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What was the endgame? Today, we know. Charles and David Koch—who, if their individual fortunes were combined in one place, would quite possibly represent the wealthiest person on earth—have almost certainly spent or raised more than a billion dollars to successfully bend one of the two national parties in America to their will. The long rise of the Tea Party movement was orchestrated, well funded, and deliberate. Its aim was to break Washington.
There are no mistakes or accidents in the Tea Party movement. Its leadership has made certain of that. One of my first assignments as a consultant for CSE was to join the CSE leadership on a New York fund-raising trip to meet with a huge corporate partner with vast experience in building real political muscle who could help CSE reach beyond Koch oil money for their new grassroots efforts.
The concept that CSE put on the conference table, which was quickly taken up by the Philip Morris staff, was a bit shocking to me. They proposed an unholy alliance—Philip Morris money commingled with Koch money to create anti-tax front groups in a handful of states that would battle any tax that moved. It would make no difference what kind of tax—the front groups could battle cigarette excise taxes in the Northeast and refined-oil fees at the coasts.
The two, year-old Charles and David, 70, have invested widely in the outcome of the 2 November elections. The brothers, their wives and employees have also given directly to Republican candidates for Congress and are the sixth-largest donors to the Senate campaign of Tea Party favourite Marco Rubio. But organisations tracking money in politics say the Kochs' biggest impact in the midterm elections will be from funding and providing logistical support to such groups as Americans for Prosperity AFP , one of the biggest Tea Party groups.
AFP, in turn, has spun off other organisations such as November is Coming, Hands Off My Healthcare, and the Institute of Liberty, which are buying up television ads and holding rallies across the country in an attempt to defeat Democrats. US campaign laws make it easy for political interest groups and their corporate backers to hide their spending in elections.
For the Kochs, who inherited their politics as well as their business from their father, Fred, this has been a long and carefully cultivated project. But after years in which their support for anti-regulation thinktanks and groups went largely undetected, the sudden visibility of the Kochs' power seems to have taken even the brothers by surprise.
The American dream of free enterprise and capitalism is alive and well. Until last summer, most Americans had no idea who the Koch brothers were, and it is very likely that even AFP members did not know they were bankrolled by one of the richest men in corporate America. But a spate of attention — sparked by a Greenpeace investigation and a profile in the New Yorker — has given the Kochs a degree of notoriety they are finding it difficult to live with.
When the Guardian stopped into the offices of the Charles G Koch charitable foundation, in the suburbs of Washington DC, the receptionist sent the head of the legal department out to talk. After declaring all conversations off the record, lawyer Brian Menkes said it was normal for the Koch legal team to be involved in routine press inquiries.
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