KOCH BROTHERS’ PR CAMPAIGN
“Perhaps realizing that forty years
of heavy spending had failed to make their ideas popular (though often
successful nonetheless), the Kochs,
[Jane] Mayer reports, are undergoing a
branding makeover, launching a PR campaign
designed to appeal to the ‘middle third’ of voters who are neither conservative
or liberal. The effort to produce a ‘positive vision’ resulted in, among other
things, a ‘Well-Being Forum’ sponsored
by the Charles Koch Institute in
Washington, where the founder quoted from Martin Luther King Jr. The most
substantive part of this image-building has been a drive for criminal justice reform, in partnership with many
progressive and minority leaders concerned about mass incarceration who
advocate reform of sentencing. But late last fall the coalition began to
falter, with many complaining that the Kochs were pushing changes to the
criminal code that would make it even harder to prosecute corporate crimes—the
very crimes that, as Mayer shows, most
of the biggest players in their network have regularly engaged in.4”
[FOOTNOTE IN THE PARAGRAPH]
[“David Koch in
particular has also given generously to many charitable and cultural causes in
the New York area, ranging from the State Theater
at Lincoln Center to the Memorial Sloan
Kettering Cancer Center, although even some of these have been
called into question. In January, for instance, he stood down from the board of
the American Museum of Natural History,
saying he lacked the time for board meetings. His decision was a “symbolic
victory” for activists who had pointed out the incongruity of a climate change
denier holding the post. In a 2010 profile of David Koch
for The New Yorker, [Jane] Mayer wrote that in an entire exhibit
devoted to the theory that mankind evolved in response to climate change, “no
cause is given for this development [of climate change]…no mention is made of
any possible role played by fossil fuels.” ↩
“The Koch Brothers’ New Brand,” a review in the New York
Review [March 10, 2016; pp. 16-18] by Bill McKibben of Jane Mayer’s Dark
Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical
Right (2016).
