Why do the koch brothers hate unions

If the Supreme Court cuts off their lifeblood, it's their own fault. These organizations are front groups for their billionaire funders, which include Pennsylvania's Scaife Foundation among a handful of other dead billionaires' foundations, set up with the intentionality of obscuring who's behind them and to create right-wing political pressure networks in states.

In Pennsylvania, the state based affiliate of these legally questionable non-profits is the Commonwealth Foundation. Leading up to the hearing, a handful of talking points about the case were distributed by the State Policy Network.

These talking points state how to avoid discussing the case to best hide their true intention. In unscripted moments, looser lips let the truth slip.

Approximately 35 percent of American workers belonged to labor unions in the s, but today that number is closer to 10 percent.

This has many wondering if labor unions have become obsolete. The president of the State Policy Network, Tracie Sharp, was quoted as saying, "when you chip away at one of the power sources that also does a lot of get-out-the-vote, I think that helps," in reference to politically motivated attacks on unions.

In fact, a recent prospecting letter from the State Policy Network spelled it out more explicitly stating their goals as defunding labor unions. This is not without reason. All of these organizations have various connections to Republican politicians. An academic paper recently spelled out why the State Policy Network, and by extension Republican leadership, are so interested in anti-union laws.

I happily took the money and gave it to charities. But anyone who understands libertarianism knows I'd agree with the Kochs even if I'd never met them. They are pro-immigration, anti-drug war. They want less defense spending. They got praised by Attorney General Holder for their campaign to jail fewer people. Why is the left so mad at them? It's definitely not because they're the only big spenders in politics. Union spending dwarfs Koch spending. I wish libertarians could just pay the government to shrink.

But that's not going to happen soon. The unions, unlike the Kochs, promote economic ignorance. By the end of — a year before the presidential elections that would bring President Obama and large Democratic congressional majorities to power — Americans for Prosperity already had 58 paid staffers, including national and regional managers and paid directors in 15 states encompassing almost half the US population. Much media attention has focused on David and Charles and on the controversial history of their family.

Even the coverage of current political efforts by the brothers has tended to rivet attention on their personalities and beliefs. In fact, Charles and David have succeeded in rallying hundreds of other wealthy conservative families to support their strategic political operation. For years, many wealthy donors — including husbands with their wives — have gathered at swank resorts for the twice-a-year Koch seminars, where they listen to presentations about conservative politics and ideas and pledge funds to support the Koch political organizations.

Available data, which we have pulled together, indicates that these meetings have grown from about 17 participants in to around in early Most donors clearly give a lot more than that.

The explosive growth of the seminars shows just how important it is to think about the Koch network as the joint project of many super-wealthy conservatives determined to reshape US politics and public policy in libertarian and anti-government directions. Especially on the left, there is a strong tendency to view the Koch network as merely a political front for their privately owned corporate conglomerate, Koch Industries, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas.

Or else the network is portrayed as a somewhat broader front for many companies represented by participants in the Koch seminars. There certainly are complementarities between political organizations created and supported by the Koch brothers and their own corporate operations. Koch Industries executives and managerial methods have been loaned to the political operation, and the full array of Koch for profit and nonprofit groups concur on certain basic tenets of free-market conservatism, such as opposition to environmental regulations and unions.

However, Koch political advocacy goes beyond mere corporate self-interest. As philosophically committed libertarians, Charles and David support or encourage many causes far beyond opposing environmental and labor-market regulations. Corporate self-interest, for instance, cannot explain the fierce opposition of the Koch network to Medicare, Social Security and even the efforts of GOP governors to tap federal health reform funding to expand market-oriented forms of Medicaid in their states.

Ongoing Medicaid civil wars in the GOP pit the Koch network against local and regional chambers of commerce and medical associations that have teamed-up with Republican governors to push for acceptance of this part of Obamacare. After all, Medicaid expansion promises to infuse local economies with billions of dollars in federal funding, boosting profits and revenues for hospitals, medical businesses and health care providers. The Koch political network has also come out strongly against many other kinds of subsidies for private sector businesses — including some that Koch companies collect for themselves.

The network has pushed GOP legislators in Congress to discontinue the Export-Import Bank and has opposed business-friendly tax breaks and infrastructure funding strongly supported by the US Chamber of Commerce. In sum, while the interests of mainstream business and the Koch network are tightly aligned when it comes to reducing taxes, loosening government regulations and undercutting labor unions, the Koch network promotes a much more sweeping, ideologically inspired free-market agenda.

The Kochs, he said, deflected criticism by presenting upbeat messages. Soon afterward, she began posting them. Fink, who has a Ph.

He was an executive vice-president and a director on the board of Koch Industries, and also a board member of Americans for Prosperity. After the losses of , Fink explained, he had surveyed twenty years of research into the political opinions of moderates, including a hundred and seventy thousand surveys conducted in the United States and abroad.

His conclusion, he told the donors, was that if conservatives wanted to win over Americans they needed to change their pitch. The United States was essentially divided into three parts.

Whoever can mobilize a majority of that thirty per cent will determine the direction of the country. What did the middle third think about corporations? I grew up with pretty much very little, O. And I worked my butt off to get what I have. Unfortunately, he continued, voters in the middle third had a different reaction when they saw the poor.

The rich donors who made up the Koch network, Fink said, needed to persuade moderate, undecided voters that their intent was generous. Fink was brutally honest about how unpopular the views of his wealthy audience were. But he pointed out that if anyone in America knew how to sell something it should be the successful business leaders in the Koch network.

We want to find out what the customer wants, right? Not what we want them to buy! This posed a problem, given that the Kochs and their network opposed environmental regulation and government action on global warming, and supported privatizing Social Security and health care.

But Fink had a solution. To illustrate the power of framing free-market theories in this way, he shared an anecdote. Among the panelists was Otteson.

Lombardo, the marketing director, joined Fink and the nonprofit leaders on the panel. Of those, eighty-seven per cent were positive.

So kudos to Michael and the team. They did a great job! The Kochs received equally positive press that fall, when, in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, they began speaking publicly about the need for criminal-justice reform.