Courtesy of Pam Martens
Charles Koch, Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries
Charles Koch is the billionaire owner of Koch Industries, one of the largest private companies in the world with vast interests in fossil fuels, refineries, chemicals, lumber, paper and glass manufacturing. A subsidiary of Koch Industries is Koch Supply and Trading, which engages in commodities trading on a scale rivaling the largest banks on Wall Street.
Charles Koch also heads an operation variously known as the Koch Network or the Kochtopus, because its tentacles are strangling the life out of representative government in the United States. The operation hosts semiannual strategy sessions where obscenely rich Americans get together to jointly commit hundreds of millions of dollars to keep Congress and the Oval Office in the hands of fossil fuel-friendly candidates who have demonstrated an obedience to a deregulatory agenda.
Koch Foundation money and two dark money groups, Donor’s Capital Fund and Donor’s Trust, have pumped billions of dollars over the years into a vast array of right-wing “news” sites, think tanks and climate change denial groups. In recent years, Koch Industries has developed a sophisticated data mining operation that uses artificial intelligence to extract data to gin up elections for candidates of their choice. The company is called i360. (See our report here.)
We have been researching Charles Koch and his brother David, who died in August of last year, for the past 15 years. In 2010 we broke the story of how Donor’s Capital Fund, a dark money group with Charles Koch’s fingerprints all over it, had donated $17,778,600 to the Clarion Fund to distribute 28 million DVDs of a race-baiting, fear-mongering film just weeks before the 2008 presidential election when the first black candidate in history, Barack Obama, was the Democratic presidential nominee. The DVD was stuffed into the Sunday edition of some of the biggest newspapers in America as well as included in a direct mail campaign.
At the time, Obama was being falsely targeted as a Muslim. The film distributed through the newspapers was called “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.” In the leadup to the election, David Horowitz, a man who has grown rich from corporate financing of his related nonprofits, was promoting an “Islamo-Fascism Awareness” program to over 100 college campuses, with the “Obsession” film made available for viewing.
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