Kansas billionaire David Koch, known for funding right-wing candidates and conservative projects nationwide with his brother, Charles Koch, has died at the age of 79. The brothers amassed a fortune through their company, Koch Industries, an umbrella for dozens of conglomerate companies, ranging from oil and gas to tissue paper products.
The brothers have an estimated combined worth of $110 billion, money they have used to shape the political landscape and the lives of average Americans by flooding the coffers of mostly conservative politicians and pushing their conservative agenda through every state legislature in this country through the American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC. The organization crafts the laws they want, with input from corporate lobbyists, and then the politicians they fund at the state level push the laws through each state house, one-by-one.
Along with his brother, David Koch also founded the Americans for Prosperity organization, whose goal is to “lower taxes, less government regulation and economic prosperity for all.” That organization backed the astroturf movement known as the Tea Party, which took aim at Democrats and even moderate Republicans. In short, they most certainly funded the partisan divide we have today. The Americans for Prosperity group not only funds projects and laws they want, they focus heavily on stopping any state investment in things like infrastructure. From The New York Times:
As part of their longstanding crusade for lower taxes and smaller government, the Koch brothers in recent years opposed dozens of transit-related initiatives in cities and counties across the country, a review by The New York Times found. Campaigns coordinated and financed by Americas for Prosperity fought state legislation to fund transportation projects, mounted ad campaigns and public forums to defeat transit plans, and organized phone banks to convince citizens that public transit was a waste of taxpayers’ money.
The NYT also notes reporter Jane Mayer, from the New Yorker magazine, wrote a book about how the Koch’s became some of the wealthiest people in the world:
Jane Mayer, the New Yorker writer and a critic of the Koch brothers, said in her book “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right” (2016), that the libertarian policies they embraced benefited Koch chemical and fossil fuel businesses, which were among the nation’s worst polluters, and paid millions in fines and court judgments for hazardous-waste violations.
Mayer said she was harassed and smeared after the book’s release.
In interviews after the book’s publication, Ms. Mayer said that investigators who she believed were hired by the Koch brothers had tried to intimidate her by digging up false information, including accusations of plagiarism, to smear her reputation.
Much like Trump, the Koch brothers got their financial start by inheriting millions from their father, Fred Koch, who also promoted radical right-wing ideas through the John Birch Society.
Fred Koch made millions in the 1920s and ’30s by inventing a process to extract more gasoline from crude oil and by building refineries in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East. Fiercely anti-Communist, he co-founded the right-wing John Birch Society and created the Wichita company that became Koch Industries.
The Koch family did not release the cause of death, but they had previously said he’d been treated for prostate cancer.
Charles Koch remains in charge of the Koch conglomerates and is still heavily involved in funding the radical right-wing agenda.