A Match Made in Smoggy Toxic Hell: Koch and Prop 23

[Joanne98]

The secretive, many-tentacled Koch Industries has just donated a million dollars to the Yes on 23 campaign. Tesoro Industries, another Texas oil business, has matched that amount. Scorecard:

Total Contributions to date: $8,221,096

Contributions from oil interests: $7,987,995 (97% of the total)

Contributions from out of state: $7,307,995 (89% of the total)

Valero, Tesoro & Koch Industries: $6,575,000 (80% of the total)

RLMiller's diary :: ::
Proposition 23 will, if passed, suspend air pollution control laws requiring major polluters to report and reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming until unemployment drops below 5.5% for one full year. In 2006, California passed the Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32), making our state the world's leader in legislating real reductions in the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Proposition 23 aims to undo that law.

Were you ever on the fence? Did you really think that a measure to "suspend" California's landmark global warming law, bankrolled by out of state dirty energy interests and opposed by Californians from Silicon Valley tycoons to Small Business California to Latino families deserves a yes vote? The oil companies who've given 97% of the money to Proposition 23 don't give a rat's a$$ about California jobs. They certainly don't care about the existing 500,000 clean energy jobs that Proposition 23 would kill. For them, it's their out-of-state bottom line.

Koch has been operating in the shadows, bankrolling tea party activists, denying the existence of climate change, for too long. Only now, with a lengthy New Yorker piece entitled Covert Operations: the Billionaire Brothers who are Waging a War Against Obama, have they been exposed to sunshine. "From 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus." Shorter, from the LA Times

"If you combined BP’s approach to safety with Enron’s greed, you would have Koch."

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/9/3/898766/-A-Match-Made-in-Smoggy-Toxic-Hell:-Koch-and-Prop-23