Koch network doubles down on border-for-DACA pitch. Koch Donor Network Will Not Support Trump in 2020, but Will Promote Permanent Legal Status for Dreamers: Report. Politically powerful billionaire Charles Koch will not lobby for President Donald Trump if he runs for re-election in the 2020 contest, Time reported. But the Koch donor network will advocate for establishing permanent legal status for Dreamers, undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, recipients are often called Dreamers, after the DREAM Act—Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors—which offered many of the same protections but never passed Congress.)
Koch will also focus his immense influence on gubernatorial and congressional races, prioritizing issues including poverty and drug addiction, the article said. "We are making significant investments to unite the country and address critical issues that will help people improve their lives," Koch spokesman James Davis told Time. David H. The Koch brothers hate public transit. But they can’t always stop projects in their tracks. The infamous Koch brothers have bankrolled climate deniers, propped up polluting industries, and even tried to turn the black community pro-fossil fuel.
But, as a recent New York Times story shows, the billionaire conservatives have been steadily exerting pressure against public transit as well. Americans for Prosperity, a conservative lobbying group funded by the Koch family, has rallied against public transit works across the country. With a mix of political ads and door-to-door campaigning, the organization managed to get a transit tax increase shot down in Little Rock in 2016. Koch-linked groups have successfully watered down legislation in Indianapolis and blocked efforts in Florida. This spring, the organization financed conservative activists in Nashville, Tennessee, to oppose a mass transit referendum.
The plan would have increased the city’s sales tax in order to fund a light rail system, eight new bus lines, and 19 transit centers in the city. One Koch Brother Forces The Other Out Of The Family Business. Tax Bill: Koch Brothers’ Senator Pushes Tax Break For ‘Dark Money’ Groups. With Republican megadonors like Charles Koch, 82, and his brother David, 77, advancing in age, a top GOP senator from the Kochs’ home state has proposed a special tax break for moguls who bequeath their riches to so-called “dark money” groups that advocate for policies and bankroll lawmakers’ election ads.
Though Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts’ proposal did not make it into the Senate-passed version of the tax bill, it could still be added by the conference committee that will write the final $1.4 trillion tax cut legislation. Although dark money groups are entitled to conceal the identities of their donors, reporting has shown the Koch brothers are some of most prolific deployers of such groups.
Roberts’ proposal would provide a new post-mortem tax break to boost that activity — at a moment when the Republican Party’s biggest donors include septa- and octogenarians such as the Kochs, Sheldon Adelson, 84, Robert Mercer, 71, and Foster Freiss, 77. “Estate Tax Modification” A Billionaire-Backed 'Movement' Is Dangerously Close to Calling a Constitutional Convention.
A billionaire-backed “movement” is dangerously close to calling a constitutional convention of states under Article V of the U.S. Constitution. If realized, it would be the first constitutional convention since the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, which replaced the Articles of Confederation with the U.S. Constitution.
After an active start to 2017, proponents are now allegedly seven states away from reaching the needed 34 states (two-thirds) to convene a convention. According to Article V, which lays out all the ways the constitution can be amended, any amendments proposed by the convention would then need to be ratified by 38 (three-fourths) of the states. Analysis of email blasts from proponents and a new op-ed shows that an emboldened group of paid pro-convention campaigners are advocating for a convention to go far beyond its professed purpose of passing a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA).
Their proposals include the creation of a national identification card. Paris Exit Was 'Victory Paid and Carried Out' by Republican Party for the Koch Brothers. The 22 Republican senators who sent a letter to President Donald Trump last week urging the United States' withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement received more than $10 million dollars in campaign funds from fossil fuel interests. The two-page letter was signed by a number of Republican heavyweights from coal/gas/oil-rich states, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma and Ted Cruz of Texas.
The Guardian calculated that the 22 senators received a total of $10,694,284 from oil, gas and coal money in just five years. (See the breakdown below.) However, that sum does not even come close to the amount of undisclosed funds coming from the deep pockets of Charles and David Koch's coal, oil and gas conglomerate, Koch Industries, and other outside groups. As the Guardian explains: Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, shared recently his views on Trump's climate walkout. John Cornyn, Texas. Koch. Koch Brothers Winter Meeting: Cautious Optimism for Future Battles | National Review.
Indian Wells, Calif. — “Elections are one thing,“ Brian Hooks, co-chair of the Koch Seminar Network told an audience of 550 well-heeled donors Sunday. “But if we’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that the biggest mistake that groups can make after an election is to pack it up and go home.” He quoted the network’s founder, Charles Koch, declaring, “the measure of success is not whether our candidates win; it’s what the winning candidates do as a result of our involvement.”
The Koch network can accurately boast that it has become one of the most consequential forces in American politics, with what it calls a “permanent grassroots infrastructure in 36 states.” Last year’s elections capped an odd but ultimately happy year for the network. The Kochs sat out the presidential election after deciding that Donald Trump’s populism was fundamentally at odds with their own libertarian philosophy.
At this point, the Koch network sees the Trump presidency as a distinctly mixed bag. Koch Brothers Worried Trump's Extreme Presidency Will Lead to Far-Left Revolt - The Ring of Fire Network. The Koch Brothers have woken up from their Libertarian dream into a fascist nightmare, and are already backpedaling furiously to save their political cash and capital in the rapidly dissolving Trump presidency. Over the weekend, the Koch brothers condemned Trump’s ban of refugees from seven Muslim-majority nations. Investors in the Koch industry have also expressed their disapproval with the proposition that the Trump administration might pay for a border wall by imposing a 20 percent tax on all Mexican imports.
The Koch brothers, sensing the temperature of the political climate, elected not to give their customary millions to a presidential candidate. Instead, they invested in Republican Senate candidates and won big. Now they, too, are dealing with Trump’s presidency, and they see the writing on the wall. Charles Koch himself alluded to Trump while speaking to donors, saying that the U.S. could “go the authoritarian route … or we can move toward a free and open society. Koch Network Focuses On Understanding Trump Voters - BuzzFeed News. Officials: Koch summit to highlight programs for the poor. WASHINGTON — Stand Together, one of the newest branches of the vast policy and political operation controlled by billionaire Charles Koch, has surpassed its fundraising goals and quadrupled its staff in its first year as the Koch-aligned donors pour greater sums into projects aimed at spreading their free-market activism to the poor.
The non-profit, which provides seed money and advice to private organizations addressing social problems, now employs 20, up from 5 when it launched in early 2016, and works with 30 groups around the country, Evan Feinberg, the group’s executive director, told USA TODAY. Stand Together still is among the network's smallest groups, but its growth spurt reflects the push by Koch and his allies to reshape public life around their small-government ideas.
“It’s not the proper role of government to step into these local communities to try to solve the problems of persistent poverty,” Feinberg said in an interview. Read more: What's the US billionaire Koch brothers' beef? In this uncertain world, there are still a few unalterable facts of political life. For example, Republicans always do what Charles and David Koch, the billionaire bankrollers of right-wing politics nationwide, tell them. Then again, maybe not. As it happens, the Koch brothers are deadset against the House Republicans' business tax reform plan, yet GOP leaders are pushing it anyway. At issue is the proposed destination-based cash flow tax (DBCFT), which despite its eye-glazing name is anything but a tepid idea. To the contrary, it could affect long-standing business models across corporate America.
Here's the plan: Instead of today's corporate tax, which charges rates up to 35 per cent on worldwide income, adjusted for deductions and loopholes, the DBCFT would impose a flat 20 per cent tax only on earnings from sales of output consumed within the United States (with an immediate write-off on capital investment and no deduction for net interest). So what's the Koch brothers' beef?
Trump’s Cabinet choices reflect deep Koch influence — High Country News. President-elect Donald Trump vowed to “drain the swamp” and rid Washington D.C. of lobbyists, corporations and industry influence. But with each new appointment, it becomes clearer that many his transition team members, Cabinet picks and close staffers are the very types he said he would steer clear of. According to an ongoing analysis by the left-leaning Washington D.C. -based policy research and advocacy organization Center for American Progress, nearly a third of Trump’s transition team has ties to Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers that own the second largest privately held company in the country, Koch Industries, and have founded and funded many conservative organizations.
That’s 72 of the 236 people the organization researched, including those on Trump’s transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Interior, and Department of Energy. Vice President Mike Pence has had Koch ties for many years. Rebranding the Koch Brothers. On the night of November 2nd, well-dressed Wichita residents formed a line that snaked through the lobby of the city’s convention center.
They all held tickets to the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce’s annual gala, which had drawn thirty-five hundred people. The evening’s featured speaker, Charles Koch, had lived in town almost all of his eighty years, but few locals—even prominent ones—had 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. Charles’s 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.” Onstage in Wichita, Charles barely discussed his political spending. The need for a new sales pitch was urgent. Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Big-Donor Education Secretary. After choosing for his cabinet a series of political outsiders who are loyal to him personally, Donald Trump has broken with this pattern to name Betsy DeVos his Secretary of Education. DeVos, whose father-in-law is a co-founder of Amway, the multilevel marketing empire, comes from the very heart of the small circle of conservative billionaires who have long funded the Republican Party.
Trump’s choice of DeVos delivers on his campaign promise to increase the role of charter schools, which she has long championed. But it also flies in the face of his fiery anti-establishment campaign rhetoric. Steve Bannon, who was named Trump’s senior counsellor and chief strategist, has mocked what he called “the donor class,” arguing that it and the politicians it bankrolls have little understanding of the needs of working-class and middle-class voters. While the DeVoses are less well known than the Kochs, they have played a similar role in bankrolling the rightward march of the Republican Party. Trump Energy Agenda Revealed in Thomas Pyle Memo | DeSmogBlog. Lies the Koch Brothers Tell | NRDC.
Charles and David Koch are living proof that money talks. The brothers, who inherited a massive oil fortune and made it even larger, rarely speak publicly about politics and the environment. Yet few people have more influence over public policy. Through their advocacy group and “think tanks,” the Kochs helped make climate change denial a thing. They fund academics who appear to support their agenda—then drop them when they accept the reality of climate change. The political groups they fund spent $100 million to influence the 2014 midterm elections (successfully, it turns out). The Koch brothers may be wrong—really wrong. That kind of money can buy you an enormous pile of baloney. Lie No. 1: Polar Bears Are Just Fine Koch-funded scientists published a non-peer-reviewed letter in the journal Ecological Complexity in 2007, making two fantastic claims.
Greenpeace has extensively documented the tepid sea of preposterousness on which this claim floats. Formaldehyde is all around you. Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine - Greenpeace USA. About Our Data: Greenpeace uses 1997 as a benchmark year due to increased coordinated backlash against global climate negotiations leading to the Kyoto Protocol of 1998. We define climate change denial as “anyone who is obstructing, delaying or trying to derail policy steps that are in line with the scientific consensus that says we need to take rapid steps to decarbonize the economy.” We do this to hold accountable those who do not state their intentions honestly.
Modern lobbyists decreasingly deny outright the irrefutable science, but instead deny the need for viable solutions — such as a cost on industrial carbon pollution, energy efficiency, clean energy alternatives to fossil fuels — as demonstrated by the science. The Koch brothers continue to finance campaigns to make Americans doubt the seriousness of global warming, increasingly hiding money through nonprofits like DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund. Why focus on Charles Koch and David Koch? Charles G. Download Our Full Reports. Trump brings Koch network's green-energy foes from the fringe to the center of power.
When an obscure nonprofit group attacked one of California’s signature green-energy projects this summer — warning a congressional panel that the embrace of solar energy would lead to crippling hikes in electricity bills — officials in the state shrugged off the testimony as noise from the fringe. With Donald Trump’s election, however, that group, the Institute for Energy Research, has moved suddenly from the fringe to the center of power. The president-elect has sent the group’s president, a former Koch Industries lobbyist named Thomas Pyle, to the Energy Department to take charge of its transition. For years, Pyle has led a coordinated national assault on renewable power. His groups and others that belong to the sprawling network bankrolled by Charles and David Koch, whose vast fortune stems originally from oil refining, pressure lawmakers to roll back policies that promote green power.
The Koch network gave Pyle’s groups $3 million in 2015. evan.halper@latimes.com Follow me: @evanhalper. Trump’s Koch administration. It’s Time To Save ‘Libraries’ From The Koch Brothers, All You Four-Eyes Pointy-Headed Smarties! Trump’s Koch administration. Michael Moore compares DeVos to Koch bros. 56-Million Voters Handed the Kochs and Religious Right Control Over America. 1 Kansas Zip Code is source of millions in campaign cash, and donors are named Koch. How the Koch Brothers Killed the Florida Film Industry. Koch Brothers’ Latest Target: Pope Francis. The Kochs Are Plotting A Multimillion-Dollar Assault On Electric Vehicles | Huffington Post. Koch brothers Hispanic group airs TV ads for Marco Rubio. The Koch Brothers Won’t Fund Trump's GOP Convention. The Koch Brothers Are Trying To Handpick Government Officials. We Have To Stop Them. What Charles Koch really thinks about climate change.
Inside Charles Koch’s $200 million quest for a ‘Republic of Science’ The Koch Brothers Could Walk Away With Madoff Cash. Cashed Out: Koch Bros. Sit on Wallets in ‘16 | US News. In Leaked Tape Mitch McConnell Admits The Koch Brothers Are Running The Republican Party. Koch brothers said to be funding plan to block Grand Canyon conservation | US news.
Charles Koch Is Privately Committed To Getting Paul Ryan Nominated In Cleveland: Source. The Secrets Behind the Koch Brothers: Inside the Remarkable New Book That Details Their Dirtiest Deeds. This is the Kochs’ right-wing coup: Deny voting rights, flood politics with dark money, capture the courts. United States of ALEC. The Koch Brothers' Dirty War on Solar Power. Charles Koch says he agrees with Bernie Sanders about inequality — but does he really? The Kochs Are Plotting A Multimillion-Dollar Assault On Electric Vehicles. The Koch Brothers Are Now Funding The Bundy Land Seizure Agenda. The Koch Brothers Are Now Funding The Bundy Land Seizure Agenda. Busted: Kochs Funding Bundy Militia, Rancher Extremists So They Can Drill On Public Land.
Father of Koch Brothers Helped Build Nazi Oil Refinery, Book Says. Koch Congress Still Pushing Keystone After Four Pipeline Explosions In A Month. Charles Koch: We’re just getting started - Kenneth P. Vogel - POLITICO. Koch Brothers’ Budget of $889 Million for 2016 Is on Par With Both Parties’ S... GOP Hopefuls To Talk Economic Growth at Koch Brothers Event | TIME. Mitt Romney Has a Koch Problem. Koch Party Delivers SOTU Response. Kochs take off mask, plan direct attacks on Democrats.
Markos Moulitsas: Bad math for the Kochs. Exclusive: Inside the Koch Brothers’ Secret Billionaire Summit. EXCLUSIVE AUDIO: How the Koch Brothers Are Molding the Next Scott Walkers. Charles Koch Personally Founded a Group Protecting Oil Industry Handouts. – Koch Brothers Freak Out After Rolling Stone Tells The Truth About Them (IMAGE) In Leaked Tape Mitch McConnell Admits The Koch Brothers Are Running The Republican Party. Three New Ways the Koch Brothers Are Screwing America | Politics News.
Why Unions Should Stop the Koch Brothers From Buying the Tribune Papers | Rolling Stone. Koch Industries Responds to Rolling Stone – And We Answer Back | Rolling Stone. Koch brothers spend millions telling Latinos how stupid they are. Koch vs. Koch: The Brutal Battle That Tore Apart America's Most Powerful Family. The “Other” Koch Brother | Vanity Fair. 17 things you didn’t know about the Koch brothers. A “tragic family story”: Inside the Koch brothers’ past — and uncertain future. The Koch Brothers and Their Daddy: Spending Millions To Wreck the Country That Made Them Rich.
John Doe Docs Indicate "David Koch" Call Part of Case Against Walker. Gov. Walker, illegal money, the Koch brothers, and Judge Randa. Memo: Value in anti-Koch attacks - Maggie Haberman. How the Koch Network Exploited the Veterans Affairs Crisis. Citizen Koch | TRAILER. Response to Rolling Stone Story. Inside the Koch Brothers' Toxic Empire. The Koch Brothers – Exposed! | Rolling Stone.