The Koch brothers hate Social Security

By Mike Andrew

Charles and David Koch, the right-wing billionaires who financed the Tea Party, have poured millions of dollars into destroying Social Security.

They learned to hate Social Security quite literally at their daddy’s knee. Their father, Fred Koch, was one of the founders and the principal financial backer of the John Birch Society, the secretive ultra-right organization of the Fifties and Sixties.

David and Charles have surpassed their father’s efforts by far, however.

According to Brave New Foundation, a social justice research group, the Koch brothers have spent more than $28 million to create what amounts to an entire anti-Social Security industry.

Koch-financed spokespeople, front groups, think tanks, and academics have produced no fewer than 297 commentaries, 200 reports, 56 studies, and 6 full-length books full of distortions of Social Security’s record of effective service.

The Brave New Foundation investigation reveals Koch-supported policies – and even specific language – repeated in each document they studied, raising the retirement age or eliminating cost of living adjustments, for example.

All of this adds up to “a self-sustaining echo chamber to transform fringe ideas into popular mainstream public policy arguments,” Brave New Foundation says.

This “echo chamber” includes think tanks like the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation and Mercatus Centre at George Mason University and the Reason Foundation, which owe their existence to Koch backing.

Their distorted message is then reported as fact on TV shows like Fox News’s Hannity, with 3.3 million viewers per episode, or CNBC's Kudlow Report, with 300,000 viewers per episode, night after night after night.

As an article in The Nation magazine points out, when Texas Governor Rick Perry calls Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” that phrase comes directly from the Koch propaganda machine.

The Koch brothers have even been able to influence the messaging for the AARP. which recently opened the door to cutting Social Security benefits.

Koch Industries spent $857,000 on lobbyists in 2004, the year before George W Bush tried and failed to privatise social security. They also donated $104,660 to his campaign.

While their attacks on Social Security were not successful in 2004, they have not retreated.

Just the opposite, in fact. They have used the country’s economic crisis as an excuse to increase their attacks.

In the first two years of the Obama administration, the Koch brothers spent $20 million on lobbying, according to the Centre for Public Integrity.

"The Koch brothers fund organizations, and you have economists and political scientists working there, and they are very, very good at getting on television," Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said. "They are very effective in getting their positions out into the media."

The brothers have diversified their donations to Republican leaders, and also to strategic Democrats who oppose revenue increases like Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY).

Traditional lobbying has now given way to a larger, more insidious propaganda campaign aimed at changing the terms of debate not only on Social Security, but on the role of government and social spending in general.

"The Koch brothers’ job is to do everything they can to dismember government in general," Sen. Sanders says. "If you can destroy social security, you will have gone a long way forward in that effort."

Union activists confront Koch Brothers conclave

By Mike Andrew

A phalanx of sheriff’s deputies in full riot gear were needed to protect Charles and David Koch and 200 of their richest and most conservative friends in Palm Springs on January 30.

The Koch brothers hosted a secret meeting of right-wing money men in the Rancho Las Palmas Resort and Spa, one of Southern California’s most luxurious hotels, to plan political strategy and raise money for the 2012 election campaign.

Challenging them were more than 1,000 activists, including members of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United (CNA/NNU), AFSCME, Health Care for America Now (HCAN) and Common Cause.

25 demonstrators were arrested.

The Koch brothers, heirs to the oil and chemical conglomerate Koch Industries, have founded or funded dozens of conservative or libertarian publications, think tanks and attack groups, according to an investigative piece by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer.

Among Koch-sponsored political organizations are Citizens United, Americans for Prosperity, and the Tea Party.

Their Palm Springs meeting raised an estimated $30 million for the 2012 election.

Their father, Fred Koch, was a founding member and the principal funder of the ultra-right John Birch Society in the 1950s and 1960s.

With annual revenues of $98 billion, Koch Industries is the second largest privately held corporation in the country. 

It is also the 10th worst corporate polluter in the country, according to the Political Economic Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. 

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was among several members of Congress who flew in for the two-day meeting. 

Cantor has been generously backed by Koch Industries in the past, having received $36,650 in campaign contributions from the company’s executives and employees since 2002, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. 

Past participants in the Koch brothers’ conclaves have included members of Congress, media personalities like Glenn Beck, and Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, both of whom voted on the Koch brothers’ side in the infamous Citizens United ruling.

No surprise, then, that the Koch brothers have been identified as financial supporters of union-busting Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. 

Koch Industries gave Walker $43,000 in direct contributions, as well as giving $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which then spent $65,000 on Walker’s campaign.

According to Salon magazine, a key section of Walker’s so-called “budget repair bill” allows the state to conclude no-bid contracts with private energy companies in order to benefit Koch industries.

The Koch brothers’ tentacles even reach into our state.

In the 2010 election, the Koch brothers donated $5000 directly to Republican Senate candidate Dino Rossi, and donated additional money to other right-wing PACs that then funneled some $64,500 to Rossi’s campaign.

In January, Kirby Wilbur, the former chairman of Americans for Prosperity in Washington, was elected chair of the state Republican Party organization.

Americans for Prosperity claims chapters in 32 states, including Washington and Wisconsin; an e-mail list of 1.6 million supporters; and a $40 million annual budget.

Officers of the organization refuse to say how much of its budget comes from the Koch family.