Talking Points Memo and other news outlets are reporting on Koch industry Invista telling its employees to spread the word: The Koch brothers are all about a free society, and folks who object to the billionaires’ pouring money into right-wing causes that benefit industry at a cost to the environment and people are lying.
Invista employees are being urged to spread “the truth” about the Kochs by sharing Charles Koch’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, in which he writes:
Rather than try to understand my vision for a free society or accurately report the facts about Koch Industries, our critics would have you believe we’re “un-American” and trying to “rig the system,” that we’re against “environmental protection” or eager to “end workplace safety standards” …
Please. Who does Charles Koch think he’s kidding? The critics “and their media allies,” as Koch Industries COO Dave Robertson says in the message to employees, are making it up out of whole cloth that the Kochs are huge supporters of ALEC, the right-wing pro-industry legislation mill that tells Arkansas Republicans what to think, that the Environmental Protection Agency has fined Koch for pollution violations, that the Koch money fuels climate-change deniers Americans for Prosperity, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Manhattan Institute?
Then there is brother Bill Koch, who has accused Charles Koch of stealing oil from Indian reservations and federal lands. What is the media to do? Ignore the facts and look to Charles Koch for “the truth”? Sheesh. Here’s what Politifact has to say on the Kochs’s other claims of environmental rectitude.