Ray Carey, Jason Childress and Kathleen Walby.

Mitchell, herself, was a former lobbyist at the federal level in years 2005 through 2008 for the Alliance for Charitable Reform, a project of The Philanthropy Roundtable, another tax-exempt organization. Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, two dark money groups which also have Charles Koch’s fingerprints all over them, were spun off from the Philanthropy Roundtable in 1999. (See our report: Koch Footprints Lead to Secret Slush Fund to Keep Fear Alive.)

Mitchell is listed on the 2018 federal tax filing for SteveBannon’s charity, Citizens of the American Republic, as an officer of the organization, holding the position of Secretary. Bannon and others were charged in August of 2021 by the Department of Justice with bilking donors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars through that charity.

Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, was one of those pushing the narrative on television that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, lawyers and staff ofFoley & Lardner were the third largest donor to Johnson’s campaign committees since 2015. Employees and officials of Koch Industries ranked fifth.

There were only eight Republican Senators who refused to certify the votes for the challenged states of Arizona and/or Pennsylvania. Those Republican Senators were: Ted Cruz of Texas; Josh Hawley of Missouri; Rick Scott of Florida; Tommy Tuberville of Alabama; Roger Marshall of Kansas; Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi; John Kennedy of Louisiana; and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming. Every Republican Senator who refused to certify the election results on January 6 received funding from Koch Industries PAC.

Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, whom Ginni Thomas enlisted in the White House to help overturn Biden’s election win, was previously a member of the House of Representatives from North Carolina from 2013 to 2020. He also received campaign funding from the Koch Industries PAC throughout his time in Congress.

Charles Koch is usually very careful in keeping an arm’s length relationship between himself and his political operations. But on at least one occasion Koch conducted a dinner meeting directly with sitting Justice Clarence Thomas at a private club in California.

In January 2008, Justice Thomas attended an all-expenses-paid, four-day trip to the Koch brothers’ semi-annual political gathering in the Palm Springs area of California. (According to his 2008 disclosure form and the Supreme Court’s public information office, Thomas’ expenses for that trip were paid by the Federalist Society, a conservative nonprofit that Koch foundations have generously supported.)

Justice Thomas’ trip to the Koch event occurred in the same year that the Citizens United case was accepted by the Supreme Court.  The Court accepts less than two percent of all cases appealed to it.

Wall Street On Parade was previously able to confirm with Scott Markley, Public Information Specialist at the Supreme Court, that during that January 2008 visit to the Koch political gathering, Justice Thomas was hosted by Charles Koch and his wife, Elizabeth, at the private Vintage Club where Charles Koch is a member.

The Citizens United decision did not pass the smell test when it was approved in a 5-4 vote by the Supreme Court. Four of the nine justices wrote a scathing dissent that raised the issue of unprincipled behavior, writing that the majority had ruled on issues that were not even legally before the court.

The money that the Koch political machine pumped into putting Trump in the Oval Office quickly paid big dividends in his first term (and made it clear as to why Charles Koch would have wanted to see a second Trump term).

Koch Industries’ law firm, Jones Day, sent 12 of its law partners to staff up key positions in the Trump administration on the very day Trump was inaugurated. Jones Day has since sacked the press release it issued at the time but you can read the reporting on it at the American Bar Association Journal.

Once Trump was settled in the Oval Office, a Koch front group, then known as Freedom Partners, mapped out the agenda it expected Trump to march to. In a document titled “Roadmap to Repeal: Removing Regulatory Barriers to Opportunity,” the group listed the laws and regulations it expected to be repealed in the first 100 days of Trump’s administration. The Trump administration dutifully marched to the beat. Repeal the Paris Climate Accord – done. Tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy – done. Gutting federal regulations and the Environmental Protection Agency – done.

By the spring of 2018, 12 people who previously worked at Freedom Partners were working in the Trump administration. Freedom Partners has since disbanded but when we last took a look at the nonprofit in July 2018, we found that all but one of Freedom Partners’ 9-member Board of Directors was a current or former Koch company employee. The Board Chair of Freedom Partners at that time was the same Mark Holden that was the General Counsel of Koch Industries.

It’s time for the House Select Committee to subpoena not just Ginni Thomas and Cleta Mitchell. It’s time to hear from Charles Koch directly on how so much money bearing his fingerprints ended up fomenting the attack on the Capitol on January 6.

There will never be a better time than now for the American people to finally get at the truth.

(Pam Martens & Russ Martens are authors at CounterPunch.org.  This originally appeared on Wall Street on Parade.)

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ref 1/20/21

Money Trail to the Siege at the Capitol Leads to Charles Koch and Koch Industries

the FBI has asked the public for help in collecting evidence surrounding the siege at the Capitol on January 6 — an insurrection that left five people dead, dozens injured, and Congressional members’ offices ransacked and laptops stolen. The violent scenes at the Capitol played out live on TV, humiliating the United States around the world. The world will watch President-Elect Joe Biden’s inauguration today, surrounded by 25,000 National Guard Troops in Washington, D.C. These images will further undermine the standing of the United States among world leaders.

Because the FBI seems to have ignored for decades the serial warning signs regarding Charles Koch, Koch Industries and their intrusions into  elections, we’re providing the FBI a simple and clear roadmap today.

Charles Koch is the billionaire Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, one of the largest private corporations in the world. Koch Industries is a conglomerate with interests in fossil fuels, refineries, chemicals, paper products and extensive trading operations. For the past forty years, Charles Koch has been involved in a stealthy network of front groups that seek to gut the federal government of its regulatory functions and kill off popular federal programs like the U.S. Post Office, Social Security and Medicare.

To understand the full scope of Koch’s involvement in the events of January 6, let’s first remember what actually fomented the attack on the Capitol. It was based on the Big Lie that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump through voter fraud — something that Trump’s own cyber security chief, Chris Krebs, and Attorney General, William Barr, dismissed as lacking a factual basis. The playbook for the Capitol attack on January 6 was to intimidate Republican members of the Senate and House into refusing to certify the election results, thus withholding the Presidency from Joe Biden.

These are the red flags that lead to the doorstep of Charles Koch and Koch Industries and should play a significant role in any serious investigation conducted by Congress, the FBI, or U.S. intelligence agencies.

Red Flag # 1: There were only eight Republican Senators who refused to certify the votes for the challenged states of Arizona and/or Pennsylvania. (All Democrats voted to certify all states.) Those Republican Senators are: Ted Cruz of Texas; Josh Hawley of Missouri; Rick Scott of Florida; Tommy Tuberville of Alabama; Roger Marshall of Kansas; Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi; John Kennedy of Louisiana; and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming.

Every Republican Senator who refused to certify the election results on January 6 received funding from Koch Industries PAC.

On January 2, ten Senators joined with Senator Ted Cruz to announce that they planned to “vote on January 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not ‘regularly given’ and ‘lawfully certified’ ” until an emergency audit was commissioned. Six of those Senators backed down from challenging the certification after the attack on the Capitol occurred. Those six Senators were: Ron Johnson of Wisconsin; James Lankford of Oklahoma; Steve Daines of Montana; Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee; Mike Braud of Indiana; and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee. All six of these Senators have also been on the receiving end of campaign largesse from the Koch Industries PAC and/or Koch family members.

The money to these 14 Senators from Koch-related entities has been documented by Alex Kotch and David Armiak in a January 5 report at the Center for Media and Democracy. Kotch and Armiak also note that Koch-funded Super PACs boosted the election chances for Blackburn, Daines, Hawley and Marshall, writing that Americans for Prosperity Action has “spent $11.9 million” to promote those candidates.

The authors also note that the Koch-backed Freedom Partners Action Fund, “dropped nearly $3 million into the Wisconsin Senate race to support Johnson and attack his liberal opponent, Russ Feingold.”

Wall Street On Parade also looked at data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics based on Federal Election Commission records. We found that since 2012 Koch Industries has ranked between the second to six largest donor to Ron Johnson in every fundraising cycle. The Center’s data also shows that Koch Industries was the number one donor to Senator Lankford in the current 2019-2020 cycle. (The money comes from the Koch PAC, employees or family members of employees of Koch Industries, not the corporation itself.)

Red Flag # 2:At least three of the “nonprofit” groups that fomented the Big Lie that the election had been stolen and actively solicited thousands of people to turn out for the January 6 event were funded by Koch Industries or its front groups.

According to the TrumpMarch.com website, which was sponsored by Women for America First, its “Coalition Partners” for the January 6 event at the Capitol included the Rule of Law Defense Fund; the Tea Party Patriots; and Turning Point Action, among others. The TrumpMarch.com website has since been taken down but it was captured on January 2, 2021 (give it a little time to load) by the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine.

Rule of Law Defense Fund is the dark money arm of Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), a group that is raising millions of dollars from corporate felons in order to elect the highest law enforcement officers at the state level. (See our in-depth report of January 14, 2021.) According to IRS filings made by RAGA, it has received $511,400 from Koch Industries and a subsidiary since 2014.

A division of Koch Industries, i360, has a massive voter database that some suggest is far more sophisticated than that of the Republican National Committee.The database includes phone numbers of people likely to turn out for an event of this nature. Its program, Predictive Dialer, says it can “scale call volume quickly so you aren’t let down as you ramp up your campaigns, from hundreds of outbound calls per hour to more than 100,000.” The Congressional Committees that are investigating the attack at the Capitol need to ascertain if Koch’s i360 services were used to make robo calls for the event.

As originally reported by Jamie Corey at the watchdog group, Documented, the dark money arm of RAGA made robo calls to boost turnout for the January 6 event at the Capitol. The message was as follows:

“I’m calling for the Rule of Law Defense Fund with an important message. The ‘March to Save America’ is tomorrow in Washington D.C. at the Ellipse in President’s Park between E St. and Constitution Avenue on the south side of the White House, with doors opening at 7:00 a.m. At 1:00 p.m., we will march to the Capitol building and call on congress to stop the steal. We are hoping patriots like you will join us to continue to fight to protect the integrity of our elections. For more information, visit MarchtoSaveAmerica.com. This call is paid for and authorized by the Rule of Law Defense Fund, 202-796-5838.”

Another of the Coalition Partners, Turning Point Action, Tweeted that it was “honored to help make this happen, sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” The Tweet was first reported by DailyDot.com.

Turning Point Action is a dark money group that does not report its donors to the Federal Election Commission. However, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, its sister group, Turning Point USA, has received $610,000 from Donors Trust since 2017. (We should note that the IRS has not posted the 990 tax filings as yet for Donors Trust’s tax years of 2019 and 2020 so it is quite possible that the cash haul is far greater than $610,000.)

Charles Koch’s footprints are all over Donors Trust, another dark money group, as we exclusively reported in 2010. (See Koch Footprints Lead to Secret Slush Fund to Keep Fear Alive.) We wrote at the time:

“There are shades of Charles Koch all over Donors Capital and Donors Trust. Two grantees receiving repeat and sizeable grants from Donors Capital are favorites of the Koch foundations: George Mason University Foundation and Institute for Humane Studies. Another tie is Claire Kittle. A project of Donor’s Trust isTalent Market.org, a headhunter for staffing nonprofits with the ‘right’ people. Ms. Kittle serves as Talent Market’s Executive Director and was the former Program Officer for Leadership and Talent Development at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Then there is Whitney Ball, President of both Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust. Ms. Ball [now deceased] was one of the elite guests at the invitation-only secret Aspen bash thrown by Charles Koch in June of this year,as reported by ThinkProgress.org. Also on the guest list for the Koch bash was Stephen Moore, a member of the Editorial Board at the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Moore is a Director at Donors Capital Fund. Rounding out the ties that bind is Lauren Vander Heyden, who serves as Client Services Coordinator at Donors Trust. Ms. Vander Heyden previously worked as grants coordinator and policy analyst at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.”

According to the April 1, 2020 report at the Center for Media and Democracy, “In 2014-15, the Koch’s Knowledge and Progress Fund gave $5.3 million to Donors Trust, and the Charles Koch Foundation has given $980,000 to it since 2014. The connected Donors Capital Fund, to which Koch family foundations have also contributed large sums, donated $100,000 to TPUSA [Turning Point USA] in 2016.”

Another Coalition Partner for the January 6 event, Tea Party Patriots, has received at least $200,000 from Freedom Partners, a Koch front group. Tea Party Patriots has also received donations from Donors Trust.

We are unable to report if Women for America First, which obtained the permit for the speeches and rally that preceded the march on the Capitol, has ties to Koch funding because it is such a new group that it has yet to file an IRS 990 form. However, its Chair, Amy Kremer, held previous positions in two tea party groups. The tea party movement was a Koch Industries and Big Tobacco creation, as insider Jeff Nesbit explains in his book, Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP.

Red Flag # 3: Charles Koch and Koch Industries were heavily vested in wanting to ensure that Donald Trump had another four-years as President.

One of the Koch front groups that played a major role in the 2016 election was Freedom Partners, which closed up shop in 2019.  It was hard to tell where Freedom Partners begins and Koch Industries ends. When the group was still active in 2018, we took a look at its Board of Directors. We found that all but one of its Board Members was a current or former Koch company employee. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, Freedom Partners ended up with 12 of its former employees working in the Trump Administration.

Freedom Partners Action Fund,a related organization that ran attack ads against Democrats, had received at least $14 million from Charles Koch and his trust before it shuttered its operations.

Freedom Partners laid down their marching orders for the Trump administration in a formal memo and their handmaidens in the Trump administration delivered: from the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord to the massive tax cut for corporations and one percenters to the gutting of federal regulations and putting industry lobbyists in charge of federal agencies.

But that was just the beginning. Koch Industries law firm, Jones Day, sent 12 of its law partners to staff up key positions in the Trump administration on the very day Trump was inaugurated. Jones Day has since removed the press release it issued at the time but you can read the reporting on it at the American Bar Association Journal. Wall Street On Parade also reported on it at the time, finding it unusual that the Trump transition team would give so many key slots to Jones Day when its partners had supported Hillary Clinton for President. This is another matter worthy of Congressional and FBI investigation.

Red Flag # 4: Koch Industries, through its ownership of i360, was deeply entangled in the campaigns of members of Congress who voted against certifying the votes for Joe Biden. (What kind of intelligence agencies and FBI would allow a private fossil fuels conglomerate like Koch Industries to directly run campaign activities for federal candidates for Congress?) We broke the news in 2018 that Koch Industries had purchased i360. We obtained that information from an internal newsletter at Koch that was available online and from the fact that help-wanted ads for i360 sent applicants to apply at Koch Industries. (The company hasn’t denied our reporting over the past two years.)

We reported this at the time:

“The i360 website says that its database now has information on 199 million voters from all 50 states; information on 290 million consumers with 700+ data points; information on precinct election returns as well as data from the Census, NOAA, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and geo-spatial data; individual sentiment information on candidates and issues from its social media operations; and information from its grassroots groups (read Americans for Prosperity) and paid door-to-door knockers who are using a sophisticated hand-held device to update the database in real time in the pivotal weeks before an election.

“But i360 is far more than just a voter database. It has social media targeting operations and really scary data collection that reaches into people’s homes. Consider this from their website:

‘Through an exclusive partnership with D2 Media Sales, the strategic relationship between DirectTV and Dish, i360 is able to identify households that meet your target criteria and serve ads uniquely to those households – no matter which stations or programs they are watching. With dozens of i360 custom segments pre-matched to more than 20 million DIRECTV and DISH homes, campaigns can now reach the largest addressable TV advertising platform in the nation. One-to-one television targeting combines the emotional impact of TV advertising with the precision and accuracy of direct mail marketing – resulting in the most cost-effective and high impact buying solutions.”

According to Federal Election Commission records, a number of Republican House Reps who objected to the certification of Biden’s win utilized the services of i360. For example, Mike Johnson of Louisiana paid i360 $15,580 for what he called “electronic media expense.” Elise Stefanik of New York paid i360 more than $128,000 which she tagged as telephone service, web service, equipment rental, or simply “subscription.” Barry Moore of Alabama paid i360 $12,815 in 2020 for fundraising mailouts and ad buys.

Senator Tommy Tuberville, who objected to the certification of Biden’s win, also engaged the services of i360 in 2020. Tuberville paid i360 $50,875 for data subscriptions and making phone calls. As the Capitol was under siege and Trump was watching these scenes on TV, he spoke with the newly-sworn in Senator Tuberville by phone, urging Tuberville to make more objections to the certification of the vote, according to reporting at CNN.At around 7 p.m., Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, made a second call to Tuberville. The call went to voice mail. Giuliani left this message for Tuberville, according to CNN, based on a report from The Dispatch:

“Sen. Tuberville? Or I should say Coach Tuberville. This is Rudy Giuliani, the President’s lawyer. I’m calling you because I want to discuss with you how they’re trying to rush this hearing and how we need you, our Republican friends, to try to just slow it down so we can get these legislatures to get more information to you. I know they’re reconvening at 8 tonight, but it … the only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow — ideally until the end of tomorrow…”

The nagging question, of course, is what Trump and Giuliani had planned for “tomorrow.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/koch/

no lnx

Koch keeps doing business in Russia as top journalist says family fortune came from Hitler: report

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement March 14, 2022

Award-winning journalist Jane Mayer, who literally wrote the book on the Koch Brothers and Koch Industries, pointed to a report published Monday stating, “Koch Industries continues doing business in Russia.” Despite major U.S. corporations shutting down operations after Putin’s illegal war on Ukraine, major U.S.-based multinational corporations, from Apple to Disney to McDonald’s, have responded by pulling out of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Mayer’s 2016 book “Dark Money” focuses on Charles Koch and (the now late) David Koch, the powerful conservative billionaire Koch Brothers.

Monday morning is his widely-read newsletter Popular Information Judd Legum reported Koch Industries doesn’t seem to be joining the American movement to isolate Putin and Russia – even after his forces have slaughtered thousands of innocent civilians in Ukraine.

“Guardian Industries,” writes Legum, “is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, acquired in 2017. Guardian, a manufacturer of industrial glass and other products, is based in Auburn Hills, Michigan but has production facilities around the world.”

Guardian has two glass production plants that operate in Russia. One facility is in Ryazan, Russia, about 120 miles southeast of Moscow. The company added “a new jumbo laminated glass production line” to that facility in August 2021. Another facility is located in Rostov, Russia, near the border with Ukraine. The Rostov plant, which began operations about a decade ago, cost $220 million to build and produces “Guardian’s high-performance, energy-efficient ClimaGuard(R) (residential) and SunGuard(R) (commercial) glass products for construction of homes, offices, retail, health-care and other facilities.” It is capable of producing “900 tons of glass per day.”

Mayer, an investigative journalist who is a staff writer for The New Yorker, also wrote an article about the Koch Brothers, in 2010: “The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.”

Mayer’s piece suggests the Koch Brothers had funded and fueled the Tea Party almost since its inception.

A Republican campaign consultant who has done research on behalf of Charles and David Koch said of the Tea Party, “The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It’s like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud—and they’re our candidates!”

And it paid off.

“The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to ‘educate,’ fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement.”

So where did the Koch money originally come from?

Mayer on Monday reminded America:

For those who would like more information, here’s The New York Times on Mayer’s 2016 book:

The father of the billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch helped construct a major oil refinery in Nazi Germany that was personally approved by Adolf Hitler, according to a new history of the Kochs and other wealthy families.

Mayer’s “book is largely focused on the Koch family, stretching back to its involvement in the far-right John Birch Society and the political and business activities of the father, Fred C. Koch, who found some of his earliest business success overseas in the years leading up to World War II. One venture was a partnership with the American Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis, who, according to Ms. Mayer, hired Mr. Koch to help build the third-largest oil refinery in the Third Reich, a critical industrial cog in Hitler’s war machine.”

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see ref below

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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/exxonmobil-funder-of-clim_b_8684320

no lnx

ExxonMobil, Funder of Climate Change Deniers

It's been an interesting time watching the ExxonMobil attempt to defend its track record on climate science, in the wake of revelations that it had bone fide climate scientists properly studying the issue since the 1970's.

By

Cindy Baxter, Contributor

Co-author of exxonsecrets.org

Updated December 1, 2016

Stacks and burn-off from the Exxon Mobil refinery are seen at dusk in St. Bernard Parish, La., Friday, Feb. 13, 2015.]

It's been an interesting time watching the ExxonMobil attempt to defend its track record on climate science, in the wake of revelations that it had bone fide climate scientists properly studying the issue since the 1970's.

The #ExxonKnew investigations by Inside Climate News and the LA Times have had ExxonMobil's head of PR, Ken Cohen, furiously tweeting, writing letters, and appearing on news programmes to defend his company's honor.

"Our company's work to help understand the role that man-made CO2 emissions play in climate fluctuations has continued unabated for four decades," he opined in the Wall St Journal.

But that's the point. ExxonMobil did know about the science. So the question now is how can the company explain its role in funding, to the tune of $31m 1998-2014, the think tanks running climate denial campaigns specifically aimed at undermining the very science that Exxon's own scientists were studying?

A new review of the climate change papers published by ExxonMobil to somehow defend its position has shown that there was 100 percent consensus among its scientists that global warming is caused by human interference.

Exxon's denial appears to have begun in earnest with CEO Lee Raymond, back in the 90's. Raymond became CEO of Exxon in 1993, and CEO and Chairman of the newly-merged ExxonMobil in 1999.

"A factual, common sense approach will also serve us well as we address the issue that perhaps poses the greatest long-term threat to our industry -- so-called global climate change," Raymond told the annual meeting of the America Petroleum Institute (API) in 1996.

The same year, he told Exxon staff in the company magazine "Lamplight" that "scientific evidence remains inconclusive as to whether human activities affect global climate."

In 1998, Exxon lobbyist Randy Randol was present at a meeting organised by the API, along with a number of the think tanks Exxon funded, where they created a communications strategy to undermine support for the Kyoto Protool, by questioning the science.

The leaked strategy's stated goal was "A majority of the American Public, including industry leadership, recognizes that signifcant uncertainties exist in climate science and therefore raises questions among those (e.g. U.S. Congress) who chart the future U.S. course on global climate change."

Victory, it stated, would be achieved when Americans, industry and media understood the uncertainties on climate science, and those supporting the Kyoto Protocol "on the basis of extant science appear out of touch with reality."

Leaks of the paper may have led to the campaign being quashed, but this was the strategy that ExxonMobil was to fund to the present day.

The think tanks present at the meeting included a number of those funded by ExxonMobil Foundation, under the leadership of Ken Cohen, its chair since 1999.

The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), while it no longer receives ExxonMobil funding, is launching a film challenging the science of global warming in Paris on December 7, as part of its 20-year campaign undermining climate science.

Under Lee Raymond's chairmanship, before his retirement in 2005, ExxonMobil spent millions funding these denial campaigns, and on a number of ads in the New York Times opinion pages. In one, in 2000, entitled "Unsettled Science," ExxonMobil quoted science on temperatures in the Sargasso Sea to prove that global warming wasn't happening.

Raymond himself cited the study at the company's AGM that year. The scientist who authored it, wrote to ExxonMobil saying:

"I believe ExxonMobil has been misleading in its use of the Sargasso Sea data. There's really no way these results bear on the question of human induced climate warming... I think the sad thing is the a company with the resources of ExxonMobil is exploiting the data for political purposes."

Think tanks receiving grants from the ExxonMobil Foundation include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which was the leading think tank pushing climate denial, coordinating the "Cooler Heads Coalition." At one point, ExxonMobil funded nearly all the groups listed in the coalition.

In 2005, the CEI ran a TV ad proclaiming "C02 is Life." This was the last straw for the UK's Royal Society, which complained to ExxonMobil and led Cohen to declare, in 2007, that the company was no longer funding these organisations. The world's media heralded the move. But ExxonMobil quietly continued funding the think tanks, extensively. In 2009, it dropped a few more.

While Ken Cohen might try to state that the organizations he funded could do what they wanted, it's important to note that in some years, the company specifically spelt out its funding as being for their work on climate change.

Even today, ExxonMobil continues to be a member of -- and to fund -- the American Legislative Exchange Council which, at its annual meeting, has hosted a number of climate change-denying scientists to question the existence of global warming. Research has revealed that that ExxonMobil donated at least $1.6 million to ALEC between 1998 and 2012. In 2014 it gave them more.

A study published in PNAS on November 23 looked at the effect of grants from ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers on the discourse around climate science. It showed that the climate denial echo chamber organizations they funded produced misinformation that effectively polluted mainstream media coverage of climate science and polarized the climate policy debate.

The way ExxonMobil is reacting to the #ExxonKnew revelations is bizarre. In the full knowledge of the climate change science, provided to it by its own scientists, this company has spent years, and many millions, funding the myths created by the denier industry to obfuscate the science and slow change.

To me, although I'm not a lawyer, knowing about the harm caused by your product, then spending millions on trying to create doubt about the facts of that harm, sounds very similar to what another industry did with its product.

This post is part of a "Corporate Skullduggery" series produced by The Huffington Post, in conjunction with the U.N.'s 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris (Nov. 30-Dec. 11), aka the climate-change conference. The series will put a spotlight on businesses that have actively tried to mislead the public about the dangers of climate change or about their own contributions to rising temperatures. To view the entire series, visit here.

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ref

https://www.desmog.com**/2015**/11/23/research-confirms-exxonmobil-koch-funded-climate-denial-echo-chamber-polluted-mainstream-media/

A new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS) shows that the climate denial echo chamber organizations funded by ExxonMobil and Kochfamily foundations produced misinformation that effectively polluted mainstream media coverage of climate science and polarized the climate policy debate. 

The abstract and full text of the study can be found here: Corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate change.

The analysis of 20 years’ worth of data by Yale University researcher Dr. Justin Farrell shows beyond a doubt that ExxonMobil and the Kochs are the key actors who funded the creation of climate disinformation think tanks and ensured the prolific spread of their doubt products throughout our mainstream media and public discourse.

“The contrarian efforts have been so effective for the fact that they have made it difficult for ordinary Americans to even know who to trust,” Dr. Farrell told the Washington Post which was first to cover the news of the study’s release. “This counter-movement produced messages aimed, at the very least, at creating ideological polarization through politicized tactics, and at the very most, at overtly refuting current scientific consensus with scientific findings of their own,” Dr. Farrell said.

From PNAS’s press briefing note about the article by Dr. Farrell:

Corporate funding likely influences the nature and content of polarizing texts pertaining to climate change, according to a study. Political polarization has become a hallmark of climate change policy discussion, with multiple groups in various sectors contributing to public discourse regarding climate and energy. To quantify the influence of corporate funding in climate change discourse, Justin Farrell analyzed more than 39 million words of text produced by 164 organizations active in the climate change counter-movement between 1993 and 2013. The author examined the ideological content of the produced texts, as well as the funding behind the organizations that produced the texts.

Organizations with corporate funding were more likely to have produced polarizing texts, the author found, with ExxonMobil and the Koch family foundation acting as influential funders (emphasis added). Further, according to the author, corporate funding may have influenced the ideological content of produced texts. The results suggest quantitative evidence of the influence of funding in the climate change debate that had previously been hypothesized, and suggests an analytical model for integrating texts with the social networks that created them, according to the author.

This study confirms once again the central thesis of industry-funded attacks on climate science, which inspired the DeSmog book Climate Cover-up and countless articles about the deception campaign over the past decade.

Now let’s see how the mainstream media cover this story — that is what I’m most curious to see. (The Washington Post article was pretty straightforward, although it gave ExxonMobil an unchallenged last word, and Joby Warrick seemed to pose a bogus question to Dr. Farrell equating the fossil-funded disinformation campaign with pro-climate-action campaigns, but Dr. Farrell correctly rebutted such a comparison.)

Will this study, published in a highly authoritative journal, finally compel the newsrooms and boardrooms of the traditional media to take responsibility to undo some of the damage done by their complicity in spreading fossil fuel industry-funded misinformation?

Will false balance — quoting a distinguished climate scientist and then speed-dialing Pat Michaels at the Cato Institute for an opposing quote — finally stop?

Will editors commit to serving as referees to ensure the same industry PR pollution isn’t published any longer?

It’s critically important today that the public hears the scientific facts about climate change without the confusion injected into the policy debate by well-funded think tanks and their highly paid PR operative counterparts.

Dr. Farrell’s research also provides further evidence of the public deception orchestrated by the fossil fuel industry, and should prove valuable to investigators examining ExxonMobil as well as other current and future efforts to hold polluters accountable for their PR pollution.

Here is a video produced years ago, “Doubt” by The Climate Reality Project, which provides a nice overview of this issue[vid]  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjVjr-qOpNk

also highly suggested: track down access to Merchants of Doubt, the full-length documentary by Food Inc. director Robert Kenner that exposes the history of tobacco-to-climate denial and their common PR manipulators such as Marc Morano and Fred Singer.

It’s far beyond the time to end the climate cover-up. And responsible media can lead the way.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/amy-coney-barrett-2652794109/

no recuse koch $

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/06/16/free-market-ideology-charles-koch-response-covid-19

Charles Koch, CEO of Koch Industries, is receiving credit for launching a COVID-19 relief fund, as he urged a “distinctly American response” of private charity — and not public benefits — to address this deadly pandemic.

Koch kickstarted the fund with a $5 million contribution, pocket change for a man who runs the second largest privately held corporation in the country, which makes about $5 million every twenty minutes.

His “distinctly American response” is not for the government to do more but for a billionaire to solicit help from Americans who make far less: his contribution amounts to 0.000125 of his net worth of roughly $40 billion, about the equivalent of a $5 donation for someone who makes $40,000 a year.

His newly rebranded “Stand Together” group has also “matched the almost $3 million raised by its GoFundMe campaign, #HelpTheHelpers,” and 87,000 other donors have lifted the fund to more than $50 million. (Stand Together was previously known as the Seminar Network and prior to that, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce.)

Koch’s miserly contribution stands in stark contrast to the hundreds of millions of dollars he’s spent on his political and policy agenda to remake U.S. laws to advance a radical free-market ideology, an approach to government that COVID-19 has revealed to be fatally flawed — literally.

Nowhere is that more evident than in President Trump’s weak response to the pandemic, which mirrors Koch’s worldview in prioritizing market forces over swift, coordinated leadership from our federal government.

Despite Trump’s assertions, America remains inshort supply of tests, personal protective equipment (PPE), and life-saving ventilators that corporationsare unlikely to produce in the time-frame and scale required to save tens of thousands of lives, without a presidential directive requiring urgent action.

Just this past week, Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) revealed that the Trump administration’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) plan to meet needs for PPE on COVID-19 was contingent on two deeply flawed assumptions: First, the number of infections would decline this summer (which was and remains demonstrably false) and second, that nurses would reuse PPE equipment that was designed for single use (which infectious disease experts strongly recommend against).

Due to this untrammeled “free market” approach, price gouging is rampant, and the cost of vital equipment is skyrocketing thanks to what New York Governor Andrew Cuomo described as aneBay-style competitive bidding war that has been playing out between states and with the federal government, due to Trump’s refusal to use his powers to stop this deadly competition for life-saving goods.

Already, President Trump’s laissez-faire approach has made America #1 in the world in infections, withclose to 2,000,000 confirmed cases and more than 100,000 deaths. Germany, in contrast, acted decisively to deploy its federal government and universal health care system toimpede the disease and reduce deaths, and it has slowed its reopening unlike America, which has recklessly accelerated its own in many states.

Meanwhile, corporate America has proven to be no match for the pandemic. Therestaurant industry has been crushed. Much of the oil and gas industry, which wasmired in debt while splurging on stock dividends, is on the brink of collapse.Wall Street is in a death spiral. Even hospitals have beencutting wages and laying off workers on the frontlines of the fight.

However, it is ordinary Americans who continue to bear the brunt of a crisis exacerbated by a social safety net riddled with holes, thanks in large part to Charles Koch.

Millions of Americans have applied for the very unemployment benefits that Koch’s network hasfought for years to kill, through his group “Americans for Prosperity” (AFP) and other organizations. More than 20 million jobs were lost in April and as of June, America’s unemployment rate is more than 13 percent, the worst rate since the Great Depression, and the rate is much higher than that in some states and in some demographics.

Loss of employment also means loss of health insurance for many people, and Koch has directed tens of millions of dollars in a concerted effort to undermine alternatives like the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and Medicare for All.

Koch-funded groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), and AFP have been relentless in their efforts to kill the ability of Americans to enroll in the ACA’s health exchanges and they’ve also helped block state expansion of Medicaid for years. Koch’s spending has been instrumental in preventing millions of Americans from getting the health care they need.

Millions of Americans also lack access to paid medical or family leave, forcing them to choose between a paycheck and their health, which will lead to more preventable infections and deaths. Last month, AFP andIWF were mobilized to block the creation of a federal paid leave program, despite research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showingpaid leave helps reduce the spread of infectious diseases.

The CDC itself has also been targeted by the Koch network,lobbying Congress to cut the agency's budget by $1 billion in 2018. AFP has alsoattacked the CDC’s shelter-in-place policies and even went to court to fight stay-at-home orders. It is also actively trying to kill the HEROES Act, which would extend benefits in the CARES Act that millions of Americans still need, and the group is running digital ads against several senators and promising to score congressional votes on this relief package that passed the House.

But a business-as-usual approach that relies on corporate America and private charity to lead the way simply cannot deliver what strong and effective governing can: a robust safety net that protects all Americans and a fair democracy that makes the lives and well-being of our citizens its top priority.

It’s time for a bold rethink of the radical libertarian ideology espoused by Charles Koch that has spread through our politics like a destructive virus. It’s not just a symptom of America's disastrous response to COVID-19; it is one of the biggest causes of our crisis.

Lisa Graves is the executive director of True North Research and curator of KochDocs. She’s a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice.

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Koch Foundations Increased Media Investments in 2018

by Alex Kotch | November 26th, 2019

Billionaire Charles Koch’s two foundations spent nearly $3.5 million on media grants and contracts in 2018.

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= he is also a fdnsomewhat neglected catmain bro, 11 red, david step down rx)see disambig nodecapt719 ===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/as-charles-koch-cultivates-anti-war-image-koch-industries-profits-from-defense-contracts/ no lnx As Charles Koch cultivates anti-war image, Koch industries profits from defense contracts Written by Alex Kotch / The American Prospect July 26, 2019 Libertarian billionaire industrialist Charles Koch has gone to great lengths to paint himself as an anti-interventionist. He has funded foreign policy-focused think tanks and university centers such as the conflict-averse Center for the Study of Statesmanship at Catholic University and the Notre Dame International Security Center, which is directed by anti-NATO professor Michael Desch. Most recently, he teamed up with an extremely unlikely ally, liberal billionaire philanthropist George Soros, to found the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. The Charles Koch Foundation and Soros’ Open Society Foundations each contributed $500,000 to help found the Quincy Institute, which will open in September, along with $800,000 from other donors. “Political leaders have increasingly deployed the military in a costly, counterproductive, and indiscriminate manner, normalizing war and treating armed dominance as an end in itself,” reads the institute’s website. “The Quincy Institute is an action-oriented think tank that will lay the foundation for a new foreign policy centered on diplomatic engagement and military restraint.” But Koch Industries, the giant oil, chemical, paper, and electronics conglomerate owned and led by Koch, has been cashing in on Department of Defense contracts. Since 2016, two Koch Industries subsidiaries have gotten federal contracts worth a total of close to $2.3 million to provide the Navy with circuit boards for its ships, according to Sludge’s review of federal contract data from the Federal Procurement Data System. A Navy spokesperson told Sludge that “circuit boards are used in a variety of ships, submarines and aircraft” but declined to provide additional details regarding the use of the Koch subsidiaries’ electronics. The two most recent contracts, which total nearly $500,000, went to Camarillo, California-based Interconnect Systems, which Koch Industries subsidiary Molex acquired in 2016. Naval Surface Warfare Systems Crane, a Navy office with a mission “to provide acquisition engineering, in-service engineering and technical support for sensors, electronics, electronic warfare and special warfare weapons,” initiated a $247,350 contract with Interconnect Systems in March 2019 for “digital signal processing computer card[s].” The company had signed a similar contract in September 2018 with NSWS Crane for $243,950. Interconnect Systems scored a $1 million contract for circuit cards in July 2018 from the Defense Logistics Agency’s (DLA) maritime facility in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. DLA Land and Maritime “manages the supply chain for ground-based and maritime weapons systems repair parts, small arms parts, and fluid-handling systems.” Nallatech, a subsidiary of Interconnect Systems, has gotten close to $247,000 worth of Navy contracts since 2016. The majority of that money came from NSWC Crane, but some came from the NAVSUP Weapons Support Systems agency, which supports naval weapons systems. NSWC Crane gave Nallatech its largest contract, for $147,000 worth of hybrid processors, in September 2017. Since 2016, Interconnect Systems and its subsidiary, Nallatech, have gotten $2,260,000 worth of Defense contracts. Nallatech, which last year integrated with Molex subsidiary BittWare, has received over $617,000 worth of Defense contracts since 2008, the year it was acquired by Interconnect Systems, according to usaspending.gov. The company advertises military and aerospace products such as radar systems for manned and unmanned vehicles that “provide unprecedented situational awareness and target coordination,” as well as a “ballistic digitizer.” Molex, an Illinois-based manufacturer of electrical connectors, provides parts for a number of industries. In its defense section, the Molex website lists products for use in unmanned vehicles, missiles, and ground vehicles. Koch Industries, the Quincy Institute, the Charles Koch Foundation, and Open Society Foundations did not respond to requests for comment. More Navy Connections A partially Koch-funded foreign policy center at a California state university is also involved with the Navy. The University of California at San Diego’s Center for Peace and Security Studies got a $3.3 million multi-year grant from the Charles Koch Foundation in 2017, its second year of existence. “We’re excited about U.C. San Diego and its scholars’ work to better understand emerging issues in security studies and their implications for U.S. foreign policy,” said Charles Koch Foundation Vice President for Research William Ruger in a university news story. Ruger, an Afghanistan war veteran, is in the Navy Reserve. The Center for Peace and Security Studies also gets funding from the Office of Naval Research’s Minerva Research Initiative. Its current grant, covering 2014-19, is called “Deterrence with Proxies.” The center’s website describes its work on military automation. “Technologies that supplant human labor in battle—such as UAVs (drones) and ground combat robots—lower military labor costs and limit political risks associated with friendly casualties. The tendency should thus be for military automation to increase the scope of threats or uses of force by the most advanced economies, geographically and in terms of the issues in dispute.” UCSD has a long and lucrative relationship with the Navy; the Navy’s Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, which works with the defense industry to create new weapons systems, has been headquartered at the university since 1997. Since 1981, UCSD has raked in nearly $250 million from Navy contracts, according to data from the Federal Procurement Data Service. Political science professor Erik Gartzke, a former Army and Navy officer who runs the Center for Peace and Security Studies, has written papers about “costless combat” drones. Meanwhile, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Koch-backed corporate bill mill, supported domestic drone use through its proposed Unmanned Aerial Vehicle program. ‘The Case for Private Defense’ “Charles Koch’s anti-interventionist posturing is more clearly understood through his decades-long support of anarcho-capitalist scholars who have developed and championed the call to privatize police and military defense,” said Ralph Wilson, co-founder of the Corporate Genome Project and former research director of activist group UnKoch My Campus. Koch’s political views are shaped by the Austrian School of economics, which advocates unfettered free markets and small governments. One prominent right-wing think tank that has promoted these concepts is the Mises Institute, which was established in 1982 and is named after one of the 20th century’s leading Austrian economists, Ludwig von Mises. The late Murray Rothbard, Mises’ close associate and vice president of academic affairs at the Mises Institute for 13 years, argued against the state entirely and advocated a privatized military and police force. Like Rothbard, Mises Institute senior fellow Hans-Hermann Hoppe supports fully privatized security. In a paper first published by the Mises Institute in 1998, Hoppe argues that “collective security is a myth that provides no justification for the modern state, [and] all security is and must be private.” In a 2002 essay, republished by the Mises Institute in 2010, Mises Institute fellow Robert Murphy made the case for privatized defense. Since then, he has continued to speak on the issue; Murphy held a session called “The Market for Military Defense” at this month’s “Mises University,” an annual free-market-economics boot camp. Murphy owes much of his career to the generosity of Koch; he’s a research assistant professor at Texas Tech’s Free Market Institute, which is heavily funded by the Charles Koch Foundation (but also, ironically, gets substantial funding from the state government); a senior economist at the Institute for Energy Research, which Koch helped found and which has received funding from the three Koch family nonprofits; and a research fellow at the Independent Institute, which has scored grants from two Koch foundations. Rothbard and Koch co-founded the libertarian Cato Institute in 1977 but had a falling out in the early 1980s. Still, their spheres continue to intersect, as several other current Mises Institute associates teach in university programs also funded by the Charles Koch Foundation. Just Another Rebrand? The Koch family has struggled with image problems for some time. Koch, along with his younger brother, David, has helmed a libertarian-minded political operation for decades, which has helped propel conservative Republicans to state and national office, and helped to found the Tea Party. Koch Industries is one of the country’s biggest polluters and has had to pay over $800 million in fines for environmental, labor, workplace, and other violations. Because of their poor reputations, Koch Industries and Koch’s political network have undergone a series of rebrands, including Koch’s newest incarnation as a philanthropist who works with both parties to reform the criminal justice system and restrain America’s forever wars. For several years now, Koch has compared himself and his network of wealthy conservative donors to civil rights heroes such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King. But critics say these recent initiatives are largely distractions from Koch’s core mission, which he has always followed: to cut taxes and slash regulations in order to maximize Koch Industries’ profits. “Koch Industries has consistently chosen corporatism and profit over their own ‘principled’ libertarianism, whether contracting with the U.S. military or accepting over half a billion dollars in local, state, and federal subsidies,” Wilson told Sludge. Koch will likely continue to fund think tanks focused on preventing wars, but his company’s simultaneous role in the military-industrial complex should not be overlooked.=maybe a bit like short lived support of criminal reform, aligns with his longtime libtartd principles? more interestingly, soros gets off bogeyman list ?! boston globe  no lnx 719 In an astonishing turn, George Soros and Charles Koch team up to end US ‘forever war’ policy By Stephen KinzerUpdated June 30, 2019, 5:01 a.m.George Soros (left) and Charles Koch are teaming up on the effort. BESIDES BEING BILLIONAIRES and spending much of their fortunes to promote pet causes, the leftist financier George Soros and the right-wing Koch brothers have little in common. They could be seen as polar opposites. Soros is an old-fashioned New Deal liberal. The Koch brothers are fire-breathing right-wingers who dream of cutting taxes and dismantling government. Now they have found something to agree on: the United States must end its “forever war” and adopt an entirely new foreign policy. In one of the most remarkable partnerships in modern American political history, Soros and Charles Koch, the more active of the two brothers, are joining to finance a new foreign-policy think tank in Washington. It will promote an approach to the world based on diplomacy and restraint rather than threats, sanctions, and bombing. This is a radical notion in Washington, where every major think tank promotes some variant of neocon militarism or liberal interventionism. Soros and Koch are uniting to revive the fading vision of a peaceable United States. The street cred they bring from both ends of the political spectrum — along with the money they are providing — will make this new think tank an off-pitch voice for statesmanship amid a Washington chorus that promotes brinksmanship. “This is big,” said Trita Parsi, former president of the National Iranian American Council and a co-founder of the new think tank. “It shows how important ending endless war is if they’re willing to put aside their differences and get together on this project. We are going to challenge the basis of American foreign policy in a way that has not been done in at least the last quarter-century.” Since peaceful foreign policy was a founding principle of the United States, it’s appropriate that the name of this think tank harken back to history. It will be called the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, an homage to John Quincy Adams, who in a seminal speech on Independence Day in 1821 declared that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” The Quincy Institute will promote a foreign policy based on that live-and-let-live principle. The institute plans to open its doors in September and hold an official inauguration later in the autumn. Its founding donors — Soros’s Open Society Foundation and the Charles Koch Foundation — have each contributed half a million dollars to fund its takeoff. A handful of individual donors have joined to add another $800,000. By next year the institute hopes to have a $3.5 million budget and a staff of policy experts who will churn out material for use in Congress and in public debates. Hiring is underway. Among Parsi’s co-founders are several well-known critics of American foreign policy, including Suzanne DiMaggio, who has spent decades promoting negotiated alternatives to conflict with China, Iran, and North Korea; the historian and essayist Stephen Wertheim; and the anti-militarist author and retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich. ...CMD Fox News’ Tucker Carlson is under fire this week for racist, sexist, and homophobic comments he made while chatting on “Bubba the Love Sponge” a shock jock radio show between 2006-2011. Groups are scrutinizing Fox’s advertisers and demanding that they drop the show.But Carlson also publishes The Daily Caller, a controversial online media outlet with ties to white nationalists that has infamously peddled everything from climate denial and anti-Islamic tropes to false prostitution charges and violence against protesters.Carlson’s moonlighting as an extremist at The Daily Caller is heavily bankrolled by — you guessed it — the Koch brothers. An investigation by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) finds that the Charles Koch Foundation has poured more than $2.7 million into the Daily Caller’s non-profit “charity” since 2012, which generates the lion’s share of the “news” that the Caller publishes.Indeed, in 2016, Koch cash accounted for 83 percent of the The Daily Caller News Foundation’s $1.1 million in revenues.Carlson Under FireAs if catering to white supremacists was not bad enough, Media Matters published an inventory of hateful comments made by Carlson as a guest on the show between 2006-2011.The radio host discusses Warren Jeffs, the religious leader who was investigated in 2007 for marrying off underage girls to older men and was eventually jailed for sexual assault of minors in 2011. When the radio host condemned Jeffs for being an “accessory to the rape of children,” Carlson said “whatever the hell that means,” and going on to suggest that forcible underage marriage is not as serious as forcible child rape. Listen to the tape here.In other interviews, Carlson called Iraqis “semi-literate primitive monkeys,” who “don’t use toilet paper or forks.” They should just “shut the fuck up and obey.” Carlson spoke about his desire for a presidential candidate to blame the “lunatic Muslims who are behaving like animals.” That candidate would be “elected king” if they vowed to “kill as many of them as [they] can.” Carlson also said Afghanistan is “never going to be a civilized country because the people aren’t civilized.” Listen to the tape here.The release of the older audio tapes gives “context and insight” on his nightly programming today, said Media Matters President Angelo Carusone on MSNBC.So far, Carlson has failed to apologize. As Fox News scrambles to control the damage, at least three advertisers — Allergan, letgo, and GreatCall — have had enough.But with the focus on advertisers, it’s important to remember who else bankrolls Carlson’s mini media empire.The Koch Caller?The Kochs have long underwritten The Daily Caller. Previously, CMD reported that the Kochs gave $805,512 to The Daily Caller News Foundation between 2012 and 2015, predominantly from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. Since then, the numbers have continued to grow.The Koch foundation gave another $946,000 in 2016 and $960,000 in 2017, the last year publicly available — for a total of $2.7 million.In 2017, CMD analyzed emails sent by the Trump campaign to The Daily Caller subscribers and estimated that the outlet also received at least $150,000 from the Trump campaign in the months right before the November election, based on the fee charged for mailings to its list. The funding was never disclosed by Carlson or The Daily Caller as they reported on the Trump campaign.In addition, CMD also examined the relationship between the non-profit and for-profit arms of Tucker Carlson’s operation. The mechanics of how they operate together raise serious concerns about whether Carlson’s tax-free nonprofit is operating primarily for the private benefit of his for-profit media outlet, which would be a violation of tax law.CMD’s story was picked up by numerous media outlets including the Washington Post, which interviewed tax experts on the legality of the scheme.“It really does look like the reason for the existence of this 501(c)(3) organization is to provide benefits to the for-profit company, and that should be a private benefit that is not acceptable,” Linda Sugin, a law professor at Fordham University, told the Post and other media outlets. “You can’t have money going into the foundation being used for purposes that are really to support the for-profit organization.”https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2019/03/12/trump-taps-climate-denier-to-lead-a-secret-white-house-climate-paneldavid aEmeritus Professor of Physics at Princeton University and well-known climate science denier William Happer will lead the Presidential Committee on Climate Security, the Washington Post has reported. Happer, a National Security Council senior director since last September, and his panel will “assess whether climate change poses a national security threat,” according to documents obtained by the Washington Post.Happer is a well-regarded researcher in the field of atomic physics and adaptive optics, but has no formal training in climate science. Happer’s name is notorious among climate scientists and environmentalists for his staunch denial of climate change and the science supporting it.Last Thursday, the leaders of four U.S. House Committees sent a letter to Trump protesting the move, saying:We are deeply concerned about recent reports that the National Security Council (NSC) is planning to assemble a secret panel, led by a discredited climate change denier, to undermine the overwhelming scientific consensus on the nature and threats of climate change, including to the national security of the United States.The panel will not operate under the standard rules for Federal Advisory Committees, which require open meetings, transparency and public involvement. If the panel meets in secret, its conclusions will not be open to peer review or criticism, hallmarks of science.Trump, who has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord, rolled back the Clean Power Plan, revived plans for Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, and deregulated the fossil fuel industry, has yet to respond to the congressional letter.Happer’s “CO2 Coalition” Well-Funded by the Far RightBefore joining Trump, Happer served as president of a group called the CO2 Coalition.After a few years of flatlining, global carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels jumped to an all time high in 2018, but that is not a problem for the CO2 Coalition.CO2 Coalition describes its mission as “educating thought leaders, policy makers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy.” In a section on its website dubbed, “CO2 Fundamentals,” CO2 Coalition says, “The debate about global warming and climate change has shifted from genuine scientific exploration to a campaign demonizing CO2.”CO2 Coalition has received $100,000 from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in 2016 and 2017, according to IRS filings examined by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). In an internal Bradley Foundation grant proposal record for CO2 Coalition dated 6/14/2016, Bradley staff writes, “Through strategic public discourse techniques, it will use science to counter the campaign demonizing the use of fossil fuels — a campaign that has effectively replaced scientific inquiry in the climate change debate.”Bradley internal documents show that it is a major funder of the web of climate change denying organizations and that it “has made significant grants to support energy policy think tanks, attack-dog groups that target environmentalists, and efforts to discredit climate science,” CMD found.An internal spreadsheet from Bradley shows a matching grant of $130,000 ($132,000 on its 2016 IRS Form) from Scaife Foundation for CO2 Coalition. The Scaife Foundation funds many organizations that dispute the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change including: Heartland Institute, Hoover Institution, Heritage Foundation, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Scaife Foundation gave another $135,000 to CO2 Coalition in 2017, its IRS filing shows.The Mercer Family Foundation led by Trump supporter Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, is the top supporter of CO2 Coalition with $320,000 in donations in 2016 and 2017 IRS filings show. A Huffington Post reportlate last year detailed more than $4 million from the foundation in grants to climate skeptics in 2017.Charles Koch, billionaire owner of one of America’s biggest polluters Koch Industries, has also given to CO2 Coalition but an examination of IRS filings raises some questions. Charles Koch Foundation (CKF) details $32,409 to CO2 Coalition in 2016 and 2017 and Charles Koch Institute (CKI) $10,000 in 2017 on their individual IRS filings, but CO2 Coalition’s detail no contributions from CKF and $46,409 from CKI in 2016 and 2017.Other major contributors to Happer’s climate science denial outfit include many of the major right-wing funders:$125,000 from Searle Freedom Trust (2016-2017)$125,000 from Thomas W. Smith Foundation (2016-2017)$50,000 from Achelis and Bodman Foundations (2016)$40,000 from the Randolph Foundation (2017)

***==http://documentedinvestigations.org/2018/07/12/janus-decision-rooted-koch-wishlist/With last month’s monumental Janus decision by the Supreme Court, the Koch family won a major victory in their multi-generational attack on unions.The ruling spreads to the entire public sector one of the laws the Koch fortune first helped push through in Kansas 60 years ago: “right-to-work.” And in doing so it enshrines the union-busting agenda their fossil fuel money has helped advance for decades.(This story was first published by In These Times.)Through a single vote, the Court’s 5-4 Janus decision reverses decades of legal precedent that had obstructed part of the Koch’s pro-corporate agenda. That vote was secured with the Kochs’ help in bankrolling efforts that include: helping to maintain a GOP Senate majority; helping the Senate block President Obama from filling the February 2016 Supreme Court vacancy; and helping to win the confirmation of right-wing corporate activist Neil Gorsuch.Janus helps cement the nation’s highest court as the Koch Court, and Charles Koch wants to keep it that way.As Documented first detailed in partnership with the Intercept, for months the Kochs had been investing heavily in anticipation of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement from the Court, which was announced on June 27, the same day as Janus. Earlier this year, the Koch group “Americans for Prosperity” (AFP) hired Sarah Field from the Koch-funded Federalist Society to spearhead its campaign to extend the Koch hold on the Court for perhaps a generation or more.Despite claims by AFP that helping to seat Gorsuch was their “first” foray into Supreme Court nominations, the Koch effort to influence who becomes a judge and how they interpret the law goes back much further.In fact, the Kochs have been investing in reshaping the law to suit their personal agenda for decades. For example, the Koch group Citizens for a Sound Economy, AFP’s predecessor, backed Clarence Thomas’ controversial confirmation to the Court more than 25 years ago.The Kochs’ long-term agenda to remake the United States in their image is a multi-pronged effort that includes changing both the law and who makes or interprets the laws, including the anti-union Janus decision.THE SEEDS OF JANUSThe effort to roll back union rights actually began almost a century ago, as wealthy industrialists objected to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, known as the Wagner Act, which enshrined the right to collective bargaining in the United States.Many tycoons of the time, like Alfred Sloan, head of General Motors, opposed those rights along with other business reforms of FDR’s New Deal.Fred Koch, co-founder of the corporation that later became Koch Industries, harshly criticized American workers under New Deal policies in 1938. He extolled the economic policies of Emperor Hirohito and fascists Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini:Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard… The laboring people in those countries are proportionately much better off than they are any place else in the world. When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.Only recently, through the investigative work of Jane Mayer, has the public learned that the Koch fortune was actually built in part on directly aiding Hitler by building the oil-cracking factory that became “a key component in the Nazi war machine.” As Mayer noted in her 2016 book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, that factory refined high-octane fuel needed for the Luftwaffe, which targeted, terrorized, and killed many thousands of innocent civilians. Fred Koch’s praise of Germany came after Hitler’s air bombers helped murder 136 men, women, and children in Guernica in the Basque region, a tragedy made famous by the mural painted by Pablo Picasso.Meanwhile, industrialists like Sloan pursued efforts to undo New Deal reforms. In 1947, Congress amended the Wagner Act with the Taft-Hartley Act. It gave states the power to pass “right-to-work” laws that undermined collective bargaining by not requiring workers who benefit from bargained rights to pay dues to the unions that secured and enforced them.HOW THE KOCHS FERTILIZED “RIGHT-TO-WORK”As Mayer noted:[Fred Koch] was an early and active member of the Wichita-based DeMille Foundation for Political Freedom, an anti-labor group [founded in 1945] that was a forerunner of the National Right to Work Defense Foundation. In a revealing private letter, one of its staff members explained the group’s ‘Astroturf’ strategy. In reality, he said, big-business industrialists would run the group, serving as its ‘anonymous quarterbacks,’ and ‘call the turns.’ But he said they needed to sell the ‘yarn’ that the group was ‘composed of housewives, farmers, small businessmen, professional people, wage earners-not big business industrialists.’ Otherwise, he admitted, the movement was ‘almost certainly doomed to failure.’By 1954, an engineer from Wichita, Kan., Reed Larson, took a leave from his job at the Coleman Company, to launch Kansans-for-the-Right-to-Work. The following year, former Rep. Fred Hartley, Jr., (R-N.J.) co-founded the National Right to Work Committee (NRTWC). By 1958, the NRTWC was targeting six states to adopt right-to-work laws but it failed in every place, except Kansas.“Fred [Koch] co-led a referendum drive to alter the state constitution in order to make it harder for unions to take root in Kansas,” Duke University Professor Nancy MacLean noted.On Nov. 9, 1958, the New York Times reported that right-to-work won in Kansas because anti-union views had taken hold, noting:More campaign efforts and more money were expended on the emotion-provoking issue than on the campaigns of all Republican and Democratic state and Congressional candidates combined. … For the last 10 days or so before Election Day an organization called Kansans-for-the-Right-to-Work flooded newspapers, television channels and other advertising media with appeals to ‘vote yes.’ These by far outnumbered the ‘vote no’ advertisements of unions opposing the amending.A month later, Fred Koch joined Robert Welch and ten other men in Indianapolis to found the extreme rightwing group dubbed the “John Birch Society” (JBS).As the Washington Post noted in its 1961 profile of JBS:At the top of the Society’s structure in Wichita are several very wealthy industrialists. Oil engineer Fred Koch is president of the Rock Island Oil and Refining Co. A millionaire several times over, he is on the Society’s national council. … Wichita is the John Birch Society’s center of strength in Kansas, and one of its greatest in the country. … The leadership of the Birch Society overlaps heavily with the leadership of the organizations that successfully campaigned in 1958 for a right to work amendment to the State’s Constitution.As detailed by Group Research Inc. in its 1962 history of JBS, Koch worked with both NRTWC and the Christian Crusade in arguing against union dues like those at issue in the Janus case.A History of HostilityIn 1959, Fred Koch joined the Executive Committee to plan the JBS strategy to push back against what it viewed as communism in nearly every American institution.In 1960, Koch published his polemic “A Business Man Looks at Communism” and distributed it to JBS chapters across the country. That pamphlet makes a variety of hysterical claims against unions, including:Labor Unions have long been a Communist goal. How far they have been penetrated by Communists I have no idea, but it must be very far indeed, judging the hatred andvenom poured out in some labor papers….Koch also accused the U.S. Supreme Court under former Gov. Earl Warren (R-CA) of issuing pro-Communist decisions, the universities of having thousands of Communist professors, the United Nations of being subversive, and former GOP President Dwight Eisenhower of being soft on Communism.Similar sentiments were expressed in numerous other publications the JBS also pushed. The organization pitched a screed against the union workers who organized against Kohler fixtures in Wisconsin. It pushed attacks on the UAW’s Walter Reuther, who was posthumously awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.It published and peddled right-wing writer Rosalie Gordon’s attack on the U.S. Supreme Court for decisions enforcing collective bargaining rights as protecting the “labor-union monopoly,” along with what she called the “plague” of desegregation caused by Brown v. Board of Education.The JBS also pushed reprints of tomes by Ludwig von Mises attacking unions as illegitimate intervenors in the “free market,” artificial inflators of wages for workers, and thieves of the profits of tycoons. It promoted F.A. Hayek’s vilification of government regulation of corporations as leading to fascism and Hilaire du Berrier’s conspiracy theories that American labor unions were supposedly using union dues to finance communist terrorist violence abroad.Fred Koch’s son Charles urged visitors to the John Birch Society bookstore in Wichita to read copies of JBS pamphlets, including those by anti-labor writers from the Austrian School of Economics, like Mises.Indeed, as the present author first documented for the Center for Media and Democracy, Charles Koch became active in JBS after returning home to Wichita to help with the family business. Charles was a leader and fundraiser for JBS, including underwriting its publications and national radio network, while it attacked collective bargaining and leaders of the civil rights movement such as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks.CHARLES KOCH IN ACTIONThough he left JBS in 1968, Charles Koch never abandoned its core anti-union agenda and the lessons of his father’s commitment to right-to-work. He did try to shed some of the rhetoric around communist conspiracies, though of late he was painted by Koch political strategist Richard Fink as a martyr against “collectivism,” in audio obtained by the Undercurrent, which also included outlandish claims linking fascism and the minimum wage.It was Charles Koch’s investment in lifting up the work of Mises and Hayek, who made similar claims, that helped preserve and extend their legacy. As Stephen Moore noted in a 2006 profile on Charles for the Wall Street Journal:The authors who have had the most profound influence on his own political philosophy include F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Simon, Paul Johnson and Charles Murray. Mr. Koch says that he experienced an intellectual epiphany in the early 1960s, when he attended a conference on free-market capitalism hosted by the late, great Leonard Reed.Charles brought Mises to Wichita to speak and deployed F.A. “Baldy” Harper’s Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) to promote Mises and his protégé Hayek. As lauded by Reed’s Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), Hayek argued that unions violated the very idea of the “rule of law” and that the Wagner Act was central to that violation, a sentiment he promoted in numerous writings.Charles Koch is deeply devoted to an alternative universe in which collective bargaining undermines the rule of law and is not a major cause of increased wages.Moore noted in his interview:As we continue, Mr. Koch becomes increasingly animated. He discusses another seminal work in his collection, F.A. Harper’s 1957 Why Wages Rise. The book demonstrates ‘that wages rise not because of unions or government action, but because of marginal productivity gains — people get more money when they produce more value for other people.’ Then he confides, “I was so thrilled by this revelation that I had what Maslow called a ‘peak experience.’'”Koch has also supported the NRTWC, which “sought to put a new face on the anti-union campaign by building its rhetoric on the arguments of Hayek, Mises, and others with a ‘respectable’ pedigree.” The NRTWC argues that:Compulsory unionism itself violates the dignity of the individual worker, regardless of how the forced union tribute is spent. As the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich A. von Hayek wrote: “[T]he coercion which unions have been permitted to exercise … is primarily the coercion of fellow workers.Deep Devotion and InvestmentHayek and Mises are not the only two virulently anti-union economists Charles Koch backed. As Nancy MacLean documented in Democracy in Chains, one of the key architects of the Koch agenda domestically and internationally, James Buchanan, also railed against the so-called “union monopolies” for distorting “free market” wages.And, as UnKoch My Campus has detailed, Koch money has funded scores of academics to push their agenda at universities, buying control over content and personnel with restrictive dictates attached to their donations.Many of the rightwing groups Charles Koch is known to have made a major investment in since the 1970s have pushed right-to-work or attacked collective bargaining rights. These include Reason magazine, the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the State Policy Network and many more.During David Koch’s 1980 bid to become vice president, running on the ticket of Libertarian Ed Clark—which was pushed by Charles and fueled with Koch cash—the campaign platform included making right-to-work the law of the land:[W]e urge repeal of the National Labor Relations Act, and all state Right to Work Laws, which prohibit employers from making voluntary contracts with unions. We oppose all government back-to-work orders as imposing a form of forced labor.That is, there would be no need for state right-to-work laws if there were no NLRA that protects collective bargaining rights. As a result, right-to-work would be effectively nationalized at the determination of the employer.After badly losing that election, the Kochs have invested heavily in changing the culture—and courts of America—to make their anti-union vision a reality.Right-to-work is part of that vision.MILLIONS SPENTA leak of the Kochs’ summer retreat in 2010 revealed that they featured NRTWC leaders at their gathering of billionaires to plot plans for that year’s midterm elections.In 2012, before most of America even knew that the Kochs had branded their billionaire conclave as “Freedom Partners,” that group injected $1 million directly into the NRTWC among the more than $200 million of its known spending that cycle.In 2016, they focused much of their known political spending on keeping a GOP majority in the Senate, and they influenced the make-up of the U.S. Supreme Court by helping to block Judge Merrick Garland’s confirmation.For the 2018 election, they’ve pledged to spend more than $400 million through the Seminar Network, the latest rebranding of their network of tycoons.To be clear, the Koch family fortune is not the only one that has been expended pushing right-to-work laws to try to weaken the power of ordinary people to negotiate through unions. A major funder of right-to-work effort has been the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, along with Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, which Mother Jones has dubbed “the ATM” of the right wing.Collective bargaining has provided women with greater economic opportunities and job security. Right-to-work laws also have a disproportionate impact on people of color, who are union members at a higher rate than whites. Black women will likely be the group most adversely affected by the Janus case. Notably, workers in right-to-work states also have lower wages than in states that have rejected this agenda.UNDERMINING PROGRESSIVES TOOThe spread of right to work through Janus also will affect our elections.As In These Times has documented with the Center for Media and Democracy, the national push for right-to-work is designed to undermine the power of unions and to “defang and defund” them as a way to weaken the chances for progressives to win in politics and policy.The Koch investment in making right-to-work a national reality represents one of the longest and deepest commitments to this agenda, aside from NRTWC itself.And this year marks the 60th anniversary of Fred Koch’s victory of making right-to-work legally binding in Kansas.Now, six decades later, Charles Koch has helped make his father’s wish binding on the rest of America through helping to make the Janus ruling a reality. Lisa Graves

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2016Charles Koch – Estimated worth: $48.3 billion. Contributions (with wife Elizabeth Buzzi) since 1989: $13.1 millionThe chairman and CEO of the sprawling Koch Industries conglomerate and his wife donated $6.9 million last cycle, the bulk of which went to Freedom Partners Action Fund, a hub in their vast political money machine. The super PAC spent $28.9 million against Democrats such as Senate candidates Ted Strickland, Catherine Cortez Masto and Katie McGinty. Koch also donated directly to a number of lawmakers, including now-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).Of course, these totals, and those for the everyone else we’ve listed, don’t include any dark money contributions — funds given to organizations that can be engaged in politics but don’t have to disclose their donors. In Koch’s case, that sum may be considerable. ===http://www.alternet.org/education/right-wing-billionaires-are-funding-cynical-plot-destroy-dissent-and-protest-colleges As s far-right speakers face loud student opposition at their university speaking gigs, conservative lawmakers in several states are introducing legislation that cracks down on protesters. As uncovered by UnKoch My Campus’ Ralph Wilson, numerous states have borrowed their so-called “campus free speech” bills from the rightwing Goldwater Institute, which is funded by conservative plutocrats including Charles Koch and the Mercer family.The intent of these bills isn’t to protect student speech; it’s actually to suppress it in favor of guest speakers who, at times, support white nationalism, LGBTQ discrimination and other hateful worldviews. By funding the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute, wealthy conservatives are enabling the promotion of hate speech while stifling student dissent. Whether or not Koch, for example, agrees with the hate speech he indirectly sponsors, he certainly benefits from a more friendly academic environment for far-right ideologues who often deny climate change and praise his extreme brand of tax- and regulation-free capitalism.The Goldwater Institute’s model bill allegedly ensures “the fullest degree of…free expression,” but it explicitly states that “protests and demonstrations that infringe upon the rights of others to engage in or listen to expressive activity shall not be permitted and shall be subject to sanction.”It goes on to say, “Any student who has twice been found responsible for infringing the expressive rights of others will be suspended for a minimum of one year, or expelled.”Under this code, imagine that a student protests a climate change denier and gets a brief suspension. Then the College Republicans group brings in a full-on white nationalist. Will this student do what she thinks is right and protest a racist who’s given a platform at a respected university, or stay home because she's risking expulsion? This campus "free speech” legislation is essentially an attack on student speech and an elevation of ultra-conservative ideas that many people in university communities think have no place in American society.“These laws would create a chilling effect on students who reject the idea that white supremacists or climate deniers are simply representing an ‘opposing viewpoint’ that should be tolerated, and who are rightfully relying on their first amendment freedoms to stop the rise of fascism and prevent global climate catastrophe,” Wilson, UnKoch’s senior researcher, told AlterNet. The group has been conducting research into Charles Koch’s considerable ideological donations to higher education, most of which goes toward free-market programs.Charles Koch Foundation representatives say that conservative views are underrepresented in higher education, and the foundation’s massive university donations—which fund free-market academic centers, professorships, grad students and lecture series—are necessary for academic freedom. This view is shared by other conservative billionaires and higher ed donors including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who recently said to the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference, “The education establishment [tells you] what to think…the real threat is silencing the First Amendment rights of people with whom you disagree.”What the Kochs and their allies really want, by amplifying the voices of far-right professors and guest speakers, is to steer society towards a tax- and regulation-free plutocracy. Charles and David Koch, who together are worth nearly $97 billion, have been working toward this goal for over 40 years.In 2014, Virginia passed the nation’s first law banning so-called “free speech zones,” which restrict protected speech to designated areas often far away from events that students want to protest. The following year, Missouri enacted a Campus Free Expression Act forbidding “free speech zones” without imposing punitive measures.But while more recent legislation bans free speech zones as well, it also restricts student free speech in scenarios where, lawmakers claim, free speech is protected.The protest crackdownLegislators in some states including Illinois and Tennessee have introduced bills in 2017 that explicitly mention sanctions on student protesters. Illinois’ bill, proposed by two Republicans, lifts this language, and additional passages, nearly verbatim from the Goldwater model. Also sponsored by Republicans, the bill in Tennessee—nicknamed the “Milo Bill” after an event at the University of California at Berkeley featuring the racist “alt-right” icon Milo Yiannopolous was canceled due to protests—directs universities to enact free speech policies that include “sanctions for anyone under the jurisdiction of the institution who interferes with the free expression of others,” and it gives faculty “the right to regulate class speech.”In North Carolina, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Forest intends to work with legislators on a Restore Campus Free Speech Act, which would create “a discipline policy that would punish students who shout down visiting speakers or deprive others of their right to free expression, a tactic commonly known as the ‘hecklers’ veto.'"Last year, Forest floated a measure calling on the University of North Carolina’s board of governors to create a system-wide policy that would impose harsh penalties, including expulsion, on students, staff and faculty members who disrupt classes, public meetings or events. The Koch-funded Generation Opportunity lauded the effort at the time. Forest has said that yelling at a guest speaker “has never been free speech,” and he’s called campus protest methods “terrorist tactics.” No one introduced a free speech bill that year.Other proposed laws, like North Dakota’s, which was introduced by six Republicans, omit sanctions provisions but state that a university may restrict student speech if it blocks entrances to buildings, obstructs traffic or interferes with events. Much of the North Dakota bill comes directly from the text of the Goldwater model legislation. A large group of most Republican legislators in Virginia has a new bill in play that includes much of the Goldwater language but stays away from restrictions on students.Additional campus free speech bills have been introduced this year in Colorado (sponsored by two Republicans and one Democrat) and Utah (sponsored by 14 Republican state representatives). Florida could be next. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has a "free speech" provision in his proposed budget.Big money driving campus 'free speech’ effortsOne of the model bill’s authors, Stanley Kurtz, is a longtime fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, which applies “the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy,” according to its website. The center has received millions of dollars in donations from the foundations of the conservative Bradley, Scaife, Olin and Earhart families, as well as hundreds of thousands from two vehicles for wealthy right-wing donors, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.Billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch are responsible for more than $9 million in contributions to the two groups from 2006 to 2015, according to the website Conservative Transparency and additional research by this author. Much of the $6.3 million that went to Donors Trust came in 2015. A now-defunct Koch nonprofit, the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, donated $190,000 to the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the Charles Koch Foundation has given over $9,000.The Goldwater Institute’s James Manley, senior attorney, and Jonathan Butcher, education director, also co-authored the “campus free speech” model legislation. The institute took in nearly $2.5 million from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund from 2002-2015, according Conservative Transparency and additional research. The Charles Koch Foundation has pitched in $75,000. Manley formerly worked at the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the two Donors funds. Butcher was a research assistant at the heavily Koch-funded Heritage Foundation from 2002 to 2006.Says Wilson, “These bills take Koch's academic presence to the next level, creating protected space to reveal the white supremacist roots of Koch's free market crusade, likeKoch's close friend and white nationalist Charles Murray who has taken to campuses to espouse the genetic superiority of white males.”Another Koch-funded think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, reportedly has student groups at nearly 80 colleges and universities. These groups bring in AEI fellows like the eugenicist Murray to speak on their campuses. Recently, Murray attempted to give a lecture at Middlebury College in Vermont but was stymied by vociferous protests. He had to end his speech early, and he and a liberal professor were attacked on their way out.Students at UC Berkeley and area residents protested Yiannopoulos, whom the College Republicans had invited to speak. The protests led to fires, vandalism, and reportedly, fights. Until recently, Yiannopoulos was an editor at Breitbart News, known as the online “platform of the alt-right,” which happens to be funded by Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, the far-right mega-donors who are major Donald Trump backers and whose family foundation has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Goldwater Institute. The younger Mercer was even a member of Trump’s transition team. Violence against a speaker, a professor or an onlooker is certainly unacceptable. So is inviting a white supremacist to speak at an institution of higher learning, and so is preventing students and faculty from protesting such a speaker. Plenty of right-wing billionaires likely don’t agree with white nationalist ideas, and by funding these so-called campus free speech bills they’re trying to advance free-market principles. But regardless of motivation, this campus "free speech" movement is spreading the hate of white nationalism, the racist “alt-right,” Islamophobia and homophobia—not to mention climate change denial and economic policies that benefit only the very wealthy—on campuses filled with young students. Conservative, corporate millionaires and billionaires are at fault.

=Charles Koch gave $90 million to influence higher ed in the Southhttp://www.southernstudies.org/2015/12/charles-koch-gave-90-million-to-influence-higher-e.htmlLast month, the provost of Western Carolina University in North Carolina asked the public school's chancellor to approve an academic center funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, a private nonprofit run by the billionaire chairman, CEO, and co-owner of the Koch Industries oil and chemical corporation. The foundation funds academic programs, professorships, scholarships, conferences, lecture series and economics centers, all for the purpose of promoting the free-market agenda embraced by Koch and his brother David.The chancellor has come out in support, and on Dec. 4 the school's trustees will vote on the fate of the Center for the Study of Free Enterprise, which would launch with $2 million from the Charles Koch Foundation over five years and $1.4 million from the university.The proposed agreement has come under fire from the school's faculty senate, which voted 21-3 to oppose the center's creation. The group raised concerns about academic freedom, cost, reputation, and the lack of peer review. "The Charles Koch Foundation has previously set forth explicit expectations in line with their political views in exchange for monetary gifts to universities," the faculty senate said in a statement, "thereby constraining academic freedom by influencing and interfering with the development of new knowledge."The proposed center at WCU is part of a long campaign by Koch to influence higher education. The Charles Koch Foundation along with three other groups led by Koch gave nearly $108 million to 366 colleges and universities from 2005 to 2014, finds an Institute for Southern Studies investigation, building on research by Greenpeace. The other groups are the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation, the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, and the Charles Koch Institute. (For more about these groups, see "The Koch-led charities funding higher education" at the end of this story.) Eighty-five percent of the donations — or $91 million — went to 147 Southern colleges and universities.The bulk of the money given by the four nonprofits — $77.7 million — went to George Mason University, a public school in Fairfax, Virginia. Much of that went to the school's Mercatus Center and Institute for Humane Studies, nonprofits housed at the university that focus on teaching and promoting free-market economics. But even when the GMU donations are excluded from the total giving, Southern schools received 45 percent of the remaining contributions.Besides GMU, the other schools that received the most money from the Koch foundations are all in the South: Florida State University at $2.3 million, West Virginia University at $1.3 million, Clemson University of South Carolina at $1.3 million, and Troy University of Alabama at $1.1 million...Looking at Koch contributions to schools by state, Virginia got the lion's share at $78.5 million followed by Florida at $3.3 million, the Kochs' home state of Kansas at $2.4 million, Texas at $1.9 million, and South Carolina at $1.7 million. Of the top 10 states for Koch higher ed contributions, six are in the South, with Alabama and West Virginia coming in at sixth and eighth, respectively.The four Koch-connected groups' donations to higher education have risen since 2005, when they gave $2.3 million to colleges and universities. The most recent tax return, posted to the foundation's website last month shows that the Charles Koch Foundation donated $23.6 million in 2014, nearly double the $12.4 million that it and the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation together donated in 2012. The latter foundation's 2014 tax return is not yet available.
A Southern focusWhy would so much of Charles Koch's contributions to higher education be going to schools in the South?The Charles Koch Foundation did not respond to requests for comment. But Ralph Wilson, a doctoral candidate at Florida State University who co-founded the student activist group FSU Progress Coalition and is active with UnKoch My Campus, a student group dedicated to uncovering the Kochs' influence on U.S. universities, thinks the Southern focus has to do with the brothers' political clout in the conservative region.Koch Industries has contributed heavily to candidates for state office in the South, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Since 1994, the company, its political action committee, and its lobbying arm have invested the most money in state candidates, other political action committees, and outside political groups in Texas ($1.5 million), with Virginia in third ($670,000), Georgia in fifth ($275,000), and Florida in seventh ($200,000).State politicians in turn are often in charge of appointing public university systems' boards of governors and trustees who appoint top administrators, who then can influence the creation of academic centers, the donations a school accepts, and hiring decisions. Some politicians even become top university officers themselves.Take for example Florida State, where a contentious search for the university president took place last year. One candidate for the job was businessman John Thrasher, then a Republican state senator in Florida and chair of the re-election campaign of Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who received significant support from the Kochs. Thrasher's own campaign got $3,000 from Koch Industries over three election cycles, and in 1998 he was named legislator of the year by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a pro-business advocacy group that receives funding from Koch foundations.Thrasher, who twice violated ethics laws as a state representative and voted to cut Florida's higher education budget, was up against three candidates who many thought were better qualified for the university presidency. But the Scott-appointed chair of the school's board of trustees picked the presidential selection committee, which included many politicians, former politicians and lobbyists. Thrasher was chosen as president.In 2008, Florida State had entered into a $1.5 million funding deal with the Charles Koch Foundation that granted the foundation wide leverage in hiring decisions and imposed other requirements. Public outcry led to a revised agreement, which drew fire from students, faculty, and alumni for infringing upon academic freedom.In Thrasher's final months in the Florida House, he supported a bill that weakened donor transparency requirements for state universities. And after Thrasher became FSU's president, the school removed the requirement for a formal gift agreement — a written document"outlining the program to be supported and the schedule of contributions" — for donations over $25,000."Thrasher, as a legislator and now as president, has enabled FSU's resistance to donor transparency," says Wilson. "He has personally perpetuated the university's misinformation about the Koch agreements as justification for refusing to meet with students and faculty, and maintained total silence regarding recent student and faculty concerns over the university's donor policy."A free-market strategyUniversity funding is part of a multi-pronged approach to social change that Charles Koch and his close ally Richard Fink devised decades ago.Fink, the Koch brothers' "grand strategist," is currently executive vice president of Koch Industries, president of the Charles Koch Foundation, and chair and CEO of Koch Companies Public Sector LLC, which coordinates Koch Industries' lobbying. Starting in the 1970s, Fink worked with Charles Koch to devise a three-part strategy of influence based on ideas from Austrian economist and free-market proponent Friedrich Hayek to spread their laissez-faire ideology as widely as possible.The first step in Fink's "Structure of Social Change" involved pouring millions of dollars into universities to produce what he called "intellectual raw materials" to support their political agenda. But these materials had to be packaged in a way that non-academics could understand, and that's where the second step in the strategy came in: Think tanks such as the libertarian Cato Institute, co-founded by Charles Koch and heavily funded by the Koch foundations, produce reports, policy proposals, and opinion pieces that turn academic work into political fodder.Next, what Fink calls "citizen activist" groups put the think tanks' ideas into action by advocating for the recommended policy changes. The Koch network includes a vast array of such groups, including the "social welfare" nonprofit Americans for Prosperity, which David Koch founded with Fink and North Carolina political mega-donor Art Pope, and the closely linked nonprofit Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which bankrolled the beginnings of the Tea Party. AFP spends millions on federal, state and local elections, often buying attack adstargeting opponents of their favored candidates. The Kochs and their companies' political action committees also donate directly to the politicians they hope will usher their policy preferences into law.While the Kochs are prolific donors to higher education in the South, they are by no means alone. Their close ally Art Pope, for example, has given six- and sometimes seven-figure donations to mainly Southern universities, much of it going towards free-market programs. The foundation of the North Carolina-based bank BB&T has given at least 63 "Moral Foundation"grants to universities that require the schools to offer a course centered on "Atlas Shrugged" by libertarian favorite Ayn Rand.And not all of the big donors to higher education are conservatives: For example, liberal financier George Soros and independent Michael Bloomberg have also donated heavily to universities, as Dave Levinthal of the Center for Public Integrity showed in his far-reaching investigation of the Koch Foundations' higher ed donations.The Kochs' giving, however, is more focused on a particular area — free-market economics — than most others' donations, and comes with more strings attached. The Charles Koch Foundation has in some cases proposed courses, sought to approve hiring decisions, and even asked for the names and email addresses of students in Koch-sponsored courses, as Levinthal documented.
As university budgets suffer in the wake of a prolonged economic recession and amidst cuts by conservative state legislatures, giving to higher ed by the Koch foundations could continue to rise. While deals like WCU's free enterprise center are often approved, the Kochs' politically polarizing image sometimes derails these efforts: Suffolk University just decided to sever tieswith its Koch-funded, conservative research institute; Brooklyn College reportedly rejected a multimillion-dollar gift from the Charles Koch Foundation last year; and the University of Daytonhas stopped accepting Koch funding.Today the Kochs and their giving to higher education are under more scrutiny than ever. UnKoch My Campus, launched in 2013 by students and alumni of numerous schools and coordinated in part by Wilson and Greenpeace investigator Connor Gibson, has active campaigns opposing Koch money at several schools including FSU, George Mason, and Suffolk.Because of UnKoch's work, "students finally have the information necessary to distinguish an education that serves the student from a privatized education in service of a Kansas billionaire," says Gibson. "That couldn't be said five years ago."* * *The Koch-led charities funding higher educationCharles Koch is the chairman of the Charles Koch Foundation, which spends primarily on educational programs and had $528 million in net assets at the end of 2014. It also funds free-market think tanks and conservative journalism. Last year, Koch was the sole funder of the foundation, giving $168 million, but in 2014 a number of family trusts, including one in his name, supplied most of the revenue.The Fred and Mary Koch Foundation, with over $30 million in assets after 2013, has Charles and David Koch on its board of directors and Charles Koch's wife, Elizabeth Koch, as its president. The foundation gives to universities, scholarship programs, and nonprofit organizations, including one that "teaches business and entrepreneurial education" in numerous high schools.The Claude R. Lambe Foundation, where Charles and Elizabeth Koch were directors, disbanded in 2013, but gave tens of thousands of dollars to universities in 2005 and 2009.The Charles Koch Institute, set up in 2011 as a 501c3 educational nonprofit organization, mainly funds its own educational programs and gives money to policy think tanks but gave tens of thousands of dollars to Indiana University, the University of North Carolina, and George Mason University from 2013 to 2014. Charles Koch is on the board of directors, and the institute had $290 million in assets at the end of last year.  By Alex Kotch on December 3, 2015 11:11 AMhttp://www.alternet.org/environment/charles-koch-admits-climate-change-happening-then-denies-problemAs the nation warily watches every Republican presidential candidate kiss the ring of billionaire donor Charles Koch [3] for a shot at his network's $300,000,000 pool of presidential cash, Charles Koch did something unusual. Last week's USA Today interview with Charles Koch [4] noted his shifting opinion on what he calls climate change “hysteria:”For the record, Koch says this of climate change: “You can plausibly say that CO2 has contributed” to the planet's warming, but he sees “no evidence” to support “this theory that it's going to be catastrophic.”Wait…Charles Koch just accepted that the planet is warming? Hold your applause.Clearly, Mr. Koch still denies that there's a problem - which means he's missing the entire point of discussing climate change. But any movement from Charles on the 5 Stages of Climate Denial–from #1 down to #3 [5]–is a big deal. This is the same guy who has poured $80 million [6] into organizations that have misrepresented climate change science to the public and advocated against any viable solutions to the problem.Koch's Right-Hand-Man: “Charles is ahead of me on this.”Last June, leaked [7] recordings surfaced [8] from Koch's regular meeting [9] of millionaires and billionaires who are coordinating $889 million in spending around the 2016 election. Charles's Koch top strategist Richard Fink indicated that we may see a shift in Koch's rhetoric on climate change. Fink, aka “Charles Koch's Brain [10],” told attending prospective donors what they wanted to hear: donate to us, and we'll fight the crazy commie hippies and their pesky science. From the Undercurrent [11]:“The environmental movement. Occupy Wall Street. These kids are searching for meaning. They're protesting the 1 percent. They are the 1 percent, but they're protesting the 1 percent. The environmental movement and climate change. It's not about climate change. I studied climate change for six years. I can't figure it out, quite frankly. Charles is ahead of me on this. I'm not a climatologist, but I'm not completely stupid. I can tell you I meet with people, particularly in California, that are convinced the world is going to burn up in you know, a year or two. They don't know the answer – they don't even know the question, because it's not about climate change. It's about a cause. It gives their life meaning.”For context, you should probably know that Fink told the room's billionaires that the minimum wage would lead to fascism, comparing today's low-income Americans to pre-Nazi Germany citizenry. Not exactly a room full of academics. And since one of the people that Mr. Fink 'meets with' was a scientist that he funded to study global temperature data, you have to wonder how much experience Rich Fink has with willful ignorance.When Charles Koch Accidentally Proved Global WarmingCharles Koch cannot deny is that he's seen the global temperature record data. In 2011, through the Charles Koch Foundation (CKF), CKF president Richard Fink funded a high-profile study on global surface temperature data. This dataset, which was an unnecessarily redundant [12] reproduction of several other similar studies, was constructed by a scientist who at the time was a climate change denier. BEST data compared with previous reconstructions of global surface temperature data.Dr. Richard Muller's Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) [13] made headlines when he announced his acceptance of what climate scientists had already been saying for over 15 years–yes, people are responsible for unnatural climate variability that scientists have documented–and surprised the country by becoming an advocate [14] for solutions to global warming.This put Mr. Koch in an awkward spot. Koch's $150,000 grant to Dr. Muller [15] made him the project's top single donor, and Muller was a celebrated skeptic before his dramatic change-of-heart.Add to that Mr. Koch's background in science–a chemical engineering degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For such an educated, celebrated albeit controversial high-society businessman, the refusal to acknowledge science that is understood by middle schoolers guaranteed to undermine the sensible reputation that Koch Industries has spent a lot of money [16] to put out there.But Charles gets no credit here. Dumping almost $80 million into organizations that have attacked the scientists who study climate change and interfered with virtually every proposed policy and regulation to solve global warming isn't being a science-savy CEO. It's being a denier, and especially in the context of a self-serving petrochemical billionaire, that's pretty offensive to the rest of us.We define climate change denial as “anyone who is obstructing, delaying or trying to derail policy steps that are in line with the scientific consensus that says we need to take rapid steps to decarbonize the economy [17].” Mr. Koch remains a staunch denier in that regard.The Koch brothers continue to finance campaigns to make Americans doubt the seriousness of global warming, increasingly hiding money [18] through nonprofits like DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund [19].Why focus on Charles Koch and David Koch? Many large foundations associated with corporate fortunes are active in financing climate denial groups [18] - Anschutz, Bradley, Coors, DeVos, Dunn, Howard, Pope, Scaife, Searle, and Seid, to name a few. Unlike Koch, most of those fortunes did not come from owning a corporation like Koch Industries, historically rooted in fossil fuel operations. And none come as close as the Kochs in terms of decades-long focus on actively building a political influence network [20] and coordinating [9] other wealthy executives, corporations and families to dump amounts money into politics that not even the Koch brothers could afford.Check out Greenpeace.org for more research on the Koch brothers crusade against climate science [6]. Connor Gibson is a researcher for Greenpeace USA and a guest author for DeSmogBlog based in Washington, D.C.. He focuses on polluting industries, their front groups and PR operatives. He specializes in tracking those who professionally deny climate change science and obstruct policy solutions to global warming.=RS 9/14 But Charles was already falling under the sway of a charismatic radio personality named Robert LeFevre, founder of the Freedom School, a whites-only­ libertarian boot camp in the foothills above Colorado Springs, Colorado. LeFevre preached a form of anarchic capitalism in which the individual should be freed from almost all government power. Charles soon had to make a choice. While the Birchers supported the Vietnam War, his new guru was a pacifist who equated militarism with out-of-control state power. LeFevre's stark influence on Koch's thinking is crystallized in a manifesto Charles wrote for the Libertarian Review in the 1970s, recently unearthed by Schulman, titled "The Business Community: Resisting Regulation." Charles lays out principles that gird today's Tea Party movement. Referring to regulation as "totalitarian," the 41-year-old Charles claimed business leaders had been "hoodwinked" by the notion that regulation is "in the public interest." He advocated the "barest possible obedience" to regulation and implored, "Do not cooperate voluntarily, instead, resist whenever and to whatever extent you legally can in the name of justice."   http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Charles_Koch  1 Koch Brothers Early History 1.1 Relationship to John Birch Society2 The Koch Fortune3 Koch Brothers Early Activism, 1960-1980 3.1 David Koch Runs for Vice President as Libertarian, 19803.2 Charles Koch Calls for the Development of a “Well Financed Cadre”4 Building the Koch Cadre, Non-Electoral Activity 4.1 Bankrolling American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)4.2 Funding Judicial Junkets4.3 Bankrolling the Tea Party5 Electoral Activity 5.1 "Triad" Campaign Finance Scheme Avoids Disclosure Laws, 19965.2 The Koch Donor Network5.3 Building a Post-Citizens United $400 Million Dark Money Web5.4 Koch Funded Dark Money Groups Investigated and Fined in California5.5 Involvement in Scott Walker Race and Recall Election in 20105.6 2012 Post-Election Audit5.7 Future Commitment to Politics6 News and Controversies 6.1 Opposition to Bailouts6.2 Opposition to Obama Administration6.3 "Mostly False" Claim that EPA Called Koch Industries a "Model"7 Affiliations8 Sourcewatch resources9 External resources10 Contact11 References Koch Brothers Early HistoryCharles Koch (b. 1935) and David Koch (b. 1940) are two of the four children of Fred Koch and Mary Koch. Fred Koch founded Wood River Oil and Refining Co. in 1940; it had been renamed Rock Island Oil & Refining Co. by 1961 and was renamed Koch Industries by Charles Koch in 1967.[5] Fred Koch was also a founder and executive committee member of the far-right John Birch Society, known for opposing the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and communism.[6]The senior Koch's views are thought to have influenced the Koch brothers' pro-business, anti-union agenda. Lisa Graves noted that "The Kochs' mistrust of public education can be traced to their father, Fred, who declared that the National Education Association was a communist group and public-school books were filled with “communist propaganda,” paranoia that extended to all unions, President Eisenhower and the “pro-communist” Supreme Court."[7] Echoing this anti-union fervor, David Koch has stated that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's attack on public unions was “critically important."[8]He also accused President Barack Obama of being "a hardcore socialist."[9]Relationship to John Birch SocietyFred Koch was a founding member of the John Birch Society. In the 1960s, Charles Koch opened a John Birch Society bookstore with Bob Love, a friend of his father.[10] At the time, the Society was campaigning against the civil rights movement, calling for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had ordered public school desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education, and accusing President John F. Kennedy of "treason" in ads shortly before his assassination. [6]Charles and Love didn't resign from the Society until 1968. The split was reportedly due to disagreement's about the Society's support for the Vietnam War.[6]Charles shared his isolationist position with Robert LeFevre's all-white "Freedom School," which he funded and on whose board he sat. Charles had also encouraged his brother, David, to attend a Freedom School retreat, according toSons of Wichita.[10]The Koch FortuneCharles Koch took over his father's Rock Island Oil and Refinery Company, becoming president and chairman in 1967 and renaming it Koch Industries [6] Since then, the company's revenues grew from just over $100 million to over $115 billion in 2014. The Koch brothers' fortunes have also grown dramatically in that time, increasing from $375 million each in 1984 to some $17 billion each in 2008--and a staggering $41 billion each in 2014, just a few years after the 2008 economic crisis.In addition to successful investments and expansion of its resource extraction operations over the years, Koch Industries has engaged in commodity speculation and created new types of derivatives.[11] The Nation has reported that Koch Industries was "among the largest traders (including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) speculating on the price of oil in the summer of 2008,"[12] afterwards also playing a prominent role in lobbying against regulation of the derivatives market, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.[13]Koch Industries has been involved in many investigations and indictments related to the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. A list of lawsuits involving Koch Industries can be accessed here: Legal Complaints Against Koch IndustriesKoch Brothers Early Activism, 1960-1980David Koch Runs for Vice President as Libertarian, 1980David Koch was the vice-presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party in 1980, running alongside presidential candidate Ed Clark. About the failed bid, the New York Times has written that "much of what occurred in that quixotic campaign shaped what the Kochs have become today — a formidable political and ideological force determined to remake American politics, driven by opposition to government power and hostility to restrictions on money in campaigns."[14]David Koch's campaign was made possible by Buckley v. Valeo, a 1976 Supreme Court decision that loosened campaign finance laws. The decision permitted unlimited spending of a candidate's own money on his/her own campaign, as well as unlimited spending by individuals to promote a candidate, if that individual was not coordinating their campaign with the candidate.[14] In 1979, David Koch wrote a letter to Libertarian Party members about his plan to make use this new loophole to fund a Libertarian Party campaign. “As the Vice­ presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party I will contribute several hundred thousand dollars to the Presidential campaign committee in order to ensure that our ideas and our Presidential nominee receive as much media exposure as possible.”[14] David would spend about $2.1 million on the campaign, but the Libertarian Party won just over 1% of the vote nationally.[14]According to William Koch, Charles and David's brother, Charles began spending significantly on the Libertarian Party. According to the New York Times, William said in a 1986 interview, "Charles was giving as much to the Libertarians as he was paying out in dividends […] Pretty soon we would get the reputation that the company and the Kochs were crazy.”[14]Statements David Koch made during the campaign are revealing of his anti-government views. As the New York Times reported about his statement at the 1979 Libertarian nominating convention, David "denounced the 'harassment of Koch Industries and implored the Libertarian Party activists to make the party 'a force that will roll back the coercive force of government.'"[14] At a speech on the campaign trail in 1980, "David Koch railed against what he saw as overregulation. Presidents Nixon and Carter had bequeathed an 'Alice in Wonderland' energy policy, he argued, a mix of subsidies and price controls that had stymied market forces and caused high prices and shortages."[14]Charles Koch Calls for the Development of a “Well Financed Cadre”Charles Koch began funding the Institute for Humane Studies in the 1960s. He also created his own Charles Koch Foundation to funnel money to the Libertarian Society. He helped found the Cato Institute in 1974, by which time he was already giving money to the Libertarian Party. Charles also purchased the Libertarian Review.[6]In a 1974 speech, Charles Koch stated:"The important strategic consideration to keep in mind is that any program adopted should be highly leveraged so that we reach those whose influence on others produces a multiplier effect. That is why education programs are superior to political action, and support of talented free-market scholars is preferable to mass advertising. The development of a well financed cadre of sound proponents of the free enterprise philosophy is the most critical need facing us at the moment."[14]The Kochs have funded a number of nonprofit organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council, think tanks and legal foundations, which are listed here:Building the Koch Cadre, Non-Electoral ActivityAfter the failed 1980 campaign for the vice presidency, the Koch brothers lessened their involvement in the Libertarian Party, increasingly focusing their attention and financial support on developing their own network of "educational programs" and "cadre" of free-market advocates.[14]The Kochs' funding founded Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) in 1984, headed Richard Fink. Fink was shortly thereafter appointed to President Ronald Reagan's "Commission on Privatization."[15] In the late 1980s and 1990s, CSE pushed for banking deregulation, like the elimination of Glass Steagall,[7] spearheaded the defeat of a greenhouse gas tax,[2] and helped in the defeat of health care reform in the Clinton era.[16][17]In 2003, a rift between CSE and its related foundation led the Kochs to found Americans for Prosperity.[2] David Koch chairs the board of directors for the Americans for Prosperity Foundation.[18]Today the brothers directly and indirectly fund a wide network of organizations that promote their "free enterprise philosophy," from think tanks to scholarship programs to policy advocacy groups. Recipients include a long list of academic institutions; Koch family foundations gave some $30.5 million to 221 colleges and universities from 2007 to 2012.[14]Access a list of organizations with ties to the Koch brothers here:Bankrolling American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)Koch Industries has had a seat and a vote on the corporate board of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) since 1994. ALEC has awarded both Koch brothers its Adam Smith Free Enterprise Award.[7] The Nation reports that the Kochs have likely given over $1 million to ALEC over the years, and many of ALEC's model bills reflect the policies the Kochs have been advocating for decades.[7]Funding Judicial JunketsThe Kochs have funded seminars for judges since the 1990s, first at the University of Kansas and later at George Mason University, which hosts the Koch-funded think tank the Mercatus Center. For example, the George Mason University Law & Economics Center hosted "an expenses-paid conference on public pension reform" which was funded by the Charles G. Koch Foundation, as well as corporate funders like ExxonMobil, Google, and Walmart, according to the Center for Public Integrity.[19] The Judicial Conference of the United States has noted that judges' attendance at such seminars "poses certain concerns," including that "judges may be influenced inappropriately by those who sponsor or contribute (financially or otherwise) to these seminar programs and who might be litigants before those judges."[20]A report by Center for Media and Democracy/The Progressive found that a federal judge who halted an investigation into alleged illegal campaign coordination, which involved groups like the Wisconsin Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity, "attended privately-funded, all-expenses-paid judicial seminars put on by George Mason University in 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2012."[21] The Washington Post reported on a similar conference in 2011, when Google was facing an antitrust investigation, writing that "Google executives worked behind the scenes with officials at George Mason University’s Law & Economics Center to put on academic conferences that would be attended by officials who were considering the case."[22]Bankrolling the Tea PartyThe Koch brothers and their network have played a significant role in supporting the far-right Tea Party movement. According to the New Yorker, the Kochs' "Americans for Prosperity has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception," providing everything from "Tea Party talking points" to lists of officials for activists to contact to funding conferences.[2] The New York Times reported that Freedom Partners, for which "longtime Koch employees" constitute a majority of the board, has given grants to a number of Tea Party-affiliated groups.[23]According to the New Yorker, a Koch Industries spokesperson has denied that the Kochs provide funding for Tea Party groups, and David Koch has told New York magazine, "No one representing the tea party has ever even approached me."[2]Electoral Activity"Triad" Campaign Finance Scheme Avoids Disclosure Laws, 1996The Koch’s have a long history of funding money into electoral campaigns. For example, the Kochs used a variety of means to influence the 1996 election cycle.In Kansas, according to the Lawrence Journal-World,"Koch-linked contributions of ‘hard money’—gifts of more than $200 by identifiable individuals or political action committees divulged to the FEC—to the state's four representatives and two Senators totaled $130,600."[24]Senate Democrats found evidence of more complex funding schemes, as well, namely a political campaign operation called "Triad," which they suggested "allowed wealthy individuals to put more money into the election process than they would otherwise legally have been allowed to do" while evading campaign reporting requirements.[6] In 1997, investigators for the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee told the New York Times that "they believe[d] Koch Industries support[ed] the Economic Education Trust, based in Twin Falls, Idaho, which gave $1.3 million to Triad in 1996."[25]In an interview with Bill Moyers, staffer Beth Stein explained the scheme as follows:"One of the things that Triad did was set up two shell corporations, essentially, tax-exempt organizations. One was called Citizens for Reform and the other was called Citizens for the Republic Education Fund, and the sole thing that those corporations did was to air attack advertising in various races across the country."[26]In 1998, the Minneapolis Star Tribute reported that “Koch Industries Inc. backed a secret trust that donated $1.8 million in 1996 to finance issue ads sympathetic to conservative Congressional candidates, [lending] new credence to the conclusion last year of Senate Democratic investigators that Koch's owners, Charles and David Koch, were probably the financiers behind the trust that contributed to at least two nonprofit groups.”[27]The Koch Donor NetworkSince at least 2006, the Kochs have hosted semi-annual meetings for wealthy right-wing donors.[28] While these Koch network gatherings are carefully guarded, occasional leaked documents and recordings have revealed that they include "titans of industry — from health insurance companies, oil executives, Wall Street investors, and real estate tycoons — working together with conservative journalists and Republican operatives," as well as prominent public officials, including members of Congress, state governors, and even Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia.[29] The meetings involve fundraising, reportedly in the millions of dollars, as well as discussions about political strategy.[30]A full list of known participants in Koch summit meetings can be accessed on the Koch network page.Building a Post-Citizens United $400 Million Dark Money WebAccording to the Washington Post, in 2012 the Kochs and fellow donors backed a "network of politically active nonprofit groups" that was "carefully constructed with extensive legal barriers to shield its donors," raising over $400 million for the election cycle. As the Post explains, a "labyrinth of tax-exempt groups and limited-liability companies help[ed] mask the sources of the money, much of which went to voter mobilization and television ads attacking President Obama and congressional Democrats."[31]For example, Freedom Partners, which Politico has referred to as "the Koch brothers' secret bank", spent some $250 million in the 2012 election cycle, much of it spent in grants to other groups that ran so-called "issue ads" during the election.[32]Koch Funded Dark Money Groups Investigated and Fined in CaliforniaThe Center to Protect Patient Rights, a group run by Koch operative Sean Noble, was fined by the California state elections board for violating campaign finance disclosure laws as part of a campaign to prohibit "unions from using automatic payroll deductions to raise money for political campaigns."[33]Other "dark money" groups involved in the network included funding sources Freedom Partners and the TC4 Trust, CSE successor Americans for Prosperity, and a long list of Koch astroturf organizations like the 60 Plus Association,Generation Opportunity, American Commitment, Concerned Women for America, the Libre Initiative, and Public Notice.[34] Additional funding went to the Wisconsin Club for Growth, and from there to Citizens for a Strong America, both of which were later involved in a criminal investigation related to the 2012 election.[35]Involvement in Scott Walker Race and Recall Election in 2010Walker's gubernatorial campaign received $43,000 from the Koch Industries PAC during the 2010 election. The Koch PAC gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which in turn spent $65,000 on independent expenditures to support Walker.[36] The RGA also spent $3.4 million on TV ads and mailers attacking Walker's opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. [37]In a February 2012 interview with the Palm Beach Post, David Koch admitted that he was helping fund Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker as Walker fought off a recall election sparked by his anti-union legislation.[38] The paper reported that Koch acknowledged his group, Americans for Prosperity, was "hard at work in places such as Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker is facing off with public unions and grappling with a likely recall."[38]Koch was quoted as saying, "We're helping him, as we should. We've gotten pretty good at this over the years [...] We've spent a lot of money in Wisconsin. We're going to spend more." [38]Highlighting the recall as a fight against unions, Koch also stated that "What Scott Walker is doing with the public unions in Wisconsin is critically important. He's an impressive guy and he's very courageous…If the unions win the recall, there will be no stopping union power."[38]2012 Post-Election AuditAccording to Politico, after this network "spent hundreds of millions to win the White House and the Senate — and came up empty," the Kochs undertook a major audit of their organizations. Reportedly disappointed with the election results, Charles Koch wrote an e-mail to major donors about the need "to re-examine our vision and the strategies and capabilities required for success," adding that "Our goal of advancing a free and prosperous America is even more difficult than we envisioned, but it is essential that we continue, rather than abandon, this struggle."[39]Future Commitment to PoliticsIn a 2014 interview with the Wichita Business Journal, Charles Koch identified "cronyism" as one of the biggest problems facing the United States, adding, "You name it, in every industry we have this. The successful companies try to keep the new entrants down. Now that’s great for a company like ours. We make more money that way because we have less competition and less innovation. But for the country as a whole, it’s horrible."[40]When asked why he continues to be involved in politics, despite negative public reactions, Charles answered, "It’s like Lee Trevino used to say, somebody asked him, "How are you winning all these golf tournaments?" and he said, “Well somebody has got to win them and it might as well be me.” That’s the way I am on this. There doesn’t seem to be any other large company trying to do this so it might as well be us. Somebody has got to work to save the country and preserve a system of opportunity."[40]News and ControversiesOpposition to BailoutsIn a 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Charles Koch wrote that "government spending on business only aggravates the problem" and "businesses that fail to do so should be allowed to go bankrupt rather than be bailed out."[41]Opposition to Obama AdministrationIn a 2014 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Koch wrote that the "fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation's own government."[42] He criticized the Obamaadministration as holding the "central belief and fatal conceit" that people are "incapable" of running their own lives.In a closed June 2011 strategy seminar, Charles Koch said: "We have Saddam Hussein...this is the mother of all wars" in what appeared to be a reference to President Obama and the 2012 elections.[43]"Mostly False" Claim that EPA Called Koch Industries a "Model"Koch claimed in a 2014 Wall Street Journal op-ed that the Environmental Protection Agency had commended Koch Industries for being a "model for other companies." PolitiFact rated this claim as "Mostly False," determining that "the statement contains an element of truth" but that "Koch Industries has a history with the EPA that was completely glossed over, and it includes multiple violations of rules."[44]Affiliations