America's Greediest: Koch Brothers, 'Libertarians' Who Hate the Free Market

By Jason Sattler, The National Memo

28 December 13

mong the most venerable Yuletide traditions is the annual appeal on behalf of the "neediest cases," which has spread nationwide since it first appeared in the New York Times so long ago.

More than a century later we still have the poor with us, of course, and the rich, not to mention the unspeakably super-duper-rich – many of whom comport themselves in ways that likewise provoke public concern, especially in an era of growing inequality and impoverishment.

National Memo editor-in-chief Joe Conason believes the time has come to revive a somewhat less charitable tradition that he and his late colleague, the great progressive journalist Jack Newfield, established at The Village Voice during an earlier era of avarice: "The Greediest Cases."

This holiday season we will feature a series of profiles of America's Greediest Cases, and we encourage readers to nominate deserving public figures in the worlds of business, government, media, entertainment, and sports who exemplify the grasping materialism and rank hypocrisy of our time.

Imagine this.

You and your brother are tied as the fourth richest person in America with $36 billion in assets each, the fruits of owning the second largest privately owned corporation in the world. How would you spend your spare time and money?

Perhaps you'd donate millions to medical research, public television and the arts. Or maybe you'd dabble in politics and try to expose the "Science of Liberty" and economic freedom to help "the most vulnerable."

That's what the Koch Brothers do. And how are they helping the most vulnerable?

By attempting to rid the public of programs like Social Security, which has kept more Americans out of poverty than anything the government has ever done.

While the Kochs insist that their goal is freedom, their agenda seems entirely based on policies that increase economic inequality and make it easy for carbon polluters like Koch Industries to continue their unfettered domination of energy markets.

Perhaps the best example of the Kochs' hypocrisy comes in their war on solar power.

While the Kochs spent millions to try to put politicians in office who have vowed to never raise taxes on the rich or anyone, the billionaires are aiding efforts to "tax the sun" in an effort to squash the nascent solar industry.

One of the main benefits of powering your home or business via solar cells, especially in a state like Arizona, is a process known as "net metering," which allows you to sell excess wattage back to the utility. While the virtue of using a renewable resource that is essentially carbon-neutral is a decent selling point, it's the economic value of net metering that has fueled Arizona's solar boom and made it the top solar state per capita.

This boom hasn't pleased Arizona Public Service (APS), which stands to lose as much as $2 billion over the next 20 years if solar adoption continues at the current pace. That's why the state's largest electricity provider has been fighting for new regulations that would raise the cost of solar by $50-$100 a month, effectively killing the benefits of net metering. And APS has been waging this battle with some very powerful allies.

Guess who?

Why would the Koch brothers be interested in a small regulatory battle in Arizona?

Because it isn't just about Arizonans reaping the unique benefit of living in a desert. It's about freedom! The freedom of carbon polluters everywhere to make massive profits at the expense of the environment.

As the decision of the Arizona Corporation Commission neared, the state was hit with a series of ads ironically decrying the solar industry's dependence on "corporate welfare" and comparing the solar businesses in the state to Solyndra, which is conservative for "something that makes me mad for some reason."

An APS spokesman denied that they were funding the ads because they were funding them indirectly, through a consultant. The Kochs could also deny that they were funding the effort to tax the sun, because they weren't funding the effort directly. Instead, the dirty work was being done by The 60 Plus Association, which models itself as the conservative alternative to AARP.

The brothers help fund The 60 Plus Association through another shadowy organization known as Freedom Partners, which gave $15.7 million to the group last year. And that wasn't the only way they were involved in the fight in Arizona.

"APS appears to be leading the first assault of a national campaign by the utility industry trade association, Edison Electric Institute (EEI), and fossil fuel interests like APS, to weaken net metering policies," notes the Energy & Policy Institute's Gabe Elsner. The EEI is trying to push "model legislation" that saps the benefits of solar in several states through the American Legislative Exchange Council, another Koch-supported group. The State Policy Network, another Koch-supported "nonprofit," is trying to roll back renewable energy credits in several states.

The New Yorker's Jane Mayer helped popularize the term "Kochtopus" to define the Kochs' ideological network. It's so vast and cloaked in vagaries of election law that we truly have no idea how vast their influence is.

But we do know that again and again, these titans of industry are trying to crush renewable energy, even when it has Tea Party support, and it's rare if they have to get a Koch Industries lobbyist directly involved. Often they're trying to roll back breaks for non-carbon-based energy companies, while taking no such stand against the billions in government help the oil industry benefits from, but they're even willing to pursue new regulations if it suits their needs, which led The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur to say, "…the Koch brothers hate the free market."

The good news is that in Arizona they lost, mostly. Regulators voted to impose a $5 monthly fee on net metering, a fraction of what APS and The 60 Plus Association wanted.

The solar industry in Arizona survived this time, despite the Kochs' best efforts.