General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsJane Mayer: greatest threat I've received for journalism didn't come from government, but the Kochs
Jane Mayer: the greatest threat I've received for journalism didn't come from the government, but the Koch brothers.Politico, on Thursday:
America Rising PAC, the GOP opposition network founded by Matt Rhoades and Joe Pounder, has set its sights on Jane Mayer, shopping around accusations that she has ideological bias
In the book, Mayer explores the Kochs history including that Charles and David Kochs father, Fred, helped construct a major oil refinery in Nazi Germany that was personally approved by Adolf Hitler. Koch Industries has not denied the fact but has said that within context the refinery was years before Germany invaded Poland and that many U.S. companies were working in Germany during the period and that when it became clear that Hitlers government was a tyrannical regime, Mr. Koch ceased doing business there.
This book was written by Jane Mayer, a biased author with connections to Clinton-world who not surprisingly makes countless disingenuous attacks against conservatives. Its important the public views Mayers book for what it really is: a liberal hatchet job to advance a partisan agenda, America Rising PAC spokesperson Amelia Chassé said
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2016/01/24/excellent-read-rebranding-the-koch-brothers/
Mayers article in the January 25th issue of the New Yorker is well worth reading, even if you have to go find a print copy:
On the night of November 2nd, well-dressed Wichita residents formed a line that snaked through the lobby of the citys convention center. They all held tickets to the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerces annual gala, which had drawn thirty-five hundred people. The evenings featured speaker, Charles Koch, had lived in town almost all of his eighty years, but few localseven prominent oneshad ever laid eyes on him. Charles, along with his brother David, owns virtually all of the energy-and-chemical conglomerate Koch Industries, which is based in Wichita and has annual revenues of a hundred and fifteen billion dollars. Charless secretive manner, right-wing views, and concerted campaign to exert political influence by spending his fortune have made him an object of fascination, especially in his home town. You never see him, one local newsman whispered. He hates publicity. He paused. Please dont quote me on that!
Charles shared the stage with Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, the co-hosts of the MSNBC cable show Morning Joe, whom Koch Industries had chosen to serve as moderators. The audience laughed as Koch recalled such boyhood misadventures as his expulsion from military school. He amiably described early business mistakes, and he pointedly criticized Republicans as well as Democrats
Starting in 2010, a controversial series of rulings by the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court essentially licensed unlimited political spending by corporations, unions, and individuals. Charles and Davida seventy-five-year-old patron of the arts, who is the wealthiest resident of Manhattanwere unusually prepared to take advantage of this shift. They had set up a broad alliance of donors and advocacy organizations to support conservative candidates who share their pro-business opposition to regulation, entitlements, and taxes. This network has since become one of the most powerful political forces in the country: a libertarian advocacy group backed by the brothers, Americans for Prosperity, has directors in thirty-four states. According to Politico, twelve hundred people work full-time for the Koch networkmore than three times the number of people who work for the Republican National Committee.
A new, data-filled study by the Harvard scholars Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez reports that the Kochs have established centralized command of a nationally-federated, full-service, ideologically focused machine that operates on the scale of a national U.S. political party. The Koch network, they conclude, acts like a force field, pulling Republican candidates and office-holders further to the right. Last week, the Times reported that funds from the Koch network are fuelling both ongoing rebellions against government control of Western land and the legal challenge to labor unions that is before the Supreme Court
***********
The Kochs strategy began to change after the last Presidential election. Having spent so much money trying to defeat Obama, they were stunned when he was reëlected. As late as Election Day, their political advisers were assuring them that Mitt Romney had secured the Presidency. The 2012 defeat led the Kochs and their advisers into an intense period of review. Most of the postmortem took place in private, but in March, 2013, a clue to the Kochs line of thinking was offered by Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute. In a speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Brooks, who frequently attends the Kochs political retreats, offered a diagnosis of what had gone wrong in 2012.
Brooks told the audience that a single statistic explained why conservatives had lost. In polls, he said, only a third of respondents agreed that Republicans cared about people like them. And fewer than half of Americans believed that Republicans cared about the poor. Conservatives had an empathy problem. This was important, Brooks explained, because Americans almost universally believed that fairness matters. He went on, I know it makes you sick to think of that word, fairness. But Americans, he said, overwhelmingly believed that its right to help the vulnerable.
Way More:
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2016/01/24/excellent-read-rebranding-the-koch-brothers/
daleanime
(17,796 posts)CaliforniaPeggy
(149,625 posts)cascadiance
(19,537 posts)OnyxCollie
(9,958 posts)http://www.democracynow.org/2016/1/20/how_the_kochs_tried_and_failed
B Calm
(28,762 posts)Jane Mayer told Dave Davies on Fresh Air that the Kochs tried to intimidate FBI agent Jim Elroy...
MAYER: Yeah, this is interesting. I came across this pattern of people who had tried to challenge the Kochs or Koch Industries in one way or another who felt that they were being targeted, particularly by private investigators.
DAVIES: And in some cases - in some cases, employees or former employees of Koch Industries, right?
MAYER: That's right. You got the sense that if their stories are true, that this was a company that plays and played super hardball. And interestingly, among those who've lodged such complaints who I've interviewed were three former prosecutors, government prosecutors - two federal ones, one state prosecutor - who have tried to either press charges against Koch Industries or to investigate it. And in each case, they felt that somebody was following them or someone was going through their garbage or somebody was trying to dig dirt on them. There's a reference to it in one of the Senate reports about the investigation into whether Koch Industries stole oil from Indian reservations. It specifically mentions that some of the investigators felt that they too were being investigated, but by Koch Industries. Let me tell you one story about - there was an FBI agent who worked on the Senate investigation into Koch Industries. His name is Jim Elroy, and I interviewed him. And he told me that he was so certain he was being tailed that one day, he just stopped his car and confronted the person who he thought was tailing him. He took out his badge. He took out his gun. And he said to this person who he thought was following him, you tell me what you're doing and who you're doing it for. And the guy sort of, you know, froze and said, I'm working for Koch Industries, he says. And Elroy told me that he told this fellow, you tell your bosses if they try to do this again, you're going to be in a body bag. So Elroy's kind of a tough guy, but he - he had investigated organized crime in Oklahoma before he had investigated Koch Industries. And he told me he'd never encountered the kinds of tactics that he thought were being employed against him when he investigated Koch Industries.
DAVIES: So it sounds like these seem credible. There's no finding by a prosecutor or jury that substantiates them. What do the Kochs' representatives say when they're asked about these things?
MAYER: Well, in the case of Elroy, they said at the time - they denied it. But then they also confirmed another case around the same time, where somebody said that - it was a witness to the Senate investigation who said that he thought he was being smeared. And they admitted that they had provided sort of some negative information to the press on him.
DAVIES: Now, you wrote about the Kochs in a 2010 piece in The New Yorker. And then you were attacked by conservatives. What happened? ...
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=463565987
http://www.npr.org/2016/01/19/463565987/hidden-history-of-koch-brothers-traces-their-childhood-and-political-rise
The way Jane Mayer described the Kochs having their enemies tailed reminded me of the Karen Silkwood story.
PeoViejo
(2,178 posts)The Karma Here is that the Plutonium Plant is now owned by Halliburton and the Courts have decreed that Halliburton has to pay for the many Billions it will cost to clean that mess up.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interact/silkwood.html
MinM
(2,650 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Billions for a propaganda machine designed to manufacture reality may hide it, but it cannot erase the truth: Jane Mayer exposed the Koch brothers for the un-American fascist bastards they are.
GoneOffShore
(17,339 posts)smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)K&R!
Fast Walker 52
(7,723 posts)Democracy Now had a great long interview with Mayer and her Koch reporting recently.
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/1/20/the_kochs_the_nazis_book_reveals
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/1/20/dark_money_jane_mayer_on_how
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/1/20/how_the_kochs_tried_and_failed
The most sickening thing is how they fight action on climate change, since it would hurt their profits...
laundry_queen
(8,646 posts)Iwillnevergiveup
(9,298 posts)Insidious.
K&R
chapdrum
(930 posts)Sadly.
"...Mayer explores the Kochs history including that Charles and David Kochs father, Fred, helped construct a major oil refinery in Nazi Germany that was personally approved by Adolf Hitler..."
But then, Hitler commissioned Ferdinand Porsche to develop what became the VW Beetle.
Sadly too, that company is still in business - even with its admitted emissions cheating (eff the climate), and its history
of using slave labor during WWII (while letting the children of same suffer and die under its "Kinderheim" [child "care"] program).
navarth
(5,927 posts)I lack sufficient invective to describe how I feel about these sons of bitches.
zentrum
(9,865 posts)A must read for anyone, from any political camp, who wants to understand what is happening to Democracy, our government, our elections, climate change policy the whole ball of wax.
Hekate
(90,704 posts)Odin2005
(53,521 posts)DirkGently
(12,151 posts)Their father was a fascist anti-government extremist, and so are they. They have an overweening sense of entitlement to have things their own may, and no ascertainable scruples whatsoever.
Their prickly defensiveness when someone dares to lift the dark rocks they prefer to operate beneath is scary, but also funny to watch. Behold the mighty billionaire titans of industry, deeply threatened by the simple exposure of who they are and what they are trying to accomplish.
Deep down somewhere, they know they are wrong, and are therefore all the more terrified and enraged when it is pointed out, even in terms of the basic facts of their history, like their Nazi-abetting father, building refineries for the Third Reich.
ErikJ
(6,335 posts)librechik
(30,674 posts)with nobody.