Only a few years ago the left championed free speech, said it was patriotic. Now they are obsessed with eliminating it. Perhaps they know their views can't stand up to competition. Whipping up hatred against others diverts attention from the failure of one's own policies. Scott Walker had never spoken with David Koch before. Koch had never even seen a photograph of Walker.
4/4/11, "The Paranoid Style in Liberal Politics," "The left’s obsession with the Koch brothers," The Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti
"David Koch’s secretary told him the news. This was in February, during the rowdy standoff between Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and demonstrators backing 14 Democratic legislators who’d fled to Illinois rather than vote on a bill weakening public employee unions. Koch’s secretary said that an editor for a left-wing website, the Buffalo Beast, had telephoned the governor posing as David Koch and recorded the conversation. And Walker had fallen for it! He’d had a 20-minute conversation with this bozo, not once questioning the caller’s identity. But then how could Walker have known? Sure, David Koch was a billionaire whose company had donated to his campaign. But Koch (pronounced “Coke”)
- had never talked to Walker in his life.
Yet here were the media reporting that he and his brother Charles were behind Walker’s push against public employees. Anger washed over David like a red tide. He’d been victimized by some punk with a political agenda. “It’s really identity theft,” he told me a month later, during an interview at Koch Industries’ headquarters. “And I think it’s extremely dishonest to misrepresent yourself....And the person who would do that has got to be an incredibly dishonest person.” Up until Walker’s showdown with the Democratic state senators, Koch had never seen a photograph of the governor. He didn’t know him at all. But now the protesters occupying the Wisconsin state capitol were calling Walker
- a “Koch Whore.”
Why? Because the Koch Industries PAC had given $43,000 to Walker’s campaign. That was less than one half of one percent of Walker’s total haul—but still enough for the left to tie Koch Industries to the battle royal in Wisconsin. David found the whole affair disturbing. “One additional thing that really bothered me,” he said, “was that the press attacked me rather than the guy who impersonated me! And I was criticized as someone who’s got a death grip on the governor and his policies. And that I control him—I mean, that’s insane!”
Ah, but such is life when you and your brother are suddenly two of the most demonized men in American politics. For decades David and Charles have run Koch Industries, an energy and manufacturing conglomerate that employs around 50,000 people in the United States and another 20,000 in 59 other countries. Depending on the year, Koch Industries is either the first- or second-largest privately held company in America—it alternates in the top spot with Cargill, the agricultural giant—with about $100 billion in revenues. David and Charles are worth around $22 billion each....Like most billionaires, the brothers spend a lot of time giving their money away: to medical and scientific research, to educational programs,
- to cultural institutions, and to public policy research and activism.
That last part has caught the attention of the left’s scouring eye. For unlike many billionaires, the Koch brothers espouse classical liberal economics: They advocate lower taxes, less government spending, fewer regulations, and limited government. “Society as a whole benefits from greater economic freedom,” Charles wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. Judging by the results of the 2012 elections,
- there are millions of Americans who agree with him.
Over the years the Kochs have flown beneath the radar, not seeking publicity and receiving little. But then the crash of 2008 arrived, and the bailouts, and the election of Barack Obama, and pretty soon the whole country was engaged in one loud, colossal, rollicking, emotional argument over the size, scope, and solvency of the federal government. Without warning, folks were springing up, dressing in colonial garb, talking about the Constitution, calling for a Tea Party. Some of them even joined a group called Americans for Prosperity—which the Kochs helped found and partly fund.
For progressives confused at the heated opposition to their do-gooder agenda, the Kochs became convenient scapegoats. Invoking their name was a way to write off opposition to Obama as the false consciousness of
- racist rubes
stoked by greedy businessmen. In the liberal imagination the Kochs ascended from obscurity to infamy in record time. Starting in the spring of 2009, whenever you turned on MSNBC or clicked on the Huffington Post you’d see the Kochs described in terms more applicable to Lex Luthor and General Zod.
As last year’s midterm elections approached, the White House singled out the Kochs for attack. President Obama relied on innuendo: “They don’t have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are,” he said in August. “You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation. You don’t know if it’s a big oil company, or a big bank.” Obama’s lieutenants were more direct. Also in August, an administration official, later identified as the economist Austan Goolsbee, delivered a background briefing to reporters in which he falsely alleged that Koch Industries paid no corporate income tax. (An inspector general is now investigating whether anyone in the Obama administration accessed confidential tax information prior to the attack.) The Kochs, former White House adviser David Axelrod wrote last September, are “billionaire oilmen secretly underwriting what the public has been told is a grass-roots movement for change in Washington.”
But that was just for starters. Liberals in the media turned into Koch addicts. They ascribed every bad thing under the sun to the brothers and their checkbooks. Pollution, the Tea Party, global warming denial—the Kochs were responsible. The liberals kneaded the facts like clay until the Kochs resembled a Lovecraftian monster: the Kochtopus! Its tentacles stretched everywhere. “Their private agenda is really the eradication of the federal government in almost all of its forms, other than the parts of it that protect personal rights,” New Yorker writer Jane Mayer told NPR’s Terry Gross. Anonymous, the hackers’ collective, accused the Kochs of attempting to “usurp American Democracy.” The Koch brothers manipulated the Tea Partiers, according to Keith Olbermann, by “telling them what to say and which causes to take on and also
- giving them lots of money to do it with.”
“They have an interest that is hard core ideological, hard core conservative. And dad’s money to pursue that agenda, it turns out, goes a long, long way,” said Rachel Maddow. Another left-wing radio host, Mike Papantonio, called them “inheritance babies who don’t want to pay taxes.” “The billionaire Koch brothers spent millions to have a seat at the Republican table in Washington,” said Ed Shultz, also of MSNBC, “and let’s be upfront about this now, folks. Now, they are the table.” For Paul Krugman, “What the Koch brothers have bought with their huge political outlays is, above all, freedom to pollute.” Frank Rich called them “fat cats.” Howard Dean was blunt: “We don’t want the right wing buying elections.” The Kochs, wrote a group of liberal bloggers, are
- “the billionaires behind the hate.”
By the time the rhetoric trickled down from the president of the United States to MSNBC talking heads to anonymous email writers, any pretense to civility or actual fact had vanished. The emails that showed up in Melissa Cohlmia’s inbox each morning were unhinged. Cohlmia is director of corporate communication for Koch Industries. Every day when she arrived at work, the first things she’d read were emails with subject lines like “This is the result of the hate you’ve been spewing,” “Corrupt Polluting Scum,” “I am boycotting Koch Industries,” “Treason,” and “Eat s—t you jerks.”
Koch Industries has a target on its gargantuan back. The brothers are the latest victims of the left’s lean, mean cyber-vilification machine. Cohlmia spends her time trying to debunk the falsehoods being spread about her bosses and her company. It may be a losing battle. There’s just too much junk. And every so often Cohlmia has to stop and wonder:
- How on earth did it come to this?...
The Kochs’ politics didn’t match traditional categories. Republicans, in their view, were just as implicated in big government as Democrats. To this day the Cato Institute calls for a much smaller defense budget, a noninterventionist foreign policy, and liberal positions on social issues. Some of these views have made movement conservatives uneasy. In June 1979 National Review went so far as to publish an essay critical of Cato Institute libertarians by Lawrence V. Cott. The title of the piece was “Cato Institute & the Invisible Finger.” The finger in question belonged to Charles Koch.
The intraconservative friction was evidence that Charles was becoming influential. In 1980 David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian party ticket. As a candidate, David could use his fortune to educate the populace about the free market. Yet it isn’t quite accurate to say, as many have, that David was running to “Reagan’s right.” Yes, the Libertarians wanted to shrink government. But they also believed it was important to
- distinguish themselves from Chamber of Commerce, “family values” Republicans.
Ed Clark, the party’s presidential nominee, described himself as a “low-tax liberal.”
There must not have been many of those. Libertarians got 1 percent of the vote in 1980. But David and Charles were pleased nonetheless. “Compared to what they’d gotten before,” Charles said, “and where we were as a movement or as a political/ideological point of view, that was pretty remarkable, to get 1 percent of the vote.”....
In 1991 he (David) was the only passenger in first class to survive when his US Airways 737 collided with a commuter jet on a runway at Los Angeles International Airport. The following year he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. “I had a terrible panic attack,” David said. “I thought I was going to die.” He underwent radiation at Sloan-Kettering, surgery, hormone therapy—each time the cancer came back. “Once you get that disease,” David said, “and I’ve had it for 20 years almost, you become a crusader to try to cure the disease not only for yourself but for other people.”
David poured himself into his philanthropy. Most of his money went to medical research and cultural institutions. His multimillion-dollar gifts went to MIT, Johns Hopkins, Lincoln Center, the American Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and elsewhere. None of these places is known for right-wing politics. “Probably the least area in terms of my overall contributions is public policy,” David said. The difference is in the hundreds of millions of dollars....
Things had settled down by the time George W. Bush was inaugurated president. The election of a self-described compassionate conservative did not allay the Kochs’ fears for the future of economic liberty. Charles and David quickly found themselves disappointed in Bush. “What he did led to the current administration,” Charles said. Charles’s favorite presidents were George Washington, Grover Cleveland, and Calvin Coolidge. “Harding was very good too,” he said, “but he had some other issues.” It’s been downhill since Hoover.
Bush wasn’t all bad: He was personally a nice guy, he made some excellent appointments to the Supreme Court, and he was business friendly. His foreign policy, the invasion of Iraq in particular, was a different story. “Boy, that’s cost a lot of money, and it’s taken so many American lives,” David said. “I question whether that was the right thing to do. In hindsight that looks like it was not a good policy.”...
Around the time the seminars began, there was an internal shake-up at Citizens for a Sound Economy. The group split into FreedomWorks, chaired by Dick Armey, and Americans for Prosperity (AFP). David Koch chairs the AFP foundation. “I see AFP as having a huge number of boots on the ground,” David said. Its ranks have swelled to upward of 1.6 million people.
Charles and David sensed that Bush’s failure would drive Americans into the arms of Barack Obama. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the financial crisis of September 2008 made a toxic brew, and Americans turned to the young Democratic senator who promised hope and change. Change is what they got. Ask Charles Koch what he thinks about Obama and he looks like he’s just bit into a lemon. “He’s a dedicated egalitarian,” Charles said. “I’m not saying he’s a Marxist, but he’s internalized some Marxist models—that is, that business tends to be successful by exploiting its customers and workers.”
- David agreed. “He’s the most radical president we’ve ever had as a nation,” he said, “and has done more damage to the free enterprise system and long-term prosperity than any president we’ve ever had.” ...
The (Obama) silver tongue promised to build a “New Foundation” for America based on greater federal government involvement in health care, education, and energy. Taxes would be raised, regulations increased, mandates imposed to guarantee a more equitable distribution of wealth. Charles and David agreed with none of this. The larger government grows, they believed, the worse off societies become.
- Obama had to be stopped.
The Kochs weren’t the only ones opposed to the president’s vision. Within months of Obama’s inauguration, the Tea Party had begun. “The way it’s grown, the passion and the intensity, was beyond what I had anticipated,” Charles said. It was beautiful—a sight to behold. But there was one other thing the Kochs didn’t expect:
- the buzz saw of the contemporary left.
- but few took them very seriously.
Not anymore. During the fight over health care and cap and trade in 2009 and 2010, liberals went looking for baddies against whom to mobilize public opinion. The Kochs’ wealth and political involvement made them an obvious choice. Reflecting on the ferocity of the onslaught that ensued, Charles told me, “I didn’t anticipate the hatred, the advocacy of violence.” He must not have been paying attention....
What happened to the Kochs was a classic example. A young researcher at the Center for American Progress noticed that some Tea Party rallies had been organized by Americans for Prosperity. On April 9, 2009, he wrote up his discovery and posted it on a Center for American Progress Action Fund blog under the headline “Spontaneous Uprising? Corporate Lobbyists Helping to Orchestrate Radical Anti-Obama Tea Party Protests.” Here was the definitive proof, he wrote, that the yokels in tricornes were only pawns of moneyed interests. A little googling revealed that Charles and David Koch had been active in politics for decades, that they’d given money to all sorts of conservative causes, that they operated—this was almost too good to be true—an energy company that had had run-ins with the EPA.
- Sound the alarm! Rachel Maddow is on line one!
Other sharks caught whiff of the chum. In March 2010 the environmentalists at Greenpeace released a report titled “Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine.” Its authors contained their fury long enough to conclude, “Koch Industries has become a financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition.” In the liberal mind, Koch had displaced ExxonMobil on the Top Ten Enemies of Gaia list.
Koch addiction became a left-wing pandemic. In August 2010 the New Yorker published Jane Mayer’s “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.” Mayer drew heavily from the writings of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the Greenpeace report, and public tax records. For several thousand words, relying on interviews with anonymous sources, Democratic operatives, a disgruntled conservative, a historian of libertarianism, and the author of “A Pagan’s Blog,” Mayer unspooled
- a fantastic tale of manipulation and malpractice.
She reported ominously that “many of the organizations funded by the Kochs employ specialists who write position papers that are subsequently quoted by politicians and pundits.” She unironically quoted former Democratic congressman Dan Glickman, who told her that before the voters in Wichita threw him out in 1994, “I’d been in Congress 18 years. The Kochs actually engaged against me and funded my opponent.” The impertinence! The outrage! “With the growing prominence of the Tea Party,” Mayer wrote, “and with increased awareness of the Kochs’ ties to the movement, the brothers may find it harder to deflect scrutiny.”
How right she was. “Covert Operations” became a sort of Rosetta Stone for Koch addicts. It was the template for any liberal wanting someone to blame for all the trouble in the world. Mayer had unlocked the secrets of the Kochtopus.
Her story contained four main lines of argument. The first was that the Kochs used Americans for Prosperity to control the Tea Party. For anyone remotely familiar with the history of the Tea Party, the assertion was laughable. In one guise or another, AFP had been around for 25 years before Obama showed up and brought the Tea Partiers out of hiding. What had taken so long?
Did the Kochs order Keli Carender to organize the first “porkulus” protest in Seattle in February 2009? Did they direct Rick Santelli to call for a Tea Party live on CNBC a few days later? The suggestion was absurd. “I see these people on TV, and they’re interviewed, and it’s obvious no one’s pulling their strings,” Charles said.
- Neither brother has attended a Tea Party.
If anything it was the Tea Partiers who used Americans for Prosperity: They would have invented it if it hadn’t already existed....
It was impossible for the liberal activists to acknowledge that libertarians might actually operate from conviction. Charles and David believed in low taxes, less spending, and limited regulation not because those policies helped them but because they helped everybody. “If I wanted to enhance my riches,” said David, “why do I give away almost all my money?”
- Particularly outrageous was Mayer’s claim that David used his position on the National Cancer Advisory Board to lobby against classifying formaldehyde as a carcinogen. David was on the board for almost seven years. Not once did he hear formaldehyde discussed....
- (The pound sterling wasn’t as lucky.)
The Kochs’ chief heresy, according to Mayer, was their dismissive attitude toward global warming alarmism. Charles and David were deemed “anti-science.” The brothers—both of whom held master’s degrees from MIT and ran successful companies that refined oil, produced chemicals, and manufactured polymers—scoffed at the accusation. “These people aren’t interested in science,” Charles said. “Science isn’t about consensus. Science is about skepticism, about challenging the status quo.” The Kochs believed the cost of a carbon-free economy would be too high. “There’s a direct correlation between the energy use of a country and its standard of living,” David said. “If your energy use is massively reduced, it’s going to damage your standard of living.” The available data didn’t justify the cost. “With the uncertainty and the politicization of the science so far,” Charles said, “to go spend trillions of dollars a year changing the whole world economy to satisfy something this uncertain, because you have some religious zealots like Al Gore going around preaching this—it doesn’t make sense.”
Mayer’s final line of attack also had to do with the environment. Koch Industries’ record wasn’t spotless. In the 1990s in particular the Kochs had to settle several lawsuits with the government. Oil had spilled and leaked from pipelines into bodies of water. Two teenagers had been killed when an underground butane pipeline ruptured. An employee at the Corpus Christi refinery had covered up illegal discharges of benzene. The repercussions were severe. “The only time I’ve ever seen Mr. Koch upset is when we had a misstep around compliance,” Koch Minerals president Steve Tatum, who’s been with Koch for 27 years, told me....
What bothered Koch employees was that the left’s attacks were devoid of context. Many of the criticisms were simply a function of Koch Industries’ long history and size. “You’ve got 74 years of opportunity to talk about fines or spills or what have you,” said Rod Learned, the internal communications director. “If you look at industry averages and look at Koch, we compare very favorably.” It’s true, for example, that Koch is one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the country—as you’d expect from one of the largest companies.
- “The investment banks, they don’t pollute very much, because they don’t make anything,” said Tatum. “We make stuff.”
Koch employees felt as if they’d entered a parallel dimension. There was a whole other side to the history of the company that
- the media totally ignored....
In August 2003 the EPA selected Koch subsidiary John Zink Company for its prestigious National Environmental Performance Track program. Koch employees traveled frequently to Washington for consultation with government officials. “I think we have a constructive relationship with EPA,” said Jim Mahoney.
Koch’s efforts continue to elicit notice. Since Obama’s inauguration, Koch companies have been recognized more than 280 times by local, state, and federal agencies for safety and environmental stewardship. In 2009 Invista voluntarily agreed to a huge settlement with EPA. “Invista is making a clean start in a settlement that achieves significant environmental benefits,” an EPA administrator said at the time. In October 2009 the EPA gave its SmartWay Excellence Award to Georgia-Pacific for reducing pollution in the freight industry. In October 2010 Flint Hills Resources agreed to a deal with the federal government over permitting rights at its Texas refinery. “The process we have agreed to with Flint Hills Resources is an excellent one,” said EPA regional administrator Al Armendariz in a press release, “and we look forward to working with the company to complete the work to transition their permits.”
- Well, hold it right there, Mr. EPA regional director! Where’s the Center for American Progress Action Fund when you need it? Someone explain to Al Armendariz: You never give the devil his due.
No amount of contrary evidence was enough to dislodge the left’s conviction that Charles and David Koch ran an empire hellbent on America’s destruction. Koch addiction was too powerful. As the media campaign intensified, demonstrators started showing up at the Koch campus in Wichita. A left-wing blogger ambushed David when he traveled to Washington to see the 112th Congress sworn in. The liberal group Common Cause organized a protest at the most recent Koch fundraising seminar in Palm Springs. The lefties outside the hotel unfurled a white banner with the words “Koch Kills” printed in red. Drops of blood fell from each letter.
- “These people were very, very extreme,” David said, “and I think very dangerous.”
The imputation in February that Governor Scott Walker had brought Wisconsin to a standstill to further the interests of Koch Industries was of course ridiculous. But it also demonstrated the power of the left-wing vilification machine. As the assaults piled up Charles couldn’t help thinking of Schopenhauer’s “Art of Controversy.” The German philosopher had noted that
- people who can’t win an argument through reason
- attack their opponent’s motivation.
“I thought I was cynical enough,” Charles said. “But that was pretty shocking, to see what we’re up against, or what the country’s up against: to have an element like this.”
The left’s inability to understand where the Kochs were coming from puzzled Charles and David. Wasn’t it obvious that small government and free markets resulted in a better world? “Why don’t we teach in schools things that make society more prosperous, and more peaceful, and people will respect each other more? It’s a strange thing, isn’t it?” said Charles. “It’s unbelievable how they distort what your message is!” said David. The Kochs thought their aim was to increase the standard of living for everyone. The way to do this, they believed, was
- by applying to society the same methods that had grown their company.
To Charles, the call for bigger government was egalitarianism run amok. Liberals, he thought, fetishized equality of condition at the expense of personal liberty. “They cannot stand that some people are better off than others,” Charles said. “I think part of it fits Mencken’s definition of a Puritan: someone that’s miserable because he knows that someone, somewhere, is enjoying himself. He cannot stand that. And I think they all slept through Economics 101.”
The raw emotions and mindless smears left employees of Koch Industries hurt and befuddled. They kept searching for an answer. It was as if the universe had turned upside down. “All of us are given something, some more than others, and it’s up to us to build on it,” said Koch Minerals executive Steve Tatum. “Charles and David did. They built on what they inherited from their family. Hopefully, I have too. And I inherited nothing but a little help with college.
“What doesn’t seem right is when a person works to get through college, gets a degree, works for 25 years to become successful—and now you’re the bad guy,” Tatum said. “
- And I think, that’s the American dream, isn’t it?”"...
via Althouse blog
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