KOCH

KOCH

see also Koch Notes , and koch1-4

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12/16KOCH-ademia (incubators, academic capture)

citizens united case amicus

819 tool doc archive

https://www.desmogblog.com/koch-network-database

tag site

http://www.politico.com/tag/the-koch-machine

citizens united case amicus

Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have attended these events. (According to Salon, "Thomas claimed he just made "a brief drop-by" at the Koch brothers' January 2008 Palm Springs political retreat to give a talk; in fact he was reimbursed for four days of “transportation, meals and accommodations” by the Federalist Society.^[56]"). The attendance of Thomas and Scalia has sparked debate over judicial ethics and the2010Citizens United decision.^[57] Common Cause filed a petition with the Justice Department in January 2011 alleging a conflict of interest for these Justices, as David and Charles Koch operate foundations that contribute to political groups, which might benefit from relaxed campaign finance rules. ^[58] Common Cause has also noted that the Cato Institute, which Charles Koch founded, filed an amicus brief in Citizens United opposing campaign finance. ^[59] The Center for Competitive Politics also filed a brief in the case; the Center is headed by Bradley Smith, who is affiliated with the Institute for Humane Studies where Charles Koch is Chair of the board and funder. ^[60] SW ^koch ^ind

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ktm brock

Chapter 3 The Party of Koch p. 51

Am Spect guys wd write ltr to scaife and get 6 figures to do BC oppo.

david koch 1980 VP run (ltr in basement found sez loophole allow him to fund whole race if a cand). 57

wrote letter to RR told him to stop calling himself libertarian b/c he was not conserve enough.

abolish:fed res, dept of ed and energy, no min wage, no hwy $ abolish soc security # threat to nukes 58.

Fail --> 3 change: don't be cand 2) don't run to rt of gop but pull part rt 3) fund movement, not elections.59.

vertically horizontally integrated strategy " 59 idea --> policy to educ, to grassroots org to lobby to litigation to pol action 59

mercatus at least 14m$ koch

koch funded FREE legal retreats 60 mercatus hit list regs 14 of 23 61

2102 400m$ fed elections

2007 82 house gop voted for; 2008 Mccain and gop platform acknowledged agw, McC cap and trade 63. [now zombies].

after CU N Carolina election $ 4x in 4 yrs, 3/4 from Pope 66; 70% of outside $ went to gop gov cand mcCrory (7 of top 10 gop)

GOP ran NC 1st time in 100 yrs; "claice away social safety net" reverse focus on schools ?

NC 300 bills 1st yr; cut unemployment, daycare .... all John Locke fdn book ideas done 67 2 doz ALEC bills;

2010 aspen/koch 1.6$m ~ dems incumbent state reps, got 80% incl Feingold

WI flipped

Justice Prosser 2.7M$ kochs, broke tie to uphold walker kill collective bargaining. 68

afp 1.5M$ on ads alone to beat recall; bus in ppl10 m total; printed absentee ballots w/ wrong date 68

cut 800m from schools, stopped min wage up, added work req

for food stamps (lost 30k ppl) voter ID...

2010 gop got control of 12 states

2012 dems got 1 mil more votes, but held house; VA BO 51%, 8 gop 3 dems house; mich 54% 9/3 dem

Thom Tillis NC speaker house beat Kay hagan w/ 50M$ outside $ lots AFP so Reid lost mjr.

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12/15

A free-market strategy

University 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 thesecond 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.

11/15

http://www.desmogblog.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 Koch family 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. [7]

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[8] 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....

The Machine. A Field Guide to the Resurgent Right. Lee Fang

new press 2013

fangmachine 6/7/2015

2008 gop brand low; Mccain had PO'd evangels in past; also old schism evangels and libertarians;

EIC after hartmann

mark meckler lawyer herbalife

FreedomWs manage TP listserv 10 AFP htland talking pts; training by koch Leadership Inst p 10

TP patriots went to CNP mtg, looked like all the others, but press called them indep 11

TP meme old, smokers rights, (nadr /norquist?) BM astroturf CART 1992, PM 2m$ to CSE exposed so cancelled?

1995 jack guthrie worldcom tob farmers 18

dick Aflat tax TP meme 1997 Tauzin

TTP $ from Howie rich, kochs; hired ed crane camp mgr -->cato; eric o'keefe term limits 23

CSE, N caro, armey uses cse for corp lobbying 24, split to FW

pvt SocSec; oil, BP, irving for offshore drill; life insur dereg;

SAM AA 26- E O'keefe , koch, oil bankers use Donors trust

eric odom

malkin 31 santelli, wrong on mkts, but still bloviating

AIG bailed out, bonus to execs, left and unions protest, but rush ~

cinci TP claimed stimulus killed jobs

beck 912

TCOT twitter 37

GOA, SPN neo-nazi support/horn in on TP 39

Porter Novelli astroturf ~ ACA rx co

API100K$ FW --> TP 40

gov perry, vitter ; mark kirk assassinate BO b/c of tax rise 41

bozell 2008 post-mort: norquist, vig, creative resp concepts, perkins, fedsoc, blackwell, regnery tyrrell am spect, go after rinos, fake populism? old rmn new rt, had built rwi 45

creative resp concepts (Pr) resp mueller w rick scott on aca 46

bozell MRC ~ BO socialism

newt says CoC ally of evals 46

norquist weds mtgs ATR $ launder for jack abr

weyrich lunch inhofe, gohmert, cooch 59

heritage hub, bloggers, townhall bought by salem

becky norton dunlop cartridge box if not ballot box 67

CNP la haye, blackwater big donor 69 (met w. dick c, rummy, paul bremer

Conserv Action pjt: feulner, mirror Sharon Stmt, dunlop, GOA, Galen, ned ryun,

vs aca, disclose, fin reform 73

Weaver Terrace Gp post CU: pol dir CoC; Steven law coc--> gps; malek; noble koch

CoC backup: when astroturf busted, CoC would start neg ads 77

coc // party in amt $

ch3 koch war BO

dupont, lib league, minute men etc Am legion, thought about kkk 84 but dems tied al landon to "economic royalists", cellophane league b/c see thru it cf bk Invisible Hands by kim Phillips-Fein new deal to RR;

dupont fail b/c lacked coherent intellectual framework, so coors and scaife built one 84 but no direct challenge to prez till kochs;

kochs took out demo maj 2010, won on climate, labor almost ACA, engr TP shellacking 85 BO caved on extending b2 tax cuts and estate tax

koch/fox paint BO socialist (no cellophane ~)

kochs combined all approaches eg norquist, CoC, BB&T bank ayn rand;

Fink after Phil Roundtable wanted Hayek model: raw mat'l --> consumer products 87

50M koch $ ~ agw, 35 groups 88 gentry two hats industries and fdn 89

confs amplify devos, anschutz, blackstone schwartman 89

venable Tx textbooks

chls CNP

academia: fund depts, mercatus 14 of 23 regulatory axed; susan dudley; chls river pay to play academia eg exxon report 92 Brown U florida state u

fred, JBS, NAM rebooted Mccarthyism 97 bozell ghost write goldwater

fred pal of textile Milliken, roger

fluoridation

say free market but B2 strategic oil reserve(ussr) stole 300m ga nat am, dole and newt covered 112

timber, coal power plants, pipeline, chemicals, fertilizers, ethanol, financial products [CDS? yup 113 1st derivative, crude, koch exec 1986; lobbied against BO reform] 2009 110B$ revenue 2010 each bro 21B$ 106

koch boost sanford and demint

carlton the wealthy eco-hypocrite 110 make $ on saving the planet; actually CBO says BO policies wd lower cost energy

effective ~ BO b/c 30 yrs of organizing

CSE ~ BTU

koch 300m tons co2/yr 114; went after state cap and trade 114 used TP and lobbyists

VA Rick Boucher backed clean energy, so ~ Morgan Griffith ended 28 yr career 115 bill passed house not senate: IER, hrtlnd, gmu heritage

koch funded spanish study bogus, climategate, bus tour (3-4, free food, visa gift cards] EPA "carbon cops" regulate churches, refrig, air you breathe, hosted TP events 116.

ark sen blanche lincoln gut clean air act; gop house 2011 one of 1st act to cut epa CAA enforcement 117

CA ab 32, pac res; NH out of rggi

2008 JMcc and BO agree on age, but by 2011 1/2 gop congress deniers (inglis , castle primaried) ; mark kirk 180 on W-M to stay 118.

1 mo into new congress, epa $ to enforce koch co2 cut 119

themis voter data

before swear in of 112th, david chat with boehner; lobbyist met with new chair energy and commerce =?

Michael Morgan (Director, Government Affairs, Koch Industries, ALEC Private Enterprise Board), National Chairman's Award^[13]
Michael Morgan is the consultant Director of Public and Government Affairs at Koch Industries.^[1][2]

Ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council

Morgan is on the Private Enterprise Board of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as of 2011.^[3] He is the Kansas "Private Sector State Chair," selected for that position by the Kansas Public Sector State Chair, Sen. Ray Merrick. ^[4]

http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/016bcfb1deb9fecd85256aca005d74df/981d17e5ab07246f8525686500621079

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/koch-industries-environmental/

The Koch companies have a notorious environmental record.

Some of the more egregious examples include:

In 2009, the US Justice Department and EPA announced in 2009 that Koch Industries'**Invista** subsidiary would pay a $1.7 million penalty and spend $500 million to fix environmental violations at facilities in seven states, in an agreement with the **US EPA**and **Department of Justice**.
In May 2001, Koch Industries paid $25 million to settle with the **US Government** over a long-standing suit brought by Bill Koch - one of the brothers bought out in 1983 - for the company's long-standing practice of illegally removing oil from federal and Indian lands.
In late 2000, the company was charged with covering up the illegal releases of 91 tons of the known carcinogen benzene from its refinery in Corpus Christi. Initially facing a 97-count indictment and potential fines of $350 million, Koch cut a deal with then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to drop all major charges in exchange for a guilty plea for falsifying documents, and a $20 million settlement.
In 2000, the EPA fined Koch Industries $30 million for its role in 300 **oil spills** that resulted in more than three million gallons of crude oil leaking into ponds, lakes, streams and coastal waters.
In 1999 a **Koch subsidiary** pleaded guilty to charges that it had negligently allowed aviation fuel to leak into waters near the Mississippi River from its refinery in Rosemount, Minnesota, and that it had illegally dumped a million gallons of high-ammonia wastewater onto the ground and into the Mississippi.
Koch's negligence toward environmental safety has led to tragic losses of life. In 1996, a rusty **Koch** pipeline leaked flammable butane near a Texas residential neighborhood. Warned by the smell of gas, two teenagers drove their truck toward the nearest payphone to call for help, but they never made it. Sparks from their truck ignited the gas cloud and the two burned alive. The **National Transportation Safety Board** determinedthat "the probable cause of this accident was the failure of Koch to adequately protect its pipeline from corrosion" and the ineffectiveness of Koch's program to educate local residents about how to respond during a pipeline leak.

sw k industries:

Similarly, the Kochs have spent at least $60 million to foster climate-change denial to help their oil and gas interests. They have convinced members of Congress to sign a pledgeto support no law dealing with climate change unless it's accompanied by a tax cut, the New Yorker reported this week. Another influential think tank founded by the Kochs, the Mercatus Center, fights government regulation, particularly the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Koch brothers and Koch Industries try their darnedest to downplay their involvement in these causes. And it's maybe too neat and reductive that Warren Buffett gets serenaded by Bono, while the Kochs are now stock villains in political comedies, Randolph and Mortimer Duke on steroids. Like Buffett, the Kochs do give to charity, including the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center -- though that charity also sometimes brings with it a corrupting influence, the New Yorker reported recently.

GP:

The new numbers are in, ladies and gentleman: since 1997 the billionaire oil brothers Charles and David Koch have dumped over 61.3 million dollars into front groups that attack climate science and policies designed to solve global warming. According to the 2010 IRS records of their private foundations, the latest year available, the Koch brothers funneled another $4.38 million into the Climate Denial Machine from their private foundations.

Despite overwhelming consensus among climate change researchers and scientific institutions worldwide—including all the Academies of Sciences in industrialized countries, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, NASA and all other major US scientific institutions—recognition of global warming among Americans remains startlingly low. Fueled by Koch money, the Climate Denial Machine has executed an unceasing, anti-scientific and anti-regulatory public relations campaign that mirrors the tactics used by tobacco companies to deny the health consequences of smoking.

The top recipients of Koch money in the Climate Denial Machine include **Americans for Prosperity** ($5.7 million since 1997), the **Heritage Foundation** ($2.7 million), the **Cato Institute** ($1.2 million), and the **Manhattan Institute** ($1.2 million).

By dragging credible science into the agenda-driven realm of politics and vilifying the world’s most prominent climate researchers, dirty money and fossil fuel apologists have prevailed in polluting public opinion and blocking national policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Koch Industries itself has been aggressive in dismissing global warming, even suing a group of young activists who created a spoof press release on behalf of Koch announcing that it would drop support for policy groups that belittle climate science.

Ironically, the Kochs funded research that concluded the planet is warming but failed to admit their hypocrisy. The Charles G. Koch Foundation gave $150,000 to the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) study in 2011, which was embraced by the denial machine until it redundantly re-confirmed that the surface of our planet has been warming increasingly for decades. While David Koch had previously claimed that “global warming could be good for the planet,” neither Charles nor David has explained how the BEST study they funded contradicts their denial of climate change, including when Greenpeace activists asked David Koch to his face—see the video for yourself.

- See more at: http://greenpeaceblogs.org/2012/04/02/koch-brothers-exposed-fueling-climate-denial-and-privatizing-democracy/#sthash.SypI8pek.dpuf

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romney caves to koch on gw? http://www.prwatch.org/node/11822**

===

Koch Industries Environmental Record

The Koch companies have a notorious environmental record.

Some of the more egregious examples include:

In 2009, the US Justice Department and EPA announced in 2009 that Koch Industries' **Invista** subsidiary would pay a $1.7 million penalty and spend $500 million to fix environmental violations at facilities in seven states, in an agreement with the **US EPA** and **Department of Justice**.
In May 2001, Koch Industries paid $25 million to settle with the **US Government** over a long-standing suit brought by Bill Koch - one of the brothers bought out in 1983 - for the company's long-standing practice of illegally removing oil from federal and Indian lands.
In late 2000, the company was charged with covering up the illegal releases of 91 tons of the known carcinogen benzene from its refinery in Corpus Christi. Initially facing a 97-count indictment and potential fines of $350 million, Koch cut a deal with then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to drop all major charges in exchange for a guilty plea for falsifying documents, and a $20 million settlement.
In 2000, the EPA fined Koch Industries $30 million for its role in 300 **oil spills** that resulted in more than three million gallons of crude oil leaking into ponds, lakes, streams and coastal waters.
In 1999 a **Koch subsidiary** pleaded guilty to charges that it had negligently allowed aviation fuel to leak into waters near the Mississippi River from its refinery in Rosemount, Minnesota, and that it had illegally dumped a million gallons of high-ammonia wastewater onto the ground and into the Mississippi.
Koch's negligence toward environmental safety has led to tragic losses of life. In 1996, a rusty **Koch** pipeline leaked flammable butane near a Texas residential neighborhood. Warned by the smell of gas, two teenagers drove their truck toward the nearest payphone to call for help, but they never made it. Sparks from their truck ignited the gas cloud and the two burned alive. The **National Transportation Safety Board** determined that "the probable cause of this accident was the failure of Koch to adequately protect its pipeline from corrosion" and the ineffectiveness of Koch's program to educate local residents about how to respond during a pipeline leak.

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/koch-industries-environmental/

http://www.thenation.com/article/161973/koch-connection ALEC

Ga pacific carcinogens http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/12/arkansas-koch-industries-plant-high-rates-of-cancer_n_1007148.html?utm_campaign=101311&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Alert-green&utm_content=FullStory

KOCH INDUSTRIES' LONG TRAIL OF POLLUTION

It's not the first time a Koch Industries-owned subsidiary has run into trouble. Koch Industries has spent $500 million in six states to fix environmental violations, the video notes. And the Environmental Protection Agency has fined Koch Industries $30 million for 300 oil spills in six states.The video relates that in 2000 a federal grand jury returned a 97-count indictment against a Koch Industries subsidiary in Corpus Christi, Texas, which was charged not only with emitting more benzene (a known human carcinogen) than was permitted, but with trying to cover it up. Koch Industries eventually reached a plea bargain with attorneys from the Bush Administration Department of Justice, pleading guilty to one count of covering up environmental violations and paid a $20 million fine.

The irony is that, having been diagnosed with prostate cancer back in 2004, billionaire David Koch has donated over $500 million to cancer research, even as his company has lobbied against the formal recognition of formaldehyde as a carcinogen. In 2007 he called it the "greatest honor" he had ever received when The Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was established in his name

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10/11 will profit from XL pipeline tho deny it http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-greenwald/hidden-koch-brother-sin-e_b_992849.html also http://www.grist.org/list/2011-10-06-koch-industries-stands-to-profit-off-keystone-xl

Pink Slips as Poker Chips Raises Legal Concerns

cf huffpo

sierra: Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), based in Bozeman, Montana. FREE conducts seminars for federal judges–including those at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, where CSEF’s briefs were filed.

huffpo AP

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/04/billionaire-koch-brothers_n_705737.html?ir=Politics

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Oil billionaires David and Charles Koch have jumped on board an effort to suspend California's global warming law by making a million-dollar contribution this week.

A subsidiary of Wichita, Kan.-based Koch Industries, the nation's second-largest private company with oil refineries and pipelines, made a $1 million contribution Thursday to the campaign for Proposition 23.They join two Texas-based companies, Valero Energy Corp. and Tesoro Corp.

According to the Los Angeles Times, a spokeswoman for Flint Hills Resources said the company "may consider additional support."

California's global warming law, known as AB32, seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions statewide to 1990 levels over the next decade.

Proposition 23 seeks to suspend California's 2006 law until the state's unemployment rate falls below 5.5 percent for four consecutive quarters. That level has happened three times in the last three decades, according to state statistics.

The initiative is opposed by environmental groups, Democratic lawmakers and Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who called the contribution "extremely disappointing."

new nyer mayer

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all

makes formaldehyde, ~ epa regs 2.2 bill lbs p

...

exerpt:

Charles Koch seems to have approached both business and politics with the deliberation of an engineer. “To bring about social change,” he told Doherty, requires “a strategy” that is “vertically and horizontally integrated,” spanning “from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action.” The project, he admitted, was extremely ambitious. “We have a radical philosophy,” he said.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

With his brother Charles, who is seventy-four, David Koch owns virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars.The company has grown spectacularly since their father, Fred, died, in 1967, and the brothers took charge. The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made David and Charles Koch—who, years ago, bought out two other brothers—among the richest men in America. Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The Kochs are longtime libertarianswho believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

In a statement, Koch Industries said that the Greenpeace report “distorts the environmental record of our companies.” And David Koch, in a recent, admiring article about him in New York, protested that the “radical press” had turned his family into “whipping boys,” and had exaggerated its influence on American politics. But Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”

A few weeks after the Lincoln Center gala, the advocacy wing of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation—an organization that David Koch started, in 2004—held a different kind of gathering. Over the July 4th weekend, a summit called Texas Defending the American Dream took place in a chilly hotel ballroom in Austin. Though Koch freely promotes his philanthropic ventures, he did not attend the summit, and his name was not in evidence. And on this occasion the audience was roused not by a dance performance but by a series of speakers denouncing President Barack Obama. Peggy Venable, the organizer of the summit, warned that Administration officials “have a socialist vision for this country.”

Five hundred people attended the summit, which served, in part, as a training session for Tea Party activists in Texas. An advertisement cast the event as a populist uprising against vested corporate power. “Today, the voices of average Americans are being drowned out by lobbyists and special interests,” it said. “But you can do something about it.” The pitch made no mention of its corporate funders. The White House has expressed frustration that such sponsors have largely eluded public notice. David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser, said, “What they don’t say is that, in part, this is a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”

In April, 2009, Melissa Cohlmia, a company spokesperson, denied that the Kochs had direct links to the Tea Party, saying that Americans for Prosperity is “an independent organization and Koch companies do not in any way direct their activities.” Later, she issued a statement: “No funding has been provided by Koch companies, the Koch foundations, or Charles Koch or David Koch specifically to support the tea parties.” David Koch told New York, “I’ve never been to a tea-party event. No one representing the tea party has ever even approached me.”

At the lectern in Austin, however, Venable—a longtime political operative who draws a salary from Americans for Prosperity, and who has worked for Koch-funded political groups since 1994—spoke less warily. “We love what the Tea Parties are doing, because that’s how we’re going to take back America!” she declared, as the crowd cheered. In a subsequent interview, she described herself as an early member of the movement, joking, “I was part of the Tea Party before it was cool!” She explained that the role of Americans for Prosperity was to help “educate” Tea Party activists on policy details, and to give them “next-step training” after their rallies, so that their political energy could be channelled “more effectively.” And she noted that Americans for Prosperity had provided Tea Party activists with lists of elected officials to target. She said of the Kochs, “They’re certainly our people. David’s the chairman of our board. I’ve certainly met with them, and I’m very appreciative of what they do.”

...

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!”

The Kochs and their political operatives declined requests for interviews. Instead, a prominent New York public-relations executive who is close with the Kochs put forward two friends: George Pataki, the former governor of New York, and Mortimer Zuckerman, the publisher and real-estate magnate. Pataki, a Republican who received campaign donations from David Koch, called him “a patriot who cares deeply about his country.” Zuckerman praised David’s “gentle decency” and the “range of his public interests.”

The Republican campaign consultant said of the family’s political activities, “To call them under the radar is an understatement. They are underground!” Another former Koch adviser said, “They’re smart. This right-wing, redneck stuff works for them. They see this as a way to get things done without getting dirty themselves.” Rob Stein, a Democratic political strategist who has studied the conservative movement’s finances, said that the Kochs are “at the epicenter of the anti-Obama movement. But it’s not just about Obama. They would have done the same to Hillary Clinton. They did the same with Bill Clinton. They are out to destroy progressivism.”

Oddly enough, the fiercely capitalist Koch family owes part of its fortune to Joseph Stalin. Fred Kochwas the son of a Dutch printer who settled in Texas and ran a weekly newspaper. Fred attended M.I.T., where he earned a degree in chemical engineering. In 1927, he invented a more efficient process for converting oil into gasoline, but, according to family lore, America’s major oil companies regarded him as a threat and shut him out of the industry. Unable to succeed at home, Koch found work in the Soviet Union. In the nineteen-thirties, his company trained Bolshevik engineers and helped Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries. Over time, however, Stalin brutally purged several of Koch’s Soviet colleagues. Koch was deeply affected by the experience, and regretted his collaboration. He returned to the U.S. In the headquarters of his company, Rock Island Oil & Refining, in Wichita, he kept photographs aimed at proving that some of those Soviet refineries had been destroyed in the Second World War. Gus diZerega, a former friend of Charles Koch, recalled, “As the Soviets became a stronger military power, Fred felt a certain amount of guilt at having helped build them up. I think it bothered him a lot.”

In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover. Members considered President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Communist agent. In a self-published broadside, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties.” He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” he warned. Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech that prefigures the Tea Party’s talk of a secret socialist plot, Koch predicted that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”

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After the 1980 election, Charles and David Koch receded from the public arena. But they poured more than a hundred million dollars into dozens of seemingly independent organizations. Tax records indicate that in 2008 the three main Koch family foundations gave money to thirty-four political and policy organizations, three of which they founded, and several of which they direct. The Kochs and their company have given additional millions to political campaigns, advocacy groups, and lobbyists. The family’s subterranean financial role has fuelled suspicion on the left; Lee Fang, of the liberal blog ThinkProgress, has called the Kochs “the billionaires behind the hate.”

Only the Kochs know precisely how much they have spent on politics. Public tax records show that between 1998 and 2008 the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than forty-eight million dollars. The Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, which is controlled by Charles Koch and his wife, along with two company employees and an accountant, spent more than twenty-eight million. The David H. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than a hundred and twenty million. Meanwhile, since 1998 Koch Industries has spent more than fifty million dollars on lobbying. Separately, the company’s political-action committee, KochPAC, has donated some eight million dollars to political campaigns, more than eighty per cent of it to Republicans. So far in 2010, Koch Industries leads all other energy companies in political contributions, as it has since 2006. In addition, during the past dozen years the Kochs and other family members have personally spent more than two million dollars on political contributions. In the second quarter of 2010, David Koch was the biggest individual contributor to the Republican Governors Association, with a million-dollar donation. Other gifts by the Kochs may be untraceable; federal tax law permits anonymous personal donations to politically active nonprofit groups.

In recent decades, members of several industrial dynasties have spent parts of their fortunes on a conservative agenda. In the nineteen-eighties, the Olin family, which owns a chemicals-and-manufacturing conglomerate, became known for funding right-leaning thinking in academia, particularly in law schools. And during the nineties Richard Mellon Scaife, a descendant of Andrew Mellon, spent millions attempting to discredit President Bill Clinton. Ari Rabin-Havt, a vice-president at the Democratic-leaning Web site Media Matters, said that the Kochs’ effort is unusual, in its marshalling of corporate and personal funds: “Their role, in terms of financial commitments, is staggering.”

Of course, Democrats give money, too. Their most prominent donor, the financier George Soros, runs a foundation, the Open Society Institute, that has spent as much as a hundred million dollars a year in America. Soros has also made generous private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including Obama’s. But Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued that Soros’s giving is transparent, and that “none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests.” The Kochs have given millions of dollars to nonprofit groups that criticize environmental regulation and support lower taxes for industry. Gus diZerega, the former friend, suggested that the Kochs’ youthful idealism about libertarianism had largely devolved into a rationale for corporate self-interest. He said of Charles, “Perhaps he has confused making money with freedom.”

Some critics have suggested that the Kochs’ approach has subverted the purpose of tax-exempt giving. By law, charitable foundations must conduct exclusively nonpartisan activities that promote the public welfare. A 2004 report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group, described the Kochs’ foundations as being self-serving, concluding, “These foundations give money to nonprofit organizations that do research and advocacy on issues that impact the profit margin of Koch Industries.”

The Kochs have gone well beyond their immediate self-interest, however, funding organizations that aim to push the country in a libertarian direction. Among the institutions that they have subsidized are theInstitute for Justice, which files lawsuits opposing state and federal regulations; the Institute for Humane Studies, which underwrites libertarian academics; and the Bill of Rights Institute, which promotes a conservative slant on the Constitution. Many of the organizations funded by the Kochs employ specialists who write position papers that are subsequently quoted by politicians and pundits. David Koch has acknowledged that the family exerts tight ideological control. “If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent,” he told Doherty. “And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding.”

The Kochs’ subsidization of a pro-corporate movement fulfills, in many ways, the vision laid out in a secret 1971 memo that Lewis Powell, then a Virginia attorney, wrote two months before he was nominated to the Supreme Court. The antiwar movement had turned its anger on defense contractors, such as Dow Chemical, and Ralph Nader was leading a public-interest crusade against corporations. Powell, writing a report for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urged American companies to fight back. The greatest threat to free enterprise, he warned, was not Communism or the New Left but, rather, “respectable elements of society”—intellectuals, journalists, and scientists. To defeat them, he wrote, business leaders needed to wage a long-term, unified campaign to change public opinion.

In 1977, the Kochs provided the funds to launch the nation’s first libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute. According to the Center for Public Integrity, between 1986 and 1993 the Koch family gave eleven million dollars to the institute. Today, Cato has more than a hundred full-time employees, and its experts and policy papers are widely quoted and respected by the mainstream media. It describes itself as nonpartisan, and its scholars have at times been critical of both parties. But it has consistently pushed for corporate tax cuts, reductions in social services, and laissez-faire environmental policies.

When President Obama, in a 2008 speech, described the science on global warming as “beyond dispute,” the Cato Institute took out a full-page ad in the Times to contradict him. Cato’s resident scholars have relentlessly criticized political attempts to stop global warming as expensive, ineffective, and unnecessary. Ed Crane, the Cato Institute’s founder and president, told me that “global-warming theories give the government more control of the economy.”

Cato scholars have been particularly energetic in promoting the Climategatescandal. Last year, private e-mails of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia, in England, were mysteriously leaked, and their exchanges appeared to suggest a willingness to falsify data in order to buttress the idea that global warming is real. In the two weeks after the e-mails went public, one Cato scholar gave more than twenty media interviews trumpeting the alleged scandal. But five independent inquiries have since exonerated the researchers, and nothing was found in their e-mails or data to discredit the scientific consensus on global warming.

Nevertheless, the controversy succeeded in spreading skepticism about climate change. Even though the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently issued a report concluding that the evidence for global warming is unequivocal, more Americans are convinced than at any time since 1997 that scientists have exaggerated the seriousness of global warming. The Kochs promote this statistic on their company’s Web site but do not mention the role that their funding has played in fostering such doubt.

In a 2002 memo, the Republican political consultant Frank Luntzwrote that so long as “voters believe there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community” the status quo would prevail. The key for opponents of environmental reform, he said, was to question the science—a public-relations strategy that the tobacco industry used effectively for years to forestall regulation. The Kochs have funded many sources of environmental skepticism, such as the Heritage Foundation, which has argued that “scientific facts gathered in the past 10 years do not support the notion of catastrophic human-made warming.” The brothers have given money to more obscure groups, too, such as the Independent Women’s Forum, which opposes the presentation of global warming as a scientific fact in American public schools. Until 2008, the group was run by Nancy Pfotenhauer, a former lobbyist for Koch Industries. Mary Beth Jarvis, a vice-president of a Koch subsidiary, is on the group’s board.

Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, is the co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” a new book that chronicles various attempts by American industry to manipulate public opinion on science. She noted that the Kochs, as the heads of “a company with refineries and pipelines,” have “a lot at stake.” She added, “If the answer is to phase out fossil fuels, a different group of people are going to be making money, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re fighting tooth and nail.”

David Koch told New York that he was unconvinced that global warming has been caused by human activity. Even if it has been, he said, the heating of the planet will be beneficial, resulting in longer growing seasons in the Northern Hemisphere. “The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because far greater land area will be available to produce food,” he said.

In the mid-eighties, the Kochs provided millions of dollars to George Mason University, in Arlington, Virginia, to set up another think tank. Now known as the Mercatus Center, it promotes itself as “the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas—bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.” Financial records show that the Koch family foundations have contributed more than thirty million dollars to George Mason, much of which has gone to the Mercatus Center, a nonprofit organization. “It’s ground zero for deregulation policy in Washington,” Rob Stein, the Democratic strategist, said. It is an unusual arrangement. “George Mason is a public university, and receives public funds,” Stein noted. “Virginia is hosting an institution that the Kochs practically control.”

The founder of the Mercatus Center is Richard Fink,formerly an economist. Fink heads Koch Industries’ lobbying operation in Washington. In addition, he is the president of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the president of the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, a director of the Fred C. and Mary R. Koch Foundation, and a director and co-founder, with David Koch, of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation.

Fink, with his many titles, has become the central nervous system of the Kochtopus. He appears to have supplanted Ed Crane, the head of the Cato Institute, as the brothers’ main political lieutenant. Though David remains on the board at Cato, Charles Koch has fallen out with Crane. Associates suggested to me that Crane had been insufficiently respectful of Charles’s management philosophy, which he distilled into a book called “The Science of Success,” and trademarked under the name Market-Based Management, or M.B.M. In the book, Charles recommends instilling a company’s corporate culture with the competitiveness of the marketplace. Koch describes M.B.M. as a “holistic system” containing “five dimensions: vision, virtue and talents, knowledge processes, decision rights and incentives.” A top Cato Institute official told me that Charles “thinks he’s a genius. He’s the emperor, and he’s convinced he’s wearing clothes.” Fink, by contrast, has been far more embracing of Charles’s ideas. (Fink, like the Kochs, declined to be interviewed.)

At a 1995 conference for philanthropists, Fink adopted the language of economics when speaking about the Mercatus Center’s purpose. He said that grant-makers should use think tanks and political-action groups to convert intellectual raw materials into policy “products.”

The Wall Street Journal has called the Mercatus Center “the most important think tank you’ve never heard of,”and noted that fourteen of the twenty-three regulations that President George W. Bush placed on a “hit list” had been suggested first by Mercatus scholars. Fink told the paper that the Kochs have “other means of fighting [their] battles,” and that the Mercatus Center does not actively promote the company’s private interests. But Thomas McGarity, a law professor at the University of Texas, who specializes in environmental issues, told me that “Koch has been constantly in trouble with the E.P.A., and Mercatus has constantly hammered on the agency.” An environmental lawyer who has clashed with the Mercatus Center called it “a means of laundering economic aims.” The lawyer explained the strategy: “You take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank,” which “hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible-seeming studies. But they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests of their funders.”

In 1997, for instance, the E.P.A. moved to reduce surface ozone, a form of pollution caused, in part, by emissions from oil refineries.Susan Dudley, an economist who became a top official at the Mercatus Center, criticized the proposed rule. The E.P.A., she argued, had not taken into account that smog-free skies would result in more cases of skin cancer. She projected that if pollution were controlled it would cause up to eleven thousand additional cases of skin cancer each year.

In 1999, the District of Columbia Circuit Court took up Dudley’s smog argument. Evaluating the E.P.A. rule, the court found that the E.P.A. had “explicitly disregarded” the “possible health benefits of ozone.” In another part of the opinion, the court ruled, 2-1, that the E.P.A. had overstepped its authority in calibrating standards for ozone emissions. As the Constitutional Accountability Center, a think tank, revealed, the judges in the majority had previously attended legal junkets, on a Montana ranch, that were arranged by the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment—a group funded by Koch family foundations. The judges have claimed that the ruling was unaffected by their attendance.

“Ideas don’t happen on their own,” Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, a Tea Party advocacy group, told me. “Throughout history, ideas need patrons.” The Koch brothers, after helping to create Cato and Mercatus, concluded that think tanks alone were not enough to effect change. They needed a mechanism to deliver those ideas to the street, and to attract the public’s support. In 1984, David Koch and Richard Fink created yet another organization, and Kibbe joined them. The group, Citizens for a Sound Economy, seemed like a grassroots movement, but according to the Center for Public Integrity it was sponsored principally by the Kochs, who provided $7.9 million between 1986 and 1993. Its mission, Kibbe said, “was to take these heavy ideas and translate them for mass America.

. . . We read the same literature Obama did about nonviolent revolutions—Saul Alinsky, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. We studied the idea of the Boston Tea Party as an example of nonviolent social change. We learned we needed boots on the ground to sell ideas, not candidates.” Within a few years, the group had mobilized fifty paid field workers, in twenty-six states, to rally voters behind the Kochs’ agenda. David and Charles, according to one participant, were “very controlling, very top down. You can’t build an organization with them. They run it.”

Around this time, the brothers faced a political crisis. In 1989, the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs investigated their business and released a scathing report accusing Koch Oil of “a widespread and sophisticated scheme to steal crude oil from Indians and others through fraudulent mismeasuring.” The Kochs admitted that they had improperly taken thirty-one million dollars’ worth of crude oil, but said that it had been accidental. Charles Koch told committee investigators that oil measurement is “a very uncertain art.”

To defend its reputation, Koch Industries hired Robert Strauss, then a premier Washington lobbyist;the company soon opened an office in the city. A grand jury was convened to investigate the allegations, but it eventually disbanded, without issuing criminal charges. According to the Senate report, after the committee hearings Koch operatives delved into the personal lives of committee staffers, even questioning an ex-wife. Senate investigators were upset by the Kochs’ tactics. Kenneth Ballen, the counsel to the Senate committee, said, “These people have amassed such unaccountable power!”

By 1993, when Bill Clinton became President, Citizens for a Sound Economy had become a prototype for the kind of corporate-backed opposition campaigns that have proliferated during the Obama era. The group waged a successful assault on Clinton’s proposed B.T.U. tax on energy, for instance, running advertisements, staging media events, and targeting opponents. And it mobilized anti-tax rallies outside the Capitol—rallies that NPR described as “designed to strike fear into the hearts of wavering Democrats.”Dan Glickman, a former Democratic congressman from Wichita, who supported the B.T.U. tax, recalled, “I’d been in Congress eighteen years. The Kochs actually engaged against me and funded my opponent. They used a lot of resources and effort—their employees, too.” Glickman suffered a surprise defeat. “I can’t prove it, but I think I was probably their victim,” he said.

The Kochs continued to disperse their money, creating slippery organizations with generic-sounding names, and this made it difficult to ascertain the extent of their influence in Washington. In 1990, Citizens for a Sound Economy created a spinoff group, Citizens for the Environment, which called acid rain and other environmental problems “myths.” When the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette [?]investigated the matter, it discovered that the spinoff group had “no citizen membership of its own.”

In 1997, another Senate investigation began looking into what a minority report called “an audacious plan to pour millions of dollars in contributions into Republican campaigns nationwide without disclosing the amount or source,” in order to evade campaign-finance laws. A shell corporation, Triad Management, had paid more than three million dollars for attack ads in twenty-six House races and three Senate races. More than half of the advertising money came from an obscure nonprofit group, the Economic Education Trust. The Senate committee’s minority report suggested that “the trust was financed in whole or in part by Charles and David Koch of Wichita, Kansas.” The brothers were suspected of having secretly paid for the attack ads, most of which aired in states where Koch Industries did business. In Kansas, where Triad Management was especially active, the funds may have played a decisive role in four of six federal races. The Kochs, when asked by reporters if they had given the money, refused to comment. In 1998, however, the Wall Street Journal confirmed that a consultant on the Kochs’ payroll had been involved in the scheme. Charles Lewis, of the Center for Public Integrity, described the scandal as “historic. Triad was the first time a major corporation used a cutout”—a front operation—“in a threatening way. Koch Industries was the poster child of a company run amok.”

During the Clinton Administration, the energy industry faced increased scrutiny and regulation. In the mid-nineties, the Justice Department filed two lawsuits against Koch Industries, claiming that it was responsible for more than three hundred oil spills, which had released an estimatedthree million gallons of oil into lakes and rivers. The penalty was potentially as high as two hundred and fourteen million dollars.In a settlement, Koch Industries paid a record thirty-million-dollar civil fine, and agreed to spend five million dollars on environmental projects.

In 1999, a jury found Koch Industries guilty of negligence and malice in the deaths of two Texas teen-agers in an explosion that resulted from a leaky underground butane pipeline. (In 2001, the company paid an undisclosed settlement.) And in the final months of the Clinton Presidency the Justice Department levelled a ninety-seven-count indictment against the company, for covering up the discharge of ninety-one tons of benzene, a carcinogen, from its refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas. The company was liable for three hundred and fifty million dollars in fines, and four Koch employees faced up to thirty-five years in prison. The Koch Petroleum Group eventually pleaded guilty to one criminal charge of covering up environmental violations, including the falsification of documents, and paid a twenty-million-dollar fine. David Uhlmann, a career prosecutor who, at the time, headed the environmental-crimes section at the Justice Department, described the suit as “one of the most significant cases ever brought under the Clean Air Act.” He added, “Environmental crimes are almost always motivated by economics and arrogance, and in the Koch case there was a healthy dose of both.”

During the 2000 election campaign, Koch Industries spent some nine hundred thousand dollars to support the candidacies of George W. Bush and other Republicans. During the Bush years, Koch Industries and other fossil-fuel companies enjoyed remarkable prosperity. The 2005 energy bill, which Hillary Clinton dubbed the Dick Cheney Lobbyist Energy Bill, offered enormous subsidies and tax breaks for energy companies. The Kochs have cast themselves as deficit hawks, but, according to a study by Media Matters, their companies have benefitted from nearly a hundred million dollars in government contracts since 2000.

In 2004, Citizens for a Sound Economy was accused of illegitimately throwing its weight behind Bush’s reëlection. The group’s Oregon branch had attempted to get Ralph Nader on the Presidential ballot, in order to dilute Democratic support for John Kerry. Critics argued that it was illegal for a tax-exempt nonprofit organization to donate its services for partisan political purposes. (A complaint was filed with the Federal Election Commission; it was dismissed.)

That year, internal rivalries at Citizens for a Sound Economy caused the organization to split apart. David Koch and Fink started a new group, Americans for Prosperity, and they hired Tim Phillips to run it. Phillips was a political veteran who had worked with Ralph Reed, the evangelical leader and Republican activist, co-founding Century Strategies, a campaign-consulting company that became notorious for its ties to the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Phillips’s online biography describes him as an expert in “grasstops” and “grassroots” political organizing. The Kochs’ choice of Phillips signalled an even greater toughness. The conservative operative Grover Norquist, who is known for praising “throat slitters” in politics, called Phillips “a grownup who can make things happen.”

Last year, Phillips told the Financial Times that Americans for Prosperity had only eight thousand registered members. Currently, its Web site claims that the group has “1.2 million activists.” Whatever its size, the Kochs’ political involvement has been intense; a former employee of the Cato Institute told me thatAmericans for Prosperity “was micromanaged by the Kochs.” And the brothers’ investment may well have paid off: Americans for Prosperity, in concert with the family’s other organizations, has been instrumental in disrupting the Obama Presidency.

In January, 2008, Charles Koch wrote in his company newsletter that America could be on the verge of “the greatest loss of liberty and prosperity since the 1930s.” That October, Americans for Prosperity held a conference of conservative operatives at a Marriott hotel outside Washington. Erick Erickson, the editor-in-chief of the conservative blog RedState.com, took the lectern, thanked David Koch, and vowed to “unite and fight . . . the armies of the left!” Soon after Obama assumed office, Americans for Prosperity launched “Porkulus” rallies against Obama’s stimulus-spending measures. Then the Mercatus Center released a report claiming that stimulus funds had been directed disproportionately toward Democratic districts; eventually, the author was forced to correct the report, but not before Rush Limbaugh, citing the paper, had labelled Obama’s program “a slush fund,” and Fox News and other conservative outlets had echoed the sentiment.(Phil Kerpen, the vice-president for policy at Americans for Prosperity, is a contributor to the Fox News Web site. Another officer at Americans for Prosperity, Walter Williams, often guest-hosts for Limbaugh.)

Americans for Prosperity also created an offshoot, Patients United Now, which organized what Phillips has estimated to be more than three hundred rallies against health-care reform. At one rally, an effigy of a Democratic congressman was hung; at another, protesters unfurled a banner depicting corpses from Dachau. The group also helped organize the “Kill the Bill” protests outside the Capitol, in March, where Democratic supporters of health-care reform alleged that they were spat on and cursed at. Phillips was a featured speaker.

Americans for Prosperity has held at least eighty events targeting cap-and-trade legislation, which is aimed at making industries pay for the air pollution that they create. Speakers for the group claimed, with exaggeration, that even back-yard barbecues and kitchen stoves would be taxed. The group was also involved in the attacks on Obama’s “green jobs” czar, Van Jones, and waged a crusade against international climate talks. Casting his group as a champion of ordinary workers who would be hurt by environmentalists,Phillips went to Copenhagenlast year and staged a protest outside the United Nations conference on climate change, declaring, “We’re a grassroots organization. . . . I think it’s unfortunate when wealthy children of wealthy families . . . want to send unemployment rates in the United States up to twenty per cent.”

Grover Norquist, who holds a weekly meeting for conservative leaders in Washington, including representatives from Americans for Prosperity, told me that last summer’s raucous rallies were pivotal in undermining Obama’s agenda. The Republican leadership in Congress, he said, “couldn’t have done it without August, when people went out on the streets. It discouraged deal-makers”—Republicans who might otherwise have worked constructively with Obama. Moreover, the appearance of growing public opposition to Obama affected corporate donors on K Street. “K Street is a three-billion-dollar weathervane,” Norquist said. “When Obama was strong, theChamber of Commerce said, ‘We can work with the Obama Administration.’ But that changed when thousands of people went into the street and ‘terrorized’ congressmen. August is what changed it. Now that Obama is weak, people are getting tough.”

As the first anniversary of Obama’s election approached, David Koch came to the Washington area to attend a triumphant Americans for Prosperity gathering. Obama’s poll numbers were falling fast. Not a single Republican senator was working with the Administration on health care, or much else. Pundits were writing about Obama’s political ineptitude, and Tea Party groups were accusing the President of initiating “a government takeover.” In a speech, Koch said, “Days like today bring to reality the vision of our board of directors when we started this organization, five years ago.” He went on,“We envisioned a mass movement, a state-based one, but national in scope, of hundreds of thousands of American citizens from all walks of life standing up and fighting for the economic freedoms that made our nation the most prosperous society in history. . . . Thankfully, the stirrings from California to Virginia, and from Texas to Michigan, show that more and more of our fellow-citizens are beginning to see the same truths as we do.”

While Koch didn’t explicitly embrace the Tea Party movement that day, more recently he has come close to doing so, praising it for demonstrating the “powerful visceral hostility in the body politic against the massive increase in government power, the massive efforts to socialize this country.” Charles Koch, in a newsletter sent to his seventy thousand employees, compared the Obama Administration to the regime of the Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez. The Kochs’ sense of imperilment is somewhat puzzling. Income inequality in America is greater than it has been since the nineteen-twenties, and since the seventies the tax rates of the wealthiest have fallen more than those of the middle class. Yet the brothers’ message has evidently resonated with voters: a recent poll found that fifty-five per cent of Americans agreed that Obama is a socialist.

Americans for Prosperity, meanwhile, has announced that it will spend an additional forty-five million dollars before the midterm elections, in November. Although the group is legally prohibited from directly endorsing candidates, it nonetheless plans to target some fifty House races and half a dozen Senate races, staging rallies, organizing door-to-door canvassing, and running ads aimed at “educating voters about where candidates stand.”

Though the Kochs have slowed Obama’s momentum, their larger political battle is far from won. Richard Fink, interviewed by FrumForum.com this spring, said, “If you look at where we’ve gone from the year 2000 to now, with the expansion of government spending and a debt burden that threatens to bankrupt the country, it doesn’t look very good at all.” He went on, “It looks like the infrastructure that was built and nurtured has not carried the day.” He suggested that the Kochs needed “to get more into the practical, day-to-day issues of governing.”

In 1991, David Koch was badly injured in a plane crash in Los Angeles. He was the sole passenger in first class to survive. As he was recovering, a routine physical exam led to the discovery of prostate cancer. Koch received treatment, settled down, started a family, and reconsidered his life. As he told Portfolio, “When you’re the only one who survived in the front of the plane and everyone else died—yeah, you think, ‘My God, the good Lord spared me for some greater purpose.’ My joke is that I’ve been busy ever since, doing all the good work I can think of, so He can have confidence in me.”

Koch began giving spectacularly large donations to the arts and sciences. And he became a patron of cancer research, focussing on prostate cancer. In addition to his gifts to Sloan-Kettering, he gave fifteen million dollars to New York-Presbyterian Hospital, a hundred and twenty-five million to M.I.T. for cancer research, twenty million to Johns Hopkins University, and twenty-five million to the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston. In response to his generosity, Sloan-Kettering gave Koch its Excellence in Corporate Leadership Award. In 2004, President Bush named him to the National Cancer Advisory Board, which guides the National Cancer Institute.

Koch’s corporate and political roles, however, may pose conflicts of interest. For example, at the same time that David Koch has been casting himself as a champion in the fight against cancer, Koch Industries has been lobbying to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying formaldehyde, which the company produces in great quantities, as a “known carcinogen” in humans.

Scientists have long known that formaldehyde causes cancer in rats, and several major scientific studies have concluded that formaldehyde causes cancer in human beings—including one published last year by the National Cancer Institute, on whose advisory board Koch sits. The study tracked twenty-five thousand patients for an average of forty years; subjects exposed to higher amounts of formaldehyde had significantly higher rates of leukemia. These results helped lead an expert panel within the National Institutes of Health to conclude that formaldehyde should be categorized as a known carcinogen, and be strictly controlled by the government. Corporations have resisted regulations on formaldehyde for decades, however, and Koch Industries has been a large funder of members of Congress who have stymied the E.P.A., requiring it to defer new regulations until more studies are completed.

Koch Industries became a major producer of the chemical in 2005,after it bought Georgia-Pacific, the paper and wood-products company, for twenty-one billion dollars. Georgia-Pacific manufactures formaldehyde in its chemical division, and uses it to produce various wood products, such as plywood and laminates. Its annual production capacity for formaldehyde is 2.2 billion pounds. Last December, Traylor Champion, Georgia-Pacific’s vice-president of environmental affairs, sent a formal letter of protest to federal health authorities. He wrote that the company “strongly disagrees” with the N.I.H. panel’s conclusion that formaldehyde should be treated as a known human carcinogen. David Koch did not recuse himself from the National Cancer Advisory Board, or divest himself of company stock, while his company was directly lobbying the government to keep formaldehyde on the market. (A board spokesperson said that the issue of formaldehyde had not come up.)

James Huff, an associate director at the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, a division of the N.I.H., told me that it was “disgusting” for Koch to be serving on the National Cancer Advisory Board: “It’s just not good for public health. Vested interests should not be on the board.” He went on, “Those boards are very important. They’re very influential as to whether N.C.I. goes into formaldehyde or not. Billions of dollars are involved in formaldehyde.”

Harold Varmus, the director of the National Cancer Institute, knows David Koch from Memorial Sloan-Kettering, which he used to run. He said that, at Sloan-Kettering, “a lot of people who gave to us had large business interests. The one thing we wouldn’t tolerate in our board members is tobacco.” When told of Koch Industries’ stance on formaldehyde, Varmus said that he was “surprised.”

The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, is a multimedia exploration of the theory that mankind evolved in response to climate change. At the main entrance, viewers are confronted with a giant graph charting the Earth’s temperature over the past ten million years, which notes that it is far cooler now than it was ten thousand years ago. Overhead, the text reads, “HUMANS EVOLVED IN RESPONSE TO A CHANGING WORLD.” The message, as amplified by the exhibit’s Web site, is that “key human adaptations evolved in response to environmental instability.” Only at the end of the exhibit, under the headline “OUR SURVIVAL CHALLENGE,” is it noted that levels of carbon dioxide are higher now than they have ever been, and that they are projected to increase dramatically in the next century. No cause is given for this development; no mention is made of any possible role played by fossil fuels. The exhibit makes it seem part of a natural continuum. The accompanying text says, “During the period in which humans evolved, Earth’s temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fluctuated together.”An interactive game in the exhibit suggests that humans will continue to adapt to climate change in the future. People may build “underground cities,” developing “short, compact bodies” or “curved spines,” so that “moving around in tight spaces will be no problem.”

Such ideas uncannily echo the Koch message. The company’s January newsletter to employees, for instance, argues that “fluctuations in the earth’s climate predate humanity,” and concludes, “Since we can’t control Mother Nature, let’s figure out how to get along with her changes.” Joseph Romm, a physicist who runs the Web site ClimateProgress.org, is infuriated by the Smithsonian’s presentation. “The whole exhibit whitewashes the modern climate issue,” he said. “I think the Kochs wanted to be seen as some sort of high-minded company, associated with the greatest natural-history and science museum in the country. But the truth is, the exhibit is underwritten by big-time polluters, who are underground funders of action to stop efforts to deal with this threat to humanity. I think the Smithsonian should have drawn the line.”

Cristián Samper, the museum’s director, said that the exhibit is not about climate change, and described Koch as “one of the best donors we’ve had, in my tenure here, because he’s very interested in the content, but completely hands off.” He noted, “I don’t know all the details of his involvement in other issues.”

The Kochs have long depended on the public’s not knowing all the details about them. They have been content to operate what David Koch has called “the largest company that you’ve never heard of.” But with the growing prominence of the Tea Party, and with increased awareness of the Kochs’ ties to the movement, the brothers may find it harder to deflect scrutiny. Recently, President Obama took aim at the Kochs’ political network. Speaking at a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser, in Austin, he warned supporters that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Citizens United case—which struck down laws prohibiting direct corporate spending on campaigns—had made it even easier for big companies to hide behind “groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity.” Obama said, “They don’t have to say who, exactly, Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation”—or even, he added, “a big oil company.” ♦

...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129425186

A Greenpeace investigation

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/dirty-money-climate-30032010/ has

identified a little-known, privately owned US oil company as the paymaster of global warming

sceptics in the US and Europe.

The environmental campaign group accuses Kansas-based Koch Industries, which owns refineries

and operates oil pipelines, of funding 35 conservative and libertarian groups, as well as

more than 20 congressmen and senators. Between them, Greenpeace says, these groups and

individuals have spread misinformation about climate science and led a sustained assault on

climate scientists and green alternatives to fossil fuels.

Greenpeace says that Koch Industries donated nearly $48m (£31.8m) to climate opposition

groups between 1997-2008. From 2005-2008, it donated $25m to groups opposed to climate

change, nearly three times as much as higher-profile funders that time such as oil company

ExxonMobil. Koch also spent $5.7m on political campaigns and $37m on direct lobbying to

support fossil fuels. ...

"Koch industries is playing a quiet but dominant role in the global warming debate. This

private, out-of-sight corporation has become a financial kingpin of climate science denial

and clean energy opposition. On repeated occasions organisations funded by Koch foundations

have led the assault on climate science and scientists, 'green jobs', renewable energy and

climate policy progress," it says.

The groups include many of the best-known conservative thinktanks in the US, like Americans

for Prosperity, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato institute, the Manhattan Institute and the

Foundation for research on economics and the environment. All have been involved in

"spinning" the "climategate" story or are at the forefront of the anti-global warming

debate, says Greenpeace.

Koch Industries is a $100bn-a-year conglomerate dominated by petroleum and chemical

interests, with operations in nearly 60 countries and 70,000 employees. It owns refineries

which process more than 800,000 barrels of crude oil a day in the US, as well as a refinery

in Holland. It has held leases on the heavily polluting tar-sand fields of Alberta, Canada

and has interests in coal, oil exploration, chemicals, forestry, and pipelines.

The majority of the group's assets are owned and controlled by Charles and David Koch, two

of the four sons of the company's founder. They have been identified by Forbes magazine as

the joint ninth richest Americans and the 19th richest men in the world, each worth between

$14-16bn.

Koch has also contributed money to politicians, the report said, listing 17 Republicans and

four Democrats whose campaign funds got more than $10,000from the company.

Greenpeace accuses the Koch companies of having a notorious environmental record. In 2000

the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) fined Koch industries $30m for its role in 300 oil

spills that resulted in more than 3m gallons of crude oil leaking intro ponds, lakes and

coastal waters....

Top 10 Koch beneficiaries 2005-2008

Mercatus center: ($9.2m received from Koch grants 2005-2008) Conservative thinktank at

George Mason University. This group suggested in 2001 that global warming would be

beneficial in winter and at the poles. In 2009 they recommended that nothing be done to cut

emissions.

Americans for prosperity. ($5.17m). Have built opposition to clean energy and climate

legislation with events across US.

Institute for humane studies ($1.96m). Several prominent climate sceptics have positions

here, including Fred Singer and Robert Bradley.

Heritage foundation ($1.62m). Conservative thinktank leads US opposition to climate change

science.

Cato Insitute ($1.02m). Thinktank disputes science behind climate change and questions the

rationale for taking action.

Manhattan Institute ($800,000). This institute regularly publishes climate science denials.

Washington legal foundation ($655,000) Published articles on the business threats posed by

regulation of climate change.

Federalist society for law ($542,000) advocates inaction on global warming

National center for policy analysis ($130,000) NCPA disseminates climate science scepticism.

American council on science and health ($113,800) Has published papers claiming that cutting

greenhouse emissions would be detrimental to public

health.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/30/us-oil-donated-millions-climate-sceptics

Think Progress

Meet the Billionaire Brothers Funding the Right-Wing War on Obama

They're the 9th richest people in America and they're pushing hard to upend President Obama's progressive agenda.

December 9, 2009 |

by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Zaid Jilani, Lee Fang, and Alex Seitz-Wald

Billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch are the wealthiest, and perhaps most effective, opponents of President Obama's progressive agenda. They have been looming in the background of every major domestic policy dispute this year. Ranked as the 9th richest men in America, the Koch brothers sit at the helm of Koch Industries, a massive privately owned conglomerate of manufacturing, oil, gas, and timber interests. They are best known for their wealth, as well as for their generous contributions to the arts, cancer research, and the Smithsonian Institute. But David and Charles are also responsible for a vicious attack campaign aimed directly at obstructing and killing progressive reform. Over the years, millions of dollars in Koch money has flowed to various right-wing think tanks, front groups, and publications. At the dawn of the Obama presidency, Koch groups quickly maneuvered to try to stop his first piece of signature legislation: the stimulus. The Koch-funded group "No Stimulus" launched television and radio ads deriding the recovery package as simply "pork" spending. The Cato Institute -- founded by Charles -- as well as other Koch-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, produced a blizzard of reports distorting the stimulus and calling for a return to Bush-style tax cuts to combat the recession. As their fronts were battling the stimulus, David's Americans for Prosperity (AFP) spent the opening months of the Obama presidency placing calls and helping to organize the very first "tea party" protests. AFP, founded in 1984 by David and managed day to day by the astroturf lobbyist Tim Phillips, has spent much of the year mobilizing "tea party" opposition to health reform, clean energy legislation, and financial regulations.

STOPPING CLEAN ENERGY: David Koch presents himself as a champion of science. Next year, because of his donations, a wing of the Smithsonian will be named after him. Nevertheless, Koch has done more to undermine the public's understanding of climate change science than any other person in America. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, funded in part by Koch foundations, has waged an underhanded campaign to falsely charge that a set of hacked e-mails somehow unravels the scientific consensus that global warming is occurring. Koch finances the "Hot Air" tour, a nationwide roadshow using a balloon to depict climate change science as "hot air." Despite the brothers' extravagant wealth, Koch's Americans for Prosperity has run populist ads mocking environmentalists as spoiled brats more concerned about their "three homes and five cars" than about economic conditions. In addition to its efforts to misinform the public, Koch Industries has spent nearly $9 million dollars so far on direct lobbying, much of it on climate change legislation. With a team of Koch-funded operatives going as far as attempting to crash the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this week, the brothers may succeed in scuttling any prospect for addressing climate change.

STOPPING HEALTH REFORM: Much of the fierce opposition to health reform can be credited to Koch organizations. As the health care debate began, AFP created a front group, known as "Patients United," dedicated itself to attacking Democratic health care reform proposals. Patients United has blanketed the country with ads distorting various provisions of the health reform legislation, particularly the public option. Patients United even centered a around Shona Robertson-Holmes, claiming she had a brain tumor the Canadian system refused to treat. However, the Ottawa Citizen reported that Patients United has been exaggerating Holmes' case, and that she in fact had a benign cyst. In their quest to block health care reform, Koch-funded groups have fostered extremism. A speaker with the roving Patients United bus tour repeatedly compared health reform to the Holocaust while an eight-by-five foot banner at an AFP health care rally with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) read, "National Socialist Health Care: Dachau, Germany" superimposed over corpses from a concentration camp. Although many were surprised at the level of anger AFP channeled into Democratic healthcare town halls in August, it wasn't the first time Koch groups have helped to hijack the health reform debate. Back in 1994, Americans for Prosperity, then known as Citizens for a Sound Economy, worked closely with then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich to bring mobs of angry men to health reform rallies with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.

A LONG HISTORY OF STOPPING PROGRESS: The Koch brothers clearly have a financial stake in blocking reform. Koch Industry oil refineries are major carbon dioxide polluters, and George-Pacific, a Koch Industries timber subsidiary, is one of the largest contributors to the loss of carbon-sink capacity. According to the EPA, Koch Industries is responsible for over 300 oil spills in the U.S. and has leaked three million gallons of crude oil into fisheries and drinking waters. So there are clear business-related reasons why Koch would want to block regulatory enforcement, clean energy, labor, and other reforms. But part of their opposition stems from a long family tradition of funding conservative movements to shift the country to the far right. Fred Koch, father of Charles and David and the company's namesake, helped to found the John Birch Society in the late 1950s. The John Birch Society harnessed Cold War fears into hate against progressives, warning that President Kennedy, Civil Rights activists, and organized labor were in league with communists. By presenting progressive reform as a capitulation to the Soviet Union, Fred Koch and the other industrialists bankrolling the Birch Society were able to galvanize hundreds of thousands of middle class people into supporting their narrow agenda of cutting corporate taxes and avoiding consumer regulations.

http://www.alternet.org/news/144455/meet_the_billionaire_brothers_funding_the_right-wing_war_on_obama?page=entire

http://www.ncrp.org/news-room/news-2006/239-the-powerful-koch-boys-from-kansas

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Americans_for_Prosperity

exxon, koch, global warming

Palast

whole book online

http://www.ethosworld.com/library/Greg-Palast-The-Best-Democracy-Money-Can-Buy-%282003%29.pdf

But if Starr was lost in a nutty cavort with Clinton's slick willy, the Senate Governmental

Affairs Committee was looking into the serious stuff: six-figure payments to Hillary's

former law partners by the Riady family of Indonesia and Entergy International of Little

Rock, Arkansas, Hillary's former client. (We'll get to those guys in the next chapter.)

Then, in 1998, just as the Republicans on the Senate committee were closing in on the

evidence that could, if borne out, pull down the Clintons . . . the committee closed its

investigation.

Why? The answer is: Triad.

Clinton was saved from the truly threatening inquiry about his Indonesian money, an

impeachable offense, by two of America's wealthiest oil and gas barons, Charles and

David Koch. They had not set out to rescue Clinton. The Koch brothers despise Clinton

with a passion.

Koch Industries is the biggest company you've never heard of-and their owners like it

that way. Estimates of its annual turnover, at $35 billion a year, make it bigger than

Microsoft or Boeing Aircraft. We can only estimate because Koch (pronounced "coke,"

like the cola) is a private corporation, the second largest in the United States. David and

Charles Koch, who own nearly all of it, are reported to have a combined net worth of $4

billion. If you've never head of the Kochs, the politicians have. Among the Big Oil that

funded the Republican party during George W. Bush's run for the White House, Koch

Industries pumped in more than any corporation except Enron and Exxon-Mobil.

The Koch clan's fortune originated in Russia, where daddy Fred Koch built oil refineries

for Stalin's regime. In 1946, Koch returned from the Soviet Union to Wichita, Kansas,

and founded the ultra-right John Birch Society. David and Charles have rejected their

father's politics, preferring to back ultra-ultra rightwing causes. In 1980, as a Libertarian

Party candidate, David campaigned against Ronald Reagan.

Secrecy is the Kochs' trademark. From headquarters in Wichita, they operate the nation's

only private, secure telephone network outside the CIA to control their core business as

America's largest purchaser of oil and gas from small farmers and Indian reservations.

As owners of a private company, the Kochs answer to no one about their expenditures.

No little old ladies query them at stockholder meetings. Unconstrained, the Koch brothers

can indulge their singular dream. Where other U.S. corporations throw a few million

dollars into the political arena in the hopes of obtaining a few special favors, the Kochs

have spent close to $100 million to change the entire tone of political discourse in

America.

And they succeeded. With $21 million spent to establish the Cato Institute in

Washington, OC, $30 million to start the Citizens for a Sound Economy and tens of

millions more for think tanks, political action committees and the like, they constructed a

nonpareil policy apparatus that reinvigorated the antigovernment movement with a new

intellectual legitimacy backed by fearsome political clout. From Cato and the Koch

machine came Newt Gingrich's "Contract for America" and the funds to put Gingrich in

power in the 1994 elections.

Not that the Kochs don't call in special favors. In 1989, the U.S. Senate Special

Committee on Investigations concluded that "Koch Oil, a subsidiary of Koch Industries,

is the most dramatic example of an oil company stealing by deliberate mismeasurement

and fraudulent reporting." FBI agents had watched Koch Industries truckers appearing to

take, but not fully paying for, oil from small gathering tanks on Indian reservations. An

expert for Indian tribes calculates that $1.5 billion of Koch Industries' wealth comes from

pilfered oil. Koch denies it.

Action against Koch for stealing from the Indians stalled until 1995 when an FBI agent

on the Senate investigation, Richard Elroy, charged in a letter to the Justice Department

that criminal prosecution had been declined "for political reasons" during the first Bush

presidency. So Clinton's Justice Department followed up on the FBI's evidence,

concentrating on environmental crimes, and filed civil lawsuits charging Koch Industries

with 315 willful acts of pollution. Clinton also impaneled two grand juries to consider

criminal indictments.

Newt Gingrich raced to the Kochs' rescue. If one clause of Newt Gingrich's "Contract for

America," the Regulatory Reform Act, had become law, the Justice Department case

against the Kochs-which sought big money and portended jail time-would have been

doomed. Proposed changes in law included eliminating some environmental controls and

decriminalizing violations.

Passage of the Koch-saving legislation depended upon the Republicans holding their

majority in Congress. In the 1996 election cycle, Republican control was in jeopardy.

Crucial to their ultimate narrow victory in that campaign was a multimillion dollar

television advertising blitz in key districts paid for by the Coalition for Our Children's

Future, a registered charity. The action was extraordinary for a child protection society-as

was their choice of candidates to assist. Only weeks before CCF purchased the adverts,

everyone of the incumbent congressmen they helped, all Republicans, voted to abolish

food stamps for children of the poor.

The politicians supported by the "Children's" fund had something in common besides an

antipathy to free meals for youngsters. Their districts contained Koch operations.

It may surprise you to learn that u.s. law prohibits corporate payments in aid of political

campaigns. Officially, donations must come through individuals or political action

committees.

Investigators with the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee located bank records

linking the children's "charity" and other political front groups to Triad Management,an

operation funded by the Kochs. Democratic senators threatened to subpoena Koch

Industries' chiefs to question whether they funded Triad and manipulated its related

groups. Democrats could drag the tycoons before the same public tribunal on campaign

finances skewering Clinton.

A key Senate insider, who must remain anonymous, says Republicans then offered a

straightforward trade: "A truce--you don't do Triad, we don't do Clinton." Other sources

inside the committee confirm that the Republicans, under the direction of Senators Trent

Lott and Don Nickles, rather than risk exposure of the Kochs' web of mega-dollar

funding operations, agreed to shut down the money probe and let Clinton off the hook.

The true, unreported reason for the collapse of the inquiry most threatening to Clinton-the

Indonesia money chain, which could have knocked him out of office-reveals the ultimate

measure of Koch influence: that Republicans sacrificed their case against the president to

keep their secret benefactors under wraps.

Both parties were content with their mutual protection agree ment. Each party's

billionaires were safe. With this sub-rosa deal in place, important fund-raising allegations

became off-limits. And that's how we ended up with Republican investigators with

nothing left to do--except rummage through Monica Lewinsky's dirty laundry and sniff at

the president's zipper.

What Every Billionaire Wants

I discovered. the billionaire-donor deal not because I was on some kind of hunt for the

goods on Clinton or on Newt Gingrich, but because, in my old day job as an investigator

and government adviser, I'd been tracking the Koch brothers, the Riadys and their

partner, Entergy International of Little Rock (we'll get to these guys in the next chapter).

That Entergy and Koch, both master deal makers, popped up in the middle of a Senate

inquiry that suddenly stopped dead gave off the smell of a bit too much bipartisan

cooperation.

The Kochs, by the way, are a real piece of work. These are the owners of the company

the FBI agent says skimmed oil out of the gathering tanks of poor Indians in Oklahoma.

In 1999, Koch Industries paid $25 million to settle claims after a civil jury found the

company liable for underpayments. Maybe the top guys at Koch Industries, the billionaire

brothers themselves, didn't know about the skimming game; maybe there was a good

explanation. But not according to Roger Williams, former executive in their oil-gathering

operation.

Williams kept records of the filching-a couple of dollars' worth of oil here, a couple

there-hardly the kind of petty cash that billionaires would seem to bother with. But

Williams (on tape I've obtained) was asked how Charles Koch reacted to a paper that

"showed how much 'overage' they had and how many dollars." Of billionaire Koch and

another executive with him at the time, Williams said: "They would just giggle and nudge

each other, you know, it's kind of a fun time."

Williams, who did not know he was being recorded, could have repeated Koch's words

wrongly, or heard Koch wrong. But what Williams reportedly heard was a phrase that

explains the success of some of America's wealthiest corporate chiefs. Williams was

surprised at the billionaire's concern over these small-change scams, but Williams said

Charles Koch told him, "I want my fair share and that's all of

Right-wing groups receiving major grants from the Koch Family Foundations

By Jim Hightower- Sun., 2/7/10

Right-wing groups receiving major grants from the Koch Family Foundations (Charles Koch, David Koch, and Claude Lambe Foundations)

Amounts granted from 1976 through 2007, the latest year for which data is available.

Organization: Amount

George Mason University Foundation, Inc.: $25,808,987
Cato Institute: $13,349,240
Citizens for a Sound Economy/Freedomworks: $12,906,712
Mercatus Center: $8,024,000
Institute for Humane Studies: $4,668,957
The Heritage Foundation: $3,272,000
Americans for Prosperity Foundation: $3,176,500
Institute for Justice: $2,615,000
Reason Foundation: $2,354,212
Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies: $2,002,700
Bill of Rights Institute: $1,667,000
Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE) : $1,305,000
Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy: $1,160,800
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Inc.: $1,125,000
Washington Legal Foundation: $1,105,000
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Inc.: $850,000
Intercollegiate Studies Institute: $706,250
Competitive Enterprise Institute: $666,420
Capital Research Center: $605,000
National Center for Policy Analysis: $600,000
American Enterprise Institute: $500,000
Tax Foundation: $475,000
American Legislative Exchange Council: $465,000
Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research: $300,000
Center for Equal Opportunity: $240,000
Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty: $297,500
Texas Policy Foundation: $296,516
Philanthropy Roundtable: $263,700
Institute for Energy Research: $237,000
Property and Environment Research Center: $219,500

hightower

Petrobillionaire brothers Charles and David Koch are not only the creators and funders of a web of right-wing think tanks and front groups (*Lowdown*, Feb. 2010), but also major lobbiers. Koch Industries regularly ranks as the top oil-company donor to congressional campaigns. The Koch boys--plus their family members, PACs, executives, and lobbyists --have already put $868,400 behind their favored candidates in this fall's congressional races.

And Koch Industries deploys a permanent team of influence peddlers to press its agenda on Capitol Hill and in federal agencies. In the past three years alone, Koch spent more than $37 million on lobbying, including $12,340,000 last year. Its 2009 force was made up of 5 in-house lobbyists, plus 40 hired guns from 10 K-Street firms.

Koch's lobbying team is headed by Matt Schlapp, who was director of the White House Office of Political Affairs for the Bush-Cheney regime. He replaced Elizabeth Stolpe, who (follow the spinning yo-yo here) went to work for Bush as associate director for environmental protection.

Koch needs such insiders because it is a serial polluter. In 2000, it was indicted for concealing illegal releases of 91 metric tons of cancer-causing benzene from its Texas oil refinery. It faced $352 million in fines, as well as possible jail time for executives.

No sweat, though. Koch put $800,000 into Bush's presidential election that year, and, in 2001, Bush's attorney general, John Ashcroft, put together a deal that dropped 88 of the 97 charges and fined Koch $20 million--pocket change for the $100-billion-a-year corporation.

hightower

The billionaire brothers

Charles and David Koch, who control this family-owned empire, are tied for a spot as the 19th-richest billionaire in the world, according to a 2009 ranking by Forbes. Each brother has a net worth of $14 billion, just below the wealth held by four heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune. Charles, 73, and David, 68, boast of being "self-made" billionaires. Actually, that's a fib, for they had a little help from Daddy. Fred Koch, who died in 1967, started his name-sake business after inventing a method of turning heavy oil into gasoline, and his sons got a leg up on their climb to billionairedom by inheriting Fred's company.

They also inherited something else: a burning ideological commitment to right-wing politics. How right wing? In 1958, Daddy Fred helped found the John Birch Society.

The Thinkers

To put an intellectual gloss on their hard-core antigovernment beliefs, the Kochs founded and funded their own think tank: the Cato Institute. Headquartered in Washington, it is home to a flock of leading right-wing thinkers who... [read more]

Following in those footsteps, Charles and David have used the wealth they draw from Koch Industries to fuel a network of three Koch Family Foundations. During the past three decades, these "charitable" foundations have set up and financed a secretive army of political operatives dedicated to achieving the brothers' antigovernment, corporate-controlled vision for America. This stealth force includes national and state-level think tanks, Astroturf front groups, academic shills, university centers, political-training programs, fundraising clearinghouses, publications, lobbyists, and various other units useful to Charles and David's ideological cause.

This army's effort is effective because it is comprehensive, well funded, coordinated, and focused on a longterm political strategy. Contrast that to the progressive movement, which largely consists of underfunded, unconnected groups and hops from battle to battle with little or no strategic planning.

Koch's wicked web

For some three decades, there's been a steadily increasing flow of think-tank studies, legislative proposals, articles, books, corporate lawsuits, citizen petitions, and other efforts to push for the deregulation of most industries and the privatization or elimination of government functions. These extremist ideas have never had strong public support, yet they've moved from the back burner of American policy in the 1970s to the red-hot front burner in the Bush years--and today we're paying the price for the adoption of these concepts at all levels of government, from privatization of local water supplies to the deregulation of Wall Street.

The different pushes to implement this antigovernment ideology have come from a wide assortment of seemingly independent groups and individuals, creating a sense of broad public demand for a libertarian corporate kingdom in America. However, when you examine those pushing this dog-eat-dog ethic, chances are you'll find that they have one thing in common: funding from the Koch fortune.

See which right-wing groups are receiving major grants from the Koch Family Foundations[read more]

The three Koch family foundations discreetly refrain from publishing the recipients of their beneficence, but some progressive watchdogs (see Do Something) have dug into the dense IRS reports that foundations must file, giving us a glimpse of the extensive right-wing web spun by this one oil family. The Kochs are not the only funders, of course--such other far-right family foundations as Bradley, Coors, Olin, and Scaife are also major players. But the size, scope, strategic purpose, and secrecy of the Koch investments make the brothers worthy of special attention. The following list by no means covers the entirety of their network (they've put money into hundreds of groups), but it'll give you a sense of their reach into every nook and cranny of public policy.

Charles and David are not idle check-writers--they're actively involved in the creation and running of this interconnected web of political influence and hold top positions in many groups. For example, David is board chairman of Americans for Prosperity and is on the boards of the Cato Institute and Reason Foundation, while Charles (who founded Cato in 1977) is chairman of the Institute for Humane Studies and a director of the Mercatus Center.

The focus of most political groups is to influence candidates, lawmakers, agency heads, and reporters at the top of the system. But these two brothers have been executing a concerted plan for more than 30 years not only to influence those at the top, but also to go much deeper. They spend freely on dozens of ideologically grounded, right-wing groups to influence schoolteachers and high-school curricula, state and federal judges, lawyers and legal scholars, conservative policy thinkers and media producers, city-council candidates and local party activists--and their aim is to shove the country's national debate to the hard right, discombobulate the public's progressive wishes, and alter government policies to advance corporate interests generally and the Kochs' own interests specifically.

Here is a profile of just one of the Koch tentacles: **Americans For Prosperity**. AFP, the third-largest recipient of Koch foundation largesse, is the brothers' overtly political unit. Essentially, it is a front group for mass-producing front groups. Much like McDonald's churns out Big Mac franchises, AFP can pop out a grassrootsy-looking, cookie-cutter political operation on demand.

It has a $7 million annual budget that supports dozens of GOP operatives and former corporate PR veterans, all standing ready to assemble, fund, staff, and package a hot-to-go front group for any issue that comes up. Its menu includes such garnishes as hoked-up studies, alarmist talking points, deceptive attack ads, divisive hate messages, celebrity and religious endorsers, and a menagerie of media stunts.

AFP was launched by David Koch in 1984 as Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), a moniker it used until switching to its present name in 2003. It refuses to disclose its list of donors, but when it was known as CSE, about 70% of the $18 million it spent came from the Koch foundations. There's no reason to think that AFP is any less of a Koch-funded operation today, and David, as one of its top officers, continues to be actively engaged in directing the organization's work.

And what a piece of work it is.

Start with Tim:{ **Phillips**:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, brought in to be AFP's president and Koch's point man in 2006. As a longtime Republican campaign director and Washington lobbyist for corporate interests, Phillips earned a reputation as one of the GOP's "Mr. Nasties," in the Karl Rovian mold.

His credits include helping George W. Bush win the pivotal 2000 GOP primary in South Carolina by spearheading a smear campaign that used images of John McCain's adopted daughter from Bangladesh to claim that he had fathered a black child; helping Saxby Chambliss defeat incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland (a highly decorated Vietnam vet who lost both legs and an arm in that war) in the 2002 Georgia election by creating a TV ad linking the Democrat to Osama bin Laden and claiming that he lacked the courage to fight terrorists; and working with super-sleaze corporate lobbyist Jack Abramoff in 1998 to stir up evangelical churches in opposition to a labor-law reform that would've ended the brutal exploitation of Chinese girls and young women enslaved in sweatshops on the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth. (Phillips rallied evangelicals by asserting that many of the Chinese workers "are exposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ" while on the islands "and return to China with Bibles in hand, so Congress should not interfere.)

At AFP, Phillips has the Kochs' deep pockets and political network at his disposal to take on a broad range of right-wing corporate causes. While the organization has 23 state "chapters" and immodestly bills itself as the nation's "premier grassroots organization," it has only 8,000 actual members, is totally controlled by corporate money, is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and is run by the exact same kind of professional political insiders it pretends to detest.

Consider the boisterous "tea bag" rebellion. No one professes more hatred for the two-party, business-as-usual political system in Washington than those angry Americans who're caught up in the tea-bag rallies. Yet unbeknownst to most of the mad-as-hellers who have showed up, it was AFP's Republican-tied lobbyists and political functionaries who cynically financed, organized, and orchestrated the very first tea-bag protest. AFP has steadily coopted the tea-bag faction to make it a front for the corporate agenda, and many of the tea-bag groups have devolved into subsidiaries of the Republican party. Indeed, AFP has become the Astroturf-To-Go Store, fabricating and spreading fake grassroots organizations all across the country. It was especially busy during the 2008 presidential campaign and in the first year of Obama's presidency. Here are a few recent AFP-manufactured campaigns on major public-policy issues:

**PATIENTS UNITED NOW.** The website for PUN (odd choice for an acronym, huh?) proclaims, "We are people just like you." However, that statement is true only if you're one of the people working as paid political hacks for AFP. PUN is nothing but a shell created by AFP's laissez-faire corporate extremists. The goal of this front group is to kill legislation that would restructure the rip-off health-insurance industry so real patients can get fairly priced, quality care. In addition to running farcical, antireform TV ads under PUN's name, the AFP-directed effort has included a "Hands Off My Health Care" bus tour. Its message wasn't subtle--a giant bloody hand was painted on the side of the bus, and a speaker traveling with the group repeatedly compared the Democrats' health-reform plans to the Holocaust.
**HOT-AIR TOUR**. During the past two years, people in 40 cities have been greeted by the sight of a 70-foot-tall hot-air balloon drifting over them. It heralded the arrival of a barnstorming tour to expose "the ballooning costs of global warming hysteria." This stunt had a just-folks veneer on it, but it was another AFP production--after all, as owners of the largest privately held oil corporation, the Koch brothers have a special interest in spreading denial about the existence of climate change. AFP ran ads mocking proponents of fossilfuel regulations as elitist brats more concerned about their "three homes and five cars" than about the jobs of working-class families (an incredible rhetorical gusher from a privileged billionaire like David, who lives the high life in Manhattan, where he hobnobs with the richest elites at society galas, while also owning a mansion in Aspen where he can curl up in luxury and sip fine wine from his collection of 5,000 vintage bottles). Perhaps he was tipsy on some of those grapes last fall when he attended an AFP summit of tea-party leaders and personally embraced the histrionics of a climate-denial film that accuses such leaders as Al Gore of wanting to bring back "the Dark Ages and the Black Plague."

Among AFP's other fronts are: FREE OUR ENERGY, which clamored during the 2008 election season to open up our seashores and national parks to oil drillers; NO STIMULUS, which tried to rev up the tea-party network last year to kill Obama's economic-recovery plan; and SAVE MY BALLOT, yet another "grassroots tour," this one to rail against a proposal to stop corporate intimidation of workers trying to unionize (AFP paid Joe the Plumber to front this smear campaign).

Out of the shadows

It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you--and they are! "They" are the corporate powers that collect our consumer dollars and then, as hush-hush as possible, use that money to finance their interlocked array of right-wing foundations, think tanks, "scholars," media sparklies, political personalities, and other fronts. What the Kochs and their ilk are out to get is nothing less than America's commitment to the Common Good, colluding to kill such egalitarian proposals as Medicare for all, green-energy jobs, workplace democracy, decentralization of capital, and clean elections.

They pose publicly as enlightened industrialists. David Koch, for example, is an MIT-educated chemist and an enthusiastic evolutionist who has given $20 million to the American Museum of Natural History (which then--I kid you not--named its dinosaur wing after him). Yet David the Enlightened cynically pays groups to nurture ignorance and exploit it for his political gain, including paying to bus angry and confused people to "citizen" rallies and town-hall meetings where they literally end up shouting themselves red-faced in support of his corporate interests over their own.

While such elites as the Kochs are a tiny minority of Americans, they've surreptitiously skewed our public debate, agenda, and policies to their self-serving agenda by instilling a totally false supposition within the mass media and both major parties that a volatile majority of people has a broad distrust of anything public and views government as the enemy. Thus even Democrats shrink from attempting anything more audacious than incremental reforms, meekly courting vituperous Republicans and corporatists who obviously are out to gut any forward-thinking changes.

http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/node/2247

cf the wonk room Koch

http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/03/31/koch-hitler-debate/ hitler youth

Koch Industries Thinks Calling People ‘Hitler Youth’ Is An ‘Honest Debate’

Wanted for Climate Crimes: The Koch BrothersAfter Greenpeace released a report http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/03/30/koch-denial-machine/ yesterday detailing the efforts of the Koch Industries billionaires David and Charles Koch to pollute energy policy and deny the threat of global warming, Koch Industries communications director Melissa Cohlmia attempted to greenwash their record:

Both a free society and the scientific method require an open and honest airing of all sides, not demonizing and silencing those with whom you disagree. We’ve strived to encourage an intellectually honest debate on the scientific basis for claims of harm from greenhouse gases.

Americans for Prosperity[ http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Americans_for_Prosperity ]http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Art_Pope] — founded, funded, and overseen by Koch Industries billionaire David Koch — claims to be trying to build that “free society” by “educating citizens about economic policy and mobilizing those citizens as advocates in the public policy process.” So far, they’re not doing a very good job of engaging in an “intellectually honest debate” without “demonizing and silencing those with whom you disagree”:

UPDATE 6/10 http://thinkprogress.org/2010/06/09/inhofe-fiorina-hoax/

‘Hitler Youth.’ At an Americans for Prosperity event in December 2009, guest speaker Christopher Monckton called youth climate activists “Hitler Youth.” He told a Jewish youth climate activist whose grandparents escaped the Nazis that he was “Hitler Youth,” and that “you people don’t care” that “millions are dying in third world countries.” Americans for Prosperity again featured Christopher Monckton at a regional summit in March 2010. [The Times, 12/11/09]

‘Radical Global Warming Agenda.’ “President Obama is at again,” the Americans for Prosperity Regulation Reality Tour warns, with a “radical global warming agenda” by “unelected bureaucrats regulating our life,” “ignoring the entire democratic process all together.” Supposed threats of “EPA’s power grab” include “Grass Mileage Standards,” “Government Control of your Thermostat,” “Churches would need EPA Permits,” and The tour features “EPA Carbon Cops” who want to punish you if you “opened your refrigerator” or “drove a car.” [RegulationReality.com]

‘Al Gore’s Global Warming Alarmism.’ The Americans for Prosperity Hot Air Tour told people to “rally against Al Gore’s global warming alarmism” and “propaganda advanced by global warming alarmists,” claiming “global warming alarmism” means “fewer jobs,” “less freedom,” and a “government that controls your home thermostat remotely.” The Hot Air Tour flew a balloon over Al Gore’s “energy-guzzling mansion” in Tennessee with the message “Global Warming Alarmism.” [HotAirTour.org]

‘We Might As Well Forget Freedom.’ The Americans for Prosperity Hot Air Tour says that “far left environmentalists” are “radicals” with a “radical Global Warming ideology that claims people are the problem” who “want GOVERNMENT to force us to drive less and live in smaller homes while killing jobs that help grow our economy” and “want GOVERNMENT dictating our lives.” [HotAirTour.org]

Cohlmia told the Wonk Room that “AFP is an independent organization and Koch companies do not in any way direct their activities.” This is a remarkable claim, as Koch Industries executive vice presidents and directors Charles Koch and Richard Fink are also directors of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation.

Report: Koch Industries Outspends Exxon Mobil On Climate Denial

Koch fundingThe Wonk Room has long detailed the role of the billionaire brothers of Koch Industries, Charles and David Koch, in destroying American prosperity. Their pollution-based fortunes have fueled a network of right-wing ideologues, from McCain mouthpiece Nancy Pfotenhauer to loony conspiracy theorist Christopher Monckton. In public, the Kochs like to burnish their reputations by buying museum and opera halls. In private, however, they’ve outspent Exxon Mobil to fund organizations of the climate denial machine, as Greenpeace details in a new report:

Although Koch intentionally stays out of the public eye, it is now playing a quiet but dominant role in a high-profile national policy debate on global warming. Koch Industries has become a financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition. This private, out-of-sight corporation is now a partner to Exxon Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute and other donors that support organizations and front-groups opposing progressive clean energy and climate policy. In fact, Koch has out-spent Exxon Mobil in funding these groups in recent years. From 2005 to 2008, Exxon Mobil spent $8.9 million while the Koch Industries-controlled foundations contributed $24.9 million in funding to organizations of the climate denial machine.

This report, “Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine” http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/usa/press-center/reports4/koch-industries-secretly-fund.pdf documents roughly 40 climate denial and opposition organizations receiving Koch foundation grants in recent years, including:

– More than $5 million to Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFP) for its nationwide “Hot Air Tour” and “Regulation Reality Tour” campaigns to spread misinformation about climate science and oppose clean energy and climate legislation.

– More than $1 million to the Heritage Foundation, a mainstay of misinformation on climate and environmental policy issues.

– Over $1 million to the Cato Institute, which disputes the scientific evidence behind global warming, questions the rationale for taking climate action, and has been heavily involved in spinning the recent ClimateGate smear campaign.

– $800,000 to the Manhattan Institute, which has hosted Bjorn Lomborg twice in the last two years. Lomborg is a prominent media spokesperson who challenges and attacks policy measures to address climate change.

– $365,000 to Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE) which advocates against taking action on climate change because warming is “inevitable” and expensive to address.

– $360,000 to Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy (PRIPP) which supported and funded “An Inconvenient Truth…or Convenient Fiction,” a film attacking the science of global warming and intended as a rebuttal to former Vice-President Al Gore’s documentary. PRIPP also threatened to sue the US Government for listing the polar bear as an endangered species.

– $325,000 to the Tax Foundation, which issued a misleading study on the costs of proposed climate legislation.

The blockbuster report covers the role of Koch’s dirty network in promoting the ClimateGate smear campaign, pushing junk science about polar bears, fueling supposedly independent Spanish and Danish studies that attacked green jobs, and selling a pack of lies about the costs of climate legislation.

http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/03/30/koch-denial-machine/

SW: David H. Koch is one of the billionaire co-owners of Koch Industries. With his brother, Charles G. Koch, he runs the Koch Family Foundations, one of the largest single sources of funding for conservative organizations in the United States.

Koch Industries received a $30,000,000.00 criminal fine in March 2000:

"$30 Million Settlement Approved - US v Koch U. S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore approved the Department of Justice and State of Texas' settlement with Koch Industries for $30 million in civil penalties and an additional $5 million in supplemental environmental projects to be funded by Koch. This is the largest penalty imposed on a company under federal environmental laws, and is based upon spills of at least 41,000 barrels of oil and other petroleum, resulting in over three hundred violations of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 in six states. The largest single spill was approximately100,000 gallons of crude oil which caused a 12-mile oil slick on Nueces Bay and Corpus Christi Bay. Eroded and broken pipelines caused the spills. Six of the spills were into ponds, lakes and rivers." [1]

During the 1990s, the firm's faulty pipelines were responsible for more than 300 oil spills in five states, prompting a penalty of $35 million. In 1996, a flawed pipeline caused an explosion outside of Dallas in which two teenagers were killed. In a lawsuit related to the deaths, a trial court returned a judgment of $376.69 million against the company.

But these lawsuits and fines accompanied many other brushes with the law. As one writer has put it, "The corporate history of Koch Industries - a company David Koch co-owns with his brother Charles --reads like a laundry list of legal disputes." Two decades ago, David and Charles bought out the shares of two other brothers, Bill and Frederick, for $1.1 billion. Bill (David's twin) and Frederick then claimed that Charles and David had misrepresented the company's value, and shortchanged them by $340 million. The dispute dragged on until last October 1999, when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in the case, letting stand a lower court's decision in favor of Charles and David. [2]

co founder of cato http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cato_Institute cato an ally of reynolds tobacco (but does sometimes bite hand that feeds) Murdoch ex dir.

usual suspect fdns

wants to privatize water

Koch dir of Earthwatch http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Earthwatch

so is rio tinto http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=622

Republican Ties

If convicted, the company faced fines of up to $352 million, plus possible jail time for company executives. After George W. Bush became president, however, the U.S. Justice Department dropped 88 of the charges. Two days before the trial, John Ashcroft settled for a plea bargain, in which Koch pled guilty to falsifying documents. All major charges were dropped, and Koch and Ashcroft settled the lawsuit for a fraction of that amount.

Koch had contributed $800,000 to the Bush election campaign and other Republican candidates.

Alex Beehler, assistant deputy under secretary of defense for Environment, Safety and Occupational Health, previously served at Koch as director of environmental and regulatory affairs and concurrently served at the Charles G. Koch Foundation as vice president for environmental projects. [3] Beehler was later nominated and re-nominated by the Bush White House, to become the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Inspector General. [4]

Lobbying

The company spent $3,528,750 for lobbying in 2006. $820,000 was to outside lobbying firms with the remainder being spent using in-house lobbyists. ^[12]

In February 2005, the Hill reported, "Top White House official Matt Schlapp is joining the Washington office of oil-and-gas conglomerate Koch Industries, the latest example of high-level administration and congressional staffers making post-election leaps to the lobbying world." Schlapp had headed the White House’s Office of Political Affairs. At Koch, Schlapp will be the executive director of federal affairs, directing Washington lobbying. [5]

Elizabeth Stolpe, previously in-house lobbyist for Koch Industries, is now Associate Director For Toxics & Environmental Protection at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Climate Change Denial

According to the 2010 report by Greenpeace, **Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine**, Koch has out-spent ExxonMobil in funding climate change denial. From 2005 to 2008, ExxonMobil spent $8.9 million, while the Koch Industries-controlled foundations contributed $24.9 million in funding to organizations of climate change skeptics. Efforts include:

ClimateGate Echo Chamber—At least twenty Koch-funded organizations have repeatedly rebroadcast, referenced and appeared as media spokespeople in the story, dubbed “ClimateGate,” of supposed malfeasance by climate scientists from stolen emails from the University of East Anglia in November 2009. These organizations claim the emails prove a “conspiracy” of scientists and "proves" climate change is a hoax.
More than $5 million to Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFP) for its nationwide “Hot Air Tour” campaign to spreading misinformation about climate science and opposing clean energy and climate legislation.
More than $1 million to the Heritage Foundation, a mainstay of misinformation on climate and environmental policy issues.
Over $1 million to the Cato Institute, which disputes the scientific evidence behind global warming, questions the rationale for taking climate action, and has been heavily involved in spinning the recent ClimateGate story.
$800,000 to the Manhattan Institute, which has hosted Bjorn Lomborg twice in the last two years, a prominent media spokesperson who challenges and attacks policy measures to address climate change.
$365,000 to Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), which advocates against taking action on climate change because warming is “inevitable” and expensive to address.
$360,000 to Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy (PRIPP) which supported and funded An Inconvenient Truth...or Convenient Fiction, a film attacking the science of global warming and intended as a rebuttal to former Vice-President Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. PRIPP also threatened to sue the U.S. Government for listing the polar bear as an endangered species.
$325,000 to the Tax Foundation, which issued a misleading study on the costs of proposed climate legislation.

The reports says such contributions are only part of the picture, because the full scope of direct contributions to organizations is not disclosed by individual Koch family members, executives, or from the company itself. But contributions through Koch’s political action committee (PAC) are a matter of public record. Since the beginning of the 2006 election cycle, Koch’s PAC spent more on contributions to federal candidates than any other oil-and-gas sector PAC. For that period, Koch Industries and its executives spent $2.51 million compared to next three biggest contributors: Exxon ($1.71 million), Valero ($1.68 million), and Chevron ($1.22 million).

Koch executives and their families wield political influence on climate change in other ways too, including direct federal lobbying and campaign contributions. Over the last few years, Koch Industries, Koch employees, and Koch family members:

Spent $37.9 million from 2006 to 2009 for direct lobbying on oil and energy issues, outspent only by ExxonMobil ($87.8 million) and Chevron Corporation ($50 million).
Spent $5.74 million in PAC money for candidates, committees, and campaign expenditures since the 2006 election cycle.
Contributed at least $270,800 to federal political party committees since the 2006 election cycle.
Gave $10,000 to Senator Lisa Murkowski in 2010,^{[13]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Koch_Industries#cite_note-12) who, in January, proposed stripping the EPA of its ability to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, and lamented that BP's Deepwater Horizon oil disaster has temporarily halted exploratory offshore drilling in the arctic planned by Shell Oil for summer 2010, a topic that even many conservative opponents of climate action have remained silent on in the face of the unfolding historic despoiling of the gulf.^{[14]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Koch_Industries#cite_note-13)^{[15]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Koch_Industries#cite_note-14)

Political Contributions

Koch Industries is the single largest oil company contributor to both Republican and Democratic candidates for Congress. These contributions total $1,065,750 to the 110th US Congress (as of the third quarter), the largest of which has been to Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS) for $42,950. Rep. Tiahrt, for his part, has consistently voted with the oil industry on energy, war and climate bills. [6]

Contributions like this from fossil fuel companies to members of Congress are often seen as a political barrier to pursuing clean energy. More information on oil industry contributions to Congress can be found at FollowtheOilMoney.org, a project created by the nonpartisan, nonprofit organization Oil Change International.

Koch Industries gave $948,000 to federal candidates in the 05/06 election cycle through its political action committee (PAC) - 17% to Democrats, 82% to Republicans. ^{[16]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Koch_Industries#cite_note-15)

Mergers & acquisitions

In 2003, Koch announced a $4.4 billion cash purchase of Invista, the world's largest fibers company and owner of brand names such as Lycra and Teflon; from DuPont. ^{[17]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Koch_Industries#cite_note-16) In 2005, Koch purchased paper products giant Georgia-Pacific for $21 billion, acquiring brands such as Quilted Northern, Angel Soft, Brawny, Sparkle, Vanity Fair, and Dixie cups. Internationally, brands include Lotus, Colhogar, Delica, Tenderly, and the Vania brand of personal care products. See also Invista.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Koch_Industries

Funding libertarian organizations

The Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation is one of Koch Family Foundations. Several of the organizations in the list below were founded by one of two Koch brothers, Charles G. Koch or David H. Koch to pursue their ideological agenda.

Organizations funded

Below is a list of recipients listing the cumulative amount, unadjusted for inflation, granted by the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation[3]

1) Cato Institute $8,450,000

2) Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation $6,025,375

3) George Mason University $2,311,149

4) George Mason University Foundation, Inc. $2,074,893

6) Heritage Foundation, The $1,004,000

7) Institute for Justice $1,000,000

8) Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment $810,000

9) Reason Foundation, The $642,000

10) Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, The $504,000

12) Institute for Humane Studies $455,000

13) Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy $385,000

14)Washington Legal Foundation$350,000

15) Capital Research Center $340,000

16) Competitive Enterprise Institute $254,460

20) Ethics and Public Policy Center, Inc. $190,000

22) National Center for Policy Analysis $175,000

23) Citizens for Congressional Reform Foundation $175,000

24) Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Inc. $125,000

25) American Legislative Exchange Council $120,000

26) Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty $115,000

28) Political Economy Research Center, Inc. $80,000

29) Media Institute $60,000

30) National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship $60,000

31) University of Chicago $59,000

32) Defenders of Property Rights $55,000

33) University of Kansas Endowment Assocation $50,000

36) Texas Public Policy Foundation $44,500

37) Center for Individual Rights, The $40,000

38) Heartland Institute $40,000

39) Texas Justice Foundation $40,000

40) Institute for Policy Innovation $35,000

42) Center of the American Experiment $31,500

43) Atlas Economic Research Foundation $28,500

44) Young America's Foundation $25,000

45) Henry Hazlitt Foundation $25,000

47)Atlantic Legal Foundation $20,000

48) National Taxpayers Union Foundation $20,000

49) Families Against Mandatory Minimums $20,000

50) Philanthropy Roundtable $19,200

51) Free Enterprise Institute $15,000

52) John Locke Foundation $15,000

53) Hudson Institute, Inc. $12,650

54) Alexis de Tocqueville Institution $12,500

55) National Environmental Policy Institute $12,500

56) Washington University $11,500

57) Pacific Legal Foundation$10,000

58) American Council for Capital Formation $10,000

60) Institute for Political Economy $8,000

62) State Policy Network $6,500

64) Fraser Institute, The $5,000

65) Mackinac Center, The $5,000

66) Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation $5,000

68) Institute for Objectivist Studies $5,000

Some additional recipients by amount granted by the Charles G. Koch Foundation http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientsoffunder.php?funderID=9

David H. Koch Charitable Foundation $2,000,000

Fred C. & Mary R. Koch Foundation $1,097,000

Bill of Rights Institute $992,000

Mercatus Center $400,000

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Koch_Family_Foundations

Ari Fleischer: It's not corporate -- the political action committee is a voluntary committee - Is there a question?

Mokhiber: Yes, there is a question -- which I think you dodged yesterday -- given that this money came from what is now a convicted corporate felon, does the President have a policy on accepting money from convicted felons, and should he give it back at least to the PAC, which is controlled by the company?

Koch Industries and the Pollution of the Bush White House, Parts I & II; on-line article includes source links.

http://www.mediawhoresonline.com/koch.htm

CASH ‘N’ CARRY CHRONICLES

An MWO Continuing Feature

KOCH INDUSTRIES AND THE POLLUTION OF THE BUSH WHITE HOUSE

Part II

In Part I of its report on Koch Industries, the second-largest privately-held company in the United States, and the Bush Administration, MWO detailed the firm’s right-wing background and its heavily one-sided investment in Republican candidates, including George W. Bush.

That was the cash part. Now, what did Koch get out of the Bushes? The story goes back a ways, before Dubya was Governor of Texas.

KOCH POLLUTION AND THE LAW

Over the past decade, Koch Industries has found itself repeatedly in one kind of legal trouble or another.

During the 1990s, the firm’s faulty pipelines were responsible for more than 300 oil spills in five states, prompting a penalty of $35 million. In 1996, a flawed pipeline caused an explosion outside of Dallas in which two teenagers were killed. In a lawsuit related to the deaths, a trial court returned a judgment of $376.69 million against the

company.

But these lawsuits and fines accompanied many other brushes with the law. As one writer has put it, “The corporate history of Koch Industries – a company David Koch co-owns with his brother Charles --reads like a laundry list of legal disputes.” Two decades ago, David and Charles bought out the shares of two other brothers, Bill and Frederick, for $1.1 billion. Bill (David's twin) and Frederick then claimed that Charles and David had misrepresented the company's value, and shortchanged them by $340 million. The dispute dragged on until last October 1999, when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in the case, letting stand a lower court's decision in favor of Charles and David.

Bill Koch has also alleged that Koch Industries underreported the amount and quality of oil it garnered from drilling operations on federal and tribal lands. The charge was highly reminiscent of the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s, in which involved private companies drilling on federally-owned lands. The charge led to an Oklahoma federal jury finding of guilty that opened Koch Industries to liabilities running as high as $214 million in penalties and claims, depending on appeals.

In January, 2000, the Koch family’s legal problems took a bizarre twist when former Playboy centerfold Anna Nicole Smith filed a lawsuit against Koch Industries for allegedly conspiring with her stepson to defraud her of $474 million in Koch Industries stock that she alleges was left to her by her late husband.

The most serious charges against the company, however, were brought by the Clinton Administration’s Department of Justice. In 2000, Koch Industries and four employees were indicted on 97 counts of violating federal clean air and hazardous waste laws. Government prosecutors accused the company of intentionally releasing fumes from benzene -- a suspected carcinogen -- into the atmosphere and then lying about it to state regulators in Texas. If convicted, the company was liable for fines up to $352 million, in addition to heavy jail terms and fines for the four employees.

GOVERNOR DUBYA, KOCH, AND THE POLLUTION OF TEXAS

While federal officials tried to crack down on Koch and other major oil polluters, George W. Bush, elected Governor of Texas in 1994, moved state policy in the other direction.

As governor, Mr. Bush quietly set up a committee led by Exxon, Koch, and other big oil and chemical companies, to advise him what to do about the state's deadly air pollution.

Regulators wanted compulsory cuts in emissions of up to 50% .

But the oil companies thought this much too expensive, even though they dared not risk the bad publicity of opposing regulation outright. So Bush’s "secret" committee instead proposed making the cuts voluntary – and Governor Bush duly steered the toothless plan through the Texas legislature.

Pollution in Texas did go down – by a measly 3%. As a result, Houston took pride of place at the most polluted city in the nation. And the oil companies saved hundred of millions of dollars that they would have had to spend under the compulsory emissions cut proposal.

When the $35 million federal settlement against Koch came in January 2000, half of the fine was awarded to Texas. State Attorney-General John Coryn and State Railroad Commissioner Tony Garza hailed the settlement, as did their boss, Governor George W. Bush, who was in the thick of launching his presidential campaign.

Politically, Bush took cover against the inevitable charges that he was in the pocket of Big Oil.

But a far bigger problem loomed for Koch, in the form of the 97-count indictment that could have cost the company serious damage – to the tune of $352 million in civil fines, plus jail time of up to 100 years and another $50 million in fines.

And this time, Bush could exert much more leverage for Koch – so long as he was able to take over the White House.

BUSH CARRIES FOR KOCH: CASES DISMISSED

Throughout the 2000 campaign, candidate Bush promised he would loosen environmental protections and limit jury awards against corporations found guilty of wrongdoing.

But scant notice as paid to the continuing federal prosecution of Koch – or the heavy Koch donations to Bush, the Republican Party, and various conservative political action committees.

David Koch and his wife Julie alone have $487,500 in campaign contributions to the Republicans – and absolutely nothing to the Democrats.

The Koch case was headed for trial last spring – just after Bush took over the White House. But then the funniest thing happened, on the very day that the jury was to begin hearing the case.

On April 9, 2001, the Department of Justice announced that it was dropping all charges against Koch Industries and its employees, in exchange for a one-time $20 million fine.

In dollar amounts, the company wound up paying about 5% of what its liability could have been, with no jail time for anyone.

And David and Julie Koch’s investment in the Republican Party paid off by a factor approaching one thousand to one.

Not surprisingly, the Bush Department of Justice made it sound as if it had scored a great environmental victory, as did Texas officials.

(See official DoJ press release: http://www.usdoj.gov:80/opa/pr/2001/April/153enrd.htm/)

But Koch could hardly contain its satisfaction.

Koch spokesman Jay Rosser noted the government did not win convictions for alleged air pollution violations against Koch and the four individuals originally charged.

And more good news was to come for Koch.

The very next month, Koch announced it has reached a payment settlement of its conviction on charges it had underreported its drilling on Federal land. Justice Department officials later confirmed that the settlement had been for $25 million – about one-tenth of what the company was liable to pay.

http://www.kochind.com/articles/380.asp

http://southflorida.bizjournals.com/southflorida/stories/2001/06/04/story6.html

In Part III of “Koch Industries and the Pollution of the Bush White House,” learn how Koch and its Big Oil friends helped the Bush Administration gut environmental laws and regulations – posing a clear and present danger to public health and safety.

KOCH INDUSTRIES AND THE POLLUTION OF THE BUSH WHITE HOUSE

Part I

Koch Industries, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, is the nation’s largest privately-held energy and energy-investment company, with annual revenues of more than $25 billion.

It is one of the world’s premier convicted air and water polluters.

It is also a huge financial backer of the Republican Party and George W. Bush, as well of numerous right-wing think tanks and “grassroots” front groups.

And, in direct return for its gigantic contributions, Koch (pronounced “Coke”) has received extraordinary financial and legal breaks from the Bush Administration – including efforts to gut existing environmental protection laws and regulations.

In 2000, Koch settled a case involving hundreds of oil leaks and millions of gallons spilled oil in six states with a record $35 million payment to the government. And it pleaded guilty in Minnesota to discharging oil into streams, paying an $8 million penalty.

But that was not all. When George W. Bush assumed the presidency, Koch was fighting an even bigger 97-count federal indictment, charging it with gross legal violations in connection with concealing from state and federal authorities the release of 91 metric tons of benzene, a known carcinogen, from its Corpus Christi, Texas, refinery in 1995.

Under Environmental Protection Agency regulations enacted by the Clinton Administration in 1995, the plant was allowed to release only up to six metric tons of benzene, a colorless petroleum byproduct – only 1/16 of what it actually released.

Suddenly, however, in April 2001, the Bush Justice Department reached a deal with Koch, dropping ALL outstanding environmental charges against the company in exchange for a one-time fine of $20 million – a paltry sum considering what the company could have been forced to pay, and no more than chump change for a $25 billion firm.

Even more alarming is the fact that the Bush Administration, with heavy input from Koch Industries and its subsidiaries, has systematically gutted preciselythose provisions of the Clean Air Act , the Clean Water Act, and other environmental laws and regulations that caused Koch such difficulties.

What Enron was to the Bush energy policy, Koch was, and is, to Bush environmental policy, posing an enormous clear and present danger to public health and safety.

It is one of the greatest political scandals in American history, fusing financial corruption, extremist right-wing politics, and the most compromised White House in living memory.

The Background: Oil, Money, & Right-Wing Politics

Koch Industries is the descendent of an oil-and-gas concern founded in 1940 by Fred G. Koch. Koch, was an inventive entrepreneur, whom the company credits with discovering a new method of thermal cracking which opened the way for his fortune-building.

He was also a right-wing extremist – a major contributor to right-wing and antiunion causes, and a founder and member of the national council of the John Birch Society.

The Founding Father:

Fred G. Koch, Oilman, Bircher

Fred’s sons Charles and David inherited the firm – and his right-wing politics as well.

Under the influence of his reading of Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand, Charles became the chief bankroller of the right-wing free-market Libertarian Party in the 1970’s. His brother, David, ran for Vice President on the Libertarian ticket in 1980.

Right-Wing Kingpins, Corrupt Polluters:

Charles and David Koch

The Koches also founded what in Libertarian circles became known (not always affectionately) as the "Kochtopus" – a nation-wide conglomerate of think tanks, front groups, and other organizations, headed by the Koches most auspicious venture, the Cato Institute.

Funding Cato has made the Koches monumental figures in the fashioning of contemporary right-wing Republican ideology, above all in the area of radical deregulation.

Along the way, both Charles and David gained astronomical personal fortunes, enough to get them BOTH on Forbes magazine’s exclusive list of the 50 richest Americans.

With the advent of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, the Koches have felt increasingly at home in the Republican Party – and they and their company have put their money where their mouth is.

Koch Industries: Bush, G.O.P. , Right-Wing Sugar Daddy

On April 10, 2001, the Washington Post's Dan Eggen, writing in connection with the Bush Administration’s dropping of charges against Koch Industries, reported the following:

"The company and its employees donated $800,000 to GOP candidates and organizations during the last election cycle, half of which came from David H. Koch, the firm's executive vice president, according to campaign finance records. Bush received more than $30,000 from Koch Industries and its employees in the presidential race and had received a similar amount since 1995 as governor of Texas, campaign records show."

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in the 2000 cycle, 76% of the Koch Industries PAC’s money went to Republicans, while 100% of its contribution in the presidential contest went to George W. Bush.

And all of David Koch’s personal contributions – totaling roughly half a million dollars -- went to Republican candidates or organizations, including George W. Bush.

But the generosity of Koch Industries and its owners is hardly limited to the G.O.P.

The Koch philanthropic foundations, building on the great success of Cato, supports right-wing causes at every level, including academic research and the recruitment of young scholars to reactionary think tanks, as well as "implementation" groups that attempt to turn these ideas into political realities.

Among the right-wing groups, apart from Cato, supported heavily by the Koch Foundation are Citizens for a Sound Economy (overseen by top Bush family consigliere and political operative, C. Boyden Gray), the Institute for Justice, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Reason Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Landmark Legal Foundation and the Young America's Foundation.

A few brave reporters – very few – have tried to press the White House on its questionable links to Koch Industries and the Koch brothers – but received the usual run-around and clever parsing and double-talk and outright falsehoods from White House press secretary Ari Fleischer.

Note the following exchange, from last May:

White House Press Briefing, May 2, 2000

Q: Ari, last month, Koch Industries, one of the nation's largest oil companies, pled guilty to a felony environmental crime. The Washington Post reported, also last month, that the company and its employees gave $30,000 to President Bush during the Presidential race and a similar amount in 1995 as Governor of Texas when he was running.

Q: -- is the President now willing to give the money back because the company has been convicted of a felony? And does the President have a policy of accepting campaign contributions from convicted felons?

Ari Fleischer: Can you give me a list of who the individuals were who gave the campaign contributions?

Q: David Koch --

Fleischer: And were these individuals convicted, or was it just the company?

Q: The company was convicted --

Fleischer: So, it was not the individuals --

Q.: But the company also gave --

Fleischer: So, it was not the individuals.

Q: The company was convicted of a felony and the company gave money to the --

Fleischer: And therefore every employee of the company is a felon?

Q: Now, wait, wait, wait, wait -- if I could follow up. The company was convicted of a felony. The company gave money to the campaign.

Fleischer: The company gave money to the campaign?

Q: According to the Post, Bush received more than $30,000 from Koch Industries and its employees in the Presidential race and received a similar amount since 1995 as Governor of Texas.

Fleischer: As you are aware, it is illegal to accept corporate contributions in federal campaigns, so therefore, any contributions came from individuals. So, unless you are prepared to say that a company that has a conviction means that all of its employees are felons -- I'd be careful there.

Q: Let me just ask one further follow-up. Does the President have a policy of accepting money from executives of corporate felons?

Fleischer: Again, individuals are free to give money in their own capacity. And it is illegal to accept money from corporations, as you know.

Think that was transparent? Here’s another exchange, from the very next day:

White House Press Briefing, May 3, 2001

Q: Ari, yesterday, I asked you about Koch Industries, which last month pled guilty to a felony environmental crime. The question was – the campaign took money from the company and from the employees, and you said -- it couldn't have taken money from the company, because it's illegal to take money from the company. Which is true, but I went and checked, and in fact, Koch Industries Political Action Committee (PAC) gave $5,000 to the campaign. And the political action committee is controlled by the company. Back to the original question --

Ari Fleischer: That's not accurate.

Q.: It is accurate.

Fleischer: The political action committee is comprised of voluntary contributions from employees.

Q: But the company decides how to spend it.

Fleischer: The political action committee decides how to spend it.

Q: But the company controls the political action committee.

Fleischer: It's not corporate -- the political action committee is a voluntary committee - Is there a question?

Q: Yes, there is a question -- which I think you dodged yesterday --given that this money came from what is now a convicted corporate felon, does the President have a policy on accepting money from convicted felons, and should he give it back at least to the PAC, which is controlled by the company?

Fleischer: Again, you are making a tie between individuals and corporations. That's not the case. Corporations cannot give campaign contributions and the campaign did not receive corporate contributions.

Q: Excuse me, could I follow up, Ari?

No follow up allowed.

As it happens, Ari was dodging matters a lot more serious that whether the Bush campaign took money from the convicted polluter Koch Industries.

A lot more serious.

So much for the cash. Next time, the carry.

In Part II of “Koch Industries and the Pollution of the Bush White House,” learn how Koch, bankroller for the G.O.P. free-market right and for George W. Bush, cashed in its chips – big time – in 2001.

Sources:

http://www.kochind.com/about/history.asp

http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/Pre_96/April95/213.txt.html

Dan Eggen, “Oil Company Agrees to Pay $20 Million In Fines,” Washington Post. April 10, 2001.

Dan Morgan and Juliet Eilperin, “Campaign Gifts, Lobbying Built Enron's Power In Washington,” December 25, 2001.

http://commondreams.org/headlines01/0502-04.htm

http://commondreams.org/headlines01/0503-03.htm

http://www.mediatransparency.org/funders/koch_family_foundations.htm

http://www.potomac-inc.org/seduclft.html

http://www.pfaw.org/issues/democracy/federalist/funding.shtml

Robert Parry, "D(OIL)E: What wouldn't Bob Do for Koch Oil?" The Nation, August 26, 1996.

www.cato.org//about/timeline.html.

**MWO Home**

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/

Case Study: The Koch-funded “ClimateGate” Echo Chamber

On this page

Page - March 29, 2010

In November 2009, anonymous hackers illegally obtained and disseminated thousands of personal emails from climate scientists housed on the server of the University of East Anglia. The emails spanned 13 years of correspondence and a handful of selected emails were taken out of context by a number of climate-denier organizations. These organizations, many part of the Koch Web, claim the emails prove a “conspiracy” of scientists and cast doubt on the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change.

This incident, dubbed "ClimateGate" by climate-denier groups, has been distorted and repeated many times by conservative media and blogs since late November 2009. Twenty organizations, roughly half of the Koch-funded groups profiled in this report, have contributed to the "ClimateGate" echo chamber. Among the most vocal groups are organizations that received over $1,000,000 from Koch foundations since 2005, including Americans for Prosperity, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute.

Americans For Prosperity (received over $5 million from Koch since 2005) hosted a live webcast from Copenhagen on Dec 9th as part of their "Hot Air Tour," using the "ClimateGate" emails as a reason to prevent passage of any progressive global warming policy. During the webcast, Steve Lonegan, AFP's New Jersey Director, said "ClimateGate" could have uncovered "the biggest hoax our world has ever seen" and vows not to allow any climate bill to pass the US Senate. Several members of the Copenhagen youth delegation crashed the AFP event and were angrily called "Hitler Youth" by AFP guest speaker and well known climate denier Lord Christopher Monckton. In addition to the Copenhagen webcast, AFP mentions "ClimateGate" in many blog posts, including in their protest of the EPA CO2 endangerment finding.

The Heritage Foundation (received over $1 million from Koch since 2005) has posted several articles on its website regarding "ClimateGate." The blogs run the gamut of possible climate-denier angles on the incident, ranging from conspiracy accusations , to a history of imagined climate scandals, to effects on world politics, to supposed economic consequences from climate legislation.

The Cato Institute (received over $1 million in grants from Koch since 2005) is the front-group for climate-denier Patrick Michaels, who has been a vocal spokesperson regarding "ClimateGate". Within two weeks following the email breach at East Anglia University, Patrick Michaels had appeared in over twenty media interviews on shows including CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, NBC's Nightly News, FOX's Fox & Friends, C-SPAN's Washington Journal, and BBC's Have Your Say. Michaels, taking one line of an illegally-obtained email out of context, has claimed the scientists have committed a "capital crime" and their actions are "akin to filtering what goes in the bible."

In addition to AFP, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute, about half of the Koch-funded climate denial groups detailed in this report contributed to the "ClimateGate" misinformation echo chamber, including:

American Enterprise Institute

Americans for Tax Reform

Capital Research Center

Fraser Institute

George C Marshall Institute

Goldwater Institute

Independent Women's Forum

John Locke Foundation

Mackinac Center

Media Research Center

Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy

Reason Foundation

State Policy Network

Texas Public Policy Foundation

Competitive Enterprise Institute

FreedomWorks

Heartland Institute

Koch think tanks

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This article is work in progress.

Koch Industries is the second largest privately-held company in the United States. Its owners, brothers Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch, have set up, developed and supported a number of influential right-wing think tanks since 1977.

Koch timeline

1970s - Center for Market Processes (predecessor to the Mercatus Center) founded by Rich Fink
1977 - Cato Institute founded
1978 - Reason Foundation founded
1984 - Citizens for a Sound Economy (now FreedomWorks) and Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation (now Americans For Prosperity) founded by Rich Fink
1989 - CSEF rescues and restructures Tax Foundation
1991 - Institute for Justice founded with seed money from Charles G. Koch
1999 - Mercatus Center first emerges as a brand from what was Center for Market Processes
2003 - Independent Women's Forum affiliates with Citizens for a Sound Economy
2003 - CSE and CSEF split; CSEF becomes Americans For Prosperity
2004 - CSE and Empower America merge to become FreedomWorks

Koch links to expand on

Reason Foundation (co-founder?)
George Mason University ? - hosts lots of Koch things, and heavily funded by Koch
Earthwatch Institute ?
Instutite for Humane Studies (? - Koch board member; Mercatus is "sister institute; affiliated with George Mason)
Aspen Institute ? - Koch board member
Progress and Freedom Foundation ?
Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment and the Federalist Society are both said to be substantially Koch-funded

Koch Industries and Think Thank crossovers

A number of individuals work or have worked for both Koch Industries and associated think tanks. These include:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Koch_think_tanks

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Koch_think_tanks"

Categories: Think tanks | United States

THE MULTIBILLIONAIRE BROTH-ers not only run the nation's largest private energy company, they rival Exxon in funding the front groups that spread disinformation about the dangers of climate change. Over the years, the Kochs and their foundations have lavished millions on climate deniers at the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute, which Charles founded in 1977. Cato, in turn, supports the work of Patrick Michaels, a leading climate denier who attempts to discredit the international scientific consensus on global warming while accepting money from coal companies.As author Thomas Frank observes in What's the Matter With Kansas?, "Koch money subsidizes the mass production of bad ideas."

One major recipient of Koch cash is Americans for Prosperity, where David chairs the foundation's board. In addition to fomenting last summer's town-hall brawls over health care reform, AFP sponsored a "Hot Air Tour" on climate change, deploying a manned balloon at 75 events for the purpose of "Exposing the Ballooning Costs of Global Warming Hysteria." At the events, the group's president, Tim Phillips, grossly exaggerated the costs of climate legislation, calling it a trillion-dollar tax on American families.

Last October, at an AFP summit attended by David Koch, the assembled Tea Partiers screened a climate-denial film that accused advocates like Al Gore of wanting to take civilization "back to the Dark Ages and the Black Plague." Such events, Koch proclaimed, "bring to reality the vision" of "fighting for the economic freedoms that made our nation the most prosperous society in history." Last year, seeking to defend its own prosperity against a carbon-capped future, Koch Industries spent more than $8.5 million on lobbying.

Front group for polluting billionaires wastes $140K on world’s dumbest global warming denier ads

February 17, 2009

Brad Johnson at WonkRoom has documented how Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is a front group for billionaire polluters. In this post, first published here, he dissects what is probably the most idiotic climate inactivist ad ever seen. Perhaps I should create a new category “unintentional humor.”

As Australia burns, animals are going extinct, and freak weather devastates our nation’s heartland, the propaganda arm of Koch Industries continues its bizarre denial of global warming. The multi-billion-dollar international polluter’s Americans for Prosperity “has launched a $140,000 advertising blitz in Virginia” telling the American public that corrupt environmentalists, not billionaire right-wing oil and coal men, are manipulating Congress and the media. According to AFP, these ads “expose the hypocrisy and outrageous economic costs of so-called global warming regulations, taxes, and green energy plans.” One of these ads portrays an “eco-hypocrite” with “three homes and five cars”:

Hey there, I’m Carlton, the wealthy eco-hypocrite. I inherited my money and attended fancy schools. I own three homes and five cars, but always talk with my rich friends about saving the planet. And I want Congress to spend billions on programs in the name of global warming and green energy. Even if it causes massive unemployment, higher energy bills, and digs people like you even deeper into the recession. Who knows, maybe I’ll even make money off of it!

Watch it:

In reality, it is the backers of Americans for Prosperity who are wine-sipping, ballet-loving trust-fund elites, a thousand times more wealthy than the likes of “eco-hypocrite” Al Gore. Charles and David Koch are the scions of Koch Industries, founded as an oil refining business by their father Fred Koch. Fred Koch also helped found the John Birch Society, an ultraconservative organization that believed the U.S. government was controlled by a traitorous cabal of Communist sympathizers.

AFP founder David Koch, with a net worth of about $17 billion, is the richest man in New York City, owning the Fifth Avenue apartment once occupied by Jackie O, a home in the Hamptons, an Aspen retreat, and the Villa Del Sarmiento in Palm Beach. He recently pledged $100 million to the Lincoln Center theater where the New York City Ballet and City Opera perform. In return, the David H. Koch theater will join the American Museum of Natural History’s David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing ($20 million), the Johns Hopkins University’s David H. Koch Cancer Research Building ($20 million), and MIT’s David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research ($100 million) in being named after this billionaire polluter. Koch enjoys not just ballet and fine art but big game hunts, whose kills he features in his Aspen ski chalet:

Mr. Koch’s home in Aspen, Colo., famous for its New Year’s Eve parties in his bachelor days, boasts trophies from big-game hunts with his father in Botswana and Mozambique. A pair of 130-pound Ugandan elephant tusks frames the dining room.

David’s brother Charles Koch, also a radical right-wing libertarian, founded the Cato Institute and launched the Mercatus Center at George Mason University to dismantle environmental regulations that limit the excesses of his private pollution corporation.

The third Koch brother, William I. Koch, split from Koch Industries to set up his own energy company. Bill Koch, worth only about $2 billion, is famed for his competitive yachting and being a “discerning speculator in his world-class collections of art, wine, and firearms.” His $10-million wine collection was marred by the purchase of $500,000 in counterfeit Chateau Lafite that were supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson.

Well, at least they aren’t hypocrites.

Update At Article XI, Miles Grant writes:

I’m just dumbfounded they’d think we’re this, well, dumb. Is this guy supposed to be a rich snob, a surfer dude, or some combination – Spicoli with a trust fund? And what’s he eating, cheese and crackers? That’s snobby rich people food? You’d think Americans for Prosperity, with millions rolling in every year, would be able to buy some better propaganda for its buddies in the dirty fossil fuel industry.

Update CORRECTION: In their ads, AFP claims ” But just this summer, they were telling reporters they weren’t deniers:

“Annie Patnaude, the organization’s communications director, said the group does not disagree with the science behind global warming, but that people should look at the policies behind bills such as the Lieberman-Warner bill.” *Kalamazoo Gazette*, [8/15/08]

So I guess they are hypocrites.

UPDATE: Okay, final update. I contacted Phil Kerpin at Americans for Prosperity, who said that the view expressed in their ad that global warming is a hoax “is not our position.” After saying that Americans for Prosperity doesn’t “take a position on the science,” he admitted that they “do believe there is a scientific debate” as to whether man-made global warming exists.

UPDATE 2: Okay, final final update: Americans for Prosperity has taken down the blog post announcing the ads and removed them from YouTube.

UPDATE 2/12: Ads and the AFP blog post have been restored (here).

– Brad J.