Why do the koch brothers hate america

Tom Steyer, for example, plans to spend millions of dollars this election cycle, primarily supporting Democrats and advocating for climate change policies. Pseudonyms will no longer be permitted. By submitting a comment, you accept that CBC has the right to reproduce and publish that comment in whole or in part, in any manner CBC chooses. Please note that CBC does not endorse the opinions expressed in comments.

Comments on this story are moderated according to our Submission Guidelines. Comments are welcome while open. We reserve the right to close comments at any time. While the Cato institute acknowledges the climate crisis, it holds that there is time to find privately funded solutions. Koch brothers. Five key ways the Koch brothers pushed their rightwing agenda. Edward Helmore. Unfortunately, he changed it by setting it on fire. They have used every means at their disposal to subvert democracy.

They funded academic posts, thinktanks, lobbying groups, fake grassroots operations, and political campaigns. They used their tremendous wealth to push a radically far-right economic vision in which government protections and welfare programs would essentially cease to exist.

They may even have been directly responsible for the election of Donald Trump, the Koch-backed Americans For Prosperity having hired staffers to make millions of phone calls and knock on tens of thousands of doors in Wisconsin and Michigan during the election.

The Koch brothers profited handsomely from fossil fuels, and had a strong hand in muddying the debate around global warming, having spent more than ExxonMobil on funding climate denial.

They stopped anything from happening back when there was still time. In reality, the only private property rights they cared about were their own. Nothing could be more destructive to private property than climate change, which threatens to create tens of millions of climate refugees around the world.

On average, Koch projects to double its revenue every six years. In , a Koch subsidiary opened a pipeline capable of carrying , barrels a day of fracked crude from South Texas to Corpus Christi, where the company owns a refinery complex, and it has announced plans to further expand its Texas pipeline operations. In a recent acquisition, Koch bought Frac-Chem, a top provider of hydraulic fracturing chemicals to drillers. Koch is also long on the richest — but also the dirtiest and most carbon-polluting — oil deposits in North America: the tar sands of Alberta.

Paul, Minnesota, processes nearly a quarter of the Canadian bitumen exported to the United States — which, in turn, has created for Koch Industries a lucrative sideline in petcoke exports. Denser, dirtier and cheaper than coal, petcoke is the dregs of tar-sands refining. Over the past dozen years, the company has quietly acquired leases for 1.

He presents himself as a man of moral clarity and high integrity. Fred C. Koch was born in in Quanah, Texas — a sunbaked patch of prairie across the Red River from Oklahoma.

In the family legend, Fred Koch emerged from the nothing of the Texas range to found an empire. Fred was not a simple country boy, and his father was not just a small-town publisher. A director and founding shareholder of the company, Harry sought to build a rail line across Texas to El Paso.

Harry was not just the financial springboard for the Koch dynasty, he was also its wellspring of far-right politics. But there is much more to this story. In its early days, refining oil was a dirty and wasteful practice.

In , Fred, who earned a degree in chemical engineering from MIT, partnered with a former Universal engineer named Lewis Winkler and designed a near carbon copy of the Universal cracking apparatus — making only tiny, unpatentable tweaks.

Relying on family connections, Fred soon landed his first client — an Oklahoma refinery owned by his maternal uncle L. In a flash, Winkler-Koch Engineering Co. It was a boom business. With his domestic business tied up in court, Fred started looking for partners abroad and was soon doing business in the Soviet Union, where leader Joseph Stalin had just launched his first Five Year Plan.

Between and , Winkler-Koch built 15 cracking units for the Soviets. Even so, he agreed to give the Soviets the engineering know-how they would need to keep building more. Back home, Fred was busy building a life of baronial splendor.

Fred Koch lorded over his domain. Frederick got shipped East to boarding school and was all but disappeared from Wichita. With Frederick gone, Charles forged a deep alliance with David, the more athletic and assertive of the young twins.

Fred countersued on antitrust grounds, arguing that Universal had wielded patents anti-competitively. In those later years, Fred also became a major benefactor and board member of the John Birch Society, the rabidly anti-communist organization founded in by candy magnate and virulent racist Robert Welch. The Birchers had high hopes for young Charles. LeFevre preached a form of anarchic capitalism 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.

After his father died in , Charles, now in command of the family business, renamed it Koch Industries. It had grown into one of the 10 largest privately owned firms in the country, buying and selling some 80 million barrels of oil a year and operating 3, miles of pipeline. In the late s, Fred Koch had bought a minority stake in a Minnesota refinery that processed heavy Canadian crude.

Howard Marshall II — the future Mr. Anna Nicole Smith. Suddenly the majority owner, the company soon bought the rest of the refinery outright. The OPEC oil embargo hit the company hard. At the time, Koch owned five supertankers and had chartered many others.

In the event they won the lottery, they would turn over their leases to the company. In , Koch Industries pleaded guilty to five felonies in federal court, including conspiracy to commit fraud. With Republicans and Democrats united in regulating the oil business, Charles had begun throwing his wealth behind the upstart Libertarian Party, seeking to transform it into a viable third party.