The Kochs’ Anti-Civil Rights Roots: New Docs Expose Charles Koch’s Ties to John Birch Society
The Kochs’ Anti-Civil Rights Roots: New Docs Expose Charles Koch’s Ties to John Birch Society
TRANSCRIPT
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AARON MATÉ: We turn now to "The Koch Cartel: Their Reach, Their Reactionary Agenda, and Their Record," a scathing new look at the Koch family’s role in the ultraconservative John Birch Society. The story appears in the new issue of The Progressive magazine, "Attack of the Plutocrats: The Robber Barons Issue." It zeroes in on Charles Koch’s roots with the John Birch Society and how he has since used his wealth to push a similar agenda into the mainstream.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we go to Washington, D.C. We’re joined by its author, Lisa Graves, president of The Progressive Inc., which includes the Center for Media and Democracy, also the publisher of The Progressive magazine.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Lisa. Can you lay out what these new revelations are that you have found out?
LISA GRAVES: Yes, well, thank you so much for having us on. And we’ve been doing research in archives across the country, and what we’ve discovered is not just that Fred Koch, Charles and David Koch’s father, was a member of the John Birch Society and in fact helped found it, but what we discovered in archives is that Charles Koch himself followed his father’s footsteps into the John Birch Society. And that society was a very extreme organization. It was an extreme right-wing organization that spent the '60s largely opposing the civil rights movement here in the United States. And so, these documents, some of the documents we're revealing today, talk about—are, in Charles Koch’s own words, funding for the John Birch Society, trying to support its mission. And what we’ve documented is what that means in context in the civil rights movement, how that organization was trying to stop the civil rights movement, trying to discredit it, opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposing other progress on integration of our society.
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AARON MATÉ: Lisa, your piece details this little-known political operation that the Kochs ran in 1996 called Triad. Can you talk about this?
LISA GRAVES: Sure. So, after leaving the John Birch Society and funding a number of other organizations, Charles and David Koch appear to have been involved in an operation called the Triad entity, basically, that was investigated by Congress back before smartphones and Google, and so it’s a little bit of obscure history, but in fact it’s very revealing because the Triad operation in Kansas was designed to use shell corporations, shell entities, to run ads to influence the 1996 races, federal races in this country. It was investigated by Congress. There were efforts to subpoena the people involved in Triad. One of the Republicans shut down that investigation, and later it turned out that part of that operation was largely financed by the Koch family fortune.
And if you fast-forward to just 2012, what you see is that operation on steroids, basically, through the Koch operatives who are running what’s known as Freedom Partners, which is another of these entities that basically operates a bunch of shell organizations or fuels shell groups with pop-up names, basically, to transfer cash, big cash. What we and the American people didn’t discover until almost a year after the 2012 elections was that the Koch brothers and their billionaire buddies had managed to inject nearly a quarter-billion dollars of money into the election through a group called Freedom Partners that no one outside those operatives knew even existed.
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AMY GOODMAN: So can you talk about the website that you’re releasing today, Lisa?
LISA GRAVES: Yes. So, we have created a clearinghouse called KochExposed.org that includes a number of profiles about the Koch family fortune, about some of their operations, about groups like this. This is a service, in essence, that we’re offering to the public to make sure that they can learn more about the Koch brothers. They can learn more about these groups that change their names or pop up here and there. And they can help trace the dark money that is being pushed into our elections. As was reported earlier this year, there has been an effort to increase the sophistication of that operation in the 2014 Senate races and governors’ races across the country. And so, we think it’s important for people to know who these Koch brothers are—
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/7/8/kochs_anti_civil_rights_roots
