A very long read about the Koch Brothers and the family fortune!
Will give some low lights?
In 1980, David Koch ran for Vice President of the United States on the Libertarian ticket. They received 1% of the vote.
"Instead of accepting America's verdict, they (the Koch brothers) set out to change how it voted. They used their fortune to impose their minority views on the majority by other means. They poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a stealthy effort to move their political views from fringe to the center of American life."
"The secession of the rich in which they "Disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about it's well-being except as a place to extract loot"
Paul Krugman : "We have two unelected multibillionaires who want to control the U.S. government and exercise the power to decide what is best for more than 300 million American people, without the voices of these people being heard."
"We are on the road not just to a highly unequal society, but to a society of an oligarchy. A society of inherited wealth."
"The program was a success, forming the backbone of the future Russian petroleum industry. 'Fred Koch continued to provide technical assistance to the Soviets as they constructed one hundred plants, according to one report, but the advisory work was less profitable."
"What happened next has been excised from the official corporate history of Koch Industries."
"After leaving the U.S.S.R., Fred Koch turned to Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. "
"Under Fred Koch's direction, the refinery was finished in 1935. With the capacity to process a thousand tons of crude a day, the third-largest refinery in the Third Reich was created by the collaboration between Davis and Koch. Significantly, it was also one of the few refineries in Germany, according to Harrington, that could "produce the high-octane gasoline needed to fuel fighter planes. Naturally,
...."the American venture became "a key component of the Nazi war machine."
“Fred Koch... wrote admiringly about fascism in Germany, and elsewhere.…”
"Frederick, known by the family as Freddie, was born in 1933, Charles was born in 1935, and twins, David and William, were born in 1940."
"In 1958, Fred Koch became one of eleven original members of the John Birch Society … Koch claimed that "the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties."
“Protestant churches, public schools, universities, labor unions, the armed services, the State Department, the World Bank, the United Nations, and modern art, in his view, were all Communist tools.”
He said this without shame, knowing he "profited himself from Soviet Communism by building up the U.S.S.R.’s oil industry."
"Blazing a trail that would later be followed by his sons, Koch tapped his fortune to subsidize his political activism."
"One ploy the group used, he said, was to set up phony front groups "pretending to be other than what they were." An alphabet soup of secretly connected organizations sprang up, with acronyms like TRAIN (To Restore American Independence Now) and TACT (Truth About Civil Turmoil). Another tactic was to wrap the group’s radical vision in mundane and unthreatening slogans that sound familiar today, such as "less government, more responsibility."
"He provided substantial support for Barry Goldwater’s right-wing bid for the Republican nomination in 1964. Goldwater, too, opposed the Civil Rights Act and the Supreme Court’s landmark desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education."
"In 1968, Fred Koch went further right still…. calling for racial segregation and the abolition of all income taxes….the Foundation for Economic Education, which spread a version of laissez-faire economics so extreme "it bordered on anarchism,"
"Fred saw taxes in America darkly, as incipient socialism. Early on, the Internal Revenue Service had sued his company for underpayment of taxes, requiring a large additional payment as well as penalties and legal fees. He remained vehemently opposed to estate taxes, and told Charles that he feared the U.S. government would tax him so heavily it might force him to sell the family business, diminishing his sons’ inheritances."
On Charles Koch : "When he was twenty-six, graduating with a bachelor of science in engineering and master’s degrees in nuclear and chemical engineering from MIT….economic anti-government writers…..these were the theories that captivated Charles."
1967 : "Fred Koch died of a heart attack. Charles, then thirty-two years old, became chairman and CEO of the family business,"
Fred Koch's Estate planning had him :" set up a charitable lead trust" that enabled him to pass on his estate to his sons without inheritance taxes, so long as the sons donated the accruing interest on the principle to charity for twenty years. To maximize their self-interest, in other words, the Koch boys were compelled to be charitable. Tax avoidance was thus the original impetus for the Koch brothers’ extraordinary philanthropy."
"Charles’s embrace of the John Birch Society, according to Coppin, was in part designed to please the old man.
…in 1968, Charles resigned from the organization…."
Charles was involved with the Freedom School
"The school taught a revisionist version of American history in which the robber barons were heroes, not villains, and the Gilded Age was the country’s golden era. Taxes were denigrated as a form of theft, and the Progressive movement, Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, in the school’s view, were ruinous turns toward socialism. The weak and poor, the school taught, should be cared for by private charity, not government."
"...human beings should be allowed to sell themselves into slavery if they wished."
"Constitution be scrapped in favor of one that limited the government’s authority to impose "compulsory taxation." The Times described LeFevre as also opposing Medicare and antipoverty programs and hinted that the school opposed government-sponsored integration, too."
Their goal was for the country to have :"...no government, no police department, no fire department, no public schools, no health or zoning laws, not even national defense."
The school's founder : "...was almost as adamantly opposed to America’s government as he was to Communism....
"government is a disease masquerading as its own cure."
"...by 1966 Charles Koch was not only a major financial supporter of the school but also an executive and trustee."
This was "...a tiny world of people who thought the New Deal was a horrible mistake."
"but if you grew up with more money than God, and felt weird about it, this version of history, where the robber barons were heroes, would certainly make you feel a lot better about it." At the Freedom School,....romanticizing a lost golden age of idealized unfettered capitalism that arguably never existed for much of the population."
Charles Koch : "His hope was to use his wealth to inject his fringe views into the mainstream by turning the Freedom School into an accredited graduate school and then a four-year undergraduate program specializing in libertarian philosophy,..."
"He also gave a speech in the 1990s crediting the Freedom School with profoundly influencing him."
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/3/12/1748318/-Union-of-the-Obscenely-Rich-The-Koch-Brothers
Like Kelly Anne, she had some work done
