NEW ANALYSIS FROM KOCH DOCS

1980 Clark-Koch Oil and Gas Journal Ad Promising to “Abolish the Department of Energy”

This document is a May 10, 1980, letter from Charles Koch’s confidant Ed Crane to “Clark V.I.P’s” about media coverage of the Ed Clark-David Koch presidential campaign. Enclosed in the letter is an ad placed in the Oil and Gas Journal, which Crane reports got a “surprisingly good response.” The ad targets the energy crisis and promises to “abolish the Department of Energy,” among other things. Document excerpts: “We ran the enclosed ad in the Oil and Gas Journal recently, and have gotten a surprisingly good response.” “Ed Clark has a solution for the energy crisis: Let America’s oil and gas producers produce.” “Ed Clark’s Libertarian energy program gets to the root of the problem: Abolish the Department of Energy….

Koch Attacks on the Electric Vehicle Tax Credit, Explained

“The Koch brothers and their oil industry allies have launched an all-out offensive on the electric vehicle tax credit. This effort applies the same tactics as the Koch network’s broader campaign to undermine public and political support for electric cars, directing them acutely at the tax credit.”

Who Wants to Kill the Electric Car This Time?

The Koch brothers hope it will be them By Ben Jervey (This story was first published by the Sierra Club on June 28, 2019, here. Jervey is a Senior Fellow at DeSmog.) IN FEBRUARY, Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican who chairs the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, introduced a bill to end the federal tax credit for plug-in electric vehicles and establish a new annual “highway user fee” for all “alternative fuel vehicles.” If the bill becomes law, these provisions of the Fairness for Every Driver Act would check off two high-priority boxes on the policy wish list of Charles and David Koch, the billionaire petrochemical barons who have built a fortune on the transport and refining…

Documents Shine New Light on Koch Brothers’ Early Efforts to Abolish the Department of Energy

By Sharon Kelly, DeSmog. A scheme to abolish the Department of Energy (DOE) helped spur a failed 1980 Libertarian Party presidential bid — and in the process laid the groundwork for Charles and David Koch’s powerful network of influence — as documents from a newly published archive show. The documents in the new KochDocs.org archive include a relatively little-noticed column penned by fossil fuel industrialist Charles Koch for the Libertarian Review in August 1977, in which Charles, who had served as a member of President Carter’s energy task force in 1976, argued against Carter’s energy policy, writing that the “only ‘certainty’ to be associated with governmental planning is that it will not work, will tend to produce results opposite to those intended, and will doom any substantial…

Netflix Takes on the Koch-Funded Attacks on Public Transit

By Lisa Graves for KochDocs The newest episode of the Netflix series “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj” focused on how the empire led by Charles Koch has funded efforts to thwart public transportation in the U.S. The episode is titled “Why Mass Transit Sucks.” Full episodes are available with a subscription to Netflix, but the company has posted this episode on Youtube, which can be streamed below for free (for an unspecified period). Charles Koch leads Koch Industries, one of the largest privately held companies in the world, and he also funds an array of political/policy groups that seek to advance his agenda in federal, state, and local politics. As Hiroko Tabuchi has detailed in the New York Times, “How…

David Koch Was One of America’s Most Powerful Politicians, though Voters Never Elected Him to Anything

By Lisa Graves David Koch was more than a billionaire or a son of a Bircher. He was one of the most powerful politicians in modern American history–even though he was never elected to anything. Make no mistake, despite some of the fawning eulogies or warm remembrances of his “honkish” laughter, he was a real villain on the most important issues facing us today. His extreme political agenda was overwhelmingly rejected when David ran for Vice President in 1980. Running against Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Koch failed to win even a million votes after spending more than $2 million of his fortune from Koch Industries, the business he and his brother inherited and made into one of the…

Koch Industries and ALEC: a History of Documents

By Connor Gibson, with research by Lisa Graves. Updated May 21, 2021 to include 2019 Koch foundation payments to ALEC. Updated Oct. 16, 2019 to include ALEC State Chair information from Documented. The American Legislative Exchange Council is a one-stop shopping outlet for large companies seeking state legislators to move their agenda through statehouses, coast to coast. ALEC has always offered a pay-to-play service to corporations, but it used to represent a more diverse array of industries that it does today. Times have changed since the year 2011, in particular. A series of crises have since reduced ALEC into a service for the most politically aggressive, and shameless, industries out there. Our own Lisa Graves and her team at the…

New Documents Show Charles Koch’s Fortune Subsidizing Attacks on Election Laws Since 1970s

Newly uncovered archive documents show that Charles Koch’s fortune helped subsidize the litigation that secured the controversial Buckley v. Valeo decision, which created loopholes in the Federal Election Campaign Act that was signed into law on February 7, 1971. These documents are the subject of an op-ed about Charles Koch and his impact on our election laws, our courts, and other policy in the Guardian today. That decision also paved the way for his brother David to have no limits on his funding of his race to become Vice President in 1980. It is also the foundation for the claim that money is speech that undergirds the U.S. Supreme Court’s discredited Citizens United decision in 2010, which unleashed Koch to…

Lisa Graves: Charles Koch’s Radical Free Market Ideology Is Not a Symptom of America’s Disastrous Response to COVID-19. It’s a Cause.

First published on DeSmog Blog here. Charles Koch, CEO of Koch Industries, is receiving credit for launching a COVID-19 relief fund, as he urged a “distinctly American response” of private charity — and not public benefits — to address this deadly pandemic. Koch kickstarted the fund with a $5 million contribution, pocket change for a man who runs the second largest privately held corporation in the country, which makes about $5 million every twenty minutes. His “distinctly American response” is not for the government to do more but for a billionaire to solicit help from Americans who make far less: his contribution amounts to 0.000125 of his net worth of roughly $40 billion, about the equivalent of a $5 donation for someone who makes $40,000 a year. His newly rebranded “Stand…