After Life of Incalculable Harm, Billionaire Climate Denialist and Right-Wing Villain David Koch Dead at 79. How US billionaires are fuelling the hard-right cause in Britain. Dark money is among the greatest current threats to democracy.
It means money spent below the public radar, that seeks to change political outcomes. It enables very rich people and corporations to influence politics without showing their hands. Among the world’s biggest political spenders are Charles and David Koch, co-owners of Koch Industries, a vast private conglomerate of oil pipelines and refineries, chemicals, timber and paper companies, commodity trading firms and cattle ranches.
If their two fortunes were rolled into one, Charles David Koch, with $120bn, would be the richest man on Earth. In a rare public statement, in an essay published in 1978, Charles Koch explained his objective. What billionaires want: the secret influence of America’s 100 richest. If we judge US billionaires by their most prominent fellows, they may seem to be a rather attractive bunch: ideologically diverse (perhaps even tending center-left), frank in speaking out about their political views, and generous in philanthropic giving for the common good – not to mention useful for the goods and jobs they have helped produce.
The very top titans – Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates – have all taken left-of-center stands on various issues, and Buffett and Gates are paragons of philanthropy. The former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is known for his advocacy of gun control, gay rights, and environmental protection. Oil giant Koch Industries try to stop the attempt to expand the electric vehicle federal tax credit - Electrek.
With a new Republican-backed effort to expand the electric vehicle federal tax credit, the Koch brothers are urging senators to vote against it – putting their political donation dollars at work.
The situation around the federal tax credit for EVs is weirder than ever right now. As Tesla hit the threshold to initiate the phase-out, there are two different legislative efforts to change it. Earlier this month, a Republican senator introduced a new bill to end the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric cars and tax them even more instead. But a few days later, another Republican senator proposed a new bill to remove the federal tax credit cap for EVs and expand it to 2022. How the Koch brothers built the most powerful rightwing group you've never heard of.
The cries of “Shame!
Shame! Shame!” Two Koch Insiders Are Creating a New Office Inside the FCC - TYT Network. Federal Communication Commission Chairman Ajit Pai at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), February, 2018.
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. By Alex Kotch. Koch Brothers, Behind Tea Party Wave, Face Democrats' Rising Tide In 2018. Tea Party activists hold a rally on Capitol Hill in 2010.
That grassroots movement, with backing from the Koch political network, helped Republicans win back the House in the 2010 midterms. In 2018, the Koch network is on defense against Democratic gains. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Tea Party activists hold a rally on Capitol Hill in 2010. How the Kochs launched Joni Ernst. Joni Ernst was surprised to receive an invitation in the summer of 2013 that she later credited with starting her meteoric rise to the U.S.
Senate. Ernst was then a little-known Iowa state senator and lieutenant colonel in the National Guard who was considering a long-shot campaign for the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate. Polls showed more than 90 percent of her state’s voters had no opinion of her. At least a half-dozen other Republicans ― some with better funding and connections and stronger establishment support ― also were positioning themselves to run against the presumptive Democratic nominee, Rep. Story Continued Below.
Koch Brothers’ Operatives Fill Top White House Positions, Ethics Forms Reveal. If the billionaire Koch brothers turn to the White House for favors, they will see many familiar faces.
Newly disclosed ethics forms reveal that a significant number of senior Trump staffers were previously employed by the sprawling network of hard-right and libertarian advocacy groups financed and controlled by Charles and David Koch, the conservative duo hyper-focused on entrenching Republican power, eliminating taxes, and slashing environmental and labor regulations. Some of the relationships were well-known. Marc Short, for instance, now Trump’s chief liaison to Congress, previously led Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the dark money nonprofit used by the Koch brothers and their donor cohort to dispense money to allied groups. Freedom Partners, which maintains an affiliate Super PAC, was at the center of the Kochs’ $750 million election effort during the campaign last year. Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP. Inside the Koch Brothers' Toxic Empire - Rolling Stone.
The enormity of the Koch fortune is no mystery.
Brothers Charles and David are each worth more than $40 billion. The electoral influence of the Koch brothers is similarly well-chronicled. The Kochs are our homegrown oligarchs; they've cornered the market on Republican politics and are nakedly attempting to buy Congress and the White House. Their political network helped finance the Tea Party and powers today's GOP. Koch-affiliated organizations raised some $400 million during the 2012 election, and aim to spend another $290 million to elect Republicans in this year's midterms. What is less clear is where all that money comes from. Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House.
On the morning after the election, November 9, 2016, the people who ran the U.S.
Department of Energy turned up in their offices and waited. They had cleared 30 desks and freed up 30 parking spaces. They didn’t know exactly how many people they’d host that day, but whoever won the election would surely be sending a small army into the Department of Energy, and every other federal agency. The Ideologues Who Want to Destroy Democracy to Save Capitalism. The Ideologues Who Want to Destroy [...] James Buchanan flashes a smile at a news conference in 1986 at George Mason University after it was announced that he is the winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economic science. (Photo by Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images) Last week we presented you with historian Nancy MacLean’s fascinating story of James McGill Buchanan — the father of “public choice economics” whose writing was influential to a number of ideologues on the far right.
Alec-meeting-denver-conservatives?akid=15891.2675170. Photo Credit: Ken Durden / Shutterstock.com This post originally appeared at Exposed by CMD. Denver’s massive Blue Bear will be peering in the windows as US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos headlines the 44th American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) Annual Meeting being held at the Colorado Convention Center’s Hyatt Regency Hotel July 19-21. Who’s Backing Scott Pruitt To Head The EPA? The Koch Brothers.
Oklahoma Attorney General and President-elect Donald Trump's nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt, meets with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), on Capitol Hill January 6, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) This post originally appeared at The Huffington Post. The two dozen nonprofit groups and Senate committee members defending Scott Pruitt, President Donald Trump’s nominee for Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, have at least two things in common. Like Pruitt, they’re climate science deniers. Secretive Foundation’s Blueprint for Spreading Right-Wing Ideology. Documents Reveal a Powerful, Secretive [...] North Carolina millionaire and political operative Art Pope, who received $1.5 million from the Bradley Foundation for two conservative groups he founded. (Photo by Ted Richardson/For The Washington Post via Getty Images) This post originally appeared at AlterNet.
The billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch get a lot of press coverage about their vast, conservative political spending network that helps elect right-wing officials at the federal, state and local levels and advocates for policies that increase the profits of their fossil fuel and manufacturing conglomerate, Koch Industries. Earning far less publicity but perhaps equally powerful in driving rightward change in America is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a private foundation based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Now the foundation is focusing on five states it views as having a strong conservative infrastructure, thus making them ripe for rightward change. In the Withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, the Koch Brothers’ Campaign Becomes Overt.
If there was any lingering doubt that a tiny clique of fossil-fuel barons has captured America’s energy and environmental policies, it was dispelled last week, when the Trump Administration withdrew from the Paris climate accord. Surveys showed that a majority of Americans in literally every state wanted to remain within the agreement, and news reports established that the heads of many of the country’s most successful and iconic Fortune 100 companies, from Disney to General Electric, did, too.
Voters and big business were arrayed against leaving the climate agreement. Yet despite the majority’s sentiment, a tiny—and until recently, almost faceless—minority somehow prevailed. How this happened is no longer a secret. The answer, as the New York Times reported, on Sunday, is “a story of big political money.” It's Official: How the Koch Brothers Killed Trump’s Job Plan.
Peasants for Plutocracy: How the Billionaires Brainwashed America (Mini-Documentary) The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. Charles Koch, 79, in his office at Koch Industries in Wichita, Kansas, on July 29, 2015. (Photo by Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post via Getty Images) Author Nancy MacLean has unearthed a stealth ideologue of the American right.
It Looks Like the Kochs' Dream of a Right-Wing Constitutional Convention Has Been Roadblocked. Photo Credit: DonkeyHotey / Flickr Creative Commons.