And who are Charles and David Koch? They refer to themselves as American businessmen and philanthropists. They inherited great wealth from their father Fred Koch, who developed an innovative method for the refinement of crude oil. The family business is rooted primarily in oil refining, heavy industry, and the manufacturing of petroleum-based products and technologies. As of late, they have ventured into the press by backing the media company Meredith’s purchase of colossus Time, Inc., and they have become monstrously large sponsors of the traditional vanguard liberal press: PBS and NPR. The brothers espouse a strict conservative libertarian philosophy and have been instrumental in funding policy and advocacy groups such as Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation… to name a few, among many; some hidden and some not. Their core belief is the less government, the better—de minimus government regulation impacting the environment, taxes and business. No social services: Welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, or for that matter, Veterans Health Care Benefits. It’s a laissez faire economic view and a tightly held belief that free markets should be allowed to work things out on their own and prosper without government interference, hence no EPA to impose penalties on heavy industry pumping benzene into a town’s air and water supply.
The Koch Brothers have made it their mission to destroy many federal agencies: the SEC, ICC, FTC, OSHA, FBI, CIA, DOE, and especially the EPA. The Koch brothers have good reason to decimate the EPA. In just one example of media scrutiny, a 2014 article in Rolling Stone, analyzed the Koch Empire that had a long history of flouting environmental regulations and of consistently releasing toxins that endangered the environment and public safety. “According to the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Political Economy Research Institute, only three companies rank among the top 30 polluters of America's air, water and climate: ExxonMobil, American Electric Power and Koch Industries.” Furthermore, “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.” It’s easy to see why the brothers are bullish on no government interference and an anathema to the EPA. They want to win.
Global warming has been cited as the number one crisis to the planet. Even high-ranking officials in the current administration have admitted that climate change is a threat. The Pacific Standard reported that Secretary of Defense James Mattis called climate change “a security threat for which military leaders need to prepare.” And former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson “admitted that climate change requires ‘serious action.”’ During a time when strong leadership and a fully sanctioned, funded and staffed EPA are critically needed to oversee a solution to the clear and imminent damage to our planet, there has been well-funded Koch-driven movement to destroy the agency and debunk global warming as a myth.
More emphasis than ever has been placed on conquering an important frontier—milking oil for all its worth, where all roads lead to the Middle East. Let’s start with Iran. The Washington Post recently reported, there are reasons to believe that we could be stumbling toward a military confrontation with Iran. In the past few months, heightened tensions among Israel, Palestine, Syria, Hezbollah and Iran have increased the risk of war. Not a day goes by where we don’t see massive violence between Israel and Hezbollah which makes the outbreak of another war imminent. And most recently Iran has spearheaded Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria to model the operations of Hezbollah. It’s only a question of time before the U.S. intervenes under the guise of stabilizing the region to avoid nuclear proliferation; but the real stakes have less to with the prospect of Iran producing enriched uranium and more to do with Koch Industries #Kochtopus.
With all of this talk of oil and winning, there is a problem. Who is going to fight the next bloody war? Or rather does our current leadership, both the seen and the unseen, understand the ravages of war? David Koch, age 77, the younger of the two brothers, served in the U.S. Army Reserve, which was a direct route to avoid the draft in the Vietnam War. Older brother Charles Koch, age 82, has no history of ever serving. Donald Trump, age 71, avoided going to Vietnam, was given four student deferments, and ultimately given a medical deferment for heel spurs.
Sheldon Adelson, age 84, an avid Trump Supporter, proclaimed at a panel discussion at Yeshiva University in 2013, the the United States must get tougher about Iran’s nuclear program and called on the United States to nuke the Iranian desert. With Adelson’s apparent financial influence on the 2016