a non-lefty look at the Koch brothers

billc

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This is an article from Biggovernment.com that looks at the Koch brothers. The new Rupert Murdoch's of the political sphere. Here is an article that isn't from the left. Enjoy.

http://biggovernment.com/publius/20...s-and-the-paranoid-style-in-liberal-politics/

From the article:

A few years ago Richard Fink told Charles and David [Koch] to prepare for the worst. The brothers were raising their political profile, Fink said, and that would come at a cost. There would be a lot of name-calling. Their opponents would impugn their beliefs, characters, and business. Charles understood what Fink was talking about. “I believed that when we were considered effective we would be attacked,” he said. Before Obama’s election, those who were aware of the Kochs’ political activities tended to assume they were tilting at Austrian windmills. The Kochs had an exotic philosophy, but few took them very seriously.
Not anymore. During the fight over health care and cap and trade in 2009 and 2010, liberals went looking for baddies against whom to mobilize public opinion. The Kochs’ wealth and political involvement made them an obvious choice. Reflecting on the ferocity of the onslaught that ensued, Charles told me, “I didn’t anticipate the hatred, the advocacy of violence.” He must not have been paying attention.

...That last part has caught the attention of the left’s scouring eye. For unlike many billionaires, the Koch brothers espouse classical liberal economics: They advocate lower taxes, less government spending, fewer regulations, and limited government. “Society as a whole benefits from greater economic freedom,” Charles wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. Judging by the results of the 2010 elections, there are millions of Americans who agree with him.

...For progressives confused at the heated opposition to their do-gooder agenda, the Kochs became convenient scapegoats. Invoking their name was a way to write off opposition to Obama as the false consciousness of racist rubes stoked by greedy businessmen. In the liberal imagination the Kochs ascended from obscurity to infamy in record time. Starting in the spring of 2009, whenever you turned on MSNBC or clicked on the Huffington Post you’d see the Kochs described in terms more applicable to Lex Luthor and General Zod.

...By the time the rhetoric trickled down from the president of the United States to MSNBC talking heads to anonymous email writers, any pretense to civility or actual fact had vanished. The emails that showed up in Melissa Cohlmia’s inbox each morning were unhinged. Cohlmia is director of corporate communication for Koch Industries. Every day when she arrived at work, the first things she’d read were emails with subject lines like “This is the result of the hate you’ve been spewing,” “Corrupt Polluting Scum,” “I am boycotting Koch Industries,” “Treason,” and “Eat s—t you jerks.”

...The Kochs’ grandfather, Harry, immigrated to the United States from the Netherlands in 1888. He settled in Quanah, Texas, where he bought a newspaper and printing company. His son Fred was born in 1900.

Fred Koch graduated from MIT, where he studied engineering. In 1925 he moved to Wichita. There he developed an oil refining process that led to bigger yields and helped smaller, independent oil companies. This made him few friends in the industry. Instantly, the major companies sued. Koch spent years fighting 44 different lawsuits. He won all but one—and that verdict was overturned when it was revealed that the judge had been bribed.
 
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Why the Koch's are conservative in philosophy:

From the weekly standard article:

With the big firms working against him, Fred looked to opportunities overseas. He found them in, of all places, the Soviet Union. Stalin, engaged in a massive program of industrialization, was hiring capitalists to assist him. Between 1929 and 1931 Fred Koch built 15 oil-cracking plants in the USSR. The experience changed him irrevocably. The Soviet Union, he wrote in his book A Businessman Looks at Communism, was “a land of hunger, misery, and terror.” During one of his trips, his handler was an old Bolshevik named Jerome Livshitz. “In the months I traveled with him he gave me a liberal education in Communist techniques and methods,” Fred wrote. Fred began to fear what would happen if communism spread. “Many of the Soviet engineers he worked with were longtime Bolsheviks who had helped bring on the revolution,” Charles Koch told me during an interview in his office. “As a matter of fact they would tell [my father] that some day they were going to destroy him. And then for them to be purged, to be killed by Stalin, it was shocking, because they had been totally dedicated to [Stalin’s] cause.”
 
Another piece of the long article:

It was impossible for the liberal activists to acknowledge that libertarians might actually operate from conviction. Charles and David believed in low taxes, less spending, and limited regulation not because those policies helped them but because they helped everybody. “If I wanted to enhance my riches,” said David, “why do I give away almost all my money?”

Particularly outrageous was Mayer’s claim that David used his position on the National Cancer Advisory Board to lobby against classifying formaldehyde as a carcinogen. David was on the board for almost seven years. Not once did he hear formaldehyde discussed. Koch Industries’ position on the status of formaldehyde, he told me, was totally separate from his being a cancer patient and medical philanthropist. “That chemical is used in thousands of different applications,” David said. “And we of course rigorously, religiously follow all those regulations and rules about its use.” It was a perfect example of the tortured logic omnipresent in the blogosphere. David Koch has prostate cancer. David Koch sat on a cancer board. David Koch’s company doesn’t think formaldehyde, which the human body produces naturally, should be regulated as a carcinogen. Conclusion: David Koch is abusing his position!
 
Koch Industries is one of the top ten air polluters in the United States.

The Koch brothers political stance on environmental regulation dovetails exactly with their corporate interests.

Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer#ixzz1HpTVWZHf
 

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