Yesterday, we suggested that if the GOP really cared about Russian funds influencing American politics and energy, as they claim when falsely attacking green groups, then there’s another place they should look to root out energy interests raking in the Rubles, and it’s a little closer to home.
As Pam and Russ Martens wrote on their Wall Street on Parade blog last Tuesday, even when BP, Shell and ExxonMobil(!) stopped (or at least promised to stop) doing business in Russia, Charles Koch “has been unusually quiet about his plans for his sprawling Russian operations.”
Koch Industries has three companies in Russia, an electric component producer Molex, pollution control equipment manufacturer Koch Engineered Solutions, and Guardian Industries, which makes glass and auto parts. (If you’ve ever tried to go to the Guardian newspaper’s website and accidentally typed it as guardian.com and not theguardian.com, you may be familiar with the company!)
The Koch network’s is not likely to reply to the Martens’ blog, but Judd Legum’s Popular.Info substack has a pretty good history of forcing companies to not be absolutely horrible, and covered the issue as well, adding that the Guardian company provided a statement to USGlass magazine that they will continue “to closely monitor the tumultuous events in Eastern Europe.” Molex offered similar statements, going so far as to remove “Russia and Ukraine” from a version of a Feb 25 statement when reposting it on March 1st, they’d changed it to “Eastern Europe,” like Guardian.
In a follow-up post, Legum reported that various nodes of the Koch influence network here in the U.S. are acting in exactly the manner one would expect from people dependent on the profits from business done in Russia, among other places: opposing economic sanctions on Russia. AIER, Reason, Stand Together, and Concerned Veterans for America have all had their stooges downplay, dismiss or otherwise disparage the economic sanctions (but not for hitting their benefactors’ bottom line, of course!).
And lo and behold, this morning Legum reported that Koch Industries released a statement Wednesday saying that it’s in Ukraine’s best interest for the Guardian glass company to continue operations in Russia, because if they left, the Russian government would just take over. Legume ends with a quote from Jane Mayer: “all Koch’s talk of rights and liberty means nothing… making money is what they value.”
Now, we aren't surprised the Koch conglomerate didn’t suddenly find a reason not to work with brutal authoritarians waging illegal wars in Eastern Europe. After all, the Koch fortune exists solely because Koch went to Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia to sell his services.
Jane Mayer’s Dark Money revealed that the vast fortune the Koch sons would spend on building the Tea Party was generated by their father’s build-up of Nazi Germany’s oil refining capacity. Per Mayer in an interview, the Winkler-Koch Co.'s Hamburg Oil Refinery “became key, according to several German historians I talked to, to Hitler’s war efforts.” Specifically, “one of the things [Hitler] was unable to do was to refine high-octane oil for warplanes.”
And that was only after “Fred Koch had worked for Stalin, where — under Stalin's first five-year plan — Fred Koch helped build up the Russian, the Soviet oil refineries and really gave huge muscle to the oil industry in the Soviet Union.”
Fast forward, and Koch Industries, which built up the USSR and fueled Nazi warplanes, is giving over a million dollars per year to Republicans, not to mention the hundreds of millions to their conservative front group network.
If the GOP is looking to revive McCarthyism with Russian-money witch-hunts, maybe they should start with their own campaign coffers.