On Koch Industries and Fingers In Pies.

Charles and David Koch: hardline libertarians, Tea Party sponsors, Climate Change deniers*, and all round nice guys, I'd imagine.

Koch Industries is the second largest privately held company in North America. Based in Wichita, Kansas, the company began life as an oil-refining venture in 1940. Today, Koch Industries employs 80,000 people worldwide and has subsidiaries in trading and investment, manufacturing, and other energy industries. They own Lycra.

Fred Koch – who, as a student at MIT, developed an improved method of converting crude oil into gasoline on which the original company was based – diversified the firm during the 1960s, investing in refineries in Minnesota and Oklahoma and ranching opportunities in the Midwest. On his death in 1967, the company passed into the hands of his two sons, Charles and David Koch, who run the company to this day.

The Kochs have always been politically active, throwing their considerable influence and wealth behind causes deemed worthy. Unsurprisingly, the Kochs’ political views “dovetail” (in the uncharacteristically neutral parlance of New Yorker columnist Jane Mayer, whose excellent article on this subject is here) neatly with their corporate interests. Since the foundation of the company in the New Deal Era, the Koch family have lobbied for a libertarian America: low (or preferably non-existent) corporate and personal taxes, minimal social security provision, and less federal oversight of industry. The Kochs have been, in Mayer’s words, “the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America.”

Fred was a founder member of the John Birch Society, a libertarian group which, amongst other things, claimed that Dwight Eisenhower was an agent of the Soviet Union and bundled Barry Goldwater towards the presidency in 1964. In 1980, David stood for president on the Libertarian Party ticket, running to the right of Ronald Reagan. His platform pledges included the abolition of the FBI and the CIA, the scrapping of Social Security, and an end to federal regulation of business. In 1963, Fred gave a speech in which he claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican parties.” In time, he went on to say, Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the US until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”

Sound familiar?

That’s right. Fred Koch’s rhetoric could easily have been lifted from any of the Tea Party rallies that have come to dominate the political narrative in the run up to November’s midterm elections. And that’s no coincidence: to say that the Kochs have their grubby fingers in the Tea Party pie would be a gross understatement.

Many of the organisations that make up the Tea Party were cast in the Koch furnace. Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) – which now operates under the moniker ‘FreedomWorks’ – was founded by David Koch in 1984 to act as a political lobbying organisation. Masquerading as a grassroots movement, CSE owes it history of activism and current prominence to nothing more than the Kochs’ generosity. Koch Industries provided over $8 million in the early 1990s, allowing CSE to effectively become the family’s Washington arm in the battle against Clinton-era reforms. The Kochs also fund conservative think tanks such as the Cato Institute and Reason Foundation. In total, Mayer estimates, the Koch brothers have given over $100 million to conservative causes.

As the 2010 midterms approach, David Koch has pledged $45 million to Americans for Prosperity, another libertarian non-government organisation that splintered from CSE during the Bush years. Reflecting upon the unexpected political salience of the Tea Party, David Axelrod – Obama’s Senior Political Adviser – quipped “What they don’t say, in part, is that this is a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”

Of course, oil billionaires pushing a libertarian agenda is nothing new – the Kochs themselves have been at it for years. What is new, however, is the receptiveness of American voters to that agenda. As the primary successes of candidates such as Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and Christine O’Donnell have shown, anti-government sentiment has gained a remarkable credibility in a political climate forged in the crucible of global recession, national decline, subconscious racism, and residual anti-intellectualism. For all the accusations of astro-turfing, the genuine sentiment behind certain aspects of the Tea Party is undeniable.

In her New Yorker article, Mayer quotes the conservative economist Bruce Bartlett at length. “The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians,” Bartlett says. However, with the ascendance of the Tea Party, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there – people who can provide real ideological power.” More so than at any other time in America’s recent political history, men such as David Koch have a receptive electorate onto which to push their self-serving, socially-damaging agenda. The Kochs, Bartlett writes, “are trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.”

Yet, no matter how hard the chiefs try to hide the fact, they are not from the same tribe as the Indians. The Kochs’ libertarianism, which shapes everything from signs at Tea Party rallies to Senate platforms, exists first and foremost to further the interests of business. The Kochs don’t give a damn about the fate of middle America, the job market, or stagnating urban centres. Yet, the con is on. Along with the Kochs, the Tea Party’s biggest donor is good old Rupert Murdoch who, with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin on the payroll, uses Fox News to push Indians towards the conclusions the chiefs want them to reach.

For her article, Mayer interviewed Gus diZerega, a former friend of Charles Koch. Reflecting on the Kochs’ libertarianism, diZerega speculates: “perhaps [they have] confused making money with freedom.” I’d wager they haven’t. Freedom is the name of the Kochs’ game because it facilitates the making of money. In a damning Rolling Stone article, Matt Taibbi predicts that the Tea Party agenda will be “whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP’s campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade, and financial deregulation.”  Soon, Taibbi writes, the “revolutionary causes” will be reduced to “voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives.”

The real worry as we approach November’s midterms is surely not that the Kochs have confused making money with freedom, but that American voters will confuse freedom with making money.



*Greenpeace have described Koch Industries as "the kingpin of climate change denial."

On Godwin's Law

On Godwin's Law

In one of the more chuckle-worthy of Family Guy’s occasionally tedious cut scenes, Cookie Monster, bed-ridden in cookie rehab, is discovered to be hoarding cookies. After attempting to pin blame on ‘Derek’, Cookie Monster makes a dart for the contraband. Restrained on his bed by doctors, he screams in distress: “You guys are Nazis, man. You’re fricking Nazis.”

Unwittingly, Cookie Monster has added further weight to an endlessly cited internet chat room phenomenon: Godwin’s Law. Godwin’s Law holds that

“as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

Devised by Jewish-American lawyer and author Mike Godwin in 1990, the Law has sprung into wide usage, transcending its original application to internet discussions. As Godwin himself has written, “this one off creation of mine, like the Energizer bunny, keeps on going and going.” The logical and widely quoted extrapolation of the Law is that, in any argument or discussion, the party that first brings up the Nazis, Hitler, the Holocaust, or any other Third Reich comparison has automatically lost.

Cookie Monster is thus not the only one losing arguments these days. Nazi references seem to be increasingly common in politics and the media. Predictably, the best example is Glenn Beck, whose Fox News show contains more references to the Fuhrer than a toothbrush-moustache convention at Eagle’s Nest. “So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research...eugenics”, Beck ranted in 2009. “In case you don't know what eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race!” The President isn’t the only one being daubed with Beck’s swastika-brush either. A figure as removed from politics as Brian Urlacher, the burly Chicago Bears linebacker, has been on the receiving end: branded a Nazi by Beck for seemingly nothing more than having broad shoulders, blue eyes, and a Germanic name. Daily Show funny man Lewis Black recently joked that Beck has “Nazi Tourettes.” And he isn’t the only one. Last month, the Democratic nominee for California governor, Jerry Brown, proved his political classiness by declaring his opponent, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, to be “like Goebbels.” Brits aren’t immune either. In 2008, the Conservative MEP for South East England, Daniel Hannan, angered by the extension of the EU President’s parliamentary powers, declared that he was “almost tempted to compare [the powers] to the Nazi Ermächtigungsgesetz - the Enabling Act of 1933.” According to Godwin’s Law, all of these guys – Beck, Brown, Hannan – have lost.

Godwin states that his opposition to Nazi comparisons is based upon “a sense of moral outrage” elicited by people flinging about Hitler and the Holocaust without properly understanding the horrors of Nazism. Such comparisons belittle the suffering of millions, he argues.

I have two problems with this.

First, our modern obsession with Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust is a symptom of a much larger problem in western society: the lack of genuine evil. The world, since Adolf’s demise in 1945, has become more relativist and uncertain. The West has, in the modern era, waged war on (amongst others) Koreans, the Viet Cong, Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia, Saddam Hussein (twice), and Islamic fundamentalists. It also engaged in a four decade-long Cold War with the Soviet Union and communism more generally.

However, none of these ‘bad guys’ offer the same moral absolute that the Nazis do. I am not in any way trying to defend the atrocities carried out in the name of Milosevic, Saddam, or any of the communist regimes, but culturally their ‘evil’ is tempered. The Viet Cong were ‘freedom fighters’, celebrated by counter-cultural elements in the West; communist revolutionaries have been deified by many; the Taliban are – it seems – terrible, but the very fact that they operate in the name of Islam leaves western commentators unwilling to hold them up as an example of genuine evil. In addition, the wars fought by the West since 1945 have been largely unpopular, thus shifting the ‘evil’ tag away from the ‘enemy’ and onto our own leaders.

In short, thanks to the rise of moral relativism, there has been no individual or regime over the last half-century that could universally be considered evil. Thus, when commentators reach for the N-bomb, it is usually not in order to make historically sound comparisons to Nazism, but rather to liken the target of their ire to the only manifestation of true, absolute, unquestionable evil that exists on our cultural horizon. Thus, Beck et al aren’t belittling Nazi atrocities but are reinforcing our condemnation of them.

This brings me to my second defence of Nazi comparers. Engraved on the wall inside the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. are the words spoken by President Clinton at the museum’s Dedication Ceremony:

“This museum will touch the life of everyone who enters and leave everyone forever changed – a place of deep sadness and a sanctuary of bright hope; an ally of education against ignorance, of humility against arrogance, an investment in a secure future against whatever insanity lurks ahead. If this museum can mobilize morality, then those who have perished will thereby gain a measure of immortality.”

The United States Holocaust Museum is brilliant and its message – to learn from the mistakes of the past in order to ensure that nothing resembling the Holocaust can ever occur again – is pitched perfectly. When the millions of tourists who visit Holocaust museums the world over read the memoirs of survivors, watch video footage of emaciated inmates, or gaze at the piles of shoes left by the murdered, their morality is indeed mobilized.

It is, however, a universal truism that when people need a museum to remember something, it is probably already in the process of being forgotten. Plus, only a limited percentage of the world’s population can visit such a museum every year.

Yet, every time Glenn Beck makes an ill-judged and foundationless comparison between his political opponents and Hitler; every time a commentator likens an event to the Holocaust; and every time the Nazis get an airing in popular culture, we are forced to observe the subliminal equation: Nazis/Holocaust/Hitler = EVIL. The more often Godwin’s Law is obeyed and discussions are ‘lost’ because of it, the more profoundly this equation – and the conviction that the world should never see another Bergen-Belsen – is embedded into our psyche. More than any museum, Nazi comparisons help us remember that the like of Hitler et al should not be tolerated in the 21^st century.

So I’m all for Nazi comparisons. Far from belittling the suffering of millions, they are a constant cultural reminder of it, ensuring that such suffering is avoided in the future.