It
was the most flattering news Unitarian
Universalists have heard in a long time.
So flattering that the UUA and
the ubiquitous Standing on the Side of
Love campaign can be heard and seen whooping it up all over the social media—and fundraising to beat the band in the reflected glory. At first guess, you might think that the news
is the virtual collapse of state laws prohibiting
same gender marriage since marriage equality was the high profile cause with which the denomination has been most closely
identified with in recent years. And
yes, that is indeed a cause for celebration and UUs can feel justifiable pride
in their tireless work on behalf of that cause.
But
that’s not it. Rather it was the back handed endorsement of UU power and influence by two despised icons
of opposition to virtually all of the Association’s most cherished social justice values. Charles
and David Koch, the billionaire moneybags behind a concerted effort to subvert democracy by simply buying it outright lock, stock, and
barrel, were wounded by the defections of several high profile corporate sponsors from one of their lynchpin organizations, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
In a plaintive appeal to sponsors who remained loyal to step up their
contributions to make up for the loss of high
profile, high tech giants like Yahoo! The Koch Brothers’ mouthpiece, ALEC Director of Development Laurel Buckley
Professional
activists ranging from Common Cause
to the Unitarian Universalist Church just won’t stop. As part of their
misleading smear campaign, these activist groups demand members stop working
with ALEC. Now we are standing up…I am asking that you show your support for
ALEC. Will you show these professional activist groups that you stand with ALEC
with a gift today?
Putting
aside for a moment that the brothers Koch and their creature can’t seem to tell
the difference between the ministers and members of a religious body from
“professional activists,” the spectacle of the enormously wealthy and
politically powerful bleating pitifully of suffering persecution at the hands
of a denomination that claims about 165,000 adult members representing far less
than 1% of the population and a reputation for “being on the fringe” seem
ludicrous. Like the elephant screaming
about a flea bite in the title of this little screed.
Let’s
examine that discrepancy beginning with who the Koch Brothers are and what ALEC
and the other parts of their sprawling operation aimed at remaking America are.
The
Koch family fortune was established by Fred
C. Koch, a Texas oil man and refiner who ironically earned much of
his initial wealth building refineries in the Soviet Union in the ‘20’s and ‘30’s.
Fred
was distantly related to Erich Koch, a
high ranking Nazi powerful in Prussia.
Erich Koch invited Fred, whose American business was virtually wiped
out by law suits by major American
refiners against his improved crackling
process, into a partnership in producing oil for Germany. This partnership
continued right up to the American entry into World War I and the company that they founded continued to refine
oil for the duration. He was also,
although perhaps tenuously, connected to Erich brother, Karl Otto Koch, Commandant of Buchenwald and his charming wife Ilse a/k/a the Bitch of Buchenwald who as a hobby made lampshade from the skin of
executed Jewish prisoners. War Crimes
Tribunals sentenced Karl Otto to be hung
an Ilse to life imprisonment. Oddly, after two years imprisonment Ilse
was pardoned by General Lucius D. Clay,
the interim military governor of the
American Zone in Germany. The public uproar at the mystifying action
eventually led to her being arrested by the post-war German government which
tried her and again sentenced her to life imprisonment. Ilse hung herself in prison in 1957.
I
would not assert that Fred Koch was personally a Nazi. He was more of an opportunist and a shrewd
businessman with any eye to turn a profit under any circumstances. But his close business association with Nazis
seems to have sharpened a growing militant anti-Communism
that came to full flower back home in the post-war era.
Fred
Koch was able to take the profits from his foreign operations and after winning
the last of the 44 suits filed against his crackling process, began to build up
his domestic business and fortune. He
quietly assembled an empire, largely flying under the radar of public awareness
because he did not operate any consumer
brands under his name.
In
the late 1950’s Koch became the main funder
of the John Birch Society, which in
turn became ground zero for the new
American right wing that would
eventually take over the venerable Republican
Party. Not only were his views
virulently anti-communist and paranoid—he avowedly believed that both major
parties were riddled with Communists and the Dwight Eisenhower was their “knowing dupe”—but they were also
profoundly racist. He believed
welfare was a secret plot to attract rural
blacks and Puerto Ricans to Eastern cities to vote for Communist
causes and “get a vicious race war started.”
The
dictatorial pater familias left both Koch
Industries and his political ideologies to his four sons, two of whom,
David and Charles, took both endeavors firmly into their own hands after the
old man died in 1967. Over the next
decade under their management Koch Industries expanded far beyond its origins
in the oil business—although energy
companies remained top targets for acquisitions. The companies vast holding now include, just
for starters, Invista (polymer
products including Lycra), Georgia-Pacific (pulp, paper, and
consumer products) , Molex
(electronic components and fiber optics), Flint
Hills Resources (the core refining and chemical business, Koch Pipeline, Koch Fertilizer, Koch
Minerals, and Matador Cattle Company.
Koch
Industries is now the second largest privately
held company in the United States after Cargill, with an annual revenue of $115 billion. If Koch it were a public company in 2013, it
would have ranked 17 in the Fortune 500.
The company employs more the 50,000 in the U.S. and an additional 20,000
around the world. Chairman and CEO Charles
Koch has publicly vowed that it would become publicly owned “over my dead body.”
Koch
Industries directly asserts the ultra-conservative
interests of its owners through the political action committee KochPAC and sophisticated lobbying operations by all of its affiliates which spent more than
$20 million on lobbying in 2008 and $12.3 million in 2009
But
the Koch Brothers draw mostly form their own personal vast fortunes—and those
of allied billionaires—to fund their political operations. Self-proclaimed libertarians with a small L they combine their father’s
anti-communism with a determination to
smother government at all levels to rudimentary vestiges with
enough police power to protect private property and interests domestically and military power to insure American domination of the world. They oppose most
forms of taxation, especially on
corporate income and property. They
advocate the dismantlement of virtually all progressive legislation back to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act including all labor and consumer protection
laws and environmental regulations. They seek the abolition of welfare, unemployment insurance, Social Security, and all government medical programs. They seek to break the power of public unions and then squash the
vestiges of a labor movement in the private sector. They advocate the privatization of most government services including public education, fire protection, and the construction
and operation of highways, roads, and
all forms of transportation. They
distrust democracy and seek to
restrict voting by any and all means, and have openly supported the return of property requirements set at substantial
levels to insure only “responsible” people vote.
It
is a breathtakingly sweeping and radical agenda that a decade or so ago would
have been written off as the fruitless wet dream of wealthy eccentrics. But by using their wealth to create a complex
web of organizations, institutions,
and fronts they have become
breathtakingly close to their goals.
 |
| Just try and make sense of this web of money, power, and influence. |
They
have donated more than $196 million to dozens of so called free-market and advocacy organizations. In 2008, the three main
Koch family foundations contributed to 34 political and policy organizations, three of which they founded, and several of which they direct. All of those numbers
are significantly up in the last six years.
Beyond
personal $2.6 million dollars in donations to candidates in the 2012 election
cycle, which by law are limited, the Koch brothers funnel hundreds of millions
of dollars more to conservative causes through several family foundations and
other foundations created by allies on which one or both of the brothers often
serve on the boards of directors. A 2013 study by the Center for Responsive Politics said that nonprofit groups backed by
the Koch donor network organized more than $400 million in the 2011–2012
election cycle. These foundations earlier
created the Cato Institute, a
flagship think tank which the Koch
brothers directly control, and a major funders and influencers of the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute. Together these and similar specialized
smaller think tanks specializing in various industries and areas of policy,
provide both a laboratory for ideas to the new Conservative movement and churn out
policy analysis papers that are
regularly gobbled up and regurgitated by major media outlets as gospel
truth.
On
the next level Koch foundations and organizations affiliated with them operate
a web of lobbying operations that
rivals or exceeds those of Koch businesses.
Then is another layer of PACs feeding funding to compliant candidates.
Way
back in 1980 David Koch was the Libertarian
Party candidate for Vice
President. The experience soured him
on personal political involvement and dashed hope that the Libertarians could
emerge as a dominant power. The brother
subsequently began to concentrate their efforts on remaking the Republican
Party into their own image by subsidizing insurgent candidacy against perceived
moderates and running a virtual guerilla
war to take the party over. In
the processes they drove the whole party, including many of those moderates,
rapidly to the right achieving almost complete victory in thirty years.
The
election of Barak Obama and the Democratic surge of 2008 was a stunning
setback to their plans. The Koch
brothers responded by declaring that they would spend even more money. And they did.
In 2012 they pledged $60 million dollars to defeat Obama and the
Democrats. Although Obama survived, they
did capture control of Congress and
especially in the House their
acolytes had free reign.
A
good deal of that success was laid at the feat of the Tea Party movement which had some genuine right-populist origins,
but which the Koch Brothers secretly funded through various foundations and
dispersed gifts until they gained control what came to be known as Astroturf organizations. Tea party groups quickly swung behind the
Koch agenda.
The
Koch brothers began to hold twice yearly donors’
conferences where they wine and dine leading Republican donors and steer
them to favored candidates and causes.
But
the Brothers were not just interested in Washington. Increasingly they turned their attention to state governments to institute their
“reforms.” They began to funnel money
into state legislative races, replacing moderate Republicans with
self-identified Tea Party crusaders and backing far right candidates for
governor. In the off year elections in
2010, while the country was still in the grip of a depression, Koch backed candidates swept to the governors’ mansions of several states
and took solid majorities in both houses of many legislatures. Scott Walker and Wisconsin were just the picture
book example of the Koch success.
ALEC
was the lynchpin of this operation. Ostensibly
not a PAC or a political operation at all
but a nonprofit organization
of state legislators and private sector representatives which drafts and shares
model legislation for distribution
among the States. ALEC claims to “work to advance the fundamental principles of
free-market enterprise, limited government, and federalism at the state level
through a nonpartisan public-private partnership of America’s state
legislators, members of the private sector and the general public.”
They
key here is drafting mode legislation. Democrats and progressives were repeatedly stunned when sweeping regulatory
changes, attacks on public unions, and moves to restrict voting began springing
up in state after state, often being introduced and adopted with hardly a comma
changed. Conservative legislators that
advanced and supported the canned proposals were rewarded by abundant campaign
support from the Koch web of PACs and directed contributions by wealthy
allies. Those who opposed it faced being
crushingly outspent by challengers.
Compliant governors were elevated to folk hero status and began to hear the sweet music of being
mentioned for a place on the national ticket.
All
of this largely flew under the radar of the press and public until an August
2010 article in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer
laid bare the Koch Brothers’ role in financing the burgeoning climate change denial movement pointing
out that they “vastly outspent ExxonMobil
[then then the most public face of climate denial] giving money to
organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a
huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. The thin skinned Koch boys yelped in outrage
and unleashed a minor army of toadies to attack Mayer and her article. The heavy handed response led only to greater
scrutiny.
Since
then the Koch brothers have become the whipping boy of the
left/liberal/progressive press. Hardly a
day goes by when they are not castigated for something in the Daily
Koz or Huffington Post, by broadcasters
like Rachel Maddow
and Melissa Harris-Perry, or in the pages of liberal magazines. Individual candidates and liberal PAC fundraise
on
the threat of what Mayer in her article called the Kochtopus.
Several exposes have been published, notably a Rolling Stone cover article Inside the Koch Brothers. Toxic Empire by Tim Dickinson the September and there have been two documentary films including the widely circulated Koch Brothers Exposed by Robert Greenwald. These have elicited complaints that boys were being persecuted and that there was a conspiracy to deprive them of their First Amendment Rights as Charles wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
But the attacks have taken their toll, especially a campaign to urge corporate sponsors of ALEC to cut support to that organization As of this September 2014, at least 93 corporations and 19 non-profits for a total of 112 private sector members have publicly announced that they cut ties with ALEC including such giants as Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Wal-Mart, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, General Motors, Sallie Mae, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and even News Corporation. It was these latter abandonments that caused the above mentioned yowls of outrage |
| Wisconsin UUs in an anti-ALEC protest as part of the Standing on the Side of Love Campaign. |
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