Bad Deeds: Koch Brothers and Other Billionaires Know What’s Best for Our Children’s Education

 

At Secret Billionaires Conference, School Teachers Are Announced as the Next Major Target – Charles and David Koch are co-owners of Koch Industries, an energy and chemical conglomerate inherited from their father that is currently America’s second-largest privately held company. To date, the brothers have spent more than $100 million supporting hard-right political campaigns and institutions. They are key funders of the movement to discredit climate science and sow doubt on the scientific consensus that human activities contribute to global warming.

The Kochs also bankrolled the fledgling tea party by making massive investments in right-wing political advocacy groups such as Americans for Prosperity. More generally, the brothers have dedicated a portion of their vast wealth—and that of their benefactors—to influencing elections across the nation and swaying public opinion on everything from health care and fracking to labor policy and government spending.

The brothers have held their biannual seminars since at least 2003, endeavoring to keep almost everything about them a secret—not just the content but also the identities of attendees and speakers, and even the locations and dates. They’ve succeeded until recently.

On the morning of June 26, Chris Christie, New Jersey’s flamboyant, tough-talking Republican governor, appeared on NBC’s Meet The Press. He then jetted out to Colorado, delivered a keynote speech at Charles and David Koch’s ultra-exclusive seminar at the Ritz-Carlton resort near Vail, and returned home the same night, all without breathing a word about his adventure to his constituents.

David Koch introduced Gov. Christie as “my kind of guy.” Christie went on to explain how he’d convinced the state’s Democratic majority leaders, against the wishes of most of their caucus, to help him slash public-sector pensions and benefits. And he drew a bead on his next major target: public-school teachers and their union. “That’s where we head next,” Christie said. “We need to take on the teachers’ union once and for all, and we need to decide who is determining our children’s future, who is running this place. Them or us? I say it’s us.”

Christie also said, “We’re going to have to reduce Medicare benefits. We’re going to have to reduce Medicaid benefits. We’re going to have to raise the Social Security age. We’re going to have to do these things. We’re going to have to cut all types of other government programs that some people in this room might like.”

Previous Koch seminars have featured “such notable leaders” as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), and Reps. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Mike Pence (R-Ind.). Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas also have attended.

Several GOP governors made it to the Vail seminar in June, among them Florida’s Rick Scott, Virginia’s Robert McDonnell, and White House hopeful Rick Perry of Texas. News of the event slipped out after McDonnell put the trip on his weekend schedule; neither Perry nor Scott initially disclosed the trip to their constituents. A Perry spokesman acknowledged his attendance only after the Austin American-Statesman tracked the tail number of a plane belonging to one of the governor’s top donors from Texas to Colorado. He described the summit as a “private gathering of business leaders.”

(Some of you may remember from the 1960s and 70s that school teachers were a favorite target of the Viet Cong. Education has always been the enemy of tyrants. – JLV)

Regards,

Jim