The Bloomberg news investigation into Charles and David Koch has uncovered unlawful and unpatriotic environmental crimes, political donations and business decisions benefitting Iran. There are so many secret sins committed by the Koch brothers no one story can cover it all.
But this is the story everyone will be talking about. We’ve documented many of the Koch brothers’ attacks on middle class families, and detailed their commitment to ending public education and resegregating communities.
The Koch brothers have smeared us and journalists who investigate their misdeeds. But the totality of evidence is clear: through our Koch Brothers Exposed film series, as well as reports in the New Yorker and now Bloomberg Markets magazine, there exists beyond a shadow of a doubt the Koch brothers’ culpability for the onslaught against Social Security, the environment, our public education system and much more.
The Koch brothers use their $50 billion personal wealth to distort and shape policy to grow their corporate profits. The Koch brothers hate public service, and work to deny the government and public sector any chance at success and social good. So when a Southern school board began blazing a trail by growing academic achievement in a diverse community, the brothers acted to reverse the community’s gains.
The video is about a school district that sets the agenda for communities across the nation. Wake County, NC was unique for its ability to grow successful outcomes for students with varying ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. The achievement gap between race and class continued shrinking, and educators everywhere attributed the success to how the school board assigned students to school.
The Koch brothers are keen to let their think tanks and front groups do their dirty work for them. They have donated more than $5 million to Americans for Prosperity, a Tea Party group that allied with like-minded organizations in North Carolina. The Koch brothers put their money to work, and the result was external groups laying the groundwork for a long, subtle campaign to elect a new school board majority.
The Koch-supported candidates won and promptly began reversing the student assignment plan. They favored one that would lead to segregated schools. The Koch brothers’ plan to resegregate schools hit a roadblock when students, parents, teachers, and civil rights leaders united to stop the return to Jim Crow.
Bloomberg’s findings about the Koch’s approving sales to anti-American agents in Iran, bribing African officials and the Koch way of stealing oil from Native Americans and lying to regulators is truly disturbing, but there’s so much more to the Koch legacy of sin.
The Koch-supported school board members in North Carolina face an election this month. An anonymous campaign flier, which could come back to Koch-supported groups, accuses the NAACP of indoctrinating local anti-resegregation candidates. It’s drawn scrutiny from state officials.
The Kochs’ wealth has been behind similar smear campaigns and stunts in Michigan and Wisconsin.
In the aggregate, the Koch brothers are the personification of what’s driving hundreds of people to occupy Boston, Los Angeles and elsewhere, and the thousands of protesters and sitting-in outside Wall Street in Lower Manhattan.
The Koch brothers have been chipping away at the American social contract and grand bargain: that people who want to work can have a decent standard of living. That promise is in tatters, and that’s why so many people, young and old, find it necessary to make their voices heard in our cities.
Before the Bloomberg report was published, the Koch brothers were playing defense through friendly media outlets. They attacked Bloomberg loudly and routinely, often questioning the integrity of the Fourth Estate and attempting to chill a free press.
The Koch brothers are the subject of press and activist scrutiny because they embody a generation of excess. Whether it’s chartering a vacation yacht for $500,000 per week or donating $28.4 million to think tanks that attack Social Security, the Koch brothers are leading the corporate charge to put profits before people.
The Koch brothers’ defenders in friendly media outlets lump the brothers in with the excess of dozens of corporations that regularly violate laws and skirt punishments. This is simply more grist and motivation propelling the protestors who are occupying our cities.
May it be the first step toward our own Arab Spring, or in other words, a path toward ending the Koch Winter.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
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We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
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With love, rage, and solidarity,
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