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