More dangerous Kochtopus shit -- laundering the capture of government though Stand Together Music
"...Stand Together Music is more than just a wealthy, middle-aged heir’s pet project [Chase Koch].
Gibson and other critics claim it allows Koch and his allies to co-opt pop musicians, young music fans and other hard-to-reach constituencies into a conservative political movement whose ultimate aims include dismantling the government’s ability to regulate polluting corporations like Koch Industries.
Stand Together Music, which appears to have launched in 2022, lists as its official partners the likes of the pop-punk rapper Machine Gun Kelly, the electronic duo the Chainsmokers and the Miami rapper Pitbull. “The result is that these musicians are being used to launder the reputation of Koch Industries, whether they know it or not,” said Gibson.
On a section of its website devoted to “free speech and peace”, the organization features an interview filmed earlier this year with Tom Morello, the former guitarist for Rage Against the Machine. “Watch him discuss how RATM has made a career of speaking out about the issues they care about,” the site explains.
It’s a bizarrely generic way to describe Rage Against the Machine’s politics. Morello has aligned himself with leftist causes like Occupy Wall Street and freeing the Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier from prison, as well as assailing capitalism’s role in “the impending environmental crisis”. So it might seem odd that he’s being championed by a music organization linked to a conglomerate that owns oil refineries, pipelines and petrochemical facilities and is a top greenhouse gas polluter in the US.
Representatives for Machine Gun Kelly, the Chainsmokers, Pitbull and Tom Morello did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
In a statement sent after this story was first published, Stand Together Music said it was “honored to partner with incredible musicians who share our passion for solving problems holding people back” and that music brought people together in “today’s polarized world ... “The artists we work with have the ability to elevate meaningful solutions to problems like addiction, criminal justice, mental health by getting involved with incredible nonprofits around the country.”
Charles Koch, with a net worth of about $60bn, is among the top 25 richest people in the world. For decades, he and his late brother David used their immense wealth to fight environmental regulations and pull US politics to the right. From 1997 to 2018, they gave more than $145m to conservative groups, such as the Manhattan Institute, that have a record of attacking climate solutions and denying that a climate emergency exists, according to Greenpeace calculations.
The Kochs founded the political advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, which in the late 2000s played a lead role in catalyzing the Tea Party, a populist movement that elected dozens of hard-right Republicans to Congress and arguably helped create the conditions for Donald Trump to be elected president in 2016.
This sprawling political operation was previously coordinated under an umbrella group called the Seminar Network (referred to by some critics as the “Kochtopus”). Its organizers cited as a major accomplishment pushing the Trump administration to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, according to private documents obtained by the Intercept and Documented.
But Koch publicly feuded with Trump on issues such as the Muslim ban. And during Trump’s presidency, he renamed his network of rich donors, political influence groups and conservative advocacy operations Stand Together. This organization then began making charitable contributions to groups working on issues with modest bipartisan support, like criminal justice reform, poverty and addiction, with Koch signaling in 2019 at a gathering of supporters in Palm Springs that he wanted to move away from partisan politics.
How much Koch actually meant that is debatable.
One of Stand Together’s members continues to be Americans for Prosperity, which during the 2020 election spent nearly $48m to help Republican candidates, according to the watchdog group Open Secrets; it spent an additional $69m during the 2022 election cycle.
Supporting bipartisan social causes while helping elect Republicans is all part of the same political strategy, said Lisa Graves, executive director of the watchdog organization True North Research.
She cited as an example Koch’s support for a sentencing reform bill known as the First Step Act, which was signed into law by Trump in 2019. That year, Americans for Prosperity went on tour with a Black man named Marshall Charles who was released from prison due to the law. Charles spoke at a Black church in Wisconsin, a state where Americans for Prosperity subsequently mailed nearly 2m flyers supporting the 2022 re-election campaign of the Republican senator Ron Johnson. “What they got out of [the criminal justice reform bill] was some access into the African American community, which advances their political game,” Graves said...
Stand Together network is meanwhile pursuing its more nakedly self-interested goals. At a 2022 panel discussion, video of which was previously shared with and reported on by the Guardian, strategists said they were quietly supporting cases before the US supreme court intended to overturn a legal doctrine known as the Chevron deference, which would weaken the power of federal agencies to craft regulations. That could make it harder for the US government to fight the climate crisis. “You won’t see them actually directly litigating on that case,” one panelist said of an advocacy organization funded by Stand Together. “But they’ve done a lot of work behind the scenes....”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/07/koch-family-stand-together-music?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR3Z-bQDp8oF6KQ8eI4nvE-wDnzl5Q917HvMrYBiXkUTQZOR1AcUW4QF8jo
