Koch industries has begun a push to convince us how marvelous they are.
Lots of TV ads.
This irritates me because the Koch boys are conservative and rich and taking full advantage of the Citizens United Supreme Court Constitutional ruling allowing enormous donations to political campaigns.
They take advantage of this to buy the people we think we are electing to represent us. This is so horrendous it renders me apoplectic with rage to the point that I cannot write another word about it.
Citizens United further eroded my confidence in the ruling elite of this country by proving that even the Supreme Court can be stupid.
Even worse it hints at the possibility that they can be bought.
The Koch ad I hate says in the body of it that Koch Industries employs 60,000 American workers, which is supposed to make us kneel in supplication to these rich bastards for propping up our economy.
The statistic is true. Koch Industries also has 40,000 more employees working in sixty other countries around the world.
Think the U.S. could use 40,00 more jobs?
I know it is a global economy and I know it is cheaper to operate in other countries but that stat suggests to me other possibly non-patriotic Koch motives.
Like off shore banking.
Looked into it and found two articles. One from 2009 and one from 2014.
The Eclectic Observer is a "newsblog delivered weekly by a team of student journalists in Budapest, Hungary" (their own description).
I don't know how credible they are but consider what they reported in 2009 and see if you think there might be some truth to it.
"Public documents available on the Luxembourg government website, Legilux.lu, reveal that Koch operates a complex system of offshore companies and accounts in order to avoid paying US taxes on huge sums of corporate profits."
In 2014, ICIJ, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, reported the following:
"......................Arteva, Europe, a Koch industries company whose Swiss branch makes hundreds of millions of dollars, in interest income, pays very little tax and - mysteriously - has no staffing costs."
Koch Industries employs 60,000 workers in the United States. They want you to think they care about our economy and, even worse, about our workers.
They don't.
They care about political influence, maximizing profits, and paying as little as is legally and (maybe illegally) possible in this country in taxes.
Sound patriotic to you? Sound like they have the best interests of this country at heart? Sound like they give a damn about the welfare of the American worker?
Scumbags.
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