Koch Brothers thread

[stillrobertpaulsen]

The Koch Brothers Are Smiling: The White House Will Be Packed With Some of Their Most Loyal Servants
One-third of the Trump team has ties to the Koch brothers.
By Alex Kotch / AlterNet
January 10, 2017

The Trump White House is going to be very, very Koch-y.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, billionaire industrialists and Republican mega-donors Charles and David Koch made headlines by refusing to endorse a candidate. But ads in U.S. Senate races paid for by Koch-linked independent political groups hurt the image of Donald Trump’s foe, Hillary Clinton, whom they criticized while associating Democratic Senate candidates with her. And the massive ground game of the Kochs’ well-known political group, Americans for Prosperity, helped turn out thousands of Trump voters in battleground states.

From the time Trump picked his vice presidential running mate, Koch favorite Mike Pence, the brothers’ influence on Trump World has grown ever stronger.

From transition team staffers to his Cabinet, Trump has brought numerous Koch lieutenants and allies into his inner circle. His taunting of Marco Rubio for being a “puppet” of the Koch brothers is long gone. It’s very likely that Trump is eager to work with Charles and David Koch, who represent exactly what Trump values most—wealth and power—which is also reflected in his potential Cabinet of billionaire executives. And though the Kochs may object to Trump’s Islamophobia or other select viewpoints, they stand to add to their combined $88 billion through Trump’s planned environmental deregulation, privatization, corporate tax cuts and other policies favoring the wealthy to be carried out by his Environmental Protection Agency pick, who recently sued that agency; his secretary of state choice, the CEO of ExxonMobil; his labor pick, a fast-food CEO who doesn’t believe in the minimum wage; and others.

David Koch attended Trump’s election night victory party. Then on Dec. 21, Trump had an informal chat with Koch at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida (where Koch is a member) about “preparations for his administration.”

The Kochs’ allies have been helping shape the Trump administration for some time. The liberal Center for American Progress’s political arm found that one-third of Trump’s transition team, which recommends Cabinet nominees, ambassadors and advisers to the president-elect, has ties to the Koch brothers. These transition team members include Trump mega-donors who are also part of the Koch political network, such as Rebekah Mercer, and employees of Koch-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Institute for Energy Research.

Here’s a look at some of the top Koch allies who’ll be running the government very soon and what kinds of Koch-backed policies we can expect them to champion.

The Koch Brothers’ Darling

The Kochs must have popped champagne when Trump announced that Mike Pence, the conservative governor of Indiana, would be his running mate. Pence is adored by the Kochs and their vast political donor network; Ken Vogel and Maggie Haberman described him in Politico as “among the best … messengers for this new Koch brand in a field of prospective [presidential] candidates who fit some portions of the brothers’ political bent but not others.” Pence has addressed a gathering of Americans for Prosperity, the Kochs’ most well-known political group that spends millions on elections each cycle opposing liberal policies and helping elect conservative Republicans. This year he planned to speak at one of the Kochs’ donor seminars, where the brothers meet with uber-wealthy allies and pool their hundreds of millions of dollars for joint political spending, but canceled two weeks beforehand.

David Koch gave Pence’s two gubernatorial campaigns $300,000. Americans for Prosperity ran ads supporting Pence, and the Republican Governors Association, to which Koch and Koch Industries have donated a combined $10.8 million since 2003, spent $4.2 million in 2012 and 2016 backing Pence.

Pence, who may be an even more powerful vice president than Dick Cheney, will be in prime position to advocate for the issues about which the Kochs care most, including corporate tax cuts, which he instituted in Indiana, and opposition to bailouts and market regulation. According to Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., Pence will be in charge of both domestic and foreign policy. And he’ll preside over the U.S. Senate, over which Republicans have a narrow majority.

“Indiana is one big free market, [and] much like Koch Industries, Mike Pence … picks the right fights,” said Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster whose company has worked for Pence and for Americans for Prosperity. Conway became Trump’s campaign manager last August and was recently named a “counselor to the president” who will help “effectively message and execute the Administration's legislative priorities and actions.” Conway is also a board member of the Koch-aligned and Koch-funded Independent Women’s Forum, which, The Nation reports, has pushed the Koch agenda.

Several of Pence’s former staffers have gone on to work in the Koch political network, including Marc Short, who went from being Pence’s chief of staff when Pence was a congressman to president of Freedom Partners, the Koch political operation’s “central bank,” which gives out enormous amounts of money to right-wing political spending groups. Short returned to advising Pence this summer when the governor joined Trump’s campaign and will soon take a job in the West Wing, likely heading legislative affairs, according to the Washington Post.

A Grim Future for the Environment

Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general who recently sued the Environmental Protection Agency over its plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is, incredibly, Trump’s pick to head that very agency. Pruitt has called the climate change debate “far from settled.”

Texas oil and gas investor Doug Deason, who, along with his billionaire father, Darwin, is a Republican political mega-donor and key figure in the Koch political network, pushed for his friend Pruitt to head the EPA. (Doug and his wife Holly wrote a tribute to the Koch brothers last year, supported by Freedom Partners.)

It’s hard to imagine anyone whose anti-environmental policies would benefit Koch Industries’ profits more than Pruitt, who is bound to deregulate the environment and encourage fossil fuel production as much as possible, benefiting large fossil fuel corporations like Koch Industries, which operates oil refineries and gas pipelines, sells natural gas and owns tar sands land in Canada. As Oklahoma attorney general, he established a “federalism unit to combat unwarranted regulation and overreach by the federal government.” As the Chicago Tribute reported, Pruitt defended ExxonMobil against allegations that it knew about climate change for decades and misled the public; fought to restrict clean water protections; and submitted a letter to the EPA that was actually written by Devon Energy, whose corporate PAC donated to his attorney general campaigns.

Sure enough, Koch Industries PAC also contributed $10,000 to Pruitt’s attorney general campaigns in 2010 and 2014. Other top contributors include Chesapeake Energy, Devon Energy and ExxonMobil. What’s more, the independent Republican State Leadership Committee, to which Koch Industries has given nearly $1.3 million in the last decade, spent $150,000 supporting Pruitt in the 2010 race. In 2014, Freedom Partners even gave $175,000 the political nonprofit Pruitt directed.

Rick Perry is also in a curious position: He’s nominated to lead the Department of Energy, a department that he said he wanted to eliminate during the 2012 presidential campaign (and couldn’t name in his famous “whoops” moment at a debate). Perry may not have been a Koch favorite for president, but Koch Industries has directly given $111,000 to his campaigns over the years, and David Koch has contributed $75,000. But perhaps Perry’s biggest fan is Darwin Deason, who gave $5 million last election cycle to a super PAC supporting Perry.

As governor of Texas, Perry allowed the expansion of wind energy, but he supported new coal plants and has close ties to the oil and gas industry. The Department of Energy has a big focus on nuclear energy but also regulates the oil and gas industry and leads the government’s fossil fuel development.

The Center for Media and Democracy got a sneak peak at Trump’s likely energy policy by obtaining a memo sent by the head of his energy transition team, a former lobbyist for Koch Industries named Thomas Pyle. Included in Pyle’s account of Trump’s energy plan is a withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, increasing federal oil and gas leasing and green-lighting pipelines such as the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.

Intelligence

A Koch favorite has been tapped to lead the Central Intelligence Agency. Mike Pompeo, a U.S. representative from the Kochs’ home state of Kansas, was involved with the brothers long before his days as a politician; his private aerospace company used seed money from Koch Venture Capital, and Pompeo was president of a company that worked with Koch Industries’ Brazilian distributor.

When he ran to represent the district that’s home to the Koch Industries headquarters in 2010, Pompeo received more Koch-linked donations than any other candidate that cycle, and after winning, he hired a Koch Industries lawyer to be his chief of staff. In 2014, the Kochs funded his campaign again. The Koch Industries PAC is the single largest donor to Pompeo’s campaigns, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

Pompeo is a “vigorous supporter” of the NSA’s surveillance program, wants whistleblower Edward Snowden executed, and opposes the United States’ deal with Iran. As CIA chief, it’s unclear how the Kochs’ influence will affect his decisions, but in the House he advocated for their causes, pushing the Americans for Prosperity-backed “No Climate Tax Pledge” and introducing a bill to quicken the natural gas pipeline approval process. If the Koch brothers want to weigh in, they’ll have the ear of one of their closest political allies.

Education

Betsy DeVos, a billionaire and recent chair of the pro-“school choice” and politically active American Federation for Children, is Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Education. Aside from donating $265,000 to sitting senators who will vote on her confirmation, her foundation has contributed millions to Americans for Prosperity and to other conservative political groups backed by the Kochs. DeVos has devoted her life to pushing for charter school expansion and private school vouchers, which use public funds to pay for kids to attend religious and other schools. There is no doubt that she will do all she can as secretary to divert traditional public school funding into under-regulated charters and private schools. Both Charles and David Koch have favored privatizing schools for decades, and many Koch-funded organizations team up on school-choice projects.

Corrupt Counsel to Defend Corrupt President

Donald McGahn, a lawyer who has worked for Freedom Partners and its affiliated super PAC, will be chief White House counsel. As a member of the Federal Election Commission from 2009 to 2013, he was known for hobbling the enforcement of campaign finance laws in favor of letting big money flood politics and transforming the commission into the ineffective, gridlocked body that it is today. McGahn, who defended Rep. Tom DeLay in a money laundering scandal and in a Russian pay-to-play scandal, will have to defend probably the most conflicts-of-interest-ridden president in history. In other words, McGahn is about the last person who will help Trump dissolve his conflicts of interest or critique a president set to make private profits all around the world while in office.

Trump’s transition team has even reached outside of the team itself for additional advice from people deeply embedded in the Koch political operation. One of the Department of Veterans Affairs' harshest critics, Florida GOP Rep. Jeff Miller, may become head of that department. Trump is considering Miller for the job, and members of a closely Koch-linked “social welfare” nonprofit are advising his transition team on the matter; one employee of the group is actually on the transition team. Concerned Veterans for America, which spends millions every year, often on ads criticizing Democrats or praising Republicans, wants to privatize veterans’ health care and make firing workers easier. Trump hasn’t yet named his selection for Veterans Affairs, but Pete Hegseth, president of Concerned Veterans for America, is also on the shortlist.

And it’s not just the transition team that’s looking for help from Koch minions—it’s Trump himself. As Steve Horn reported in DeSmog, the only person Trump spoke to on the record about a big anti-regulatory act that’s been on the Kochs’ agenda for years was Phil Kerpen, former vice president of policy for Americans for Prosperity. The REINS Act just passed the House on Jan. 5.

Another Koch ally, Pennsylvania GOP Rep. Bill Shuster, is hoping to privatize air traffic control under a corporate president who, despite winning several states with the help of union voters, is no fan of unions. Shuster has already met with Trump and the Transportation nominee, Elaine Chao, and indicated that Trump is open to privatization. The congressman, who’s received $30,000 from the Koch Industries PAC since 2012, fought a federal wind energy tax credit, in line with the Kochs’ campaign targeting the program. In 2016, a Koch-funded outside political spending group, American Action Network, put $208,000 toward ads benefiting Shuster.

Shuster’s 2016 campaign manager was Andy Post, who previously worked in media relations for the Charles Koch Institute and was grassroots coordinator for Americans for Prosperity during the 2012 election cycle. He’s now communications coordinator with the Presidential Inaugural Committee.

This article merely scratches the surface of the Koch brothers’ influence on the incoming administration. With one-third of Trump’s transition team reportedly linked to the Kochs, more unfilled positions will go to Koch-linked individuals. From environmental regulation to veterans’ health care, the Koch agenda will be well represented in the White House.

[seemslikeadream]

Behind the Complex and Secretive Koch Conspiracy Against Democracy


Photo Credit: L (David Koch) by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons; R (Charles Koch) by Dechateau via Wikimedia Commons; Composition by AlterNet
In 1933, a handful of wealthy Wall Streeters were upset that the newly elected president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had dared to tax the rich in order to fund programs to lessen the painful poverty people were experiencing due to the Great Depression. They were so upset that they came up with a ridiculous plan to overthrow Roosevelt and install a military government. Due to their own ineptitude and hubris, their plan failed, and important poverty-busting programs of the New Deal like Social Security, the Works Progress Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority put people to work, pulled them out of desperate poverty and propelled the country into the 20th century.

It's tempting to brush off 1933's bumbling fat cats -- we can just picture them cloistered in their posh private club, smoking $100 cigars, grumping about Roosevelt and whispering about hiring a private army to overthrow the whole damn democratic process. However, our nation's common good is constantly under attack from plutocrats, kleptocrats and kakistocrats who want to line their pockets at the expense of workaday Americans.

But while the 1933 plot was hairbrained, their plutocratic intent is no laughing matter. Their presumption of class privilege -- the warped idea that their great wealth entitled them to rule over and even impoverish the many -- is not unique. The Wall Street Putsch died and was buried in 1934, but it is just one manifestation of a deadly serious social disease that has infected the history of democratic struggles.

And now, that sickness has grown more virulent, confronting us in the form of a complex, sophisticated web of efforts funded by brothers Charles and David Koch and their billionaire buddies who share the same set of extreme, kleptocratic beliefs that guided last century's class-war militants, including making property rights supreme over all of the people's political rights and replacing majority rule with a new governing order that empowers the owner class (the "Makers," as they dub themselves) to overrule regulations, taxes, unionization and other collective actions that the lower classes (the "Takers," or so we're called) try to impose on the property-rich minority.

The Koch coup is not one they're planning to spring someday with a brash, illegal military takeover of Washington. Don't look now, but they've already sprung it! It's a quiet, multifaceted coup that has been underway for some 40 years and has been astonishingly successful ... and disturbingly legal. Measure by measure, the Koch brothers and their allied extremists have used their fortunes to gain a grip on nearly every level of government (including the courts and whole states like Wisconsin, North Carolina and Texas), corporatized many of our most basic laws and institutions, and largely had their plutocratic wish list adopted as the agenda of the Republican Party. They've been able to come this far because of three factors:

Patience. The Kochs have taken the long view with their ideological power grab. They have been willing to experiment, trying a variety of tactics -- large and small, national and local -- expanding those that work and abandoning those that don't. And they have used "patient capital": giving an idea time to prove itself before yanking funding and jumping to the next trendy idea (Progressive funders: Take note.).

Quiet and compartmentalization. The Koch coup has crept up on us because it abhorred publicity and couched each move as an independent effort by a separate group. The commonality of the changes was barely perceptible for decades and until 2010, when the Supreme Court grabbed the obscure Citizens United case to decree that corporate campaign cash qualifies as free speech. It was only then that progressives woke to the reality that a coordinated corporate assault on democracy itself was being backed by a panoply of Koch groups (at least three of which were prime funders and pushers of the court case).

Scope and scale. Even the word "vast" doesn't encompass the immensity of the Kochs' offensive on democracy. The Charles Koch Foundation, the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation, the State Policy Network, Americans for Prosperity: These are just a handful of the many organizations that the Koch brothers and their buddies fund to dismantle our social safety net and radically change our outlook on "everybody does better when everybody does better." To learn more about the Koch agenda, check out the Center for Media and Democracy's work at www.exposedbycmd.org/Koch
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-polit ... -democracy

[seemslikeadream]

Koch Group Must Disclose Donors to State Officials, Court Rules

Koch Brothers

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a Koch brothers–founded conservative nonprofit political group, must disclose its largest givers to authorities in California.

The three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Becerra reversed a district court’s decision in Prosperity Foundation v. Harris that the group does not need to disclose its donors to state officials.

As a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization, the foundation now is required to disclose donors to the IRS. The state court ruled that the foundation must also disclose this information to the California Attorney General. The Koch-funded foundation argued that the state donor filing rules violated the First Amendment, in that it discouraged people from donating because they would be exposed to threats and harassment.

Bill Riggs, a spokesman for the foundation, said in a statement that the group is disappointed by a decision that “imperils people’s 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech and of association” and “intends to continue doing all it can to champion and protect the important constitutional rights at stake.”

The Americans for Prosperity Foundation was co-founded in part by the billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch and is a sister group of the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity. The group’s stated mission is to “recruit, educate, and mobilize citizens in support of the policies and goals of a free society at the local, state, and federal level, helping every American live their dream — especially the least fortunate.”

United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
Seal of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Photo credit: US Government / Wikimedia

The group will likely appeal to the US Supreme Court, but it can also have the appeals court hear the case again with a larger, 11-judge panel. As of publication time the foundation’s leaders had not made their intentions to move forward with the case clear.

If the case goes to the Supreme Court, it seems likely the justices will reverse the appeals court’s ruling, given the high court’s history of ruling against donor disclosure laws.

“Our mission is to protect Californians who donate their hard-earned dollars to charity. Charities operating in California must not engage in fraud or unfair business practices,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in a statement.

Judge Raymond C. Fisher, in his ruling, said that it is in the state’s interest to collect information about organizations to verify their legitimacy and to combat fraud among nonprofit organizations, and that states have taken steps to protect donor information.

“The mere possibility that some contributors may choose to withhold their support does not establish a substantial burden on First Amendment rights,” he wrote in the opinion filed Tuesday. “Nothing is perfectly secure on the internet in 2018, and the Attorney General’s data are no exception, but this factor alone does not establish a significant risk of public disclosure.”

Filmmaker and director of Pay 2 Play, Holly Mosher, tweeted, “Great news, Koch group Americans for Prosperity must disclose donors,” in response to the decision.

The ruling comes after the release of a report titled Dark Money Illuminated, by Issue One, which found that 75 percent of dark money influencing politics in recent years has been contributed by just 15 organizations. Americans for Prosperity gave the third-largest amount, after the US Chamber of Commerce and Crossroads GPS.

“Since dark money changed politics as we know it in the post-Citizens United era, the top 15 dark money groups have spent more than $600 million in secret money in our elections,” the report stated.
https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/09/12/koch- ... urt-rules/

[seemslikeadream]

looking forward to his next interview with Glenn


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq4UUfi35qI

Who Bankrolls Tucker Carlson's Hateful Propaganda? Why the Kochs of Course.
Submitted by PRWatch Editors on March 13, 2019 - 9:46am


Tucker Carlson
Fox News' Tucker Carlson is under fire this week for racist, sexist, and homophobic comments he made while chatting on "Bubba the Love Sponge" a shock jock radio show between 2006-2011. Groups are scrutinizing Fox's advertisers and demanding that they drop Carlson's show.

But Carlson also publishes The Daily Caller, a controversial online media outlet with ties to white nationalists that has infamously peddled everything from climate denial and anti-Islamic tropes to false prostitution charges and violence against protesters.

Carlson's moonlighting as an extremist at The Daily Caller is heavily bankrolled by -- you guessed it -- the Koch brothers. An investigation by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) finds that the Charles Koch Foundation has poured more than $2.7 million into the Daily Caller's non-profit "charity" since 2012, which generates the lion's share of the "news" that the Caller publishes.

Indeed, in 2016, Koch cash accounted for 83 percent of the The Daily Caller News Foundation's $1.1 million in revenues.

Carlson Under Fire

As if catering to white supremacists was not bad enough, Media Matters published an inventory of hateful comments made by Carlson as a guest on the radio show between 2006-2011.

The radio host discusses Warren Jeffs, the religious leader who was investigated in 2007 for marrying off underage girls to older men and was eventually jailed for sexual assault of minors in 2011. When the radio host condemned Jeffs for being an "accessory to the rape of children," Carlson said "whatever the hell that means," and going on to suggest that forcible underage marriage is not as serious as forcible child rape. Listen to the tape here.

In other interviews, Carlson called Iraqis "semi-literate primitive monkeys," who "don't use toilet paper or forks." They should just "shut the fuck up and obey." Carlson spoke about his desire for a presidential candidate to blame the "lunatic Muslims who are behaving like animals." That candidate would be "elected king" if they vowed to "kill as many of them as [they] can." Carlson also said Afghanistan is "never going to be a civilized country because the people aren't civilized." Listen to the tape here.

The release of the older audio tapes gives "context and insight" on his nightly programming today, said Media Matters President Angelo Carusone on MSNBC.

So far, Carlson has failed to apologize. As Fox News scrambles to control the damage, at least three advertisers -- Allergan, letgo, and GreatCall -- have had enough.

But with the focus on advertisers, it's important to remember who else bankrolls Carlson's mini media empire.

The Koch Caller?

The Kochs have long underwritten The Daily Caller. Previously, CMD reported that the Kochs gave $805,512 to The Daily Caller News Foundation between 2012 and 2015, predominantly from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. Since then, the numbers have continued to grow.

The Koch foundation gave another $946,000 in 2016 and $960,000 in 2017, the last year publicly available -- for a total of $2.7 million.

In 2017, CMD analyzed emails sent by the Trump campaign to The Daily Caller subscribers and estimated that the outlet also received at least $150,000 from the Trump campaign in the months right before the November election, based on the fee charged for mailings to its list. The funding was never disclosed by Carlson or The Daily Caller as they reported on the Trump campaign.

In addition, CMD also examined the relationship between the non-profit and for-profit arms of Tucker Carlson's operation. The mechanics of how they operate together raise serious concerns about whether Carlson's tax-free nonprofit is operating primarily for the private benefit of his for-profit media outlet, which would be a violation of tax law.

CMD's story was picked up by numerous media outlets including the Washington Post, which interviewed tax experts on the legality of the scheme.

"It really does look like the reason for the existence of this 501(c)(3) organization is to provide benefits to the for-profit company, and that should be a private benefit that is not acceptable," Linda Sugin, a law professor at Fordham University, told the Post and other media outlets. "You can't have money going into the foundation being used for purposes that are really to support the for-profit organization."
https://www.prwatch.org/news/2019/03/13 ... chs-course

[Elvis]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/16 ... adas-left/
February 16, 2018
Canada vs. Venezuela: Have the Koch Brothers Captured Canada’s Left?
by Joyce Nelson

. . . In 2013, investigative reporter Greg Palast told RT’s Abby Martin that the reason Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez became U.S. “enemy number one” in 2001 is that he decided that he wasn’t going to give away the country’s oil anymore. “Big U.S. oil companies were paying a royalty for Venezuela’s super-heavy oil of about 1 per cent – 1 percent! Okay? – And for the regular oil, it was 16 per cent. So the oil companies were keeping 84 per cent, and Chavez said, ‘You’re going to have to pay 30 per cent, you can only keep 70 per cent of our oil …You gotta split off a bit for the people of Venezuela’.” [6]

According to Palast, that change in Venezuela’s royalty rates became a huge irritant to the billionaire Koch Brothers, who own a refinery in Texas that has long imported Venezuelan heavy crude. The Koch Brothers are also a top lease-holder in the Alberta tar sands, and their Pine Hills refinery in Minnesota refines millions of barrels of imported tar sands crude.

As the price of oil escalated to more than $100 per barrel, Palast said the Koch Brothers determined that it would be cheaper – by about $2 billion per year – for them to substitute Canadian tar sands crude in their Texas refinery than to keep on importing Venezuelan heavy oil, so they became a big advocate for the Keystone XL pipeline to bring more tar sands crude all the way to the Gulf coast. The Koch Brothers’ Flint Hills Resources refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas is right next to Venezuela’s Citgo refinery.

In an Op-Ed for the Financial Post (March 7, 2013), business consultant Ryan W. Lijdsman noted that “Canada and Venezuela are both producers of heavy oil and compete for the limited number of customers that can refine heavy bitumen …A slide in Venezuelan production would be good for Canadian producers, which could meet the additional demand for heavy oil in the U.S. market.” [7]

Unlike Venezuela, Canada had taken no such stand to raise royalty rates for its oil, and as of December 2016 it has the lowest royalty rates in the world. Similarly, the Justin Trudeau Liberal government (like the previous Harper Conservative government) is in favour of the Keystone XL pipeline (and others) that would replace Venezuelan heavy oil in Gulf Coast refineries.

So when Chrystia Freeland acts to target Venezuela because “this is our hemisphere,” she is acting in concert with the Koch Brothers’ (and oil patch) desires – of course, without ever mentioning the tar sands.

. . .

[seemslikeadream]

Billionaire conservative icon David Koch dies at 79
https://abcnews.go.com/US/billionaire-c ... itter_abcn

the damage he has done to this country.....I will not say too much more

can't even live long enough to watch the Amazon burn

too bad you can't take all the misery you created with you

Here are 11 things the Koch brothers didn’t want you to know
Steven Rosenfeld
August 23, 2019

Koch Brothers Exposed political ad
Written by
The mega-billionaire brothers, David and Charles Koch, stand apart in the world of Republicans.

This story first ran in May of 2014.

In 2012, their network of hardcore libertarian political donors spent $400 million on negative campaign ads intended to destroy government safety nets and defeat Democrats. They want to repeal Obamacare, dismantle labor unions, repeal any environmental law protecting clean water and air, roll back voting rights, privatize Social Security, stop a minimum wage increase and more. They don’t care about destroying the checks and balances in American democracy to get their way.

In an updated documentary by Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films, Koch Brothers Exposed: 2014 Edition, we learn many things the Kochs don’t want you to know, from the origin of their radical agenda to other issues they’ve championed that haven’t made the national news, such as resegregating public schools.

Here are 11 things the Kochs don’t want you to know about them.

1. The family’s $100 billion fortune comes mostly from a massive network of oil and gas pipelines, and investments in other polluting industries like paper and plastics. The brothers inherited the seed money for their holdings from their father Fred Koch, who made his first fortune building oil pipelines for the Russian dictator Joseph Stalin in the 1930s. Back in the states, Fred Koch supported racial segregation and white supremacist groups like the John Birch Society.

2. Koch Industries is the second largest privately held company in America, worth upwards of $80 billion. It is one of the country’s top 15 polluters, responsible for more than 300 oil spills. It has paid over $100 million in fines and been found guilty by a federal jury of stealing oil from Native American lands.

3. The Kochs have invested multi-millions in more than 85 right-wing organizations over the years to push an anti-government, libertarian agenda. Many local Tea Party chapters were fronts for Americans for Prosperity, one of their groups. Another big recipient, ALEC, or the American Legislative Exchange Council, drafts bills and talking points that Republican officials cite again and again. In the 2012 presidential election cycle, the Koch’s right-wing donor network spent $400 million on electioneering.

4. The brothers work to create legal decisions to empower their efforts. They brought two U.S. Supreme Court Justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, to give speeches at their invitation-only gatherings for libertarian industrialists. That was before the Court issued its Citizens United ruling, gutting federal laws that restricted the kinds of outside campaigns they bankroll. They funded groups that filed thousands of pages of legal briefs to attack those election laws. After the Court threw out federal campaign restrictions in 2010—a ruling they help to write—the Kochs began to spend unprecedented sums to sway elections.

5. Americans for Prosperity led a successful takeover of the school board in Wake County, North Carolina in 2009, which then ended student busing to resegregate high schools. They resurrected the coded rhetoric of the old South, using terms like “forced busing” and “neighborhood schools.” After hundreds of students were sent to other schools, the uproar was so great the AFP slate was voted out two years later, but not before the kids experienced racism and prejudice.

6. As donors to higher education, the Kochs have designed grant agreements with more than 150 colleges and universities where they restrict academic freedom by exerting control over who gets hired. The programs they fund present only their views in class, curricula and in their research. They promote pro-business, libertarian inquiry, which does not allow the facts and results to lead to their own conclusions. Faculties at many universities have protested these donations and threats to academic freedom.

7. AFP was one of the lead groups in Wisconsin, encouraging Republican Gov. Scott Walker to revoke collective bargaining agreements with public employees—except for police and firefighters, who tend to support the GOP and law-and-order politicians. Through national legal advocacy groups like ALEC, they have introduced scores of reactionary anti-union bills in dozens of states.

8. Other Koch-funded efforts include the Republican national effort to unduly police the voting process to discourage young people, minorities and senior from casting ballots. The reactionary voting rights bills they have introduced in dozens of states impose stricter voter ID requirements, which do not prevent people from registering to vote but will keep them from getting a ballot if they cannot present specific paperwork. AFP and other Koch-funded groups, such as True The Vote, have recruited and trained mostly white poll watchers to challenge the credentials of mostly non-white voters, creating a climate of fear and intimidation around voting.

9. The Koch brothers make $13 million a day from their investments, but they want to eliminate minimum wage laws and oppose any increases. People earning the federal minimum wage earn about $60 a day. A minimum wage worker would have to work almost 700 years to earn what the Kochs make in a day. (Koch-funded politicians have proposed 67 bills in 25 states to reduce the minimum wage.)

10. The Koch brothers want to destroy the most popular government program of all, Social Security, by funding right-wing think tanks that spread misinformation about Social Security’s long-term financial health, claiming it will not survive. They want people to invest their retirement savings on Wall Street, which is riskier and would earn billions in fees for investment firms. They want to raise the retirement age for Social Security to 70, which would especially penalize blue-collar workers who do manual labor, as their bodies wear out more quickly than white-collar workers.

11. The Koch brothers’ massive investments and holdings are literally killing the planet, because their primary business is transporting gas and oil. That includes the Canadian oil tar sands, which is the dirtiest source of fossil fuel on earth. If these sands are developed for the U.S. or Chinese markets, it would be the biggest carbon bomb in decades, hastening the progress of global climate change.
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/here-a ... &list_id=2

[seemslikeadream]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6zSy5lAxd0

The Koch Money Was a Primary Vector for the Prion Disease That's Infected the Republican Party
David Koch's worst legacy, however, will be on climate.

By Charles P. Pierce Aug 23, 2019

Fair warning. I am about to speak very ill of the dead. David Koch went to his eternal barbecue spit on Friday. Except for his surviving brother, Charles, no man had a worse effect on American politics since the death of John C. Calhoun. Every malignancy currently afflicting us can be traced in one way or another into their wallets, and that's not even to mention the lasting damage they've done to the planet as a whole. Sorry, Morning Joe gang, I wouldn't care if they opened branches of the National Museum of Puppies and Rainbows in every congressional district in the United States. The Koch brothers financed the wrecking ball that is still doing damage, and now one of them is dead, and, if I am not rejoicing, I am breathing deep sighs of relief and praying deep prayers of thanksgiving.

Jane Mayer, of course, has written the fundamental text on how the Kochs financed the destruction of American democracy and the ruination of planet Earth. (Here's a shorter version that was published in The New Yorker.) There's no need to dive deep into how they sabotaged campaign finance, bankrolled the Tea Party idiocy, dropped Scott Walker on Wisconsin and, worst of all, lavishly financed the climate denial movement until now it may be too late to undo the damage they've done. Other people will handle all of that better elsewhere. (One hopes.)

Make no mistake about the Koch Brother legacy.

I'd like to talk about the one thing that always symbolized how effectively the Koch money acted as a vector for the prion disease that has now consumed the higher functions of conservatism. From Mayer's New Yorker piece:

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 campaigns Industries leads all other energy companies in political contributions, as it has since 2006, more than eighty per cent of it to Republicans. 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.
Let's look at one particular project. In 2018, the city of Nashville proposed to build a $5.4 billion rapid-transit project involving high-speed rail. To pay for it, the city proposed to raise four taxes, including the sales tax. Which is about when someone lit up the Koch Signal. The Kochs hate rapid transit. It keeps people from buying cars, which run on the fuels that make the Koch family rich. They also produce the asphalt for the roads on which those cars run. Acting through a Koch-funded astroturfing operation, Americans For Prosperity, the Kochs lavishly funded the opposition and killed the plan. This kind of eye-on-the-sparrow bludgeoning is a measure of how thoroughly the Koch money has infected our politics all the way down to the local level.

Of course, the most lasting damage done by the Kochs is in the area of the climate crisis, in which their money and influence may have paralyzed the response to it until, now, things have gone past the point of control. It is in that spirit that I make the following proposal: If David Koch is to be cremated, I suggest we dispense with all the fuss and bother and just drop his corpse from a helicopter into the fires now consuming the Amazon rainforest. Let him be one with his legacy.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/p ... ssion=true