On my way to doing some research for another post I had planned for today, I saw a prompt from The Blogging Meetup. The topic was money and I knew I couldn’t pass up the chance.
Now, I came across a video from The Real News Network about the Koch Brothers (Charles and David), two of the wealthiest individuals in the world who inherited an oil fortune. The video, narrated by Danny Glover, was instructive and I came away from it knowing more about the Kochs than I did before.
What’s appalling (but not all that surprising in the scheme of things) was how Fred Koch (Charles and David’s father) built his fortune and what two of his sons are doing to grow it. The Kochs became rich mostly by stealing oil from Native Americans. The father, Fred, also grew his fortune by building oil refineries for Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Today, Charles and David Koch are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to affect American legislation, particularly laws governing environmental policy.
The Koch Brothers Are Buying Politicians
The Kochs are certainly going after politicians.
In this second part of Greg Palast’s interview with The Real News’ John Jay (Part 1 can be seen here), the investigative reporter gets to the heart of how Republicans grabbed power from the 1990’s on. Their rise was mostly funded by the Koch Brothers, who founded the Heritage Foundation and other organizations.
Of course, there’s more.
In future posts, I would like to discuss what the Kochs have done and what their end game is:
- The Koch Influence: They Want to Give Us the Worst Government Money Can Buy
- Money Rant 7: They Don’t Care About YOU (Money in Politics)
I have only published 2 money rants so far, so that’s a series I need to catch up on.
Shmaltz and Menudo 