Not only were they not, the reports in the U.S. is that they've kept their money on the sidelines in the current U.S. Presidential contest (to date). I think this is part of the reason why claims of bias in reporting are legitimate.
The Guardian has an editorial perspective and that doesn't get left behind on opinion pages. Why not implicate the Kochs in a story like this if you already have a set of opinions about them which would have them fit nicely here? You achieve guilt by association and you reinforce the notion that they are part of this evil cabal that you desire to lump them in with anyway... and you're more agreeable readers will cheer simply cheer you, rather than ask about any pesky facts that really tie them in with subject at hand.
"The political network overseen by the conservative billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch plans to spend close to $900 million on the 2016 campaign, an unparalleled effort by coordinated outside groups to shape a presidential election that is already on track to be the most expensive in history."
"In 2012, the Kochs’ network spent just under $400 million, an astonishing sum at the time. The $889 million spending goal for 2016 would put it on track to spend nearly as much as the campaigns of each party’s presidential nominee."
Budget was revised downwards in October 2015, likely due to the unpredictable nature of the GOP nomination and the Trump "phenomenon":
"Billionaire Republican Charles Koch said the Koch-backed network of political network of donors will spend $750 million on politics over two years, a significant amount less than the nearly $900 million expected."
"He chalked it up to people not contributing the way they expected."
> the reports in the U.S. is that they've kept their money on the sidelines in the current U.S. Presidential contest (to date).
They haven't endorsed a specific candidate yet, but they spent something like $400 million in 2015 and are planning on spending another $900 million this year. I'd say that's not exactly money on the sidelines.
I never said they don't spend and I do expect them to spend... but the context of the statement matters and until they do spend... they haven't. Moreover, political spending, even by the rich isn't necessarily bad (and I don't think it should be legally curtailed, even when it is). It all depends on what they are supporting. I suspect that I support what the Kochs will say with their money (note this is a highly qualified endorsement and may change depending on the specifics).
For example, I wonder if Soros, a 1%er that is also known for dedicating some degree of his wealth to political advocacy last I heard. I suspect that the Guardian largely agrees with his advocacy and thus would never appear in an article like this. Their goal in suggesting wasn't to point out the likelihood of spending as a fact, but rather to suggest they would use their spending for nefarious purposes... without even the benefit of my kind of qualification: they suggest a foregone conclusion. That's not factual reporting, that's opinion making.
And while some folks might disagree with the Koch's philosophy, they haven't done anything quite as evil as has George Soros:
In 1992, George Soros brought the Bank of England to its knees. In the process, he pocketed over a billion dollars. Making a billion dollars is by all accounts pretty cool. But demolishing the monetary system of Great Britain in a single day with an elegantly constructed bet against its currency? That’s the stuff of legends.
-- http://priceonomics.com/the-trade-of-the-century-when-george...
Many people would disagree with that statement since trading against currency manipulation on a free market is arguably much more benign than running a massive polluting enterprise for decades and funding much of the bad science behind climate denial... (aside from the evidence that the elder Koch built and ran refineries for the Nazis and the Soviets.)
Um, there's nothing remotely evil about that trade and trying to paint Soros as a bad guy in the same vein as the Koch's is rather disgusting; they aren't in the same league. Soros was doing something good there, he stopped the bank of England from manipulating their currency and forced them to accept the markets opinion of the value of it. The Koch's are literal villans, Soros is not.
This is kind of funny. You're saying that Soros should be heralded for forcing market rates, but that the Kochs are evil, because, umm, they're champions of the free market?
In any case, the information I have doesn't paint the picture the same way you do. Drawing from the same link I posted above [1]:
each country set their currency’s value in Deutschmarks. They agreed to maintain the exchange rate between their currency and the Deutschmark within an acceptable band of plus or minus 6% of the agreed upon rate. ... The British government was obligated to keep the exchange rate within 2.78 DM to 3.13 DM. ... while the people of Great Britain dealt with a recession, the government’s hands were tied; they’d just have to ride it out.
You'll note the word "obligated" there. By 1992, it wasn't their right to decide whether to follow the market or not. They were bound by international agreements to maintain the exchange rate to the Deutschmark.
Soros retorted with a different strategy: “Go for the jugular.”
If Schlesinger’s quote could be used as the catalyst for the pound to devalue, why shouldn’t today be the day it happened? Instead of slowly building up a short position against the sterling, [Soros's] Quantum Fund could short sell sterling on an unprecedented scale today. Doing so would not only help hasten the tumble of the sterling, but also increase the fund’s profit.
It was this decision to “go for the jugular” that netted Soros’s firm over a billion dollars, toppled the Bank of England’s currency regime, and ultimately led to the disgrace of the Prime Minister. It also cost the British taxpayers billions.
...
As Europe slept, Soros borrowed and sold pounds from anyone that he could. The Quantum Fund’s position exceeded $10 billion shorting the pound. Other hedge funds got wind of the the trade and the report from the Bundesbank and started following suit, also borrowing and selling pounds.
By the time London markets opened for business and British treasury officials started their day, tens of billions of pounds had been sold and the the pound was dangerously close to trading below the levels mandated by the ERM.
The Bank of England was about to have a very shitty day.
...
At 7:30 PM that night, Lamont held a news conference to announce that Britain would be exiting the ERM and floating its currency on the market. Soros and the speculators won.
So this wasn't some inevitable disaster. Soros largely caused the problem, manipulating the market by shorting 15 Billion GBP. In a market that was already shaky, Soros was the one to kick the animal spirits (to steal a Keynes meme) into action. It was likely that something would have happened, but Soros maximized the damage for his own profit.
No he didn't, Soros exposed the problem of pegging a currency to an exchange rate they couldn't hold; a problem created by the Bank of England. You seem to think quoting an article you just read is educating me, it isn't; I'm a trader, Soros billion dollar trade is legendary among traders, I've known about it for years and you're clearly not educated in what he did or what it means. The problem here was the Bank of England pegging the currency, not Soros profiting from their inability to maintain that peg. The bad guy here is the Bank of England, not Soros.
And no, the Koch's are evil because they actively spend enormous amounts of money doing everything they can to destroy the political process and suppress votes, destroy the planet and deny climate change, and just generally prove themselves to be utterly disgusting and repugnant human beings who only care about maintaining their own power. They are the literal personification of the evils of excessive wealth.
Nor are the Koch's by any standard champions of the free market. The Koch's are crony capitalists eager to spend their billions messing with the political process to gain favor and legal protections for their businesses. This isn't championing a free market by any stretch of the imagination.
You won't find Soros doing that shit. Shit you're trying to sell his trading as being bad precisely because you can't find much else to call him bad for despite the fact that his billion dollar trade is in no way him being bad.
I'm not accusing the person you responded to of it since he clearly doesn't know that much about the history of trading, but there was certainly a whole lot of "evil Jew broke the bank" innuendo around Soros's trade as well. Soros couldn't have broke the bank by himself, there were billions of additional dollars pouring into the short since it was long clear that the BoE couldn't maintain the peg, but only Soros is singled out.
Yea, people are just ignorant of the details and think "billion dollar trade" sounds bad. As if one guy could bring down a whole country because he just wanted to.
You seem to think quoting an article you just read is educating me
It's true that my knowledge of trading is from my personal experience in my own investments.
However, you're exhibiting precisely the same kind of blinders about the Kochs. It's clear that you don't understand their political positions, or exactly what they've done, you're just jumping on the partisan bandwagon.
while the economy was melting down and U.S. banks were going broke, Koch Industries was moving corporate money out of the country and into the Luxembourg jurisdiction in order to dodge taxes and move nearly $1 billion around a Byzantine maze in order to ultimately cancel the debt and not impact balance sheets
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. Out of his Kansas office, Global Tax Director for Koch Industries, Craig M. Munson, manages these offshore corporations with the assistance of a shady Luxembourg company, ATOZ s.a., whose partners are primarily former Arthur Anderson staffers – the tax advisory giant that ceased to exist as a result of their felony conviction in the Enron “off-shore and off-balance sheet” debt scandal of 2002.
Moreover, I'm pretty sure that the Kochs despise Trump. So why did the OP stuff them into the article? And why does the left side of the political spectrum vilify the Kochs, while still seeing nasty people like George Soros [1] as philanthropes.
I doubt very seriously t least Charles would even consider this. He's too big a target.
Those guys are , if anything, living with the ghost of their father. Charles comes off like The Big Lebowski ( wheelchair Jeff ) only much more for real. My parents are Silent Generation and that's how they thought.
The "Koch" tropes in media are largely fabricated. I'm not a fan, just disappointed in the reporting.
