It likes to present itself as a grassroots insurgency made up of hundreds of local groups intent on toppling the Washington elite. However, the Tea Party movement, which is threatening to cause an upset in next month’s midterm elections, would not be where it is today without the backing of that most traditional of US political supporters — Big Oil.
The billionaire brothers who own Koch Industries, a private firm with 70,000 staff and annual revenues of US$100 billion, used to joke that they controlled the biggest company nobody had ever heard of. Not anymore. After decades during which their fortune grew exponentially and they channeled millions to right-wing causes, Charles and David Koch are finally getting noticed for their part in the extraordinary growth of the Tea Party movement.
Charles, 74, and David, 70, have invested widely in the outcome of the Nov. 2 elections. One Koch subsidiary has pumped US$1 million into the campaign to repeal California’s global warming law, according to state records.
The brothers, their wives and employees have also given directly to Republican candidates for Congress and are the sixth-largest donors to the Senate campaign of Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio. They have also given heavily to the Republican Jim DeMint in South Carolina, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
However, those tracking money in politics say the Kochs’ biggest impact in the midterms will be from funding and providing logistical support to such groups as Americans for Prosperity (AFP), one of the biggest in the Tea Party movement.
AFP, in turn, has spun off other organizations such as November is Coming, Hands Off My Healthcare and the Institute of Liberty, which are buying up TV ads and holding rallies across the country in an attempt to defeat Democrats.
US campaign laws make it easy for political interest groups and their corporate backers to hide their spending in elections.
“This is a world of shadows,” said Taki Oldham, an Australian documentary film-maker who spent months following Tea Party activists. “In my mind, without a doubt nobody has had more influence on the anti-Obama campaign than the Koch-funded groups.”
For the Kochs, this has been a long and carefully cultivated project, but after years in which their support for anti-regulation think tanks and groups went largely undetected, the sudden visibility of the Kochs’ power seems to have taken even the brothers by surprise.
“Five years ago, my brother Charles and I provided the funds to start Americans for Prosperity,” David Koch told AFP’s annual gathering last year.
“It is beyond my wildest dreams that AFP has grown into this enormous organization. The American dream of free enterprise and capitalism is alive and well,” he said.
Until last summer, most people in the US had no idea who the Kochs were, and it is very likely that even AFP members did not know they were bankrolled by two of the richest men in corporate America. However, a spate of attention — sparked by a Greenpeace investigation and a profile in the New Yorker — has given the brothers a degree of notoriety they are finding it difficult to live with.
There was no sign of David Koch at this year’s AFP summit. When this reporter stopped into the offices of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, in the suburbs of Washington, the receptionist sent the head of the legal department out to talk.
After declaring all conversations off the record, lawyer Brian Menkes said it was normal for the Koch legal team to be involved in routine press inquiries.
David Koch now seeks to distance himself from the movement.
In a rare interview in New York magazine, he said: “I’ve never been to a Tea Party event. No one representing the Tea Party has ever even approached me.”
This sensitivity carries across to the company Web site, where recent additions tout the brothers’ commitment to environmental protection and offer a selection of “Koch facts,” an antidote to the unflattering personal and political portraits that have appeared recently.
“This is the outing of the Koch brothers. They didn’t want this story told, especially in an election year,” said Kert Davies, the Greenpeace research director who has spent a decade gathering data on the family. “They have never been face forward.”
They do have deep pockets, however. Koch Industries has expanded from oil refining to paper towels and Lycra. The two brothers each own 42 percent of the company and occupy top-10 positions in the Forbes annual ranking of wealthy Americans, with personal fortunes of US$21 billion each.
Over the last 20 years, their company has donated at least US$5.9 million to political candidates, some 83 percent of which was set aside for Republican candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Since 1989, Koch Industries has spent more than any other oil and gas company on finding favor in Congress, paying US$50 million to lobbying firms.
However, it is the Kochs’ links to a welter of mass mobilization campaigns opposing US President Barack Obama that is making the biggest impact. Political monitoring groups say the Koch-connected Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation has given US$3.1 million to AFP. The Kochs’ involvement in anti-government causes goes back to their father, Fred, who was a founding member of the virulently anti-communist John Birch Society.
He made his fortune by developing a more efficient refining method and built plants around the world, including 15 in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. He came to despise Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and, David Koch told the New Yorker, was “paranoid about communism.”
Fred Koch worked hard to instil the same beliefs in his four sons. Two of those sons later became estranged from the family and were eventually bought out of Koch Industries, but for Charles and David Koch, the right-wing free market ideology was their lodestar.
The brothers did try direct action. In 1980, David Koch ran as a vice-presidential candidate on the libertarian ticket, winning 1 percent of the vote. That episode, Charles Koch has written, persuaded the brothers to refocus their energies. In the 1980s, they founded Citizens for a Sound Economy and over the next 20 years, they funneled around US$13 million into it. In 2004, the group split into AFP and FreedomWorks, which is closely tied to the former Republican representative Dick Armey and has received no more funding from the Kochs.
Obama’s election, and the prospect that he would reverse nearly two decades of reduced government oversight of industry, put the Kochs and their AFP footsoldiers on high alert.
A day after CNBC’s Rick Santelli launched his on-air howl against the president’s mortgage bailout plan, AFP and FreedomWorks put up Facebook pages and began organizing events around the country. The Tea Party movement was under way.
How the US right takes its fight online
By Ed Pilkington
The Guardian, RICHMOND, Virginia Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing campaign funded in part by the energy billionaires the Koch brothers, is working with the Tea Party movement to increase its impact through the use of new media and social networking.
At a Tea Party convention in Virginia this week, the AFP sponsored a workshop called Online Activism 101 to train members in the political use of the Internet. Delegates were given an AFP publication called Grassroots Activist Handbook as well as detailed advice on how to set up their own blogs, spread the word through Facebook and Twitter and lobby their local politicians.
Erik Telford, AFP’s director of online strategy and a leading figure on the right in the deployment of the Internet as a political tool, exhorted Tea Party members to attack politicians through their blogs.
“Pick your least favorite public official and beat the crap out of him every day,” Telford told the audience. “It’s fun, and people will start to notice and you will have a tremendous impact.”
“The way to beat the left is to link more and more to one another, and to link to articles that are in tune with our ideology and that will push the articles to the top of Google search,” he said.
Telford is an expert in the political exploitation of the Internet, an area in which the Democrats proved to be superior in the 2008 presidential race, but where conservatives have since regained the initiative.
AFP’s funding sources are secret. A large, though undisclosed, amount of its resources come from the Koch brothers, who started the group in 2004.
David Koch has denied any links to the Tea Party, but AFP’s sponsorship of the workshop and its training on how to take on the political left through blogs, video posting on YouTube and social networking suggests a more direct link.
“We don’t push people to pursue any interests other than their own. The influence the Kochs have on us is greatly overstated. Their contributions to us are small compared to the 60,000 donors we have,” Telford said.
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