Koch Brothers: From Stalin to Beck and Ellis

From Fresh Air:

Terry GROSS: You might not know their names, but brothers Charles and David Koch have quietly given more than $100 million to right-wing causes, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think-tanks and political groups.

Jane Mayer reports on the Koch brothers in the current edition of The New Yorker, in an article titled "Covert Operations: The Billionaire Brothers Who are Waging a War Against Obama."
She says the Koch brothers have become the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America, and their views dovetail with their corporate interests. Charles, who is 74, and David, who is 70, own virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate whose annual revenues are estimated to be $100 billion.
The Kochs operate oil refineries in several states and control some 4,000 miles of pipelines. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet and Lycra and is ranked by Forbes as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill.

Jane MAYER: They have been working to fight the federal government really since the 1970s. And their father was doing it before they were. So they're trying to get rid of federal regulations, particularly on energy companies like their own. They particularly have been at war with environmental regulations, and they have a history of serious and even criminal pollution problems. And they're very anti-tax in almost every form.

Terry GROSS: They founded the Cato Institute, the first libertarian think-tank.

Ms. MAYER: Absolutely, the Cato Institute has become, you know, a very powerful player in the area of shaping political opinion in the country. I mean, it's quoted all the time as a kind of a nonpartisan and impartial libertarian think-tank. But it was founded by the Koch fortune, and it has been funded by it ever since.

GROSS: Although the Koch brothers are libertarians, and they think government should be stripped to its most minimal role, you say they've been great beneficiaries of government money. Their companies have gotten about $100 million in government contracts since 2000.

Ms. MAYER: That's right. They've got a you know, so there's a certain amount of hypocrisy in this libertarian notion, and in fact, there have been some more kind of purist libertarian thinkers who have attacked the Kochs for exactly this, for kind of disguising their corporate self-interest as a kind of a lofty libertarian philosophy.

They were also, I think, tremendous beneficiaries during the Bush years of the 2005 energy bill, which was a tremendous giveaway of subsidies and tax breaks to various energy companies.

You know, I think that David Koch has, you know, you don't want to take that away from him. But at the same time, I have to say one of the things that really shocked me in doing the reporting on this family was that at the same time that David Koch has been, you know, sort of portraying himself as such a champion of the fight against cancer and actually has given a tremendous amount of money to that fight, his company produces a chemical, formaldehyde, in many, many, many products, and they produce it in huge quantities, which the U.S. government has been trying to regulate as a known carcinogen in human beings.

And the Koch Industries, through its Georgia-Pacific subsidiary, produces tons of formaldehyde and puts it into tons of products, particularly things like plywood and laminates.

And the company has been fighting the regulation of formaldehyde, trying to hold off the EPA from keeping it from flowing freely into the marketplace. And, you know, I just don't know how they can reconcile these two roles.

GROSS: The Koch brothers have an interesting family political history. Their father was an oil man in the 1930s. He spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union. You say his company trained Bolshevik engineers and helped Stalin's regime set up 15 modern oil refineries but, eventually, Stalin brutally purged several of Koch's Soviet colleagues and then he became fiercely anti-communist, became an original member of the John Birch Society.

Do you think that his, like, fervent anti-communist beliefs had any effect on his sons' beliefs?

Ms. MAYER: Oh, absolutely. I mean, and they've talked about it themselves. At the dinner table they were told over and over again that strong centralized government were evil. And some ways - and I've interviewed an old family friend of theirs who basically suggests that they transferred their father's paranoia about communism to paranoia about the federal government in the United States and all regulations.

And, I mean there was a consistent thread even within the Birch Society there, too, which was that the Birch Society was founded mostly by largely businessmen who were opposed to labor unions and, you know, minimum wage laws, and specifically opposed to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and a larger federal government. So there's kind of a consistent line that moves from the father, whose name is Fred Koch, to these sons. And, I mean I just don't think you could make some of the details up, though.

Who would ever think that behind one of America's most spectacular private fortunes is a father who made his first millions working for Joseph Stalin setting up the Soviet oil refineries?

GROSS: So the Koch brothers were brought up by a father who was fervently anti-communist. They grew up with anti-government, anti-big-state beliefs. How much of their work now in funding libertarian causes and anti-regulation, how much of that do you think is just like personal political philosophy and how much of it is like, this will help my corporation make profits?

Ms. MAYER: Well, I think there is no separation between the two in their thinking. They believe that prosperity will result for themselves and others, I guess, if you get rid of all kinds of state regulations and just allow the marketplace to bloom, as they would put it. They see both things as being united, really.

One of the things that I found fascinating was that they're not just your sort of ordinary Republican captains of industry; they are really self-described radicals. And Charles Koch specifically calls himself a radical and says he has a radical agenda when he talked to Brian Doherty in this book Radicals for Capitalism. Their vision is really pretty far out.

It doesn't take long to follow the money from these guys to the TEA movement on the lunatic fringe.

UPDATE: h/t to TGrindAdams.

New York Magazine. Koch apparatchik. Koch Industries reply.