Quite a number of months ago, possibly even as far back as a year, I started to read a book written by Jane Mayer called

"Dark Money : The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right."

NYT review



Like a lot of people, I've watched as time after time whenever it looks like momentum is being gained in shifting our industrial systems to a more sustainable footing, most importantly how we obtain our energy, something seems to jump in the way and stop it. A lot of it is for artificial reasons, political reasons and often it has the appearance of being spontaneous - take for example 'Climategate' and how that was used politically. So with each disappointment a reassessment takes place, what happened, what could be done differently, how did it happen, can it be fixed, what next?



Until I read this book however, I did not realize the extent, nor the time frames involved, the resources they had available, nor the single-minded intent which a small handful of individuals would show in deliberately misinforming people to suit their own ends. The depth of the deception, for it is that, is over such a long term & so overwhelming I had a lot of trouble finishing this book. With almost unlimited resources for at least the past 50 years, the Koch brothers along with a number of other Obscenely rich Americans, have been working for the day they could eliminate as much government as possible. They are currently systematically doing so, quietly, in the background, with Donald Trump serving as the 24hr news cycle distraction puppet. Excerpts from the book in block quotes and parenthesis. In 1980, David Koch ran for Vice President of the United States on the Libertarian ticket. They received 1% of the vote. "Instead of accepting America's verdict, they (the Koch brothers) set out to change how it voted. They used their fortune to impose their minority views on the majority by other means. They poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a stealthy effort to move their political views from fringe to the center of American life." "The secession of the rich in which they "Disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about it's well-being except as a place to extract loot" Paul Krugman : "We have two unelected multibillionaires who want to control the U.S. government and exercise the power to decide what is best for more than 300 million American people, without the voices of these people being heard." "We are on the road not just to a highly unequal society, but to a society of an oligarchy. A society of inherited wealth." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It was Fred Koch, their Father in 1927, not Charles & David Koch, who invented a new process for extracting crude oil & made much of his initial fortune working for the Russians & the Nazis to build out their refining capacity. Most of both Charles & David Koch's fortune & belief structure was derived from their Father, who had an intense hatred of government. Using his vast fortune he funded & worked towards an elimination of American governance, establishing think tanks, hiding their true purpose, aiming to drive United States towards anarchy. “In 1927, Fred, who was an inveterate tinkerer, invented an improved process for extracting gasoline from crude oil. But as he would later tell his sons bitterly and often, America’s major oil companies regarded him as a business threat and shut him out of the industry, suing him and his customers in 1929 for patent infringement. Koch regarded the monopolistic patents invoked by the major oil companies as anti-competitive and unfair. The fight appears to be an early version of the Kochs’ later opposition to "corporate cronyism" in which they contend that the government and big business collaborate unfairly." "He correctly suspected that his opponents bribed at least one presiding judge, an incompetent lush who left the case in the hands of a crooked clerk. "The fact that the judge was bribed completely altered their view of justice," one longtime family employee suggests. "They believe justice can be bought, and the rules are for chumps." Meanwhile, crippled by lawsuits in America during this period, Koch took his innovative refining method abroad. He had already helped build a refinery in Great Britain after World War I with Charles de Ganahl, a mentor. At the time, the Russians supplied England with fuel, which led to the Russians seeking his expertise as they set up their own oil refineries after the Bolshevik Revolution. At first, according to family lore, Koch tore up the telegram from the Soviet Union asking for his help." "The program was a success, forming the backbone of the future Russian petroleum industry. 'Fred Koch continued to provide technical assistance to the Soviets as they constructed one hundred plants, according to one report, but the advisory work was less profitable." "What happened next has been excised from the official corporate history of Koch Industries."

"After leaving the U.S.S.R., Fred Koch turned to Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. "

"Under Fred Koch's direction, the refinery was finished in 1935. With the capacity to process a thousand tons of crude a day, the third-largest refinery in the Third Reich was created by the collaboration between Davis and Koch. Significantly, it was also one of the few refineries in Germany, according to Harrington, that could "produce the high-octane gasoline needed to fuel fighter planes. Naturally,

...."the American venture became "a key component of the Nazi war machine." “Fred Koch... wrote admiringly about fascism in Germany, and elsewhere.…” "Frederick, known by the family as Freddie, was born in 1933, Charles was born in 1935, and twins, David and William, were born in 1940." "In 1958, Fred Koch became one of eleven original members of the John Birch Society … Koch claimed that "the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties." “Protestant churches, public schools, universities, labor unions, the armed services, the State Department, the World Bank, the United Nations, and modern art, in his view, were all Communist tools.” He said this without shame, knowing he "profited himself from Soviet Communism by building up the U.S.S.R.’s oil industry." "Blazing a trail that would later be followed by his sons, Koch tapped his fortune to subsidize his political activism." "One ploy the group used, he said, was to set up phony front groups "pretending to be other than what they were." An alphabet soup of secretly connected organizations sprang up, with acronyms like TRAIN (To Restore American Independence Now) and TACT (Truth About Civil Turmoil). Another tactic was to wrap the group’s radical vision in mundane and unthreatening slogans that sound familiar today, such as "less government, more responsibility." "He provided substantial support for Barry Goldwater’s right-wing bid for the Republican nomination in 1964. Goldwater, too, opposed the Civil Rights Act and the Supreme Court’s landmark desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education." "In 1968, Fred Koch went further right still…. calling for racial segregation and the abolition of all income taxes….the Foundation for Economic Education, which spread a version of laissez-faire economics so extreme "it bordered on anarchism," "Fred saw taxes in America darkly, as incipient socialism. Early on, the Internal Revenue Service had sued his company for underpayment of taxes, requiring a large additional payment as well as penalties and legal fees. He remained vehemently opposed to estate taxes, and told Charles that he feared the U.S. government would tax him so heavily it might force him to sell the family business, diminishing his sons’ inheritances." On Charles Koch : "When he was twenty-six, graduating with a bachelor of science in engineering and master’s degrees in nuclear and chemical engineering from MIT….economic anti-government writers…..these were the theories that captivated Charles." 1967 : "Fred Koch died of a heart attack. Charles, then thirty-two years old, became chairman and CEO of the family business," Fred Koch's Estate planning had him :" set up a charitable lead trust" that enabled him to pass on his estate to his sons without inheritance taxes, so long as the sons donated the accruing interest on the principle to charity for twenty years. To maximize their self-interest, in other words, the Koch boys were compelled to be charitable. Tax avoidance was thus the original impetus for the Koch brothers’ extraordinary philanthropy."

They would use much of these tax-avoidance dollars funding radical think-tanks with the express purpose of manipulating American public opinion, such that it favored everything the obscenely-rich wanted and nothing the working classes needed. In other words, American taxpayers paid for their own indoctrination.

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Polluting without consequence nor cost was the Koch brothers competitive advantage over other refining companies, in their most successful venture. In fact it has been demonstrated that polluting common areas is treated a right which the government should not be able to do anything about. The amount they pollute linked with their profit. Yet despite calls for lesser government, they are more than happy to use the government to suppress competing technologies with ALEC and compliant politicians doing their will - not protecting people nor conserving the environment.

"...principal business was refining oil, operating pipelines, and cattle ranching. Its annual revenues were estimated at $177 million,

the Pine Bend Refinery, then called the Great Northern Oil Company, in Rosemount, Minnesota, not far from Minneapolis."

"Pine Bend was a gold mine..." It would : "....buy inexpensive, heavy, "garbage" crude oil from Canada." And "...because of a host of environmental regulations, it became increasingly difficult for rivals to build new refineries in the area to compete. By 2015, Pine

350,000 barrels of Canadian crude a day,"

"This single Koch refinery is now responsible for an estimated 25 percent of the 1.2 million barrels of oil the U.S. imports each day from Canada’s tar sands territories." "The Kochs vehemently opposed the government taking any action on climate change that would hurt their fossil fuel profits."

"Nearly half of America’s population lived within ten miles of a toxic waste site, according to one study, but in towns like Saltville, taxpayers rather than corporations were left to clean up the mess."

"Koch Industries was the number one producer of toxic waste in the United States." "We want to decrease regulations. Why? It’s because we can make more profit, okay?" "ALEC produced numerous bills promoting the interests of fossil fuel companies such as Koch Industries. In 2013 alone, it produced some seventy bills aimed at impeding government support for alternative, renewable energy programs."

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The Kochs Used the tax avoidance funds from the charitable trust to build a multi-state psychological influence operation aimed at Americans. In 1964 Charles became involved in the Freedom School which offered 2 week immersion courses on the philosophy of freedom....it taught a revisionist theory of American economic history where the obscenely-rich (ie. Charles & David), the robber barons were heroes. Charles set about bringing this type of thinking into the mainstream. In other words propaganda to convince Americans something that wasn't true, was.

"Charles’s embrace of the John Birch Society, according to Coppin, was in part designed to please the old man.

…in 1968, Charles resigned from the organization…." Charles was involved with the Freedom School "The school taught a revisionist version of American history in which the robber barons were heroes, not villains, and the Gilded Age was the country’s golden era. Taxes were denigrated as a form of theft, and the Progressive movement, Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, in the school’s view, were ruinous turns toward socialism. The weak and poor, the school taught, should be cared for by private charity, not government."

"...human beings should be allowed to sell themselves into slavery if they wished."

"Constitution be scrapped in favor of one that limited the government’s authority to impose "compulsory taxation." The Times described LeFevre as also opposing Medicare and antipoverty programs and hinted that the school opposed government-sponsored integration, too."

Their goal was for the country to have :"...no government, no police department, no fire department, no public schools, no health or zoning laws, not even national defense." The school's founder : "...was almost as adamantly opposed to America’s government as he was to Communism....

"government is a disease masquerading as its own cure."

"...by 1966 Charles Koch was not only a major financial supporter of the school but also an executive and trustee." This was "...a tiny world of people who thought the New Deal was a horrible mistake." "but if you grew up with more money than God, and felt weird about it, this version of history, where the robber barons were heroes, would certainly make you feel a lot better about it." At the Freedom School,....romanticizing a lost golden age of idealized unfettered capitalism that arguably never existed for much of the population." Charles Koch : "His hope was to use his wealth to inject his fringe views into the mainstream by turning the Freedom School into an accredited graduate school and then a four-year undergraduate program specializing in libertarian philosophy,..."

"He also gave a speech in the 1990s crediting the Freedom School with profoundly influencing him."

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They say there is no honor among thieves, likewise it seems there is no loyalty, love, nor favor when it comes to money & power among members of the same family who have inherited, rather than have had to struggle from nothing to accumulate vast wealth. Charles & David worked to destroy their eldest brother by threatening to tell their father he was gay in an effort to disinherit him. They also starved another brother of funds, extremely wealthy on paper (that Charles controlled) such that he couldn't buy a house without a loan. Eventually leading to these two brothers selling their shares to the other two brothers in 1983. Bill & Frederick took Charles & David to court over this as they claimed they had been intentionally misled about the companies true value & had sold their shares too cheaply based on this misrepresentation.

Charles & David did not tell either of these two brothers, Bill and Frederick, of their mother's death & funeral in 1990. Frederick missing the funeral, with Bill arriving just in time to find he was not seated with direct family members. To add insult to injury, their Mother had changed her will such that any brother would be disinherited were he to be involved in litigation against any other brother.

If they would do this to their own kin, their own family, their own brothers, why would anyone believe they would ever have anyone else's interests, any other American, as something they would give any priority to?

The answer is pretty clear…

"...blackmail attempt by the other brothers,...deposition given by Bill Koch in 1982. In his deposition, Bill described an emotionally wrenching confrontation in the mid-1960s in which he, Charles, and David tried to force their older brother Frederick, who they believed was gay, to relinquish his claim to a share of the family company, or else they threatened to expose his private life to their father." "Chairs were arranged so that Frederick was on one side, facing his three brothers. According to the deposition,....homosexual blackmail attempt by Charles against Freddie to get his stock at a cheap price." "In 1983, Charles and David bought out their brothers’ shares in the company for about $1.1 billion....."

"Refinery in particular became the focus of contention, with Bill and Frederick arguing that Charles and David had hidden its true worth from them—..." "Bill, "Here I am one of the wealthiest men in America and I had to borrow money to buy a house," "Charles was giving as much to the Libertarians as he was paying out in dividends."

Frederick : "Charles, hadn’t given him early enough notice about the funeral arrangements for him to be able to attend the service. "He was heartbroken,"

"...Bill, too, nearly missed the funeral. He was given such short notice… and then was seated not with the immediate family but with cousins..." "...when Mary Koch’s will was opened, it included a provision denying any inheritance from her $10 million estate to any son who was engaged in litigation against any other within six weeks of her death. Frederick and Bill, who were in the midst of suing their other two brothers, suspected their mother, who had suffered from dementia, had been unduly influenced during her fading days into adding this provision to her will...." Frederick : "...refused to speak to Charles for the rest of his life."

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Finding a purpose in life is probably one of the most important things you can do. Charles Koch it seems, decided his purpose was to bring everyone around to his way of thinking, that somehow America, which has survived because of the strength of it's institutions, should have all government functions & institutions eliminated. To this end the Kochs have worked to take over the US government & from the inside are now dismantling it.

"As their fortunes grew, Charles and David Koch became the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America.

Charles’s aim, he said, was to tear the government out "at the root."… Charles harbored a hatred of the government so intense it could only be truly understood as an extension of his childhood conflicts with authority." "From his earliest years, he writes, Charles’s goal was to achieve total control. "He did not escape his father’s authority until his father died," he notes. After that, Charles went to great lengths to ensure that neither his brothers nor anyone else could challenge his personal control of the family company. Later clashes with unionized workers at the Pine Bend Refinery and with the expanding regulatory state strengthened his resolve. "Only the governments and the courts remained as sources of authority," Coppin writes, and if enacted, Charles’s "libertarian policies would eliminate these." "...he was attracted to fringe groups that bordered on anarchism." "Charles wrote a revealing 1978 article in the Libertarian Review, arguing that outsiders like themselves needed to organize. "Ideas do not spread by themselves; they spread only through people. Which means we need a movement," he wrote. His language was militant, demanding that "our movement must destroy the prevalent statist paradigm." In 1976, : "Charles Koch laid out much of the road map for the Kochs’ future attempted takeover of American politics."

"The papers are striking in their radicalism, their disdain for the public, and their belief in the necessity of political subterfuge. Speakers proposed that libertarians hide their true antigovernment extremism by banishing the word "anarchism," because it reminded too many people of "terrorists."

"In order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organization is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised," Charles wrote, arguing for stealth in his future plans to influence American politics." "To attract a bigger following, some suggested, they needed to organize synthetic "grassroots" groups and issue meaningless titles to volunteers, without yielding any real control." "Charles would go on to issue stock in his own nonprofit think tank, the Cato Institute,"

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No takeover of a country would be complete without first claiming every fact based education facility out there was biased - a massive level of projecting — whilst at the same time integrating their manifesto / agenda into schools and universities to influence the young. Even revealing whose model of influencing youth they were following.

"attracting youth" because "this is the only group that is open to a radically different social philosophy." He would act on this belief in years to come by funneling millions of dollars into educational indoctrination, with free-market curricula and even video games promoting his ideology pitched to prospects as young as grade school." "Liggio, who was affiliated with the Koch-funded Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) from 1974 until 1998, described the Nazis’ successful creation of a youth movement as key to their capture of the state. Like the Nazis, he suggested, libertarians should organize university students to create group identity." "It would be necessary to use ambiguous and misleading names, obscure the true agenda, and conceal the means of control. This is the method that Charles Koch would soon practice in his charitable giving, and later in his political actions." "He became not just the group’s financial angel but also the author of its plank on energy policy, which called for the abolition of all government controls.

"They opposed all limits on campaign donations, so they found a legal way around them.....he could lavish as much of his personal fortune as he wished on the campaign rather than being limited by the $1,000 donation cap."

"David Koch ran in ’80 to go against the campaign-finance rules"

"Indeed the Libertarian Party’s standard-bearer that year, Clark, told The Nation that libertarians were getting ready to stage "a very big tea party," because people were "sick to death" of taxes." "According to Doherty’s history, the Kochs came to regard elected politicians as merely "actors playing out a script." Instead of wasting more time, a confidant of the Kochs’ told Doherty, the brothers now wanted to "supply the themes and words for the scripts." In order to alter the direction of America..." winning the hearts and minds of college students had long been a core strategy on the right. "we’ve built a robust, freedom-advancing network" of nearly five thousand scholars in some four hundred colleges and universities across the country. What the Koch network needed to do, he said, was to persuade moderate, undecided voters that the "intent" of economic libertarians was virtuous. "We’ve got to convince these people we mean well and that we’re good people," said Fink. "Whoever does," he said, "will drive this country."

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Citizens United went exactly to plan.

The Libertarian platform : "It called for the repeal of all campaign-finance laws and the abolition of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). It also favored the abolition of all government health-care programs, including Medicaid and Medicare. It attacked Social Security as "virtually bankrupt" and called for its abolition, too." "The Libertarians also opposed all income and corporate taxes, including capital gains taxes, and called for an end to the prosecution of tax evaders. Their platform called for the abolition too of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, and the CIA, among other government agencies. It demanded the abolition of "any laws" impeding employment—by which it meant minimum wage and child labor laws." "And it targeted public schools for abolition too, along with what it termed the "compulsory" education of children." "The Libertarians also wanted to get rid of the Food and Drug Administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, seat belt laws, and all forms of welfare for the poor. The platform was, in short, an effort to repeal virtually every major political reform passed during the twentieth century." "In the view of the Kochs and other members of the Libertarian Party, government should be reduced to a skeletal function: the protection of individual and property rights."

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The projection these groups have demonstrated and amplified through the media has to be seen in this context to be believed. The money used to spread their influence over decades, whilst claiming some other side was doing so is remarkable.

"But during the next three decades, they contributed well over $100 million, much of it undisclosed, to dozens of seemingly independent organizations aimed at advancing their radical ideas. Their front groups demonized the American government, casting it as the enemy rather than the democratic representative of its citizens. They defined liberty as its absence, and the unfettered accumulation of enormous private wealth as America’s purpose." "But their goal was patently political: to undo not just Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal but Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Era, too. In taking on this daunting task, they were in many cases refighting battles that had been lost by their fathers. " " Moreover, none of them needed to rely on government social services for their health or welfare."

"When oligarchs control the levers of government, they get the spoils. It’s litigated through tax policy." "Let’s call the system that Citizens United and other rulings and laws have created what it is: an oligarchy," declared McKinnon. "The system is controlled by a handful of ultra-wealthy people, most of whom got rich from the system and who will get richer from the system." Charles Lewis : "The Koch's are on a whole different level. There's no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obsfucation. I've been in Washington since Watergate, and I've neer seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times." "He regarded his self-interest and the public interest as synonymous."

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Although at first there was a disjointed approach to how best to have a much greater influence than one man/woman one vote in American politics, over time the outcome these individuals sought converged and what has eventuated is effectively a joining in common cause, or put another way, the creation of a UNION. Their members make contributions, they have a wish list, they have strategies to achieve their goals, they have offices in multiple states & union delegates, footsoldiers, they have vast and effective media reach & media management, after achieving their goals they move on to the next campaign.

Machiavellian Union of Tyrannical Heirs and/or Authoritarians - MUTHAs may be an appropriate name for this union as it certainly describes who they are.

"The Kochs hadn’t done it on their own...." "Koch Summit attendees listed in the book : Steven A. Cohen, Paul Singer, Stephen Schwarzman, Robert Mercer, Ken Langone, Richard Strong, Philip Anschutz, Richard DeVos, Extractive Industry Energy magnates, Corbin Robertson Jr, Richard Gilliam, Kevin Crutchfield, J. Larry Nichols, Harold Hamm, Sheldon Adelson, Oliver Grace Jr, Richard Farmer, Stephen Bechtel Jr"

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Additional Links :

Koch payoff to GOP politicians.

44 different Trump officials have links to the Koch Brothers

Koch Seminar Network Leaked memo — what they’ve achieved with Trump as President

The Heritage Foundation Mandate for Leadership. "The Keys to a Successful Presidency" first created in 1979 as a 2000 point agenda to gut the functions of the US government & leave nothing in it's place. By 2005 this list had fallen to 334.

x The Heritage Foundation (Mercer sits on the board) has a list of Trump to-doÃ¢ÂÂs. This is what has been completed so far, as of Jan, 2018.



Who is running the country? https://t.co/6o2FQ6XZfI Ã¢ÂÂ RynheartTheReluctant (@TheRynheart) February 18, 2018

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