tagged w/ Koch Brothers
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By David Edwards
Friday, October 7, 2011
ABC News caught David Koch leaving his Park Avenue apartment this week, but the tea party billionaire quickly fled to his car, avoiding questions about a scandal involving his company’s trade with Iran.
A recent report in Bloomberg Markets magazine revealed that Koch Industries had been caught paying bribes to win contracts, engaging in possibly-illegal trade with Iran, price fixing, and ignoring environmental regulations.
The magazine also uncovered a Koch Industries document admitting that they had violated federal law.
“It’s a document right there on the record, right out of the lips of Koch Industries,” Bloomberg Markets reporter David Evans told ABC News.
“I think there are enough of these payments that I think any prosecutor would want to look further,” Columbia University Law School professor John Coffee explained.
“The only issue that I think Koch has by way of defense is showing that these payments were never authorized, encouraged or ratified by the parent company, but were only done by the foreign subsidiary.”
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/10/07/david-koch-dodges-abc-news-over-iran-scandal-question/
Watch this video from ABC’s Good Morning America, broadcast Oct. 7, 2011.
“I think there are enough of these payments that I think any prosecutor would want to look further,” Columbia University Law School professor John Coffee explained.
"I am sure Eric Holder must be too busy, but I guess we shall see!!!"By David Edwards
Friday, October 7, 2011
ABC News caught David Koch leaving his... more
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Here is what OCCUPY WALL ST is doing:
The declaration of the occupation of New York City, the first official statement from the occupation, leads with the need “to express a feeling of mass injustice.” You could hardly come up with a better elucidation of that injustice than the fact that social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security and welfare are being offered up for cuts, while the richest people and corporations aren’t asked to contribute. Corporatism and massive inequality is the core grievance of this occupation, and of the dozens of smaller movements we’ve seen over the past year. They are connected in spirit and sentiment. And maybe the bill of particulars is variegated, some might say “unfocused.” But everything on that list springs from that core grievance.
And the only call to action, at the end, is one of greater civic participation:
We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.
Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.
To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.
Join us and make your voices heard!
That’s a message that can build and grow something quickly. And we’re already seeing that, mass arrests notwithstanding. Major trade unions and labor leaders are taking the side of OccupyWallStreet and providing reinforcements. The culture has already created the narrative that the protesters are plugging into. A series of direct actions, many of which were already planned weeks ago, have picked up the “Occupy” branding and are rolling out across the country, with 100,000 people signed up on Facebook to support them. Even major media types have understood that this is something not only to be studied, but to be celebrated.
http://tinyurl.com/3n5fkenHere is what OCCUPY WALL ST is doing:
The declaration of the occupation of New York... more
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LOrion
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A document filed with Canada's Energy Board appears to cast doubt on claims by Koch Industries that it has no interest in the keystone pipeline.A document filed with Canada's Energy Board appears to cast doubt on claims by... more
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The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur on an investigative piece in Bloomberg on the Koch Brothers.The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur on an investigative piece in Bloomberg on the Koch... more
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In May 2008, a unit of Koch Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held companies, sent Ludmila Egorova-Farines, its newly hired compliance officer and ethics manager, to investigate the management of a subsidiary in Arles in southern France. In less than a week, she discovered that the company had paid bribes to win contracts.
“I uncovered the practices within a few days,” Egorova- Farines says. “They were not hidden at all.”
She immediately notified her supervisors in the U.S. A week later, Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries dispatched an investigative team to look into her findings, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue.
By September of that year, the researchers had found evidence of improper payments to secure contracts in six countries dating back to 2002, authorized by the business director of the company’s Koch-Glitsch affiliate in France.
“Those activities constitute violations of criminal law,” Koch Industries wrote in a Dec. 8, 2008, letter giving details of its findings. The letter was made public in a civil court ruling in France in September 2010; the document has never before been reported by the media.......
Continue at:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-02/koch-brothers-flout-law-getting-richer-with-secret-iran-sales.htmlIn May 2008, a unit of Koch Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest... more
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There’s right-wing hypocrisy, and then there’s this: Charles Koch, billionaire patron of free-market libertarianism, privately championed the benefits of Social Security to Friedrich Hayek, the leading laissez-faire economist of the twentieth century. Koch even sent Hayek a government pamphlet to help him take advantage of America’s federal retirement insurance and healthcare programs.
This extraordinary correspondence regarding Social Security began in early June 1973, weeks after Koch was appointed president of the Institute for Humane Studies. Along with his brothers, Koch inherited his father’s privately held oil company in 1967, becoming one of the richest men in America. He used this fortune to help turn the IHS, then based in Menlo Park, California, into one of the world’s foremost libertarian think tanks. Soon after taking over as president, Koch invited Hayek to serve as the institute’s “distinguished senior scholar” in preparation for its first conference on Austrian economics, to be held in June 1974.
Hayek initially declined Koch’s offer. In a letter to IHS secretary Kenneth Templeton Jr., dated June 16, 1973, Hayek explains that he underwent gall bladder surgery in Austria earlier that year, which only heightened his fear of “the problems (and costs) of falling ill away from home.” (Thanks to waves of progressive reforms, postwar Austria had near universal healthcare and robust social insurance plans that Hayek would have been eligible for.)
Read More here: http://www.thenation.com/article/163672/charles-koch-friedrich-hayek-use-social-securityThere’s right-wing hypocrisy, and then there’s this: Charles Koch,... more
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The NFIB is asking the high court not only to weigh in on the law’s mandate, but also whether the entire law should fall if that provision is deemed unconstitutional. The 11th Circuit ruled against the plaintiffs on that issue and agreed with the Obama administration that the mandate is severable from the rest of the law.
http://veracitystew.com/2011/09/28/supreme-court-officially-petitioned-to-review-healthcare-law/The NFIB is asking the high court not only to weigh in on the law’s mandate, but... more
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And that’s why they’re running scared and doing everything in their power to block this movement’s purpose from reaching the awareness of the people. It’s the very last thing the monied interests want, because once that happens, their tenuous control over the country ceases to be, and that ain’t good for profits.
http://veracitystew.com/2011/09/27/occupy-wall-street-ignoring-a-growing-movement-video/And that’s why they’re running scared and doing everything in their power... more
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There are two ways of cutting a deficit: raising taxes or reducing spending. Raising taxes means taking money from the rich. Cutting spending means taking money from the poor. Not in all cases of course: some taxation is regressive; some state spending takes money from ordinary citizens and gives it to banks, arms companies, oil barons and farmers. But in most cases the state transfers wealth from rich to poor, while tax cuts shift it from poor to rich.
So the rich, in a nominal democracy, have a struggle on their hands. Somehow they must persuade the other 99% to vote against their own interests: to shrink the state, supporting spending cuts rather than tax rises. In the US they appear to be succeeding.
Partly as a result of the Bush tax cuts of 2001, 2003 and 2005 (shamefully extended by Barack Obama), taxation of the wealthy, in Obama's words, "is at its lowest level in half a century". The consequence of such regressive policies is a level of inequality unknown in other developed nations. As the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, in the past 10 years the income of the top 1% has risen by 18%, while that of blue-collar male workers has fallen by 12%.
The deal being thrashed out in Congress as this article goes to press seeks only to cut state spending. As the former Republican senator Alan Simpson says: "The little guy is going to be cremated." That means more economic decline, which means a bigger deficit. It's insane. But how did it happen?
The immediate reason is that Republican members of Congress supported by the Tea Party movement won't budge. But this explains nothing. The Tea Party movement mostly consists of people who have been harmed by tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the poor and middle. Why would they mobilise against their own welfare? You can understand what is happening in Washington only if you remember what everyone seems to have forgotten: how this movement began.
On Sunday the Observer claimed that "the Tea Party rose out of anger over the scale of federal spending, and in particular in bailing out the banks". This is what its members claim. It's nonsense.
The movement started with Rick Santelli's call on CNBC for a tea party of city traders to dump securities in Lake Michigan, in protest at Obama's plan to "subsidise the losers". In other words, it was a demand for a financiers' mobilisation against the bailout of their victims: people losing their homes. On the same day, a group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP) set up a Tea Party Facebook page and started organising Tea Party events. The movement, whose programme is still lavishly supported by AFP, took off from there.
So who or what is Americans for Prosperity? It was founded and is funded by Charles and David Koch........
Continue at:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/23-6There are two ways of cutting a deficit: raising taxes or reducing spending. Raising... more
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Forbes estimates that Tea Party petrochemical scions Charles and David Koch have a fortune of $25 billion each, making them the fourth richest Americans, behind only Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Larry Ellison. Their combined wealth of $50 billion is exceeded only by the Microsoft founder’s $59 billion fortune. Buoyed by aggressive speculative trading on volatile energy markets, the Koch brothers accumulated $15 billion in wealth since March 2010, a 43 percent increase.
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They make all of that money in speculative trading, and yet they want us to believe that our govt OVER-regulates them.Forbes estimates that Tea Party petrochemical scions Charles and David Koch have a... more
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Obviously, this new “academy” values the welfare of the corporate interest over the interests of the individual voter and seeks limit corporate losses suffered through lawsuits and punitive damages, and it was launched by the right-wing Law and Economics Center at George Mason University, which means, as an educational institution, it maintains a special exemption from the House Ethics Rules on banning gifts to elected officials
http://veracitystew.com/2011/09/21/the-brothers-koch-educating-our-elected-leaders-video/Obviously, this new “academy” values the welfare of the corporate interest... more
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By Lee Fang on Sep 15, 2011 at 11:30 am
Last month, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) leaked confidential data about oil speculation to a number of media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal. Ordinarily, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the regulatory body that oversees futures trading, does not provide identities of speculators to the public. However, the data leaked by Sanders provides a rare snapshot into the trading volumes by major speculators right before the oil price spike in the summer of 2008.
As experts from Stanford University, Rice University, the University of Massachusetts, and authorities have concluded, rampant oil speculation was the prime driver of the record high prices for crude oil three years ago.
To view a copy of the data, click here for documents leaked by Sanders. To view an organized spreadsheet, click here.
Notably, the top speculators are noncommercial players, meaning they are companies that simply and buy and sell crude contracts with no interest in actually refining and selling the product. Each contract in the list represents 1,000 barrels of oil. The documents show the total volume of trades made on one specific day shortly before the record high price of $148 per barrel.
The data, though revealing, still does not give a complete picture of trading strategies. Speculators invest in multiple private exchanges, and trading tactics can shift from day to day. Moreover physical plays, such as buying up large quantities of actual oil and storing it on tankers or in large containers, are still largely hidden from public view.
Tyson Slocum, an oil speculation expert at Public Citizen, reviewed the documents and spoke with ThinkProgress. He said that this data is important because it shows who the “big players are” and underscores the need for transparency and regulation in these so-called dark markets:
SLOCUM: What this tells us is who the big players are, because volume equates market share in a way, if you are driving volume, and if your volume is at a significant enough amount you become a price setter or at least a price trender where you’re going to have the effect of unilaterally influencing prices and that’s very significant. And you’ve got sort of a cascading effect, and the smaller traders are going to follow Goldman Sach and others will chase the leader, which is why Dodd Frank said Congress shall set position limits in these markets. Position limits would limit the market share, limit the positions banks could take. Dodd Frank recognizes the danger that one or two traders can have when they dominate the positions in a given market.
Professor Michael Greenberger, a former CFTC official, told ThinkProgress that the “short” positions outlined by the document might cause confusion because in many cases banks act simply as intermediaries for their clients. Critics will note the net short positions and assume incorrectly that many of these players were simply betting on prices to go down, not up. Greenberger explained that if you look closer at the data, the trading shows banks and other speculators were actually pushing the price up:
GREENBERGER: When you look at it carefully, the speculative money has all been heavily weighted in the favor of buying in the direction of the price going up. […] They go in and buy long in the regular futures market, which sends a long signal to the market, that there’s a supply problem that really doesn’t exist. To keep their long bets in place, they have to do something called the “Goldman Roll,” which is these contracts don’t go on forever. They expire. So what they have to do is sell short to get out of the contract when the expiration takes place, then roll around and buy long again to keep the long bet on the books. So the long bets are predicated on intermediate short bets, that are canceled out within three or four days of each other.
Regardless of the actual trading strategies, the volume makes clear that not only were Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, as well as pension and sovereign wealth funds, among the top participants in the oil speculation bubble, but so were politically connected hedge funds. Elliott Management, one of the top hedge funds revealed by the documents, is led by Paul Singer, a billionaire investor and a major donor to Karl Rove’s network of attack groups and to Republicans on the Financial Services Committee.
As we have discussed on this blog, “all the major oil companies (Shell, BP, Occidental, etc) operate like Wall Street investment banks and use their privileged position in the oil market to make speculative bets on the price of oil.” An accidental leak of private Chevron data two months ago confirmed that the company relied on sophisticated speculation strategies, just as much as drilling and refining oil, to make a profit. This data seems to confirms that Koch Industries — a conglomerate that has admitted that it is among the top five oil speculators in the world — participates in the oil speculation market on the level of big banks.
The Dodd-Frank law passed last year contains a mandate that the CFTC crack down on rampant oil speculation by imposing position limits to curb the number of contracts held by participants in this market. As lobbying firms have spent months fighting these new rules, it is instructive to note that the biggest players 2008 oil price spike have also flooded campaign coffers of DC politicians, potentially hoping for influence in shaping these rules or weakening the CFTC’s hand (through budget cuts and other limitations). MapLight has compiled the campaign donations for some of the largest speculators revealed by Sanders’ leak, which can be viewed on this spreadsheet.
For more on Koch Industries’ role in deregulating the oil speculation market, carving out the infamous loopholes, and actually inventing the first oil derivatives, view our report here.By Lee Fang on Sep 15, 2011 at 11:30 am
Last month, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)... more
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In case you haven’t heard, the 2012 presidential election is already over and the Republicans stole it. Both Rolling Stone and Mother Jones report this week that those wascally Wepublicans have already walked away with the ballot boxes.
The Rolling Stone piece (Sept. 15, 2011) finds evidence of an “unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008.” Comparing the Republican efforts to suppress the vote to the Jim Crow-era poll taxes and literacy tests erected by Dixiecrats, writer Ari Berman claims that a “dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting.” By “obstacles” Berman means new laws requiring proof of citizenship in Kansas and Alabama; the repeal of Election Day voter registration in Maine; shortened early voting periods in Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia; and the presentation of government-issued ID before casting ballots in Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin, as well as other new voting measures.
As clampdowns go, these measures seem too anemic to support the Rolling Stone‘s hysterical headline, “The GOP War on Voting,” but it is no journalistic crime to over-promise and under-deliver on a piece, especially a political piece.
Mother Jones’s less wiggy article, by Nick Baumann, explains how Pennsylvania’s Republican state legislators are “pushing a scheme” to change the way the state’s Electoral College votes are cast from winner-take-all to winner by congressional district (two votes would go to the state-wide contest winner). The horror of the plan, Baumann writes, is that it’s legal. It’s also constitutional—Nebraska and Maine cast their votes this way, he writes, and it could cost President Barack Obama a second term in a close election.
Whatever might be said about these charges, they are certainly not “unprecedented.” Fears of a stolen election are as old as American politics and as contemporary as the last big contest. In 2008′s third presidential campaign debate, John McCain declared that ACORN was “now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” In October 2008, Rolling Stone published a feature whose thesis was similar to the current piece, titled “Block the Vote: Will the GOP’s campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president?” By the time the froth on both sides dried, nobody uncovered evidence of either an ACORN or Republican coup d’etat.
At the risk of sounding like the moderating voice of reason, I’d like to point out that the Republican efforts to “suppress the Democratic vote” aren’t quite as demonic and unfair as Rolling Stone makes them out to be. Of course, Republicans want as few potential Democratic voters to cast ballots as possible, and will shout “Vote fraud!” if that makes their case more persuasive. That’s politics. Democrats want as many potential Democratic voters to cast ballots as possible, and they don’t particularly care if those Democrats are double registered or otherwise ineligible as long as nobody finds out. That’s politics, too, a point that historian Alexander Keyssar makes repeatedly in the 2006 2000 book The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States.
Any effort to uncouple politics from the way that voters are registered, votes are cast, and votes are counted is foolhardy, because the whole enterprise is political and always has been. “Federalists and then Whigs tended to favor longer periods of residence,” Keyssar writes of politics in early 19th century America, “because they were wary of the unsettled and the poor and suspected that most transients would vote for Republicans or Democrats. The Democrats shared this analysis, advocating shorter residency requirements in the hope of enfranchising more of their own supporters.”
Rolling Stone makes a big deal out of the fact that the feds convicted only 86 people of voter fraud between 2002 and 2007. But the lack of prosecution doesn’t mean widespread voter fraud doesn’t exist. In 2004, journalist Bill Gifford compiled these hilarious examples of non-partisan voter fraud for Slate.
The Orlando Sentinel found that 68,000 Florida voters are also registered in Georgia or North Carolina (the only two states it checked), 1,650 of whom voted twice in 2000 or 2002. The Kansas City Star discovered 300 “potential” cases of individual voter fraud, including Kansans voting in Missouri and St. Louisans voting in both the city and the surrounding suburbs.
At the risk of sounding like a Republican, I direct you to the data collected by the United States Elections Project at George Washington University, which indicates that “suppressing” the potential Democratic vote in such Electoral College vote-rich states as California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois could be a worthy, democratic initiative. According to the Elections Project, almost 20 percent of the voting-age population in California in 2006 was ineligible to vote because of their lack of citizenship or other reasons. In Texas, the figure was 16.34 percent; in Florida, 13.47 percent; in New York, 13.21 percent; in Illinois, 9.72 percent. In the average state, about 7 percent of its voting-age population is ineligible to vote.
So when Republicans deploy their “suppressive” measures in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois—and other places in which the ineligible are found in profusion—you can make like a Democrat and complain that their efforts are disenfranchising whole populations that have a right to vote. Or you can make like a Republican and claim that the GOP is protecting the sanctity of votes cast by the eligible by making it harder for the ineligible to register.
Or, you can make like the moderating voice of reason—me—and have it both ways, simultaneously supporting and protesting the Republicans’ war on voting.
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Disclosure: The 2011 Rolling Stone article notes that the Koch brothers help fund the American Legislative Exchange Council, which designs legislation “to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.” I worked for almost three years in the early 1980s for Inquiry magazine, which was funded by the Kochs. Cast your ballot for or against this piece with email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. This hand-built RSS feed rings every time a Shafer correction is filed.
PHOTO: Voters cast their ballots at the Super Suds laundry in Long Beach, California November 2, 2010. REUTERS/Phil McCartenIn case you haven’t heard, the 2012 presidential election is already over and... more
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by Jon Ber
Al Jazeera published this week a fantastic interactive-map that illustrates vividly, how wide, thus dangerous, is Murdoch's News Corp.
As someone who considers Rupert Murdoch to be the most destructive force on Earth, Koch brother second, I find a great comfort in the knowledge, that at last, the UK parliament has opened News Crop's Pandora's box.
Even Rupert Murdoch can't stop the 10 current separate criminal investigations against News Corp and his family members.
And while the sheer magnitude of Murdoch's media empire, guaranteed his political dominance at end of the 20th century, the 21st century cyber revolution, is sure to put an end to that.
View Map here: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/interactive/2011/07/2011719163156896567.htmlby Jon Ber
Al Jazeera published this week a fantastic interactive-map that... more
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The right-wing billionaire Koch Brothers held a secret retreat for rich conservatives in Colorado. Charles Koch was caught comparing president Obama to killed 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden.The right-wing billionaire Koch Brothers held a secret retreat for rich conservatives... more
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By Stephen C. Webster
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011 -- 2:52 pm
In states where a photo identification is required to vote, Republican lawmakers have been able to avoid legal challenges to the rule by giving away free voter ID cards, thereby ducking the label of a "poll tax."
But in Wisconsin, which recently passed one of the nation's most restrictive voter ID laws, another roadblock exists: ignorance.
A leaked memo written by a high-ranking Wisconsin Dept. of Transportation official stipulates that DMV workers are not to offer the voter ID, leaving it to the patron to explicitly ask for the free ID, then fill out the proper paperwork.
"While you should certainly help customers who come in asking for a free ID to check the appropriate box, you should refrain from offering the free version to customers who do not ask for it," Steve Krieser, executive secretary for the Wisconsin Dept. of Transportation, wrote to employees.
Signage which was supposed to notify DMV patrons of the new voting rules is also missing in action, still being designed, according to The Capital Times.
After passage of the voter ID law, Gov. Scott Walker (R), pictured above, called for the closure of as many as 16 DMV offices, mainly in Democratic-leaning areas. After intense public backlash, he reversed himself, expanding the DMV and adding operating hours in some offices to accommodate increased demand for ID cards -- at a cost of $6 million over the previously allotted budget.
Democrats argue that voter ID laws are unnecessary due to a complete lack of evidence of any organized voter fraud scheme. They say it unfairly targets students, the poor and the elderly, who are more likely to not have a photo ID and also tend to support Democrats over Republicans.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/09/07/wisc-dept-of-transportation-official-orders-workers-not-to-offer-voter-ids/
"Will they be asking for your Birth Certificate next???"By Stephen C. Webster
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011 -- 2:52 pm
In states where a... more
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