The Koch Brothers’ Axi$ Of Evil
The Koch brothers are done being shy. That’s the conclusion one would have to draw from their announcement that they hope to spend $889 million on the 2016 election, an unprecedented amount of outside money.
It won’t all be theirs, however. According to The Press of Atlantic City, the super-rich siblings are assembling a kind of plutocrat Politburo, a group of billionaires and zillionaires who will contribute—but with a combined worth of over $80 billion, they’ll surely be the ones opening their wallets the widest and determining the strategy and the agenda.
But unlike some previous reporting on Charles and David Koch’s political efforts, this revelation didn’t require any secret meetings with anonymous sources to unearth. They just told everyone. The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Politico all published stories with ample details and on-the-record quotes. Reporters may not have been invited into the gathering in beautiful Rancho Mirage, Calif., of Freedom Partners—the organization through which the Kochs and their allies will distribute all these millions—but they were allowed to hang around and talk to the participants. And no fewer than four potential GOP presidential candidates (Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Sens. Rand Paul, Sen. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz) showed up as well, obviously unconcerned about any charge that they’re kowtowing to the uber-rich.