WOW! Rolling Stone EXPOSES Koch Bros: financially, politically, environmentally ***MUST READ

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24. A different set of excerpts/overview:

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http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-the-koch-brothers-toxic-empire-20140924#ixzz3EQrx8btk
[font size=5]Inside the Koch Brothers' Toxic Empire [/font]

Together, Charles and David Koch control one of the world's largest fortunes, which they are using to buy up our political system. But what they don't want you to know is how they made all that money

By Tim Dickinson

The enormity of the Koch fortune is no mystery. Brothers Charles and David are each worth more than $40 billion. The electoral influence of the Koch brothers is similarly well-chronicled. The Kochs are our homegrown oligarchs; they've cornered the market on Republican politics and are nakedly attempting to buy Congress and the White House. Their political network helped finance the Tea Party and powers today's GOP. Koch-affiliated organizations raised some [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]$400 million during the 2012 election[/FONT], and aim to spend another [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]$290 million[/FONT] to elect Republicans [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]in this year's midterms[/FONT]. So far in this cycle, Koch-backed entities have bought 44,000 political ads to boost Republican efforts to take back the Senate. ....

The volume of [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]Koch Industries' toxic output is staggering[/FONT]. According to the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Political Economy Research Institute, [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]only three companies[/FONT] rank among the [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]top 30 polluters[/FONT] of America's air, water and climate: [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]ExxonMobil, American Electric Power and Koch Industries[/FONT]. Thanks in part to its 2005 purchase of paper-mill giant [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]Georgia-Pacific[/FONT], Koch Industries dumps more pollutants into the nation's waterways than General Electric and International Paper combined. The company ranks 13th in the nation for toxic air pollution. Koch's climate pollution, meanwhile, outpaces oil giants including Valero, Chevron and Shell. Across its businesses, Koch generates 24 million metric tons of greenhouse gases a year.

For Koch, this [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]license to pollute[/FONT] amounts to a perverse, hidden subsidy. [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]The cost is borne by communities[/FONT] in cities like Port Arthur, Texas, where a Koch-owned facility produces as much as 2 billion pounds of petrochemicals every year. In March, Koch signed a consent decree with the Department of Justice requiring it to spend more than $40 million to bring this plant into compliance with the Clean Air Act.

The toxic history of Koch Industries is not limited to physical pollution. It also extends to the company's [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]business practices[/FONT], which have been the target of numerous federal investigations, resulting in several indictments and convictions, as well as a whole host of fines and penalties. ....

But Charles was already falling under the sway of a charismatic radio personality named [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]Robert LeFevre[/FONT], founder of the [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]Freedom School, a whites-only­ libertarian[/FONT] boot camp in the foothills above Colorado Springs, Colorado. LeFevre preached a form of [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]anarchic capitalism[/FONT] in which the individual should be freed from almost all government power. Charles soon had to make a choice. While the Birchers supported the Vietnam War, his new guru was a pacifist who equated militarism with out-of-control state power. LeFevre's stark influence on Koch's thinking is crystallized in a manifesto Charles wrote for the Libertarian Review in the 1970s, recently unearthed by Schulman, titled "The Business Community: Resisting Regulation." Charles lays out principles that gird [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]today's Tea Party[/FONT] movement. Referring to regulation as "totalitarian," the 41-year-old Charles claimed business leaders had been "hoodwinked" by the notion that regulation is "in the public interest." ....

By this time, the Kochs had [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]soured on the Libertarian[/FONT] Party, concluding that control of a small party would never give them the muscle they sought in the nation's capital. [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]Now they would spend millions[/FONT] in efforts to influence – and ultimately [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]take over – the GOP[/FONT]. The work began close to home; the Kochs had become dedicated patrons of Sen. [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]Bob Dole[/FONT] of Kansas, who ran interference for Koch Industries in Washington. On the Senate floor in March 1990, Dole gloatingly cautioned against a "rush to judgment" against Koch, citing "very real concerns about some of the evidence on which the special committee was basing its findings." A grand jury investigated the claims but disbanded in 1992, without issuing indictments. ....

Then George W. Bush entered the White House in 2001, his campaign fattened with Koch money. [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]Charles Koch may decry cronyism as "nothing more than welfare for the rich and powerful," but[/FONT] he put his company to work, hand in glove, with the Bush White House. Correspondence, contacts and visits among Koch Industries representatives and the Bush White House generated nearly 20,000 pages of records, according to a Rolling Stone FOIA request of the George W. Bush Presidential Library. In 2007, the administration installed a fiercely anti-regulatory academic, Susan Dudley, who hailed from the Koch-funded [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]Mercatus Center at George Mason University[/FONT], as its top regulatory official. ....
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