The tape shared by The Undercurrent with The Nation illustrates how gubernatorial candidates appealed for the blessing not just of the Kochs but of the network of wealthy donors that can provide support both for specific campaigns and for "independent" projects such as a primary-season ad blitz highlighting Walker s endorsement of Arizona s Ducey. As Ducey told the Koch brothers summit on June 16, I can t emphasize enough the power of organizations like this. Why does the Koch power matter so much? That s easy. The policies that governors like Walker have outlined and implemented are not popular. Despite an $18 million investment by the RGA and its allies in Walker s Wisconsin experiment, Cox acknowledged at the Koch summit that the governor has no easy route to re-election. "This is a race we re going to have to be engaged in right on until the end," he said of this year s race in Wisconsin, where recent polls have had Walker in a tied race or actually trailing.

Billionaire David Koch’s prime political organization, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), having failed in its $125 million quest to oust President Barack Obama, is now aiming at a slightly less sophisticated political target: victims of Hurricane Sandy.Hurricane Sandy was the second most costly in American history, leaving 100 lives lost, over $50 billion in devastation and tens of thousands of damaged or destroyed homes. Legislative efforts to help those who survived Hurricane Sandy’s wrath will reach a major stumbling block. 

Billionaire campaign donor David Koch has rarely spoken in public about the central role he has played in the election of Scott Walker as governor of Wisconsin, the defense of Walker s embattled governorship and, now, Walker s desperate attempt to defeat the recall election that more than one million Wisconsinites have demanded. Until now. And that has raised fundamental legal and political questions about the manipulation of Wisconsin politics by out-of-state billionaires

There's right-wing hypocrisy, and then there s this: Charles Koch, billionaire patron of free-market libertarianism, privately championed the benefits of Social Security to Friedrich Hayek, the leading laissez-faire economist of the twentieth century. Koch even sent Hayek a government pamphlet to help him take advantage of America s federal retirement insurance and healthcare programs.