Tag: koch brothers
Koch Industries Still Operating In Russia Despite Massive Corporate Shutdowns

Koch Industries Still Operating In Russia Despite Massive Corporate Shutdowns

Award-winning journalist Jane Mayer, who literally wrote the book on the Koch Brothers and Koch Industries, pointed to a report published Monday stating, “Koch Industries continues doing business in Russia.” Despite major U.S. corporations shutting down operations after Putin’s illegal war on Ukraine, major U.S.-based multinational corporations, from Apple to Disney to McDonald’s, have responded by pulling out of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Mayer’s 2016 book “Dark Money” focuses on Charles Koch and (the now late) David Koch, the powerful conservative billionaire Koch Brothers.

Monday morning in his widely-read newsletter Popular Information Judd Legum reported Koch Industries doesn’t seem to be joining the American movement to isolate Putin and Russia – even after his forces have slaughtered thousands of innocent civilians in Ukraine.

“Guardian Industries,” writes Legum, “is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, acquired in 2017. Guardian, a manufacturer of industrial glass and other products, is based in Auburn Hills, Michigan but has production facilities around the world.”

Guardian has two glass production plants that operate in Russia. One facility is in Ryazan, Russia, about 120 miles southeast of Moscow. The company added “a new jumbo laminated glass production line” to that facility in August 2021. Another facility is located in Rostov, Russia, near the border with Ukraine. The Rostov plant, which began operations about a decade ago, cost $220 million to build and produces “Guardian’s high-performance, energy-efficient ClimaGuard(R) (residential) and SunGuard(R) (commercial) glass products for construction of homes, offices, retail, health-care and other facilities.” It is capable of producing “900 tons of glass per day.”

Mayer, an investigative journalist who is a staff writer for The New Yorker, also wrote an article about the Koch Brothers, in 2010: “The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.”

Mayer’s piece suggests the Koch Brothers had funded and fueled the Tea Party almost since its inception.

A Republican campaign consultant who has done research on behalf of Charles and David Koch said of the Tea Party, “The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It’s like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud—and they’re our candidates!”

And it paid off.

“The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to ‘educate,’ fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement.”

So where did the Koch money originally come from?

Mayer on Monday reminded America:

For those who would like more information, here’s The New York Times on Mayer’s 2016 book:

The father of the billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch helped construct a major oil refinery in Nazi Germany that was personally approved by Adolf Hitler, according to a new history of the Kochs and other wealthy families.

Mayer’s “book is largely focused on the Koch family, stretching back to its involvement in the far-right John Birch Society and the political and business activities of the father, Fred C. Koch, who found some of his earliest business success overseas in the years leading up to World War II. One venture was a partnership with the American Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis, who, according to Ms. Mayer, hired Mr. Koch to help build the third-largest oil refinery in the Third Reich, a critical industrial cog in Hitler’s war machine.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Why Shouldn't Trees And Rivers Have Equal Standing With Corporations?

Why Shouldn't Trees And Rivers Have Equal Standing With Corporations?

As an old axiom notes, "Mighty oaks from little acorns grow." From coast to coast, millions of these long-lived jewels have graced our landscape, but one mighty specimen in particular has recently become a hardy symbol of a fast-growing environmental movement. The significance of this oak — rooted on a small piece of land at the corner of Dearing and Finley Streets near downtown Athens, Georgia — is that no one owned it. It was an autonomous being, known locally as "The Tree That Owns Itself."

The tree was already a couple of centuries old back in 1832 when William Jackson, a property owner and prominent resident, expressed his "great affection" for the tree he had long enjoyed, and proclaimed his "great desire to see it protected." So, Jackson formally deeded "unto the said oak tree entire possession of itself (and the plot around it)."

Alas, age and decades of storms took their toll, and even though appreciative locals had tenderly nurtured it, the 100-foot-tall, self-possessed oak finally toppled in 1942. End of story? No!

It was common in Athens for people to collect and cultivate the tree's acorns, growing its offspring in their yards. So, in a citywide effort, a hardy, five-foot-tall direct descendant was soon located, donated, transplanted in the original plot and granted the same status of self-possession. And there it stands today, now more than 50 feet tall and officially embraced by the city as "Son of the Tree That Owns Itself."

This is more than just a heartwarming story, for that oak's autonomy and ancestry have become emblematic of a newly energized, transformative legal concept: "Rights of Nature." It's a simple idea: Rather than continuing to rely on the corporate-controlled, business-as-usual model of environmental regulation, why not grant self-protective rights of law to our invaluable natural systems? In a 1972 article, University of Southern California law professor Christopher Stone first pushed this straightforward and profound idea into public discussion by "seriously proposing that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers, and other so-called 'natural objects' in the environment — indeed, to the natural environment as a whole."

His point was that these living beings, no less than humans, have intrinsic value and the inherent right to exist, regenerate, flourish and defend themselves from exploitation and death. Current legal theory, though, generally recognizes nature as nothing but "property," and those who harm or even kill it can be prosecuted only if it can be proved that the damage injures humans. In short, harming nature is not itself illegal.

Thus, under the present regulatory regime, nature's well-being is irrelevant, and environmental cases are reduced to nitpicking over micro details, such as how many parts per billion of a chemical contaminant in a river is safe for humans. Establishing rights for nature would empower the river itself to sue for its loss of life, along with harm to the fish, plants and other organisms that depend on the river's health.

But, you might ask, how can trees, lakes, etc., argue in court? The same way we do, explained Stone: Lawyers could sue on their behalf, and groups, from Greenpeace to local coalitions, could serve as legal guardians. No less a judicial eminence than Justice William O. Douglas endorsed Stone's proposal in a dissenting opinion in a landmark 1972 Supreme Court case. In Sierra Club v. Morton, Douglas asserted:

Contemporary public concern for protecting nature's ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.

The foundational truth upholding this legal approach is that we humans and our environment are one organism. After all, we can't live without nature; indeed, we are nature, and nature is us.

Such an obvious truth, however, is not only inconvenient, but abhorrent to profiteering environmental exploiters. They immediately ridiculed Stone and the Rights of Nature idea, but the concept caught on anyway, so that now, 50 years later, corporate interests are hyperventilating and on the attack. Last July, Koch brothers political operative David McDonald warned property owners to rally against this movement. "Streams don't have rights," he barked. "Rights ... belong to people, not to artifacts within the environment or natural wonders."

Seriously? A tree is just an "artifact"? Don't "natural wonders" — from rainforests to coral reefs — have more intrinsic value to Earth, our own health and our posterity than some corporation's short-term profits?

And what a hoot it is for this representative of corporate supremacy to declare that rights only "belong to people." He is, after all a functionary for the avaricious money powers that have spent years perverting law, logic and reality to promote the absurd fiction that corporations (artificial constructs with no life, no organic systems, no pulse or brain, no sentient existence whatsoever) are "people" with the legal rights of "personhood."

Populist author, public speaker, and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes The Hightower Lowdown, a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America's ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.

Danziger: That Loud Guy Is Talking Again

Danziger: That Loud Guy Is Talking Again

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.

#EndorseThis: FAU Students Expose White Supremacist Professor

#EndorseThis: FAU Students Expose White Supremacist Professor

Southern white slave owners were the group most responsible for African-American slavery. Sounds like a fairly obvious statement, doesn’t it? Those revisionists who try to blame African slave-traders or other groups are rightfully associated with the the alt-right, the Klu Klux Klan or the lunatic fringe.

Until they start teaching at public universities.

In today’s clip, a group of concerned Florida Atlantic students confront professor Marshall DeRosa. A paid crony of the Koch brothers, DeRosa has used race-baiting language while blaming southern slavery on something called “black supremacy.” The cowardly prof tries to deny the quotes while accusing the kids of bad faith, but a well-armed student sets the record straight by reading DeRosa’s own argument out loud.

It only takes two words for the brutal truth to sink in. Click to watch youngsters chase a racist out of their classroom.

 

Posted by Adam Wasserman on Monday, April 2, 2018