Who’s Afraid of the Brothers Koch?
By TOBIN HARSHAW
The Thread is an in-depth look at how major news and controversies are being debated across the online spectrum.Tags:
Oh, these two:
Robert Caplin for The New York Times, right; Dave Williams/Wichita Eagle via Associated PressDavid, left, and Charles KochSo who are David and Charles Koch? “The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama,” “want to use their wealth to give others the same opportunity to succeed that they have had,” according to Kimberly O. Dennis at National Review. It’s an argument that has been percolating for years around the blogosphere, but has taken on a new urgency now that my hometown has turned into Cairo in the Midwest. And it caught fire last week, thanks to Ian Murphy, a prankster with a Web site called the Buffalo Beast, who got on the phone with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker by pretending to be the younger Koch, David. according to Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Two philanthropists who
The transcript isn’t going to do much for Walker’s image as a reasonable foe:
Walker: …I’ve got layoff notices ready…In fact, some are accusing the governor of stepping over the legal line. Here is report from John Nichols of Madison’s Capital Times:
Koch: Beautiful; beautiful. Gotta crush that union.
Walker: [bragging about how he doesn't budge]…I would be willing to sit down and talk to him, the assembly Democrat leader, plus the other two Republican leaders—talk, not negotiate and listen to what they have to say if they will in turn—but I’ll only do it if all 14 of them will come back and sit down in the state assembly…legally, we believe, once they’ve gone into session, they don’t physically have to be there. If they’re actually in session for that day, and they take a recess, the 19 Senate Republicans could then go into action and they’d have quorum…so we’re double checking that. If you heard I was going to talk to them that’s the only reason why. We’d only do it if they came back to the capital with all 14 of them…
Koch: Bring a baseball bat. That’s what I’d do.
Walker: I have one in my office; you’d be happy with that. I have a slugger with my name on it.
Koch: Beautiful.
When Gov. Scott Walker discussed strategies to lay off state employees for political purposes, to coordinate supposedly “independent” political expenditures to aid legislators who support his budget repair bill, and to place agent provocateurs on the streets of Madison in order to disrupt peaceful demonstrations, he engaged in what a former attorney general of Wisconsin says could turn out to be serious ethics, election law and labor violations …“I’d certainly have preferred that Walker dismiss the suggestion as outrageous,” responds James Joyner at Outside the Beltway. “But he’s clearly trying to schmooze ‘Koch’ by explaining why his suggestion doesn’t even make political — leaving aside legal and moral — sense. There’s no evidence that Walker actually planned to insert ‘troublemakers.’ into the protests. My guess is that it had never occurred to him … The prank phone call showed the extent to which politicians are beholden to campaign money. It’s unseemly. But there’s no clear alternative, either.”
“There clearly are potential ethics violations, and there are potential election law violations and there are a lot of what look to me like labor law violations,” said Peg Lautenschlager, a Democrat who served as Wisconsin’s attorney general after serving for many years as a U.S. attorney. “One of the things I find most problematic in all of this is the governor’s casual talk about using outside troublemakers to stir up trouble on the streets, and the fact that he only dismissed the idea because it might cause a political problem for him.”
Of course, there are those who think that the Buffalo Beast was the one trespassing legitimacy, if not the law, including some Koch Industries officials who talked with National Review’s Robert Costa:
“It was a fraudulent call,” says Mark Holden, the general counsel for Koch Industries. “There are serious fiscal issues at play in Wisconsin. Yet our opponents are interjecting us falsely into this story. But our Wisconsin story is about bringing and keeping good manufacturing jobs in the state. It is disturbing that when a blogger calls using the Koch name, it is used as an opportunity to attack the company.”“The 20-minute phone call undermined the grand Koch conspiracy by exposing that Walker didn’t know Koch at all,” added Michelle Malkin. “If a right-leaning activist had perpetrated such a stunt, he’d be labeled a radical, stalking fraudster. But that’s par for the media’s double-standards course.”
Fink tells us that he does not see the Walker prank as an isolated act. “This is not just left-wing bloggers,” he says. “This is part of an orchestrated campaign that has been going on for many months. It involves the Obama administration, the Center for American Progress, aligned left-wing groups, and their friends in the media.
While Greg Sargent at the Plum Line keeps an even hand:
In fairness to Walker, the exchange is quite convoluted. It’s not clear what precisely he was asking for when he suggested support to shore up embattled legislators. It’s also unclear how the fact that the caller turned out to be a fake would impact the legal issues involved. But the drip-drip-drip of such stories will continue to feed impressions that Walker’s call — even though it was with an impostor — pushed ethical and perhaps legal boundaries.“How big a role are the Kochs actually playing in Wisconsin?” asks Slate’s David Weigel. His answer: “A popular argument on the streets here is that Walker got $43,000 from Koch’s PAC, and that the PAC gave $1 million to the Republican Governor’s Association—a fact dug up first by Andy Kroll of Mother Jones. One protester pointed out to me that Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., had spoken at one of the Kochs’ annual conferences. Thanks to the no-cameras-please PR strategy of the Kochs (none of their Madison lobbyists responded to my interview requests today), these mid-sized donations have taken on mythic proportions.”
But if the left needed any proof of a conspiracy, writes Weigel, the prank phone call took care of that qualm:
“These Koch brothers!” said a worried-sounding Rep. Gary Hebl. “These Koch brothers are talking to Gov. Walker!” After Walker participated in a tense press conference dominated by questions about the Koch tapes, Democratic Rep. Brett Hulsey took questions and explained why the Koch conversation rattled Democrats while confirming their suspicions. The call was evidence of “pay for play.” “It was shocking to us,” he said. “We now understand why [Walker] killed the train money, why he killed the wind development, why he killed $46 million of transit money. He’s in the pocket of big oil interests.”Times columnist Paul Krugman is piqued by this section of Governor Walker’s budget bill: “The department may sell any state-owned heating, cooling, and power plant or may contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state.”
I asked why this proved that these were things David Koch wanted.
“I’m not going to talk about a vast right-wing conspiracy like Mrs. Clinton,” he said, laughing. “But I’ve seen this movie before.”
Krugman explains the significance:
What’s that about? The state of Wisconsin owns a number of plants supplying heating, cooling, and electricity to state-run facilities (like the University of Wisconsin). The language in the budget bill would, in effect, let the governor privatize any or all of these facilities at whim. Not only that, he could sell them, without taking bids, to anyone he chooses. And note that any such sale would, by definition, be “considered to be in the public interest.”Politico’s Bob King reports that Koch Industries isn’t very happy with such speculation:
If this sounds to you like a perfect setup for cronyism and profiteering — remember those missing billions in Iraq? — you’re not alone. Indeed, there are enough suspicious minds out there that Koch Industries, owned by the billionaire brothers who are playing such a large role in Mr. Walker’s anti-union push, felt compelled to issue a denial that it’s interested in purchasing any of those power plants. Are you reassured?
Koch insists it doesn’t stand to gain from the legislation, and is furiously denouncing the rumors as they have spread to media outlets including MSNBC, Forbes and Bloomberg.“If you were concerned that Charles and David Koch … might be frightened off by the vicious attacks that have been launched against them by the Left, from the Obama administration down to the deepest cesspits of the internet, you can rest easy,” writes John Hinderaker at PowerLine, easing worries that nobody on earth was actually experiencing. But what are these unfrightened billionaires really working toward?
“The power plant assertion is one more example of many baseless falsehoods and speculation made by a vested interest that gets picked up and repeated over and over in the media,” said a statement from Philip Ellender, president of government and public affairs for Koch Cos. Public Sector LLC. “We have no interest in purchasing any of the state owned power plants in Wisconsin and any allegations to the contrary are completely false.”
The Times’s Eric Lipton has been rounding up opinions on exactly that question: “To Bob Edgar, a former House Democrat who is now president of Common Cause, a liberal group that has been critical of what it sees as the rising influence of corporate interests in American politics, the Koch brothers are using their money to create a façade of grass-roots support for their favorite causes. ‘This is a dangerous moment in America history,’ Mr. Edgar said. ‘It is not that these folks don’t have a right to participate in politics. But they are moving democracy into the control of more wealthy corporate hands.’ ”
Ira Stoll at Future of Capitalism doesn’t think Edgar, on the payroll at Common Cause, is one to be talking about the rich dabbling in politics:
Common Cause’s 2008 annual report — the most recent one posted on the Common Cause Web site, which is pretty pathetic for a group supposedly in favor of transparency — lists the Ford Foundation, the GE Foundation,and the Carnegie Corporation of New York as among its backers.And, for the most obvious example, here is Timothy P. Carney at The Washington Examiner: “Common Cause has received $2 million from George Soros’s Open Society Institute in the past eight years, according to grant data provided by Capital Research Center. Two panelists at Common Cause’s rival conference nearby — President Obama’s former green jobs czar, Van Jones, and blogger Lee Fang — work at the Center for American Progress, which was started and funded by Soros but, as a 501(c)4 nonprofit “think tank,” legally conceals the names of its donors. In other words, money from billionaire George Soros and anonymous, well-heeled liberals was funding a protest against rich people’s influence on politics.”
The 2008 Common Cause annual report lists five donors in the top giving bracket of between $100,000 and $999,000. They include:
Donna A. Curling, whose husband’s company, ChoicePoint, was acquired in 2008 for $4.1 billion. Mr. and Mrs. John C. Haas, whose family controls charitable and income-producing trusts (the Philadelphia chemical company Rohm & Haas was acquired by Dow Chemical) reportedly worth worth a total of more than $4 billion. Markos Kounalakis, whose wife, a real estate developer, has enough money to endow a professorship at Stanford. Chang K. Park, whose company supplies 80% of the remote controls for Time Warner Cable.
What Common Cause is is a bunch of millionaires and billionaires trying to prevent other millionaires and billionaires from participating in the political process the same way they do. In other words, they are hypocrites.
(OpenSecrets.org has a fascinating, if somewhat outdated, comparison between the Kochs and Soros.)
All of this billionaire-bashing sure is fun, but it’s taken us a long way from figuring out what the Kochs’ agenda really is. Here is Jane Mayer’s take:
The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.”Epistemicfail, a commenter at Reddit, had an equally concise description:
The KOCH brothers must be stopped. They gave $40K to Scott Walker, the MAX allowed by state law. That’s small potatoes compared to the $100+ million they give to other organizations. These organizations will terrify you. If the anti-union thing weren’t enough, here are bigger and better reasons to stop the evil Kochs. They are trying to:Glad we straightened that out.
1. decriminalize drugs,
2. legalize gay marriage,
3. repeal the Patriot Act,
4. end the police state,
5. cut defense spending.
