The Koch Money Was a Primary Vector for the Prion Disease That's Infected the Republican Party
Fair warning. I am about to speak very ill of the dead. David Koch went to his eternal barbecue spit on Friday. Except for his surviving brother, Charles, no man had a worse effect on American politics since the death of John C. Calhoun. Every malignancy currently afflicting us can be traced in one way or another into their wallets, and that's not even to mention the lasting damage they've done to the planet as a whole. Sorry, Morning Joe gang, I wouldn't care if they opened branches of the National Museum of Puppies and Rainbows in every congressional district in the United States. The Koch brothers financed the wrecking ball that is still doing damage, and now one of them is dead, and, if I am not rejoicing, I am breathing deep sighs of relief and praying deep prayers of thanksgiving.
Jane Mayer, of course, has written the fundamental text on how the Kochs financed the destruction of American democracy and the ruination of planet Earth. (Here's a shorter version that was published in The New Yorker.) There's no need to dive deep into how they sabotaged campaign finance, bankrolled the Tea Party idiocy, dropped Scott Walker on Wisconsin and, worst of all, lavishly financed the climate denial movement until now it may be too late to undo the damage they've done. Other people will handle all of that better elsewhere. (One hopes.)
I'd like to talk about the one thing that always symbolized how effectively the Koch money acted as a vector for the prion disease that has now consumed the higher functions of conservatism. From Mayer's New Yorker piece:
Only the Kochs know precisely how much they have spent on politics. Public tax records show that between 1998 and 2008 the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than forty-eight million dollars. The Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, which is controlled by Charles Koch and his wife, along with two company employees and an accountant, spent more than twenty-eight million. The David H. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than a hundred and twenty million. Meanwhile, since 1998 Koch Industries has spent more than fifty million dollars on lobbying. Separately, the company’s political-action committee, Kochpac, has donated some eight million dollars to political campaigns, more than eighty per cent of it to Republicans. So far in 2010, Koch campaigns Industries leads all other energy companies in political contributions, as it has since 2006, more than eighty per cent of it to Republicans. In addition, during the past dozen years the Kochs and other family members have personally spent more than two million dollars on political contributions. In the second quarter of 2010, David Koch was the biggest individual contributor to the Republican Governors Association, with a million-dollar donation. Other gifts by the Kochs may be untraceable; federal tax law permits anonymous personal donations to politically active nonprofit groups.
Let's look at one particular project. In 2018, the city of Nashville proposed to build a $5.4 billion rapid-transit project involving high-speed rail. To pay for it, the city proposed to raise four taxes, including the sales tax. Which is about when someone lit up the Koch Signal. The Kochs hate rapid transit. It keeps people from buying cars, which run on the fuels that make the Koch family rich. They also produce the asphalt for the roads on which those cars run. Acting through a Koch-funded astroturfing operation, Americans For Prosperity, the Kochs lavishly funded the opposition and killed the plan. This kind of eye-on-the-sparrow bludgeoning is a measure of how thoroughly the Koch money has infected our politics all the way down to the local level.
Of course, the most lasting damage done by the Kochs is in the area of the climate crisis, in which their money and influence may have paralyzed the response to it until, now, things have gone past the point of control. It is in that spirit that I make the following proposal: If David Koch is to be cremated, I suggest we dispense with all the fuss and bother and just drop his corpse from a helicopter into the fires now consuming the Amazon rainforest. Let him be one with his legacy.
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