Things Go Better With Koch (Pronounced "Coke")

[Bud Struggle]

From The New Yorker. These are the guys that almost singlehandedly fund the Tea Party Movement. They gave over 100 million dollars to right wing causes.



Covert Operations



The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama





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



The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus...



Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all#ixzz0y7loUhEj

[Revolution starts with U]

Not surprising. And yet the dereg fanatics will not realize the implications of it :laugh::confused::mad::crying:

[Adi Shankara]

...I always thought it was pronounced "coach" :confused:

[Bud Struggle]

...I always thought it was pronounced "coach" :confused: It's actually somewhere in between coke and coach--but with coach I couldn't make a very good pun. :(

[Raúl Duke]

I remember reading from an eXile article that the Koch Bros. family got their money with trading, ironically, with Stalin's USSR.

[Dean]

I remember reading from an eXile article that the Koch Bros. family got their money with trading, ironically, with Stalin's USSR.
Yep.

And I think its 'kawtch' (that is, if my phonetics line up with whomever reads that).

[Die Rote Fahne]

Koch, pronouncd like Kosh in the word Kosher?

I dunno. I'm not Chomsky.

[x371322]

We need some super rich asshole to fund our movements. Oh well, I guess it must be hard to become a billionaire when you actually have principles.

[Demogorgon]

This is a really good example of how there is no political equality in capitalist society. Those with wealth get to define the political agenda.

[Leonid Brozhnev]

Doesn't matter how the name is pronounced, they're still a pair of cocks.

[RGacky3]

Biggest political scam since the Nazi party.

[Bud Struggle]

You guys should actually read the article--it's quite informative. :)

[RGacky3]

I've read it before :)

[Nolan]

What a recipe. Coke + Tea = Kool-Aid.

[NGNM85]

It's a fantastic article. This is one of those great stories that gets virtually no coverage.

[Dean]

Look at these hilarious responses to a post about Koch industries and corporate welfare:
http://community.livejournal.com/libertarianism/2769544.html?view=81319816#t81319816

[Kiev Communard]

One more example of how supporters of corporate neo-feudalism ("feudal" in political, not socioeconomic terms) hijacked the term "libertarian". Really, this whole "libertarian" movement in the U.S. resembles National "Socialism" in its appropriation of historically left-wing symbolism and slogans, while attaching radically right-wing content to them.

[Revolution starts with U]

The right wing has never been good at creating their own rhetoric. The only way they ever hegemonize common people is by adopting left-wing populist rhetoric to right wing causes. Case in point, right libertarians trying to convince people that regulations create super-corporations, etc.

[NGNM85]

Here's an excellent piece on the Koch brothers from Democracy Now!;
6cW_3xO3w90

[Bud Struggle]

The right wing has never been good at creating their own rhetoric. The only way they ever hegemonize common people is by adopting left-wing populist rhetoric to right wing causes. Case in point, right libertarians trying to convince people that regulations create super-corporations, etc.

Leftism isn't the default position of Populism. It runs the all over the spectrum form Hard Left to Hard Right. That's why so many Revolutions end up in so many differern places politically.

[Revolution starts with U]

Populism, I would posit, usually starts with a revolutionary stance. Hegemonic populism (poor people defending elites) is usually a reaction to that, and it uses leftist rhetoric against it. Think of Ron Paul, for all intents and purposes his outcomes are vastly similar to the left wing, but he is still a right wing defender of elites and elitist institutions.

[Klaatu]

It is strange to me that penniless (or near-penniless) Libertarians fiercely defend the politicics of the rich man, even though it is practically impossible that these working-class people will never become wealthy themselves.

[Sasha]

Class War For Idiots (http://exiledonline.com/cat/class-war-for-idiots/) / Investigative Report (http://exiledonline.com/cat/investigative-report/) / September 4, 2010
A People’s History of Koch Industries, Part II: Libertarian Billionaires Charles and David Koch Are Closetcase Subsidy Kings Who Milk Big Government Tyranny, But Want To Slash Spending On Anyone Else (http://exiledonline.com/a-people-history-of-koch-industries-part-ii-libertarian-billionaires-charles-and-david-koch-are-closetcase-subsidy-kings-who-milk-big-government-tyranny-but-want-to-slash-spending-on-anyone-else/)
By

http://exiledonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/welfare-cadillac-charles-david-koch1.jpg

An abridged version of this article was first published (http://www.observer.com/2010/daily-transom/how-libertarian-koch-bros-benefit-corporate-welfare)

in the New York Observer (http://www.observer.com/2010/daily-transom/how-libertarian-koch-bros-benefit-corporate-welfare)

https://exiledonline.com/wp-content/uploads/dot-sep-know.gif

Mainstream America is finally getting to know the billionaire brothers backing the libertarian movement, thanks to a pair of dueling profiles (http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2010/08/press_clips_day_3.php) in New York and The New Yorker. Now that we’ve heard about their charitable giving, David’s 240-foot mega-yacht and role as patrons of the Tea Party movement, it’s time to ask a more serious question: How libertarian are they?
The short answer…not very.
Charles and David Koch, the secretive billionaire brothers who own Koch Industries, the largest private oil company in America, have spent millions bankrolling free-market think tanks and pro-business politicians in order, as David Koch has put it, “to minimize the role of government, to maximize the role of private economy and to maximize personal freedoms.” But a closer look at their dealings reveals that for the past 35 years the brothers have never shied away from using government subsidies to maximize their own profits, even while endeavoring to limit government spending on anything else. Simply put: the Kochs have no problem with socialism — as long as they’re in on the action.
In 1977, Charles Koch founded the Cato Institute, an influential libertarian think tank, with the aim of injecting free-market ideas into the mainstream. The Kochs would go on to establish and fund a vast network of overlapping think tanks, institutes, foundations, media outlets, and lobby groups that would vilify centralized government and promote laissez-faire capitalism as the only route to economic prosperity. The Mercatus Center, Americans for Prosperity, Reason Magazine, the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation are just a few of the right-wing organizations that run on Koch cash today.
Koch Industries is America’s second-largest private corporation (http://www.forbes.com/lists/2009/21/private-companies-09_Americas-Largest-Private-Companies_Rank.html), with revenue of $100 billion in 2009, and 80,000 employees in 60 countries. According to Charles Koch, Koch Industries has grown 2,000-fold since he took over from his dad in 1967, transforming a middling oil transportation and refinement operation into a corporate mini-state involved in oil, petrochemicals, paper, agriculture and financial services (http://nymag.com/news/features/67285/index3.html). Worth just under $20 billion apiece, the brothers live like emperors. David Koch, 70, resides in a Park Avenue and likes to take a few weeks off every year to lounge on his 246-foot megayacht in the Mediterranean, which costs $500,000 a week to operate and has been rented out for pleasure cruises by Prince Charles.
Seventy-four-year-old Charles G. Koch, who runs the company from a compound in Wichita, Kansas, has attributed the company’s success to an unshakable belief in the power of the free-markets—a belief that he says can be traced back to an “intellectual epiphany” he experienced at a conference more than 40 years ago. There, Koch realized that free-market economics were an objective reality “as immutable as the laws that work in science,” he explained in 2006 (http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Article/005912-2006-05-09-the-worlds-richest-libertarian.htm?EdNo=001&From).
In its recent profile, the New Yorker called Charles and David Koch “the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America.” But the magazine failed to mention that their free market philanthropy belies the immense profit they have made from corporate welfare.
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1. SOCIALIST SHIPBUILDING

Two years before founding the influential Cato Institute, Charles Koch bought a supertanker from a communist regime. According to information in the Lehman Brothers business archives, as well as records found in a Croatian shipyard, in 1975, Koch Industries purchased ship from the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. The ship, a standard 274,330-ton dual use tanker, was named after the Kochs’ mother, Mary. (http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/lehman/query.html?company=koch_industries_inc&deal=1)
The purchase of a ship from Yugoslavia would not have been a big deal, had the Kochs not been the ones doing the buying. With the whole free world to choose from, why would a supposedly true-believer libertarian like Charles Koch buy a vessel produced in a communist country—and name it after his own dear mother, to boot? After all, didn’t Austrian school economist Ludwig Von Mises, an early influence on Charles’ intellectual journey to libertarianism, write in his 1933 seminal work, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, that centrally planned economies are so inherently inefficient that “socialism must fail”?
It turned out that Yugoslavia’s highly-centralized economy was the opposite of inefficient—it was on fire. In the 1960s and 1970s, the country was churning out, among other things, low-cost, high-quality ships that were sold around the world. Even the old-school libertarian magazine The Freeman couldn’t help but praise the country’s economic performance, writing in 1988, “Many of Yugoslavia’s industries seemed highly competitive in world markets, and there were even astonishing reports that efficient Yugoslav shipbuilders wrested contracts away from the Japanese (http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/yugoslavia-trouble-in-the-halfway-house/).”

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2. VENEZUELAN FERTILIZER

In 1998, Koch Industries entered into a lucrative partnership with two state-owned companies–one Venezuelan, the other Italian–to open a massive $1 billion nitrogen-based fertilizer plant in Venezuela called Fertinitro (http://www.allbusiness.com/banking-finance/financial-markets-investing-securities/6873860-1.html).
A business venture with two state-run companies? How did Koch Industries find itself in this libertarian nightmare scenario? After all, Charles Koch’s own Cato Institute (http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10543) brain trust has been writing for decades that state-owned enterprises are less efficient and productive than private companies.
Fertilizer production requires massive amounts of natural gas, and obtaining it can account for 50 percent of operating costs. Luckily for Koch, Fertinitro’s semi-state-owned status allowed it to tap into a guaranteed supply of natural gas subsidized by the state. Steven Bodzin, a former Bloomberg journalist, found that “just on the natural gas, never mind the electricity or water subsidies, Koch profits from a direct Venezuelan government subsidy of $1.23 for every thousand cubic feet of gas consumed at Fertinitro.” For Koch Industries, whose role in the partnership is to unload half of the 6 million tons of fertilizer produced by Fertinitro every year on the American market, that equals up to $123.6 million in subsidies (http://www.observer.com/2010/slideshow/131739/%20https://settysoutham.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/tea-partiers-funded-by-hugo-chavez/) every (http://www.observer.com/2010/slideshow/131739/%20https://settysoutham.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/tea-partiers-funded-by-hugo-chavez/) year (http://www.observer.com/2010/slideshow/131739/%20https://settysoutham.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/tea-partiers-funded-by-hugo-chavez/).
Savor the irony: While tea partiers wave Koch-funded placards comparing President Obama to Hugo Chavez, the Kochs are busy profiting off Chavez’s socialist economy—only to turn around and blame Venezuela’s poverty on Hugo Chavez’s socialist policies.
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3. RANCHING

For the past fifty years, through its Matador Cattle Company subsidiary, Koch Industries has been quietly milking (http://www.scribd.com/doc/36756374/Another-Stop-on-the-Western-Livestock-Journal) a New Deal program that allows ranchers to use federal land basically for free. Matador, one of the ten biggest domestic cattle ranching operations, has something in the neighborhood of 300,000 acres of grazing land for its cows—two-thirds of which belong to American taxpayers, who will never see a penny of profit (http://www.observer.com/2010/slideshow/131739/%20http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Annie,+get+your+Guccis.-a012514447).
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4. LOGGING

In 2006, Koch Industries acquired pulp and paper giant Georgia-Pacific (http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12776) for a $21-billion cash payment, allowing the Koch brothers to tap into a whole new area of government largesse: the ability to log public forests for private gain and have taxpayers cover the operating costs. Not only can companies like Georgia-Pacific, which is the world’s leading manufacturer of paper products, exploit a publicly-shared resource without sharing the profits, but the U.S. Forestry Service subsidizes them to do it by forcing taxpayers to fund the construction of new logging roads that provide loggers with access to virgin growth—a nice welfare arrangement for the industry that costs taxpayers over $1 billion a year (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jDax1lln3RkJ:www.johnmuirproject.or g/pdf/JMP-NFTaxLoss.pdf).
“Private logging of America’s National Forests is a heavily subsidized form of corporate welfare,” wrote Scott Silver, founder and executive director of Wild Wilderness, a conservation watchdog, at the time of the Georgia-Pacific’s sale to Koch Industries. “Logging companies such as Georgia-Pacific strip lands bare, destroy vast acreages and pay only a small fee to the federal government in proportion to what they take from the public (http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=1169).”
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5. ETHANOL

Just two weeks ago, Koch Industries got into the ethanol business (http://www.kansas.com/2010/08/18/1451617/koch-firm-buys-2-ethanol-plants.html) by buying two ethanol plants in Iowa. Other than defense, ethanol is possibly the most subsidized industry in America. Koch’s own Cato Institute has called ethanol a “boondoggle (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:RUtE4ga67rIJ:www.cato.org/pubs/articles/ethanol-boondoggle.pdf+cato+institute+ethanol&hl=en&gl=us),” writing that “the dizzying array of federal, state and local subsidies, preferences and mandates for ethanol fuel are a sad reflection of how a mix of cynical politics and we-can-do-anything American naiveté can cloud minds and distort markets.” The institute has sharply criticized the billions of dollars in federal and state subsidies that are poured into the ethanol industry (between $5 billion and $6.8 billion in 2006 alone).
Koch Industries has traded ethanol for years on the commodities market, but their entry into the production side of the business puts them in a position to profit off the subsidies in a more direct manner.
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6. EMINENT DOMAIN

Although highly diversified, Koch Industries’ vast network of oil and gas pipelines remains the company’s core business and main source of revenue (http://books.google.com/books?id=8_MZt3z92BkC&lpg=PA92&ots=02ViGwjX_m&dq=koch%20industries%20pipelines%20where%20are%20t hey%25A0miles%20000&pg=PA92#v=onepage&q&f=false). The exact size of their pipeline network is not known, but some estimate that Koch Industries operates anywhere between 35,000 and 50,000 miles of pipelines between Texas and Canada—enough plumbing to wrap around the globe twice or zigzag between New York and Los Angeles 15 times. How did the Kochs manage to build up a pipeline network of this magnitude? By getting the government to use its tyrannical powers of eminent domain forcibly seize private property on Koch Industries’ behalf.
As far as libertarians are concerned, eminent domain is a socialist tyranny straight out of the Leninist playbook, as it recognizes the government as the real owner of all land and vests it with the power to expropriate private property for alleged public good. At the most fundamental level, libertarians believe that eminent domain invalidates the notion of private property rights, threatening not just prosperity, but freedom. Charles Koch is clear on this. “Countries that clearly define and protect individual private property rights stimulate investment and grow,” he writes in his book The Science of Success. “Those that threaten and confiscate private property lose capital and decline.”
But not all property rights are created equal. A Koch Industries oil pipeline recently built in Minnesota shows that Charles Koch does not see an is anything wrong with the government confiscating private property, as long as he stands to make a profit.
Completed in 2008, the 304-mile line (http://www.scribd.com/doc/34960116/MINNCAN%20,) now carries crude oil from the Canadian border to a Koch Industries refinery near the Twin Cities area via a two-foot-wide pipe. Company PR execs pitched the pipeline as a public benefit project, as it would increase Minnesota’s gasoline supply. But the 1,000-plus landowners who were forced to handover their private property so that Koch Industries could run its pipeline didn’t quite see it that way. “People’s rights were violated, and they never got their due process,” a farmer whose fields were going to be cut in two by the pipeline told a newspaper in 2007 (http://www.glencoenews.com/main.asp?SectionID=18&SubSectionID=31&ArticleID=17180). “It’s wrong. People’s property is one of the most important things to their livelihood.”
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7. STALIN

Before Fredrick Koch suddenly developed a pinko paranoia and helped start up the John Birch Society, he was making piles of cash laying the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure in the 1920s and early 1930s. He designed and built refineries, hosted Soviet engineers for training in Wichita, Kansas, and made an invaluable contribution to the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union during Joseph Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan. This is a touchy issue for the Koch family: without the Commie Reds providing his future seed capital, Koch Industries would not exist today—and neither would the Tea Parties (http://exiledonline.com/a-peoples-history-of-koch-industries-how-stalin-funded-the-tea-party-movement/).
When I wrote about the Koch family’s wealth and its connection to the Soviet Union in April 2010, libertarians rushed to the Kochs’ defense, arguing that business decisions made when they were children had no bearing on Charles and David Koch. They are not their father, and cannot be blamed for his sins―which is true. The brothers are better at the libertarian lie than their father ever was: their self-help libertarianism is more effective pro-billionaire propaganda than his racist Bircher rants. But while the tone may be different, the objective is very much the same: to con the American people into voting against their own interests.
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8. TAKEAWAY MESSAGE

The next time you hear Michele Bachmann (who’s a welfare queen in her own right (https://exiledonline.com/teabagger-queen-michele-bachmann-cashed-in-on-250000-in-welfare/)) screaming at the top of her lungs that socialized healthcare is “reaching down the throat and ripping the guts out of freedom” or watch a Cato Institute shill on Meet the Press layout a case for why you should support the privatization of social security, remember: they aren’t hypocrites, they’re cons looking to rip you off.


Yasha Levine is an editor of The eXiled (http://exiledonline.com/). Levine and co-author Mark Ames first broke the connection between the Tea Party and the billionaire Koch brothers in Playboy.com in February 2009, sparking lawsuit threats, and causing CNBC’s Rick Santelli to publicly distance himself from the Tea Party movement and cancel his Daily Show appearance (http://www.alternet.org/story/129656/the_rick_santelli_%27tea_party%27_controversy%3A_a rticle_kicks_up_a_media_dust_storm/).
Read other takedowns of the Koch brothers by Levine and Ames… (https://exiledonline.com/?s=koch)


source: http://exiledonline.com/a-people-history-of-koch-industries-part-ii-libertarian-billionaires-charles-and-david-koch-are-closetcase-subsidy-kings-who-milk-big-government-tyranny-but-want-to-slash-spending-on-anyone-else/

[Bud Struggle]

^^^FYI: I'm getting security pop ups on my computer because of this link to exiled online dot com.

[RGacky3]

Whats interstinga about the Koch brothers, and whats telling about the lunicy of the right wing since obama, is that WILLIAM BUCKLEY, yeah, you heard it correctly WILLIAM BUCKLEY, the voice of the right and conservatism for decades, called what the Koch brothers supported Anarcho-Totalitarianism (http://www.thenation.com/article/154595/money-well-spent).

Sounds like it could have come straight out of any anarcho-communist or anarcho-syndicalist mouth.

[Amphictyonis]

We need some super rich asshole to fund our movements. Oh well, I guess it must be hard to become a billionaire when you actually have principles.

There are super rich assholes funding Obama. Luckily thats not our movement. I almost don't care about the representative "democracy" in the states anymore. At the beginning of Obama's term I wrote extensively concerning the Koch (pronounced Coke) brothers funding of the tea parties.

They fund everything from the DLC (Democrat leadership Council- which Obama is a member of) to CATO to freedomworks and on and on. The biggest surprise is the DLC seeing most of Obama's cronies come from that shit hole of a political organization. It's all a sham. Rahm Emanuel basically gets his funding from the Koch brothers. This is how he rigged a pro Irq war congress in 2006:

http://www.counterpunch.org/walsh10142006.html

[La Comédie Noire]

That picture of him in the New Yorker is positively evil.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I gave a speech on the Tea Parties and I read up on these guys - they've given about 100 million to tea-party associated groups and one of their organizations, Americans For Prosperity sells t-shirts that say:

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/AFP-shirt-back1.jpg

But, in fact, the money that fuels this group is a front for these things.

Also the Koch bros. are the sons of one of the original John-Birchers... of tea party politics are not grassroots or new and spontaneous expressions of populist anger from below: they are dressed-up 50 year old politics promoted for decades by some of the richest people in the world.

Ironically, I just came back from a free vacation to NYC (woo-hoo!) and the Natural History Museum has a wing of dinosaur bones funded by David Koch. I guess if you promote monstrous politics, you are pretty familiar with all kinds of prehistoric beasts.

http://www.triplepundit.com/2010/04/smithsonian-dragged-into-koch-industries-global-warming-controversy/