Charles Koch wants to make one thing clear: He and his brother didn’t get involved in politics until 2003, and that’s a fact. Well, except… it isn’t.
According to an interview (read: PR stunt) with Marketplace,
Koch: I’ve been working in this arena for over 50 years, and for the first 40 we didn’t get into politics, so we didn’t have this. Then in 2003, because of what the Bush administration was doing, we said, “Gosh, we’ve got to get involved in politics.”
Ryssdal: So let’s be clear, that’s George W. Bush, a Republican president, who’s doing things you didn’t like. Growing government, and all of that.
Koch: Increasing destructive regulations which led to the great recession.
But Charles and David were politically active at least twenty years earlier when David made a bid for the vice presidency, when they felt that Republicans supporting environmental laws and the oil export ban would hurt their corporate profits. David wrote a letter to the Libertarian Party promising to fund their ticket if they would make him their nominee for vice president.
As the New York Times reported,
It was the first and only bid for high office by a Koch family member. But much of what occurred in that quixotic campaign shaped what the Kochs have become today — a formidable political and ideological force determined to remake American politics, driven by opposition to government power and hostility to restrictions on money in campaigns.
After the failed campaign, David and Charles dove in to creating the powerful Koch machine they lead today. In 1984, David Koch and Richard Fink started Citizens for a Sound Economy, which would later turn into the Kochs’ political long arm Americans for Prosperity. According to the New Yorker, CSE “was sponsored principally by the Kochs, who provided $7.9 million between 1986 and 1993.” Throughout the 1990s, the Kochs spent an average of nearly $400,000 on political contributions during presidential and midterm elections. And in the same cycle George W. Bush won the presidency, the Kochs’ political action committee gave more than $430,000 to federal candidates.
The Kochs got into politics long before 2003. Charles’ attempt to whitewash their political history is just the latest in their PR campaign to recast themselves as charitable and humble philanthropists instead of the greedy, power-hungry billionaires they really are.