“The Koch Brothers”: The Extremist Roots Run Deep
Some women and men spend their lives rebelling against their father or mother, but others follow in their footsteps or yearn for their approval. Some become friends.
A few spend millions to make their parents’ vision a reality.
Charles and David Koch are among those few.
Raw ideas that were once at the fringes have been carved into ‘mainstream’ policy through their wealth and will.
According to the lore, a lawsuit against his company by big oil companies forced their dad, Fred Koch, into helping Stalin build refineries, fueling his anti-communist/anti-government views.
The truth is less tidy.
A company called Universal Oil Products sued Fred Koch’s company for patent infringement in 1929.
Four years earlier, in 1925, the 25-year old Koch formed the Winkler-Koch Engineering Company, with Lewis Winkler. After studying at Rice and MIT, the Texan-born Koch joined Winkler and another man in launching the company in Wichita.
Before that, Winkler had worked as the chief engineer at Universal Oil Products, a firm that held patents on the fuel processing methods developed by Jesse Dubbs. Before joining up with Koch, Winkler had helped Dubbs’ son Carbon install one of the first thermal “cracking” stills that used the pressure and heat process that Koch’s firm would later deploy with slight modification, according to the expert testimony of the chairman of MIT’s chemical engineering department, as noted in Dan Schulman’s “Sons of Wichita.” Ultimately, though, after a bribery scandal involving an appellate judge the verdict against the Koch firm would be overturned and Universal Oil Products’ successor firms would pay the company damages.
But back in 1929 – before the sudden stock market crash and nearly three years before the patent case went to trial — Koch’s firm signed contracts to build cracking stills in the U.S.S.R.
The communist regime didn’t recognize intellectual property rights, but it did pay well.
America had broken diplomatic ties with Russia nearly twelve years earlier, after the bloody Bolshevik revolution. Koch’s firm was not the only U.S. company doing business there. Henry Ford inked a deal, too.
Koch spent a few months in the Soviet Union to help fulfill the terms of the $5 million contract. He claimed the experience made him deeply anti-communist, but that didn’t stop him from cashing in on Stalin’s rubles.
Five million in revenue in today’s dollars would put an American small business — like Koch’s firm was back then — in the top 1%, after the stock market crashed.
The average American’s net income in 1930 was $4,887 and one penny, according to the IRS. That was back when five cents could buy a Rocky Ford cigar and 500 bucks could buy a basic Model A Ford. The average gross revenue of companies that year was about $177,000. Koch’s soviet contract was worth millions more than that.
Flush with riches, in 1932 Koch was playing polo at the Kansas City Country Club when he met Mary Robinson whom he wooed and married, according to Fortune magazine. Four sons soon followed. Over the years, they imbibed many doses of their adamant father’s rightwing political and economic diatribes.
Koch expressed deep antipathy toward the New Deal policies that helped pull the country out of the Great Depression.
He was not alone. By 1950, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy began accusing workers at the State Department, veterans, playwrights, actors, and others of being communist sympathizers dedicated to the overthrow of the U.S. government. McCarthy even accused President Harry S. Truman and Democrats of being in league with communists.
The Progressive repeatedly wrote against McCarthyism and published a special issue in April 1954 entitled “McCarthy: A Documented Record,” helping to expose him for the fraud he was. A month later journalist Edward R. Murrow criticized McCarthy on national TV, noting “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.”
His fellow Senators censured McCarthy later that year.
Disgraced, by 1957 he was dead.
But McCarthy’s paranoid worldview was not.
In 1958, Robert Welch invited Fred Koch and a handful of other businessmen to his home to create the John Birch Society, as Schulman noted.
At that secret meeting, Welch practically channeled McCarthy on communism:
“This octopus is so large that its tentacles now reach into all the legislative halls, all of the union labor meetings, a majority of religious gatherings, and most of the schools of the whole world.”
Koch quickly signed up for the national council of the new John Birch Society.
That year, according to archives, Koch worked with fellow Kansan Robert Love, of the Love Box Company, to help amend the Kansas Constitution to limit the rights of workers and unions, making it a so-called right to work state.
In 1960, Koch published a pamphlet based on his speeches called “A Businessman Looks at Communism.” The booklet, which was reprinted in 1961, ranted and raved that the National Education Association was a communist group and public-school books were filled with “communist propaganda,” paranoia that extended to all unions, and the “pro-communist” Supreme Court. Fred Koch also claimed that African Americans would engage in a “vicious race war,” echoing the words of white supremacists–including Birchers–who opposed desegregating public schools.
Koch also claimed that President Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the U.S. and allied forces in World War II, was soft on communism.
Such red-baiting might be ancient history if fifty years later Fred’s son David were not calling President Obama a “scary” “hard-core socialist” and spending millions on groups trying to defeat him.
Koch’s fanaticism echoed claims of his Bircher buddy Welch, who had written: “Could Eisenhower really be simply a smart politician, entirely without principles and hungry for glory, who is only the tool of the Communists? The answer is yes . . . it is difficult to avoid raising the question of deliberate treason.”
Treason? (That charge has a familiar hollow ring, as rightwing pundits and Tea Party pals fling it at President Obama and Birchers also flung it a President Kennedy, before he was assassinated.)
Eisenhower’s face is now engraved on every American dime.
After the CIA’s invasion of Cuba spectacularly foundered, David Koch and his twin brother, William, led a “May Day” party at their MIT frat house that hanged Fidel Castro in effigy. A riot broke out and thirty people were arrested, as noted by Brian Doherty in Radicals for Capitalism. (There’s no record the Koch boys were among those booked.)
That was the year that Charles had moved home to Kansas to be groomed to take over the family firm, after finishing engineering degrees at MIT and a short gig designing cigarette filters.
Charles was not only his dad’s choice to succeed him at the company.
He was also the heir to his extreme anti-government politics. By the time Charles stepped in as CEO in 1966, he’d been steeped in Fred’s Bircher outlook and enthralled with the Austrian economics books lining his dad’s library walls, providing an academic rationale for the free market fundamentalism he’s peddled with millions of dollars ever since.
That year, his father Fred helped form and fund another Birch front group, the “1776 Committee,” to try to recruit Eza Taft Benson, one of the leaders of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, to run for president as an independent, along with U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond, the racist segregationist politician from South Carolina, to run for vice president. (This fact was discovered in the national archive review of the Center for Media and Democracy, but also discovered by other researchers like Ernie Lazar.)
Both Benson and Thurmond had routinely echoed Bircher attacks on the civil rights movement. The effort was ultimately rebuffed, although it underscores how central to the John Birch Society was its animus toward government efforts to challenge racial segregation and anti-discrimination laws.
Month after month in publications to its members and promoted in its bookstores, attacking the civil rights movement and lauding its opponents were the Birchers’ top domestic agenda items throughout the 1960s. Challenging the United Nations and opposing communism abroad were its foreign policy focal points.
Although years later Fred’s wife Mary claimed to the press that Fred had abandoned the John Birch Society as too extreme, archived letters show that Fred Koch continued to support it and its mission until he met his end, although his failing health made it harder for him to keep up the pace of its executive committee. His family also asked that memorials (donations) be given in his name to only a handful of organizations, including the John Birch Society bookstore in Wichita.
Archived documents also show that Charles continued his role in the John BIrch Society into the year after his father’s death.
Decades later, perhaps it should come as no surprise that Charles and his brother David have fueled operations that attack progressive policies and those who defend them as “communists,” “collectivists,” or “socialists.”
Such smears are not new, but with the Kochs’ doubling of their personal fortune during the Obama administration while most Americans’ wages have stagnated, such claims seem like grand misdirection. The volume of the revival of these attacks has grown dramatically, and will soon grow louder still, fueled by Koch cash and U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have unleashed billionaires to spend unlimited funds influencing American elections.
By: Lisa Graves, The Center for Media and Democracy, July 10, 2014
“GOP’s New Plutocratic Populism”: A Bizarre Vision Of The Working Class
Fresh off his victory over Tea Party challenger Matt Bevin, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell headed to the American Enterprise Institute Thursday to make himself over as a GOP populist. The party, as you’ve heard, has decided it needs “middle-class outreach” – since it’s given up on outreach to women, Latinos, African-Americans and the LGBT community – and thus some intellectuals and politicians have tried to craft “a middle class agenda.”
While the party should continue to stand for the free market and business interests, McConnell said, it had to face facts: “For most Americans whose daily concerns revolve around aging parents, long commutes, shrinking budgets and obscenely high tuition bills, these hymns to entrepreneurialism are as a practical matter largely irrelevant. And the audience for them is probably a lot smaller than we think.”
That, you’ll recall, was the takeaway from Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, where the plutocrat’s self-satisfied slogan “You built that!” was meant to mock Obama’s declaring that nobody builds a business entirely alone, but seemed to mock anyone who drew a paycheck, which is most of us.
But what is the tangible help McConnell and his friends are now offering to middle-class families? Very little, it turns out. McConnell had the audacity to present his union-busting National Right to Work Act as a pro-middle class reform, ignoring the way the labor movement actually built the middle class from the 1940s through the 1970s. Oh well.
The AEI event also included Sens. Mike Lee and Tim Scott, along with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and writers like Ross Douthat, Ramesh Ponnuru and Reihan Salam, who contributed to a collection of essays on the new middle-class agenda called “Room to Grow.” They talked about helping single mothers, tackling student debt and ending corporate cronyism. But they offered very few ideas that would make a difference, and their good ideas are strangled by GOP orthodoxy. Lee wants to develop a package of tax cuts and credits for the middle class, for instance, but it adds $2.4 billion to the deficit so he hasn’t worked out his numbers.
The Utah Tea Party favorite also proposes to help the middle class while cracking down on the poor: Since he believes poverty programs create a “disincentive to work,” he wants to cut them and step up work requirements for those who do get help. “We don’t want people to have to make that kind of awful choice” between welfare and work, Lee told a reporter, so we’ll cut back welfare and make it harder to access. Bless his heart.
Ending corporate cronyism seems like a place the two parties might find common ground, but every time Democrats and a few Republicans put together a proposal for cutting the tax loopholes that make the tax code so unfair, conservatives squash it.
Still, let’s give the folks behind “Room to Grow” credit for trying, again, to buck the prevailing pro-plutocrat direction of their party. In the conservative Washington Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti praised the agenda, but offered a caveat. “I do not doubt for a moment that if the Republican Party adopted Room to Grow as its platform tomorrow, then both the GOP and the country would enjoy a better future,” he wrote. But he remembered a similar reception for Douthat and Salam’s widely praised “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save The American Dream,” and concluded the GOP “is no closer to embracing the ideas of Salam [and] Douthat…than it was when we celebrated the publication of ‘Grand New Party’ at the Watergate in 2008.”
Continetti deserves credit for explaining exactly why that is:
The outreach Republicans make to single women and to minorities inevitably repels the groups that give the party 48 percent of the popular vote—Christians and seniors and men. As has been made abundantly clear, 48 percent of the popular vote does not a presidential victory make. But 48 percent is not quite something to sniff at either. That number can always go down.
So if the GOP can craft an agenda that it can sell to Christian senior men, this middle-class thing is a go. Otherwise, it’s going to have to wait for people with the courage to sacrifice part of that 48 percent to get to 51 percent.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, May 23, 2014
“The Rich, Still Different From You And Me”: We Still Treat Them As Though Their Feelings About Money Are Similar To Ours
When the news broke that Los Angeles Clippers owner and creepy racist misogynist billionaire Donald Sterling would be banned from the NBA for life (perhaps resulting in him selling the team) and fined $2.5 million, a lot of people probably said, “$2.5 million? The guy’s got a couple of billion dollars! Why not give him a fine that’ll hurt?”
Frankly, I think any fine at all is a little strange in this case. We usually think of fines as punishment for violations of some rule or law, not as a response to someone just being a horrible human being (though there could well be some clause in the the secret NBA owner bylaws about behavior that reflects poorly on the league). The ban, on the other hand, seems perfectly appropriate, even if when he sells the team he’ll net a few hundred million dollars on his original $12 million investment. But the fine—and the weird fact that he was about to get a “lifetime achievement award” from the NAACP for his contributions to the welfare of black people—remind us that although the super-rich have a fundamentally different relationship to money than the rest of us, we still treat them as though their feelings about money are similar to ours.
Here’s what I mean. Back in the day (and maybe still, I’m not sure), when the United Jewish Appeal was soliciting contributions, they used to tell people, “Give till it hurts.” The idea was that if your contributions hadn’t actually had an effect on your life that you could feel, you could still give a little more. But for someone like Sterling, it would be almost impossible to give till it hurts, whether it’s a contribution to the NAACP to get people off his back about those pesky discrimination lawsuits, or a fine from the NBA.
This reminded me of a memorial service I attended a few years ago with a few hundred other people for a billionaire who had just died. All the speakers discussed how moving and inspiring his generosity was, and he had indeed given away hundreds of millions of dollars to a variety of worthy causes. But all the encomiums to his extraordinary character as evidenced by his financial contributions had me shaking my head. He could have given away 99 percent of his fortune and still lived like a king. It wasn’t as though, when he signed a $10 million check, he said to himself, “Well, no going out to dinner this month.” He still had a bunch of homes, a staff to attend to his every need, and pretty much anything he wanted, even if he had parted with half his assets before he died.
To a billionaire, contributions that make people stagger with gratitude are meaningless, no different from tossing a quarter to a beggar. A billionaire who wanted to undertake a truly inspiring act of generosity would give away all but, say, $5 million of what they had. I don’t remember hearing of a single case in which someone did that. And as it happens, poor people actually donate a greater proportion of their income to charity on average than rich people do.
Of course, the NAACP wasn’t going to give Donald Sterling a lifetime achievement award because they were actually bowled over by his generosity and wanted his lifetime of service to inspire others, but because it’s good fundraising practice. When someone gives you a bunch of money, you have to flatter them, tell them how much you admire them, give them a handsome plaque. And lots of the super-rich are narcissistic or insecure enough that when they make a large contribution they want to see their names on the side of the building, so everyone knows how wonderful they are. Likewise, the NBA isn’t fining Sterling $2.5 million because that amount will make him reflect on what a jerk he is and lead to a change in his outlook on the common threads joining all of humanity, but because it sounds to the rest of us like a sizeable number, so they look like they’re serious about delivering a serious punishment. But Sterling won’t even feel it.
On the other hand, given that he is now one of the most (rightfully) hated men in America, he may have a slightly harder time finding women in their twenties who’ll agree to screw him if he buys them a car. Or at least we can hope.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 30, 2014
“Pity The Poor Plutocrats”: Time’s Winged Chariot Draws Near, And There’s No Baggage Compartment
Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt…a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
–President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a 1954 letter to his brother Edgar
Pity the poor plutocrats, victims of the envious mob. You can hardly open the Wall Street Journal these days without reading a self-pitying screed by some billionaire hungry for love.
A while back it was venture capitalist Tom Perkins, who equated criticism of the wealthy with the Holocaust.
“I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich,’” he opined in a letter to the newspaper.
Makes sense to me. One day they’re saying Wall Street bankers should pay the same tax rate as the guys who rotate their tires, next day they’re flinging them into concentration camps. Soon billionaires will be hiding in attic penthouses, quietly fondling stock certificates. Their limos will be disguised as UPS trucks, their yachts as humble tugboats.
In a subsequent San Francisco speaking engagement, Perkins suggested that the United States formally adopt a one-dollar, one-vote electoral system. Citizens, he said, should be like shareholders in a corporation.
“You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How’s that?”
The audience laughed, but Perkins claimed to be dead serious. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the investment firm he co-founded, called itself shocked, and emphasized its disagreement.
More recently, Charles Koch, the elder of the infamous Koch brothers of legend and song, contributed an op-ed to the Journal bitterly complaining that people targeted by TV attack ads he’s paid for are actually allowed to talk back. The brothers, you see, are pure idealists campaigning for liberty.
So that when their Tea Party front groups oppose a public transport system in Nashville, Tennessee, work to forbid Georgia Power from investing in solar technology, or spend big on a county referendum on open pit mining in Wisconsin, it has nothing whatsoever to do with Koch Industries’ oil, gas and mining profits. It’s all about freedom.
And when the same organizations spend millions on TV commercials featuring actresses reading prepared scripts, pretending to have been injured by the Affordable Care Act and attacking Democratic U.S. senators in Arkansas, Louisiana and Alaska, that too is all about liberty.
However, wicked “collectivists” who “promise heaven but deliver hell,” — hell evidently being reliable health insurance not subject to cancellation on an employer’s whim — have called the Koch brothers out. One such is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who went so far as to call their secretive methods “un-American.”
“Instead of encouraging free and open debate,” Charles Koch whined, “collectivists strive to discredit and intimidate opponents. They engage in character assassination. (I should know, as the almost daily target of their attacks.) This is the approach that…Saul Alinsky famously advocated in the 20th [century], and that so many despots have infamously practiced. Such tactics are the antithesis of what is required for a free society.”
“Despots,” mind you. Boo-hoo-hoo. Far from being abashed, Senator Reid must have been thrilled that his taunts lured Koch out of hiding. These boys normally prefer to hide the hundreds of millions they spend purchasing U.S. Senate seats behind benign-sounding outfits like “Americans for Prosperity.”
Because who’s against prosperity, right?
That said, I do think it’s wrong to call anybody “un-American.” To the contrary, the Koch brothers are every bit as American as John D. Rockefeller, H.L. Hunt or Scrooge McDuck, dabbling in his private bullion pool. The comic-heroic figure of the tycoon furiously stamping his little webbed feet because people are free to disagree with him has long been a staple of national life.
Like Charles and David Koch, who inherited hundreds of millions from their oilman father — a founding member of the John Birch Society, which famously held that President Eisenhower was a card-carrying member of the International Communist Conspiracy — their legacy often includes crackpot megalomania. Hence “collectivists,” a polite euphemism.
Koch’s Syndrome, you might call it: combining an obsessive-compulsive need to accumulate money — these boys are worth $100 billion, but they’re nevertheless bitter about paying taxes — along with a deep-seated fear of being found unworthy. Surrounded by obsequious underlings all their lives, they’ve no idea if they’ve ever really deserved it.
It may also be significant that Tom Perkins is 82, the Koch brothers 78 and 73, respectively.
Time’s winged chariot draws near, and there’s no baggage compartment.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, April 9, 2014
“We’ve Got A Good Thing Going”: Why Can’t You Miserable Commoners Be Happier With Your Lot?
Venture capital billionaire Tom Perkins may be new to the trolling game, but he made an absolutely spectacular debut when he wrote to the Wall Street Journal a few weeks back warning that resentment toward the super-rich in American society reminded him a lot of the Nazi campaign against the Jews. Then last weekend, he followed that bit of wisdom by proposing that the wealthy ought to get more votes than the unwashed masses, since they pay more in taxes. “The Tom Perkins system is: You don’t get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes,” he said in a speech. “But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How’s that?”
That, you’re probably saying, is abominable. Why not just let the richest one person choose the president? He’s got the most money, so he’s obviously the wisest and has the greatest interest in government, right? Although Perkins might not be too pleased with that outcome, since the richest person in America is Bill Gates, who seems pretty liberal, what with his efforts to improve global health and fight poverty rather than letting the sick and destitute contemplate their well-deserved fate while they gaze up in admiration at their betters.
Okay, so Tom Perkins is kind of a lunatic. But is he a representative lunatic? Do his peers up in the penthouse suite and down at the yacht club think the same things he does, or is he an outlier?
This is actually a difficult question to answer, because while most good surveys ask about people’s income, their scales usually stop at a pretty modest level. Often the final option is “$100,00 per year or more,” which doesn’t allow you to separate the wealthy from the upper-middle-class. Nevertheless, the higher you go up the income scale, the more Republican people tend to be. Take, for instance, the 2012 election results:
Even if those with incomes over $100,000 tilt Republican, there are still plenty of Democrats there. But that’s not really the people Perkins is talking about. The people who arouse his concern are those earning seven, eight, or nine figures a year, and being Republican is only the start (I’m sure there are plenty of Republicans who think Perkins takes his advocacy for the upmarket downtrodden quite a ways too far). I’ve only come across one study that attempted to assess these people’s opinions quantitatively. It’s this one from Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels, and Jason Seawright. The sample of ultra-wealthy people they managed to assemble is pretty small, so we shouldn’t make too many sweeping judgments from it, but the differences with the general public they found are pretty striking:
The days of noblesse oblige are obviously long gone. Fortunately for these folks, it isn’t really necessary for them to get votes proportional to their net worth; the government already works hard for them. Even in the administration of that socialist Barack Obama, the Dow has hit record levels and the wealth of the wealthiest has gone nowhere but up. So things are working out pretty well. Which is why, I’m guessing, most of them would like Tom Perkins to keep his mouth shut. Sure, there may be a few who actually agree with him that the wealthy deserve more votes. But why admit that in public? After all, they’ve got a good thing going.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 19, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 