Ellender, P

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koch enforcer

HQ occupied 7/14?

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mayer gdk $:

PR: Philip one P ellender 2 l koch ind PR plays rough → kochfacts www ad hom attacks on reporters inc mayer (lobby firm ex congr JC Watts); Michael Goldfarb gop pol op

Vigilant resources howard Safir nyc police comm under giuliani (adam son); led by nancy pfotenhauer; jon strong at dailer caller plagiarism; algor to find similar phrases? Found no dirt on life so #2. Tmed to ~ NYer sat;l mag award. Ed Crane made fun of MBM → shares, co fdr Cato, later forced out, nancy p and Kevin gentry before added to bd; wanted intel ammo for AFP not academic.

UPDATE:April 28 — The legislation passed out of the Ways and Means Committee on a party line vote with all Republicans in support and Democrats in opposition. Prior to the vote, committee members were sent another letter in support of the bill. This letter came from Phillip Ellender, president of Koch Public Sector, the official lobbying and PR arm of the Koch brothers.

PREVIOUSLY:

WASHINGTON — Republicans in Congress are trying to decrease the already scant amount of disclosure for politically-active nonprofits — known as dark money groups. The legislative effort is unsurprisingly supported by the main political arm of the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) is expected to introduce a bill in the Ways and Means Committee that would eliminate the requirement for nonprofits to make a non-public disclosure of their donors to the IRS when they file their annual tax forms. The donor disclosures — known as the Schedule B report — are not released to the public, but the list of donation amounts with the donor names redacted are released.

The bill is supported by Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the dark money donor hub run by the Koch brothers. The Kochs operate a vast political empire that mostly operates through nonprofit organizations that do not disclose their donations.

“This bill is an important first step toward reaffirming Americans’ right to free speech while protecting them from threats and intimidation because of their personal beliefs,” Mark Holden, Freedom Partners chairman and lead lobbyist for Koch Industries, said in a statement.

Roskam’s legislation comes amid a court case involving the donor list of another Koch brothers outfit, Americans for Prosperity Foundation.California attorney general Kamala Harris had sought the donor list of the organization for non-public review to ensure that it was abiding by California laws. A federal court, however, agreed on April 21 with Americans for Prosperity Foundation’s argument that this was a violation of its First Amendment rights.

Campaign finance reform and transparency proponents issued a letter calling on members of the Ways and Means Committee to oppose Roskam’s bill. Those backing the letter include Brennan Center for Justice, Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause, CREW, Democracy 21, Public Citizen, Sunlight Foundation and Rootstrikers.

“Eliminating the existing requirement for disclosure to the IRS of donations to 501(c)(4) “social welfare” groups would open the door wide for secret, unaccountable money from foreign governments, foreign corporations and foreign individuals to be illegally laundered into federal elections through 501(c)(4) groups,” the letter reads.

ICN:

The Kochs and Keystone XL

InsideClimate fails to make its case about brothers’ interest in the pipeline—but it should keep trying

By Curtis Brainard

Koch Industries, a giant oil and energy conglomerate, has InsideClimate News, a four-year-old online news startup, in its crosshairs.

In October, the company launched an online ad campaign via Google, Facebook, and its KochFacts.comwebsite (which rebuts coverage it finds unsatisfactory) claiming that InsideClimate “misleads readers and asserts outright falsehoods” about Koch’s interest in the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. The pipeline would transport crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to Gulf Coast refineries in the US, and has drawn vigorous opposition from environmentalists. Koch’s ads feature a jaundiced image InsideClimate’s founder and publisher, David Sassoon, calling him the “activist/owner” of the site. Sassoon calls the ads “media intimidation.”

It is not the first time that Koch Industries—one of the largest private companies in the country—has targeted a news outlet. In recent months, the company has employed a nearly identical strategy to criticize reporting by Bloomberg News and the Center for Public Integrity. InsideClimate’s battle with the firm is more complicated than a hackneyed David-and-Goliath story, however, revealing both the strengths and weaknesses of a young news site trying to prove its mettle.

Round One

The saga began with an investigative article by Sassoon that InsideClimate News (then called SolveClimate News) published last February. Based on publicly available records, the site reported that “Koch Industries is already responsible for close to 25 percent of the oil sands crude that is imported into the United States, and is well-positioned to benefit from increasing Canadian oil imports.”

Koch Industries owns an Alberta-based subsidiary called Flint Hills Resources Canada LP, whose website says it is “among Canada’s largest crude oil purchasers, shippers, and exporters.” According to InsideClimate, it “supplies about 250,000 barrels of tar sands oil a day to a heavy oil refinery in Minnesota, also owned by the Koch brothers,” and “operates a crude oil terminal in Hardisty, Alberta, the starting point of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.”

“Although the pipeline, if approved, would increase the supply of oil reaching the U.S., a 2009 market analysis conducted by TransCanada, builder of the pipeline, forecast higher prices,” InsideClimate reported. “The analysis, which TransCanada conducted as part of its Canadian permit application, projected that prices would increase about $3 per barrel as a result of the pipeline,” putting at least a $2 billion in Canadian oil producers’ pockets.

“Given its deep involvement in the Canadian petroleum industry, the Koch brothers’ operation stands to snare some of the windfall,” Sassoon concluded.

Reuters and other major outlets syndicated the article, which eventually caught the attention of Representative Henry Waxman. His staff contacted Koch Industries to ask about its role in the Keystone XL pipeline and Canadian tar sands. It did not receive satisfactory answers, however, so the California Democrat sent a letter to leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in May urging them “to request documents from Koch Industries related to the company’s interest in Canadian tar sands and the extent to which it will benefit if the Keystone XL pipeline is constructed.”

In the letter, Waxman described his staff’s interaction with the company:

The Koch representatives said that the Keystone XL pipeline has “nothing to do with any of our businesses” and that Koch had “no financial interest” in the pipeline. They also stated that the company neither supports nor opposes the legislation we will be considering next week.

However, Koch’s representatives refused to answer questions about Koch’s activities or interests in the Canadian tar sands.They refused to confirm or deny reports that the company is developing tar sand projects. They also refused to say whether Koch Industries owns—through a wholly owned subsidiary—a terminal involved in the tar sands business.

There appears to be a significant discrepancy between the published reports that Koch Industries would be “big winners” if the pipeline is approved and the statement of the Koch representatives that the pipeline has “nothing to do” with Koch’s businesses. We do not presume that Koch’s representations are inaccurate. But we were dismayed by the company’s lack of candor in responding to staff’s questions and believe additional inquiry is warranted.

Five days later, InsideClimate News ran an article by Elizabeth McGowan headlined, “Koch Bros. Accused of Stonewalling Congress on Their Keystone XL Pipeline Interest.” When Reuters carried that piece, too, the company decided it was time to go on the offensive.

Phillip Ellender, whom Politico called “the Koch brothers’ enforcer” in a June profile, sent an e-mail to the wire service’s managing editor, Jack Reernick in May, which began:

For the second time in recent weeks, Reuters has permitted an agenda-driven advocacy organization, SolveClimate [referring to InsideClimate’s original name], to run an article on your news agency about Koch Industries that is factually inaccurate and beneath Reuters’ standards.

The letter went on to say that Koch had no financial stake in Keystone XL, that it was not a proposed shipper or customer of oil delivered by the pipeline, and that it had taken no position on the legislative proposal to construct the pipeline. It also called InsideClimate “a self-described advocacy organization, which is also easily discerned from the articles since they are littered with opinionated assertions about what it thinks the administration and Congress ought to do or not do.”

Richard Baum, Reuters’s general manager for New York and Canada replied:

We take feeds from several news organizations on the condition that they uphold Reuters standards. We’re satisfied that SolveClimate, which is a news organization, meets those. I have in particular checked that they contact companies for comment. SolveClimate says they have tried to get comment from you repeatedly without success.

Baum added that it was Reuters’s policy to direct complaints about “third-party content” to those who supplied it.

Ellender wrote back expressing dismay at Baum’s response. A few days later, according to the account laid out at Kochfacts.com, he followed up with another e-mail that laid out a variety of specific complaints about Sassoon. They included Sassoon’s ownership of Science First, Inc., which Sassoon once described on his LinkedIn page as a “communications consulting practice devoted to helping organizations working in the public interest to advance their agendas”; the fact that Science First received funding from The Energy Foundation (which supports actions to address climate change); and the fact that Sassoon had written a report for Greenpeace and what Ellender described as “advocacy articles” for The Huffington Post and National Geographic.

“Mr. Sassoon seems to have an active financial relationship with numerous groups that he is reporting on in your pages—and yet he is being presented to Reuters readers as an objective, legitimate news source,” Ellender concluded. “He also takes grants from advocacy groups with the explicit goal of helping advance their environmental agenda—a fact that is being obscured from Reuters readers.”

Baum rejected nearly all of Ellender’s contentions, writing that Sassoon had assured him that since Reuters.com began publishing stories from SolveClimate in 2010, neither Sassoon nor Science First had been involved in any business other than SolveClimate, and that Science First “is a shell company he uses exclusively as the legal entity of SolveClimate.” Baum pointed out that The Energy Foundation described its grant to SolveClimate as supporting “objective, nonpartisan reporting of climate and energy issues in 2010 midterms.”

With regard to Sassoon’s other writings, Baum said the work for Greenpeace and The Huffington Post predated his relationship with Reuters:

Mr Sassoon says that in-between that period and the start of the Reuters.com relationship he decided to focus his work exclusively on building up SolveClimate as a non-partisan organization. I think he made a subsequent misstep with the National Geographic blog post that you mention, but not a fatal one. The post was published this year and concerns an activist who at the time was awaiting trial, not convicted. It was an interesting story covered by many media outlets. This post was not written in a form that would have been published on Reuters.com, but then of course it wasn’t.

The question for us is, does it significantly undermine our confidence in his ability to run a non-partisan news organization? The answer is no. All journalists engaged in non-partisan reporting must be able to leave their personal political views at their front door when they go to work. Our confidence that Mr. Sassoon’s staff do that remains and has been strengthened by his recent appointment of a new executive editor. In September, CJR [wrote about InsideClimate’s decision to hire Susan White, a former senior editor at ProPublica.]

Ellender was displeased, vowing that, “To the extent that coverage by SolveClimate about us appears on Reuters, we intend to point out the conflicts of interest and also that Reuters is apparently tolerating them. And when that coverage is inaccurate or slanted, we will take all necessary action, including alerting readers that the reporting is unreliable and agenda-driven.”

Round Two

Ellender carried through on his promise. On October 5, InsideClimate and its syndication partners ran an article by Stacy Feldman, which revealed that Flint Hills Resources, Koch’s Alberta-based subsidiary, had told Canadian regulators in 2009 that it had “a direct and substantial interest in the application” to build Keystone XL.

Canada’s National Energy Board was holding hearings that led to its 2010 approval of its portion of the pipeline. Flint Hills Resources applied for and won what is known as “intervener status” in the hearings, stating that because it was “among Canada’s largest crude oil purchasers, shippers and exporters, coordinating supply for its refinery in Pine Bend, Minnesota … [it had] “a direct and substantial interest in the application” to build the pipeline.

On Capitol Hill, the article prompted Waxman, whose first request that the Energy and Commerce Committee investigate Koch’s interest in Keystone XL was rebuffed, to repeat his plea. “There appears to be a direct contradiction between what Koch representatives told me and the assertion by a Koch subsidiary that it ‘has a direct and substantial interest’ in the Keystone XL pipeline,” he wrote in a letter to committee leaders. Koch Industries fired back almost immediately in a post at KochFacts.com, which read:

We have detailed publicly on numerous occasions (and to InsideClimate directly) why Flint Hills Resources Canada LP, a Koch subsidiary, applied for “intervener” status with the Canadian National Energy Board. An intervener in a NEB proceeding is entitled to gain access to information about the progress of a particular matter, in this case the “application” concerning the Keystone XL Pipeline project. Many others also applied and were granted intervener status in exactly the same way — including individual citizens, members of various First Nation groups, businesses, and environmental activists similar to Mr. Sassoon and InsideClimate.

… When a party applies to be an intervener, they formally state that they have an “interest” in the application that is being considered. That use of the word “interest” means, by first definition, curious or paying attention. But InsideClimate distorts that meaning as if it meant a financial interest or stake — a secondary but altogether different meaning of the word.

Around the same time that Kochfacts.com posted this missive, Koch launched its Google and Facebook ad campaign against Sassoon and InsideClimate.

Split Decision

Do Koch’s actions amount to media intimidation? Yes and no. InsideClimate deserves immense credit for digging where no other news outlet thought to dig. It exhibited the kind of dogged,investigative instinct that is too often lacking these days among its peers in the “mainstream media,” drawing Congressional attention in the process. But it failed to make its case.

The assertion in Sassoon’s February article that the Koch brothers are “positioned to be big winners” if the pipeline is approved is based on two pieces of circumstantial evidence: Koch’s role as a major player in Canadian oil industry and the 2009 market analysis that Keystone XL would drive up oil prices. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong. In fact, he’s probably right that Koch will benefit financially if the pipeline is built. But believing that and proving it—and establishing that Koch will benefit in a way that really matters—are two different things and it’s a distinction that gets to the heart of the standards of good journalism.

InsideClimate never made it clear who wrote the “market analysis” or what it was. Sassoon’s story, which linked to an Associated Press article that mentioned it, says it was “conducted by” TransCanada, while Feldman’s piece says it was “conducted for” TransCanada. In fact, the market analysis was part of the application to build and operate Keystone XL that TransCanada submitted to Canada’s National Energy Board in February 2009, and the original document is available in the board’s database. InsideClimate misrepresents what that document says in a small, but significant, way.

Sassoon reported that the estimated price spike crude would send at least $2 billion “from American consumers to Canadian and multinational oil interests.” What it actually says is that the spike would increase the revenue of the Canadian producing industry.

Feldman was clear about this in her piece, but tacked on another sentence that is problematic: “But the entire industry—including the refineries and shipping businesses where Koch Industries has concentrated its efforts—would also profit.” Feldman supports the statement with a quote from Danielle Droitsch, a senior adviser to the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental organization, saying that, “Keystone XL is about the whole industry.” That may be true in some senses, but it’s still a generalization. The idea that there will be no losers in the oil industry—thateverybody will profit—is implausible.

And even if the entire oil industry is “well positioned” to benefit from Keystone XL’s approval, the question becomes, why focus on Koch? This was an issue that Waxman faced on Capitol Hill. When House Republicans rebuffed his request to investigate Koch, “he offered to expand his investigation to include all energy companies that might benefit from Keystone XL so as not to single out Koch,” InsideClimate reported.

The news site’s justification for the special attention was that if the Obama administration approves the project, the president could unwittingly help his adversaries. A quarter of Sassoon’s February article was devoted to rehashing the Koch brothers’ “war” on Obama and, according to the third paragraph:

What’s been left out of the ferocious debate over the pipeline, however, is the prospect that if president Obama allows a permit for the Keystone XL to be granted, he would be handing a big victory and great financial opportunity to Charles and David Koch, his bitterest political enemies and among the most powerful opponents of his clean economy agenda.

It is true that the Koch brothers have been huge boosters of conservative politicians and opponents of liberal ones. They are also, as InsideClimate pointed out, “the most powerful opponents of his clean economy agenda,” so it makes sense to investigate their interest in Keystone XL. But without proof that the company will profit directly or inordinately from the pipeline—or more specific information about the “victory and opportunity” it would confer—the political frame seems weak.

The evidence that Feldman presented in her October article—Flint Hills Resources’ statement that it had “direct and substantial interest in the application” to build pipeline—did little to help InsideClimate’s case. The application for “intervener status” was newsworthy because it contradicted Koch’s statement to Waxman that Keystone XL had “nothing to do with any of our businesses.” Yet the contradiction was mild, and Feldman’s article was remiss for not explaining the relatively innocuous context of what it means to be an “intervener,” that the language Koch used is fairly standard, and the fact that groups like the Sierra Club also applied for, and received, intervener status.

These quibbles notwithstanding, Koch’s suggestion to Reuters (via Ellender’s e-mails) and to readers (via the online ad campaign) that InsideClimate News is a deceptive advocacy site that ought to be abandoned is spurious and unwarranted, and Reuters should be commended for defending the integrity of its content partner.

:{:{:{The shortcomings in InsideClimate’s work are those of a young news site flexing new muscles in effort to establish itself as a major contributor to American journalism. And journalism it is. There are no correctable mistakes in InsideClimate’s work. The flaws in its articles are errors of omission, tone, and tenor. They should be remedied in future coverage, but InsideClimate should also keep pursuing its investigative instincts.

}:}:}:

hhmn

LAT coverage, incl pressure employee vote 45K

http://articles.latimes.com/keyword/koch-industries

“Koch has not taken a position on the legislative tactic of tying the continuing resolution to defunding ObamaCare nor have we lobbied on legislative provisions defunding ObamaCare,” Philip Ellender, Koch’s government and public affairs president, wrote in a letter to Senate lawmakers Wednesday.

Koch Industries is a conglomerate of companies including Dixie Cups, Lycra and Brawny paper towels — all owned by the billionaire Koch brothers.

Charles and David Koch, a recent New York Times report says, have been funneling money into the GOP’s effort to destroy President Obama’s healthcare law. They have been major backers of the Tea Party movement, which has led the push to defund ObamaCare in Congress.

Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, a group linked to the Koch brothers, has paid more than $200 million to groups working to defund the law, the report says. But it also adds the group hasn’t promoted the fight itself.

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/327449-koch-industries-to-senators-we-havent-lobbied-to-defund-obamacare#ixzz36Kn7fq4N

Philip Ellender: The Kochs' unlikely Democratic enforcer

By: Kenneth P. Vogel

June 14, 2011 01:10 AM EDT

Back when Philip Ellender was getting started in Louisiana, the Koch brothers’ enforcer wondered whether he had the right stuff for the cutthroat world of politics.

“Sometimes I wish I was more assertive and more of a bulldog,” he told an interviewer in 1994, when his résumé looked more like that of a Democratic environmentalist than the key operative for the billionaire industrialists he would later become.

“What’s that quote about bees and honey? ‘You can attract more bees with honey?’ I tend toward that philosophy, and sometimes I need to have a little more bulldog in me.”

These days, Ellender, 49, is serving up a lot more bulldog than honey for Charles and David Koch, crafting and directing a sharp-edged pushback against critics of their business interests and conservative politics with tactics that have helped cement the view that the Kochs play rough.

While the Koch brothers’ conservative donor conferences and support of the political group Americans for Prosperity have drawn extensive scrutiny in the past year, Ellender is part of a low-profile Koch inner circle that includes Richard Fink, a former academic who sits on the boards of Koch-funded nonprofits, and Mark Holden, Koch Industries’ top lawyer, and that is more directly involved in carrying out the Kochs’ legislative and political agenda.

As co-president of Koch Companies Public Sector, set up in 2009 to handle government, public and legal affairs for the Kochs’ privately held oil, chemical and consumer products empire, Ellender, based in Atlanta, is in charge of the Kochs’ multimillion-dollar lobbying operation as well as the response to what he calls “an orchestrated campaign against Koch that has been enthusiastically supported and aided by some in the media.”

“I would like to request some explanation for how Reuters justifies such obviously distorted and agenda-driven copy to be presented to its readers as though it’s actual, hard news,” Ellender wrote late last month in a typical missive to a news outlet, this one questioning a decision by the news service to run a pair of stories by an environmentalist press outfit called SolveClimate News.

YES MEN? After an anonymous group of environmentalists staged an elaborate prank late last year suggesting Koch Industries had changed its skeptical stance toward climate change, Koch brought a lawsuit in late December seeking $100,000 in damages.

“It’s sort of like using a bazooka to get at a fly,” asserted Deepak Gupta, a lawyer for the watchdog group Public Citizen, who represented the pranksters in the suit, which was thrown out last month by a federal judge.

Although the Kochs’ influence in the world of business and conservative politics is not anything new, they traditionally functioned outside the spotlight. But in the past few years — a period that coincides with Ellender’s time at the helm of Koch Companies Public Sector — the brothers have found themselves in a contentious and high-profile tug of war over their image.

Under Ellender’s watch, Koch Industries has assembled a team of crisis communications professionals with experience working for top Republicans, including Sarah Palin and Arnold Schwarzenegger, commissioned polling to monitor any damage to their business interests and launched a website called KochFacts that picks fights with reporters and media outlets in a way that is rare for a major company.

In response to liberal attacks portraying the Kochs as archconservatives pushing a policy agenda that boosts their businesses — a criticism echoed by a fundraising appeal last week from President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign — Ellender and his associates have tried to cast the brothers as free-market enthusiasts vilified for trying to increase economic opportunity by stripping away market-hindering regulation.

But despite the attention that now surrounds it, relatively little is known about Koch Industries, a privately held company, the brothers who own it or the executives who run it. And Ellender is a key part of the Koch enigma.

The great-nephew of the late Democratic Sen. Allen Ellender of Louisiana, Ellender’s career before joining the Kochs was mostly spent working for Democrats and environmental groups in his native Louisiana. }:He is still registered to vote as a Democrat and remains on the board of the Nature Conservancy chapter in his adopted home state of Georgia.

In an email interview, Ellender rejected the idea that there is any inconsistency between his political background and his job with Koch. Describing himself as “a classical liberal,” Ellender said he has never been as committed to a political party as to a small-government, free-enterprise ideology that matches precisely the one espoused by the Kochs.

And he said he favors environmental regulations based on “sound science and economic cost-benefit analysis” but never supported proposals like the cap-and-trade legislation backed by Nature Conservancy and opposed by many conservatives.

Still, his role with the Kochs leaves some who knew him in Louisiana searching for explanations.

“I’m actually a little bit disappointed that Philip works for the Koch brothers, because he seemed to me to be one of the good guys,” said Melissa Flournoy, a former Democratic state representative who in the early 1990s worked with Ellender at the Council for A Better Louisiana, a nonpartisan public interest group in Baton Rouge, and said she would have considered him “a progressive.”

George C. Kennedy, a veteran Louisiana political consultant who worked with Ellender on a Democratic campaign, said his politics have evolved but in a way that reflects the region as a whole.

“If you look at the story of Phil Ellender, you’re going to see a metaphor for the entire sea change of politics among elites and movers and shakers in the Deep South,” Kennedy said. “You’re going to see a guy who came up with a Democratic heritage, some money and influence, who evolved as a young man into a hard-right conservative.”

Ellender got his start in politics working on the 1987 gubernatorial campaign of Buddy Roemer, an up-and-coming young Democratic congressman running as a reform-minded environmentalist who later became a Republican. After Roemer won, he appointed Ellender to the state Mineral Board, which leases state lands and water-bottoms to oil companies for drilling.

Ellender resigned two years later out of his concern over a potential conflict with his work for the Nature Conservancy — for which he was raising money, including from some of the same oil companies to which the Mineral Board leased drilling rights.

“In order to maintain the highest standards of accountability that you have instituted in public service, and in order to maintain the credibility of myself, your administration, and The Nature Conservancy, I have concluded that the best solution is for me to resign,” Ellender wrote in 1990 letter to Roemer.

Ellender went on to work for the Council for A Better Louisiana and briefly for Roy Fletcher, a prominent Louisiana-based political consultant who worked for Democrats and Republicans, before being hired in 1994 by a Baton Rouge lobbying firm, Harris, DeVille & Associates. It guided Koch through tricky situations with environmental groups, local press and government permitting agencies.

Koch hired Ellender full time in 1998, and he helped the company win support from environmental groups — and deal with an angry neighbor or two — en route to getting approval for an $85 million gas line project. Later, he handled public relations surrounding the $55 million the company paid in settlements, fines and remediation for crude oil spills across several Southern states and charges it covered up massive environmental :{violations:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: at a Texas plant.

Just before the Texas settlement was reached in 2001, Ellender pledged to “aggressively defend our company” and its accused employees “at an incredible expense” against what he called “unjust criminal prosecution.” And he stressed that “the government does have unlimited resources in pursuing matters like this.”

Nancy Roberts, a close friend from Ellender’s Baton Rouge days, said Ellender was particularly skilled at brokering agreement between seemingly conflicting factions like environmentalists and industry. Roberts – who in the early 1990s appointed Ellender to the board of the non-profit she runs, then called Friends of Environmental Education – said “Philip is the kind of guy who can negotiate and build consensus around something.”

But compromise and consensus don’t appear to be the driving principles of the national PR strategy Ellender has implemented at Koch.

After the nonprofit media outlet Center for Public Integrity published a 4,000-word report by reporter Jack Farrell on Koch’s lobbying operation, the response was quick.

“Koch Confronts CPI: Bias, hidden agenda, at Center for Public Integrity,” read a Facebook ad placed by Koch as part of an online advertising campaign challenging the accuracy of specific suggestions in the center’s report and presenting Koch’s lobbying and advocacy as “based on principles of economic freedom and property rights that are core values recognized and held by the majority of Americans.” The rebuttal questioned Farrell’s objectivity and alleged an inherent bias in the center’s funding from George Soros’s Open Society Institute, which also bankrolls a handful of advocacy groups that have led the left’s campaign against the Kochs.

KochFacts also has questioned the integrity and motives of media outlets and adversaries ranging from The New York Times and The New Yorker to POLITICO — even a University of Kansas political science professor has felt Ellender’s bite.

The center’s executive director, Bill Buzenberg, described the KochFacts campaign against Farrell’s story as an “ad hominem attack on a reporter who was objectively doing his job” and an effort “to use advertising to bully and chill a free press.”

Ellender said the mission of KochFacts is “to set the record straight and to communicate the truth about our company when news stories are factually incorrect or misleading.”}:

He declined to comment on his 1994 quote about wanting to be more of a bulldog but said “I think honest debate in a civil manner is good.”

As for his ties to the Nature Conservancy, he said he has “openly expressed my disagreement” with its support for legislation that Koch and Americans for Prosperity oppose that would cap carbon emissions and set up a market-based trading system for emission credits.

“A disagreement on one issue does not necessarily foreclose me from working with a group on the many other issues we share an aligned interest and point of view,” he said.

Koch brothers slam 'guy who makes obscene gestures with a monkey'

Posted by

CNN Political Unit

(CNN) - Actor Zach Galifianakis may be known for his less-than family-friendly sense of humor, but billionaires David and Charles Koch demonstrated Tuesday they don't find him so funny.

The comedian is co-starring with Will Ferrell in the upcoming comedy, "The Campaign," which features a pair of wealthy donors called the "Motch brothers," played by Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow.

– Follow the Ticker on Twitter: @PoliticalTicker

Galifianakis, whose uncle served as a U.S. congressman from North Carolina, told the New York Daily News on Monday that it was "pretty obvious" the Motch brothers, a pair of wealthy donors who attempt to manipulate political campaigns, were crafted after David and Charles Koch, best known as the "Koch brothers."

The Koch brothers are high-profile figures in the Republican Party who support conservative and libertarian causes. Backers of the group Americans for Prosperity, the pair of industrialists are expected to spend tens – if not hundreds – of millions on Republican causes this year.

In July, the Kochs hosted a fund-raiser for Mitt Romney in Southampton, which drew multiple protests from Occupy Wall Street crowds.

In the interview Monday, "The Hangover" star wasted no time expressing how he feels about the real-life industrialist titans.

"I disagree with everything they do. They are creepy and there is no way around that. It's not freedom what they are doing," Galifianakis said.

Apparently, the real Koch brothers weren't so amused. A spokesman for the industrialist titans released a statement, chiding the actor's comments.

"Last we checked, the movie is a comedy. Maybe more to the point is that it's laughable to take political guidance or moral instruction from a guy who makes obscene gestures with a monkey on a bus in Bangkok," said Philip Ellender, referring to a scene from the movie "The Hangover Part II."

Ellender continued: "We disagree with his uninformed characterization of Koch and our beliefs. His comments, which appear to be based on false attacks made by our political opponents, demonstrate a lack of understanding of our longstanding support of individual freedom, freedom of expression, and constitutional rights."

"The Campaign" is produced by Warner Bros., which, like CNN, is owned by Time Warner.

– CNN's Mark Preston and Ashley Killough contributed to this report.

This Koch’s NOT for you!

Posted by Admin on Mar 12, 2012 in People Issues | 0 comments

Louisiana's own Phillip Ellender drinks a 'Koch-Cola' while coaching his boss David Koch on how to portray global warming as either a hoax or actually good for mankind..

Native son coaches the Kochs on how best to rationalize the destruction of Louisiana’s coast.

by Len Bahr*

Koch Industries is the second largest private corporation in America (after Cargill). Koch entities have reaped enormous wealth from the sale of hydrocarbons extracted and processed from deposits around the world, including the coast of Louisiana. In August 2010 Jane Mayer wrote a carefully-researched and rigorously fact-checked article for The New Yorker that described a war being waged on the Obama administration by Charles and David Koch…who own Koch Industries.

Mayer portrayed the brothers Koch as partisan puppeteers, hell-bent on shrink-wrapping the U.S. government into a corporate controlled cocoon. A major step in this ambitious goal involves defeating Barack Obama in November and scuttling progress toward a national energy policy with a smaller carbon footprint, i.e., less dependent on hydrocarbons from Koch and its fellow suppliers.

According to an article by Paige Lavender in HuffPost on February 25 2012, the commanding officer in the energy policy theater of the Obama war is Phillip Ellender…the name of a former colleague from the dawn of coastal restoration in the early 90s.

Upon Googling Phillip Ellenderand Louisiana,I was led to a June 2011 article by Kenneth Vogel posted in Politico.com in which I discovered that the Ellender mentioned in Lavender’s post is the same guy I had known back in the day, a Louisiana native son who now lives in Atlanta. If his surname rings a bell it’s because Ellender is a great nephew of Louisiana’s late Congressman Allen Ellender from Houma, who died in office in 1972, the year before I arrived in Louisiana.

Vogel described Ellender’s job at Koch Companies as follows:

Ellender is part of a low-profile Koch inner circle that includes Richard Fink, a former academic who sits on the boards of Koch-funded nonprofits, and Mark Holden, Koch Industries’ top lawyer, and that is more directly involved in carrying out the Kochs’ legislative and political agenda.

An article on 6-14-11 by Brad Johnson sheds more detail about Ellender’s role in Koch causes. Especially noteworthy is his long term affiliation with the Georgia chapter of The Nature Conservancy (TNC), which seems particularly incongruous. TNC is a highly respected environmental NGO with a distinguished history of the protection of endangered habitats around the world, including parts of the coastal ecosystem of Louisiana.**

My limited interaction with Ellender occurred in the early 90s during the final Edwards Administration, while I was struggling to energize Louisiana’s gestating coastal restoration program. I remember talking with him about Louisiana politics, about his great uncle, of whom he was understandably proud, and about funding coastal restoration.

On the latter subject, we specifically discussed former Governor Dave Treen’s heroic and unsuccessful proposal to enact the so-called Coastal Wetlands Environmental Levy (CWEL) which would have taxed foreign and domestic oil and gas transported across the coast, to help pay for repairing the damage caused by that very operation. Click here for a reaction to CWEL from Don Briggs, who heads the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association. The prospect of a CWEL tax would doubtless bring the Koch Bro’s blood to a boil, so I assume that Ellender has lost his previous interest in that topic.

Vogel’s article alludes to Ellender’s apparent transformation from the progressive and green Democrat whom I had met to a savvy shill for the notoriously anti-environmental Brothers Koch. To make his case Vogel quotes another former colleague of Ellender as follows:

I have great respect for Melissa Flournoy, but ‘a little disappointed’ sounds far less surprised and critical of Phil’s apparent transformation than am I. On the other hand, her professional career requires a little more diplomacy than mine does.

'Democracy' by checkbook. Modified from graphic in opensecrets.org.

The story of the Koch’s war on Obama and Ellender’s key role in the fight continues. Byron Tau has wriiten on the subject in Politico.com,including a post on 2/25 and another on 2/29, in which he described an exchange of barbs between Ellender and the President’s campaign manager, Jim Messina. The latter included the contentious issue of gasoline prices.

This war of words was also reported by Aaron Blake on February 29 in a post in the Washington Post blog The Fix, updated on March 1. Here’s a quote:

According to the Kansas City Star, Koch Industries has enriched itself by keeping oil off the market, storing it in offshore tankers and waiting to cash in when the cost of oil rises. The Koch brothers have also been vocal critics of the administration’s investments in clean energy alternatives.

Anthropogenic climate change and global warming pose the single greatest obstacle to the the ecological mitigation of a century of human-caused destruction in south Louisiana. The Koch brothers have long been working surreptitiously behind the scenes to convince the public that global warming is a hoax. In April 2010 I posted a two part feature on the most influential Americans on each side of the global warming debate. Part one, posted on 4/1/10, described my top ten list of climate change ‘April Fools,’ including David Koch.

Based on what I’ve read, Phil Ellender is the principal articulator of the Kochs’ disingenuous and even dangerous anti-climate change message. I can’t prove that Ellender’s role with Koch Industries specifically threatens our struggling program to save *but as long as he shills for the Bro’s Koch he’s complicit.

Having worked in the intense political context of the governor’s office for 18 years I take some pride in my ability to evaluate the political-environmental attitudes of acquaintances. My perception obviously has limits, however and Phillip Ellender either slipped under my green-radar (gradar) or he’s had a serious change of priorities since the early 90s.

*Founding Editor leonardbahr@gmx.com

**See the following quote on environmental stewardship from the Koch Industries web site that touts the company’s relationships with NOs other than TNC:

Koch companies are involved in environmental preservation projects onsite and in the community. Employees regularly participate in river cleanup and ecosystem restoration projects with groups such as Friends of the Mississippi River, Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Anacostia Watershed Society, among others. What’s more, Koch companies regularly share their sites certified by the international Wildlife Habitat Council with students and organizations such as the Audubon Society.

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