Courtesy of Pam Martens
Andrew Vollmer, Senior Affiliated Scholar, Mercatus Center
We’re starting to see a pattern. When the House Financial Services Committee held its February 18 hearing on the wild, manipulative trading patterns in shares of GameStop, a right-wing front group funded with Koch money sent a surprise witness to testify. The front group was the Cato Institute, which was secretly owned by Charles and David Koch and a handful of men through much of its history. Tomorrow, the Senate Banking Committee will hold its own hearing on the GameStop matter and one of the five witnesses called to testify hails from another bastion of Koch money, influence and dubious history.
The witness we’re referring to is Andrew (Andy) Vollmer, a Senior Affiliated Scholar with the Mercatus Center. It’s a safe bet this witness wasn’t invited by the Chair of the Committee, Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, but was invited by one of the numerous radical right Republicans that have landed on this Committee.
Charles and David Koch were the billionaire majority owners of the sprawling fossils fuels and trading conglomerate known as Koch Industries, one of the largest private corporations in the world. David died in 2019, leaving his heirs and Charles as the new majority owners. Charles has been the Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries for more than five decades while simultaneously creating and funding “think tanks” to spew out propaganda on why regulation is bad and privatizing anything run by the government is good. Charles Koch has also increasingly inserted his operations into determining the outcome of elections, by funding of PACs running attack ads against Democrats as well as through an Orwellian political campaign services company known as i360, which we exposed in 2018 as being owned by Koch Industries.
While the details surrounding Koch funding of climate denial “think tanks” has received much attention, Koch’s massive trading operation known as Koch Supply and Trading has remained under the radar. But the presence of Cato and now Mercatus at hearings on GameStop suggests that protecting algorithmic and high frequency trading must be near and dear to the heart of Charles Koch as well as Koch Supply and Trading.
The Mercatus Center is part of George Mason University (GMU). The Associated Press reported that “From 2011 to 2014, the Charles Koch Foundation gave nearly $48 million to George Mason in one form or another, tax records show” and the bulk of that sum was steered to the Mercatus Center.
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