Real Koch Facts

Koch Subsidiary In AK Pays $80k To Settle Mishandled Hazardous Waste Accusations

September 19, 2014

A Koch Industries subsidiary, Flint Hills, has already made some unsavory headlines in Alaska. That’s because they decided in February to close their refinery in North Pole, AK — killing over 80 jobs — rather than meet environmental standards and pay for groundwater cleanup.

It’s hardly a surprising sequence of events. The Flint Hills episode is consistent with the Kochs’ mantra of money over all else, and their disregard for environmental safety has been well documented, including by former Koch Industries managers.

Now, Flint Hills has agreed to pay the $80,000 in a settlement over accusations of mishandling hazardous waste. Here’s what happened in this specific incident, as described by Fairbanks Daily News-Miner:

After filtering groundwater, Flint Hills disposed of the used filters in an open trash bin at the site. The filters soon “self ignited” inside the bins, according to an EPA complaint, requiring a response from the North Pole Fire Department to extinguish two fires.

Meanwhile the Kochs are […]

Pursuit of Koch, Chapter Infinity: Chris Christie’s Climate Stunt

In the ongoing Pursuit of Koch race being run by 2016 GOP presidential hopefuls, it appears Chris Christie is making his move. Already in recent weeks, we’ve seen Rick Perry traversing the country to court their favor. Ted Cruz joined them for a national chat session. Mike Pence got his own POLITICO story on his love affair with the Kochs. And the three of them were joined with fellow 2016 wannabes Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal and Ben Carson to “defend the American Dream” with the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity.

Well Chris Christie, being the insanely ambitious lackluster governor he is, isn’t going to miss out on the opportunity to get a crack at the new power brokers of the GOP and their treasure chest. In a piece about Christie’s utter and proud refusal to tackle climate change, Coral Davenport at the New York Times reveals that Christie […]

GOP would be in “bad shape” without the Koch brothers

The Koch brothers and their allies have pledged to spend a massive sum of money to influence this year’s midterm elections, at least $500 million, which is why their true, self-serving political motivations merit close scrutiny. After all, their exorbitant political spending is this blog’s entire raison d’être. It turns out it’s also the GOP’s, according to a report from Charlie Cook.

In his discussion of key Senate races this fall, Cook notes that some Republicans’ fundraising and spending efforts are being outpaced by their Democratic counterparts. Yet, political realities don’t necessarily reflect these disparities, precisely because of the Kochs’ exorbitant spending. According to Cook, “GOP strategists have privately said that if it were not for spending by organizations affiliated with the Koch brothers, they might well be in really bad shape.” Out of the mouths of babes!

It’s not just that the Kochs’ largesse is merely backstopping Republicans’ fundraising […]

New documents reveal same-old Koch extortion-as-education scheme

September 16, 2014

Across the country, up and down the Republican ticket, the Koch brothers’ exorbitant campaign spending has helped the billionaire brothers ensure that GOP candidates support the self-serving Koch policy agenda on issues like environmental protections, the minimum wage and tax breaks for the wealthy. Whether it’s through the Young Entrepreneurs program for high schoolers, or the college-level Edvantage curriculum, the Kochs have used charitable donations to education in much the same way, wielding their influence to create programs that indoctrinate students with their extreme libertarian views. It’s therefore disappointing — but not surprising — that higher education institutions, once thought sacrosanct, have also been subject to the Kochs’ attempts to purchase influence.

New documents released by the Center for Public Integrity detail the negotiations that took place in 2007 between the Charles G. Koch Foundation and Florida State University’s economics department over a proposed Koch donation worth millions. The […]

Tom really “Cottons” to the Koch brothers

September 11, 2014

This week, the National Federation of Independent Businesses, a Koch-backed entity purporting to represent the interests of small business owners, released radio and television ads in support of Arkansas’s Tom Cotton. Though the ads feature earnest-sounding proprietors of Arkansas small businesses, the spots actually represent just another favor in the mutually-beneficial relationship between Tom Cotton and the Koch brothers.

Last year, Tom Cotton’s vote against the Farm Bill turned heads, as he was the only member of the state’s delegation to vote against the bill and especially because the agricultural industry is critically important to Arkansas. Recently, new audio recordings revealed that when considering the Farm Bill, Cotton may have prioritized a constituency of two over his actual constituency. Recordings released earlier this month reveal that Cotton’s no vote on the Farm Bill received thunderous applause from Koch supporters during the Koch network’s secretive donor summit earlier this year. The Kochs’ […]

Video: Rick Perry and Rick Scott Try To Out-Koch Each Other

The past two weeks have seen Rick Perry skip the formal reading of his felony charges to do an event with the Kochs’ AFP in New Hampshire, then explain that he was being indicted for bribery (he’s not, shouldn’t have skipped that arraignment), then return to Dallas for AFP’s “Defending the American Dream Summit.”

At the end of this Tour-de-Koch, the gaffe-prone governor sat down with Ed Morrissey of the conservative blog Hot Air, and further revealed the extent to which Republicans revere the Kochs and court their political support — they even brag about it, apparently.

Perry opens the interview joking about how Rick Scott is always trying to one-up him, saying “Rick Scott always tries to one-up me, so you know, he was the first to call me and say ‘hey, we got Americans for Prosperity, what’d you get?’”

This was in reference to the previous year’s summit, which […]

New Report: The Long History of the Koch Agenda Hurting Arkansas Agriculture

September 2, 2014

The Farm Bill plays a critical role in Arkansas’s economy, benefiting the livelihood of the state’s farmers by guiding crop planting efforts, aiding in access to crop loans, and bolstering the state’s critical agriculture economy writ large. Whenever the future of this important legislation has been jeopardized by political back-and-forth, Arkansas’s agricultural community has vocalized its support for the Farm Bill – such as in 2013 when Chairman of the Arkansas Rice Federation Dow Brantley said that farmers “desperately need a farm bill written so we know where we stand” when it comes to deciding which crops to plant. That same year, Arkansas Farm Bureau President Randy Veach said that the state’s farmers and consumers would “suffer” if Congress did not pass a Farm Bill or extend the previous bill.

Yet despite obvious and vocal support for the Farm Bill, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the Koch brothers’ primary political engine, has […]

Three Questions for the Kochs as they “Defend the American Dream”

August 29, 2014

This weekend, capping off an interesting week for the Koch brothers, their chief political arm, Americans For Prosperity is hosting their so-called “Defending the American Dream Summit.” This is their public-facing summit, not to be confused with the highly secretive meeting of billionaires that dominated this week’s political conversation, after new audio surfaced from the event.

Those newly released recordings further exposed the degree to which the billionaire brothers have taken the reins of the Republican Party. One key Senate candidate after the next extolled the Kochs and their increasingly powerful network, expressing gratitude for their support and reaffirming their devotion to the extreme agenda they champion. On top of that, the executive director of the Republican Governors’ Association lauded AFP as their strongest partner.

The more we learn about the Koch brothers’ shadowy operation, the more we see how central they’ve become to the GOP. In fact, Washington Post […]

Indiana’s Mike Pence could be the Kochs’ 2016 candidate of choice

August 29, 2014

On the heels of new revelations about the Koch brothers’ favorite 2014 GOP Senate candidates, POLITICO looks at a candidate the Kochs may be grooming for a 2016 run — Indiana Governor Mike Pence. The report points to numerous instances of alignment between Pence’s activities as a Member of Congress and Governor and the Kochs’ extreme agenda, in addition to the collection of former Pence staffers that are now among the upper echelons of Koch World. Given the hundreds of millions of dollars the Koch network is likely to pour into the next Presidential election — it raised over $400 million in 2012 — the headline’s claim that Pence could have a “Koch advantage” is quite the understatement.

In what reads like a 2,000 word love story about the romance between Pence and the Koch brothers, POLITICO notes that Pence initially piqued the Kochs’ interest as a Member of Congress for […]

Even non-attending Koch cronies get shout out at secret donor conference

August 27, 2014

As revealed by new reporting from The Nation and Huffington Post, GOP Senate candidates Mitch McConnell, Joni Ernst, Tom Cotton and Cory Gardner all had their chance to kiss the ring at the Koch brothers’ secretive donor conference earlier this year. Luckily for some of their compatriots, in-person attendance to pander to the high-rolling “seminar” attendees wasn’t a prerequisite for receiving shout-outs from the presidents of Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners, two key organizations in the Kochs’ political network.

From East to West, AFP president Tim Phillips and Freedom Partners president Marc Short highlighted the Senate campaigns of Virginia’s Ed Gillespie, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, Minnesota’s Mike McFadden and Oregon’s Monica Wehby, illustrating that two of the Kochs’ top operatives consider all of these candidates to be exemplary of the anti-working class agenda the billionaires are pushing in this fall’s midterm elections. Put simply, all of these candidates are carrying water for the Kochs, AFP and Freedom Partners, or else Phillips and Short wouldn’t have sung their praises to the Kochs’ network of mysterious donors. Phillips told donors at the event that North Carolina’s Tillis offers “the best opportunity” and that McFadden is “a good candidate,” while Wehby is “running a strong campaign” despite being in “a tough blue state.” In extolling the virtues of Gillespie and Cassidy, Phillips and Short noted that Virginia is a “key state for us” and that energy issues (near and dear to Koch Industries’ heart, of course) represent a “key battleground” in Louisiana.

With the Freedom Partners network committing to spend $500 million in this midterm cycle, including AFP’s pledge to pour over $125 million into the election, these new revelations shed light on which candidates the billionaire Koch brothers view as a sound investment. More on Phillips’ and Short’s’ comments lauding key Senate candidates after the jump:

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