This year, CMD continued to punch above its weight in exposing the Koch political network. Our investigations revealed:
- More than half a billion spent to influence policy and politics. Charles Koch and Koch Industries control a fleet of 27 organizations that push their right-wing agenda in Washington, D.C. and universities, courts, and state houses across the country.
- The Koch’s quiet “flat tax revolution.” A decade-long push by Koch’s political and policy network to get more states to flatten or abolish income taxes is finally beginning to pay off, thanks to billions in federal Covid relief funds flowing to the states. The winners? Huge corporations and the wealthy — like Koch Industries and the Koch family — while the rest of us pick up the tab through higher sales taxes and fees.
- Koch cash bankrolling the effort to kill big tech reform. The Biden administration’s ambitious antitrust enforcement agenda — which has been focused on curbing the growing power of Big Tech — has largely been stymied thanks to intense lobbying by dark money groups funded by the donor network of Charles Koch, whose influence over antitrust legislation goes back decades.
- How Koch Industries was forced to pay $1.2 million for its latest lies after a federal regulatory agency fined its subsidiary Georgia-Pacific for abandoning a natural gas pipeline without notifying federal regulators and lying about work already completed once it did notify them. Koch Industries has been fined more than $1 billion since 2000 for environmental violations, employment-related offenses, and price fixing.
Koch and his network of billionaires operate with resources that match or exceed spending by the major political parties and drown out the voices of the rest of us.
They use that power to erode the integrity of our elections and sap taxpayer dollars away from investments in climate progress, public infrastructure, education, and healthcare to benefit narrow special interests and global corporations. And they’re going to shift into overdrive in 2024.
So please help shine a light on Koch machine influence in 2024 by making your tax-deductible gift to CMD now!
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Together we can stand up to the Koch machine and dark-money forces and win back a democracy of which we can all be proud!
Thank you for your support of CMD and all that you do,
Arn Pearson
Executive Director
