Courtesy of Pam Martens
U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown
Koch Industries seems to have developed a secret sauce for winning elections. In January 2017 Time Magazine’s Philip Elliott reported that “In seven of the eight up-for-grabs U.S. Senate races last year, the Koch-backed candidate won. In all, Koch-backed candidates at all levels of races prevailed 96% of the time—a record any outside group would covet.”
Now, despite polls showing Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown with a wide lead against his Republican challenger, U.S. Congressman Jim Renacci, there is reason to worry about what is going on in Ohio.
On April 21 The Australian published an intriguing news article by Michael Owen. It revealed that the South Australian Liberal party leader Steven Marshall (in reality a conservative party as opposed to how we think of liberals in the U.S.) had sent two of his key people to the U.S. state of Ohio “for briefings and negotiations on how to adapt” the i360 voter data technology for Australian elections. Owen notes further that “The South Australian Liberal Party was the first outside the US to use i360 in an election. Party sources say it was critical in defeating Labor for the first time in 16 years.”
What is i360? It’s a vast voter database/data mining/micro-targeting/media buying/door-to-door knocking/phone banking/artificial intelligence business owned by Koch Industries, a fossil fuels conglomerate with more than $100 billion in revenues per year. Koch Industries is known for its anti-climate-science and anti-regulatory agenda. Last November, the watchdog group, Public Citizen, reported that 44 Trump administration officials have been plucked from the Koch big money donor network. (See our recent in-depth reports on i360 for CounterPunch here and here.)
Koch Industries has, for some reason, decided to come out of the closet on its ownership of i360 and is now openly running help wanted advertising for data scientists and other IT professionals to assist it in meddling in the 2018 election. It says in all of these ads that the location of the jobs is in Arlington, Virginia. So if the i360 brainiacs are located in Virginia, why was the South Australian Liberal Party sending folks to Ohio?
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