We will add other areas of Koch influence on the American fabric in a bit. Areas that include anti-choice, re-segregation of schools and personal gain from the Keystone XL Pipeline.
Now, we offer a set of data to add “color” to the Koch social political paradigm. All data is as published via Source Watch and seems to reflect through 2010 and verbiage, just below, through 2012.
Koch Brothers Facts
Here are Some More Koch Brothers Facts and Resources to Help You Understand the Guys Who are Trying to Divide the Country, Take Power Away From the Federal Government and Destroy Public Programs All in the Name of Profit:
“American’s For Prosperity spent over $10 million during the 2012 campaign cycle on ads attacking Obamacare and the candidates who supported it. They dropped over $5 million on just one anti-Obamacare ad spot, falsely describing the health law as “one of the largest tax increases in history,” even though the Affordable Care Act actually represents a massive tax cut for the middle class.” – Kantar Media Group’s CMAG
• Koch Industries, which the brothers own, is one of the top ten polluters in the United States — which perhaps explains why the Kochs have given $60 million to climate denial groups between 1997 and 2010.
• The Kochs are the oil and gas industry’s biggest donors to the congressional committee with oversight of the hazardous Keystone XL oil pipeline. They and their employees gave more than $300,000 to members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in 2010 alone.
• From 1998-2008, Koch-controlled foundations gave more than $196 million to organizations that favor polices that would financially enrich the two brothers. In addition, Koch Industries spent $50 million on lobbying and some $8 million in PAC contributions.
• The Koch fortune has its origins in engineering contracts with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.
• The Kochs are suing to take over the Cato Institute, which has accused the Kochs of attempting to destroy the group’s identity as an independent, libertarian think and align it more closely with a partisan agenda.
• A Huffington Post source who was at a three-day retreat of conservative billionaires said the Koch brothers pledged to donate $60 million to defeat President Obama in 2012 and produce pledges of $40 million more from others at the retreat.
• Since 2000, the Kochs have collected almost $100 million in government contracts, mostly from the Department of Defense.
• Koch Industries has an annual production capacity of 2.2 billion pounds of the carcinogen formaldehyde. The company has worked to keep it from being classified as a carcinogen even though David Koch is a prostate cancer survivor.
• The Koch brothers’ combined fortune of roughly $50 billion is exceeded only by that of Bill Gates in the United States.
• The Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs accused Koch Oil of scheming to steal $31 million of crude oil from Native Americans. Although the company claimed it was accidental, a former executive in this operation said Charles Koch had known about it and had responded to the overages by saying, “I want my fair share, and that’s all of it.”
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Koch_Industries
• The Koch brothers’ net worth tops $50 billion and they have pledged to spend $60 million to defeat President Barack Obama, according to the Huffington Post.
• The Koch PAC is the largest oil and gas contributor — donating more than even ExxonMobil — spending over $1 million in each of the last two cycles. This cycle, it has spent almost $750,000. Koch Industries sends 90 percent of these contributions to Republicans.
• It’s the fourth-largest lobbyist in the oil and gas industry, spending$2,300,000 so far in 2012 and over $8 million in 2011.
• Koch Industries emits over 300 million tons of greenhouse gases a year, based on the assumption that Koch emits the same amount of greenhouse pollution per billion dollars in revenue as Exxon and Chevron.
• Flint Hills Resources, a Koch subsidiary, processes 300 million barrels of oil a year. This company is responsible for up to five percent of the U.S. 7-gigaton carbon footprint.
• Koch says itself that the company is on par with big banks and is among the world’s top five oil speculators.
• Koch is a major player in driving up gas prices through speculation, hurting American consumers. ThinkProgress reported that in 2008, Koch leased four supertankers to hold oil in the Gulf, leading to a gas price increase anywhere from 20 to 40 cents a gallon at the time.
• According to Inside Climate News, Koch industries “has touched virtually every aspect of the tar sands industry since the company established a toehold in Canada more than 50 years ago.” It is active in mining Canada’s tar sands and exporting to the U.S., and is active in Canadian politics, with half a million dollars in donations between 2007-2010.
• As reporters consider these factors, Koch has been widely reported as a Big Oil corporation by media outlets like Politico, Forbes, NPR, and Politifact.
• According to the CBO, Obamacare would reduce federal deficits by $127 billion over the 2012–2021 period.
• When Republicans threatened to repeal health reform, the CBO determined that a repeal would increase the deficit by $147 billion.
• Just last month, the CBO found that the insurance coverage provisions of Obamacare will actually cost $50 billion less that it had originally projected.
http://thinkprogress.org/tag/koch-industries/
Charles Koch, one of the Big Oil barons who is dedicating at least $40 million of his own money—and has helped collect $100 million in pledges—to defeat President Obama. Not only did the Koch family foundations contribute nearly $30 million to “set up” and sustain the Mercatus Center, Charles Koch is currently a member of its Board of Directors. The founder of the Mercatus Center, Richard Fink, actually headed the Koch Industries’ lobbying operation in Washington, D.C., and is currently the president of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.
http://www.barackobama.com/truth-team/entry/fact-check-for-the-koch-brothers-obamacare-reduces-the-deficit-by-billions/
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If you are unaware, be aware the Kochs are plutocrats. They are of the nation’s most wealthy and appear to feel nothing moves forward in the United States unless it fits their political and social paradigm and folds neatly into their brand of libertarianism.
More after the break belowDo you see the problem?
According to recent studies and factual data regarding the GOP and the Libertarian movement, both entities are predominately white and overwhelmingly male. While such demographics must be handled somewhat gingerly to avoid perceptions of uneven or biased analysis, the facts are stark and real. Thus, shouldn’t we expect the Kochs would funnel millions into the GOP War on Women?
The following piece from RH Reality Check provides visual and literary description of Koch sponsored anti-choice support equal to none.
November 5, 2013 – 11:27 am
Excerpt
Koch Brothers Funding of Anti-Choice Groups, by Organization
Freedom Partners
- more than $8 million to Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee
- $32 million to Americans for Prosperity
- $15.7 million to 60 Plus
Freedom Partners via CPPR
Since November 2011, the Center to Protect Patient Rights (CPPR) has recieved about$115 million from Freedom Partners. CPPR also took in some $11 million from Americans for Job Security, another pass-through group with connections to prominent businessmen Bob Fisher (director of The Gap, Inc.), Charles Schwab (founder and chairman of Charles Schwab Corporation), and Eli Broad (founder, KB Home and Sun America).
CPPR, in turn, has long had deep funding ties to anti-choice organizations. Here is a list of CPPR disbursements to anti-choice organizations by year.
CPPR 2009
- $2.6 million to 60 Plus
- $2.25 million to Americans for Prosperity
- $250,000 to Independent Women’s Voice
- $25,000 to Nebraska Right to Life
CPPR 2010
- $9 million to 60 Plus
- $1.9 million to Americans for Prosperity
- $1 million to the Susan B. Anthony List
- $559,000 to Americans United for Life Action
- $45,000 to Americans United for Life
CPPR 2011
- $2.4 million to 60 Plus
- $1.5 million to Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee
Through the creation of non-profit organizations under sections 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) of the tax code, the Kochs and other political money-wranglers concocted several layers of obfuscation for their well-heeled friends to hide behind. The tax code protects groups in those categories from having to reveal their donors.
By its name, you might take the Koch-linked CPPR—now apparently defunct, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics—as yet another astroturf group launched to oppose Obamacare. Run by longtime Koch political operative Sean Noble, CPPR was indeed that, but it was much, much more. Known in political parlance as a pass-through group, CPPR was used by big, unnamed donors to pass money to other organizations, apparently as a means of further obscuring the original source of the funding.
RH Reality Check, examining CPPR’s tax filings, confirmed reporting by NARAL Pro-Choice America and American Bridge that in 2010, it granted more than $1 million to the Susan B. Anthony (SBA) List, about half of the $2 million the group spent that year on advertising for anti-choice candidates and against pro-choice candidates in state and federal races across the country. The CPPR grant accounted for nearly 15 percent of the group’s overall revenues that year.
In Ohio, the SBA List mounted billboards in 2010 making the false claim that Obamacare included taxpayer-funded abortion. (When the Ohio Election Commission ruled that the billboards had to be taken down because the state’s election law prohibits false claims, the SBA List launched a legal challenge, which it has since lost in Ohio courts. The group has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review Ohio’s decision.)
In the 2012 elections, the SBA List upped its game, spending more than $11 million on races across the country, according to a memo reported by The Hill. Because 2012 tax filings were not yet available for public view at the time of publication, we cannot report whether CPPR provided any of those ad dollars.
CPPR’s generosity to groups that push for laws restricting access to reproductive health care and limit women’s rights in pregnancy doesn’t end with the SBA List. In 2010, it provided Americans United for Life Action (AULA) with 39 percent of the group’s operating budget that year. It’s likely that the $559,000 AULA received from CPPR accounted for the $425,374 that it spent, according to AULA’s tax filing, on elections that year. CPPR also gave an additional $45,000 in 2010 to AULA’s sibling organization, Americans United for Life.
In 2011, CPPR gave $1.5 million to the Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee (CWALAC); that more than filled the $500,000 hole Mother Jones’ Stephanie Mencimer reported the organization dug for itself after spending $2 million in the 2010 elections—with a cool $1 million left over for the committee’s anti-choice lobbying in state legislatures, and millions more to come from Freedom Partners, another Koch-linked group. CWALAC was deeply involved in pushing the passage of the Texas anti-choice law.
End RH Reality Check
I have read that many libertarians are not anti-choice. So, we cannot lay the anti-choice ideology to Koch libertarianism. Koch anti-choice ideology and dogma relates more to common Koch ideology and that of GOP leadership. Kochism can be offset by people who exercise their right to vote.
We only hope people who count notice the extreme amounts of money expended to affect policy and power over large swaths of the US legislators. People who count are people who vote. If you do not vote against Koch plutocracy, you have no right to complain about life in a plutocratic United States. If you do not vote, you forsake the right to elect leadership from people who are not obligated to Koch’s via political contributions (past, current or future).
For people who find the GOP palatable and do not see the party as a fading shadow of a former proud political movement and party, you should ask yourself a few questions.
What is the good in Koch involvement public schools systems beyond libertarian aversion to public school systems? It is one thing to hold public school systems in contempt, it is yet another to actively fund efforts to re-segregate schools. An example was Koch involvement in working to re-segregate a North Carolina County school system. The denominator in that activity: “race.”
Why should the United states provide a pipeline across our heartland that will return billions to the Kochs? We have reported along with other sources, the prospect of a Koch $100 billion net profit from construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. If you are a person who gets news and information outside of television media, you know of frequent oil spills and ruined environment due to pipeline spills.
Why do uber wealthy people resent and oppose healthcare for people without access to medical and dental care? Koch expenditures against the Affordable Care Act may reach into the stratosphere at tens of millions.
Momocrats via TPM
In a pre-emptive move, the president of Freedom Partners, a trade association organized under section 501(c)(6) in a similar fashion to the US Chamber of Commerce, has released their IRS disclosure filing to Politico in advance of it becoming public.
The 38-page IRS filing amounts to the Rosetta Stone of the vast web of conservative groups — some prominent, some obscure — that spend time, money and resources to influence public debate, especially over Obamacare.
The group has about 200 donors, each paying at least $100,000 in annual dues. It raised $256 million in the year after its creation in November 2011, the document shows. And it made grants of $236 million — meaning a totally unknown group was the largest sugar daddy for conservative groups in the last election, second in total spending only to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, which together spent about $300 million.
Follow the Money
The list of groups that benefited from Freedom Partners’ funding is a roster of conservative organizations large and small: $115 [million] to the Center to Protect Patient Rights, $32.3 million to Americans for Prosperity, $15.7 million to the 60 Plus Association, $13.6 million to the American Future Fund, $8.2 million to the Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee, $3.5 million to the National Rifle Association, $3.1 million to the LIBRE Initiative, $2 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And that’s just the start.
Originally named the Association for American Innovation, Freedom Partners is organized as a 501(c)6 tax-exempt chamber of commerce. The designation allow it to keep its donors secret (but is different from the 501(c)4 “social welfare” group status that became popular after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.) On its website, which was registered in early September, Freedom Partners claims to have over 200 members. And according to Politico, those members are drawn from the semiannual conferences hosted by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire businessmen and conservative donors. Each member of Freedom Partners pays at least $100,000 in annual dues.
“Other than payment of dues, the only requirement for membership is sharing our mission,” Freedom Partners states on its site.
Follow the People
Adding the GOP War on Women to the Koch’s War chest is really not a surprise.
The Pardu's Scroll 