By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 30, 2025 ~
Donald Trump and Charles Koch
Aren’t Republicans the candidates who got elected promising to bring down the spiraling U.S. debt and annual deficits? Yesterday, the national debt clocked in at $37 trillion as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report showing that President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” would add $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
Donald Trump has been a master of Orwell’s reverse-speak throughout his life. So when he labels federal legislation “Beautiful” when it actually gives massive tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans while cutting critical food and health care benefits to the poor and middle class, Americans should finally accept that they have a clear window into the soul and sociopathy of multi-billionaire Donald Trump.
Among the biggest winners, of course, is the fossil fuel industry and the political kingpin of that industry, Charles Koch, whose fortune is estimated by Forbes to be $67.5 billion.
Perhaps because of the scorched-earth attack taken by Charles Koch to the investigative reporting of The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer on his and his brother David’s activities, corporate media seems reticent to link Koch with Trump.
That has not been the case here at Wall Street On Parade. See these titles as a tiny sampling:
The Supreme Court’s EPA Decision Is One More Win for Charles Koch’s Dystopian America
Now, the details of what exactly is in that “Big Beautiful Bill” that Donald Trump wants to ram through Congress are coming to light and it’s obvious that the fossil fuel billionaires are having their way with Trump once again.
Last week, as Northeast cities and towns were setting ungodly heat records of more than 100 degrees, thanks to the dangerous heating of the planet from fossil fuels (in what should have been the blissful days of springtime weather) Trump was yelling in all caps on his propaganda/vanity platform (known ironically as Truth Social) for the Department of Energy to “DRILL, BABY, DRILL!!! And I mean NOW!!!”
It is frightening enough that a 34-count convicted felon has gained control of the Oval Office, the U.S. military, the Republican majority in Congress, and has put his grossly conflicted loyalists in charge of federal law enforcement and regulatory agencies, but now it appears that Trump actually believes the DOE – a regulatory agency – has the power to order private industry to “DRILL, BABY, DRILL!!!” at his command – like a dictator in a communist country.
Koch’s Freedom Partners front group exhibited a very large footprint in the first Trump administration. In a document titled “Roadmap to Repeal: Removing Regulatory Barriers to Opportunity,” (more reverse-speak) the Koch front group listed the laws and regulations impacting fossil fuels that it expected to be repealed in the first 100 days of Trump’s first term as president. The Trump administration dutifully followed the demanded agenda, repealing the Paris Climate Accord to the shock of our allies; passing obscene tax cuts for the wealthy; and gutting federal regulations and the Environmental Protection Agency.
By the spring of 2018, 12 people who previously worked at Freedom Partners were working in the Trump administration. When we looked at the makeup of Freedom Partners in 2018, we found that all but one of Freedom Partners’ 9-member Board of Directors was a current or former Koch company employee. The Board Chair of Freedom Partners at that time was the same Mark Holden that was the General Counsel of Koch Industries, the fossil fuels conglomerate that has made Charles Koch a billionaire.
In September of 2022 we sent an email inquiry to the Federal Election Commission, asking the following:
“The fossil fuels conglomerate, Koch Industries, which is privately-owned by billionaire Charles Koch and the heirs of his late brother, David, owns a massive voter database, data mining, get-out-the-vote operation, etc. called i360.
“As you will see from the FEC link below, i360 is selling its services to a multitude of Republican candidates for seats in the House and Senate, as well as to PACs that in turn support those candidates.
“My question is, how is it legal for a privately-owned fossil fuels conglomerate to operate i360, effectively a more sophisticated version of the Republican National Committee.
“My second question is, how does the public know that i360 isn’t charging $50,000 for a service and providing $250,000 in actual services to the candidate that it believes will vote on behalf of the fossil fuel agenda in Congress?
“And, finally, Koch Industries and/or Charles Koch also fund various front groups, like the former Freedom Partners [Action] and the ongoing Americans for Prosperity [Action], which finance attack ads against candidates opposing Koch-supported candidates. How is this broad sweep of campaign operations legal for a sprawling, privately-owned fossil fuels conglomerate operated by a billionaire?”
The FEC responded, advising that we could file a complaint with the FEC if we felt campaign laws were being violated. The problem with that is the same entities – Charles Koch and Koch Industries – were part of a corporate network that pushed Citizens United to the Supreme Court and got an effective rewrite of campaign finance laws in 2010, so that corporations and the ultra wealthy now have a far superior advantage over average citizens when it comes to electing political candidates.
Yesterday, Thor Benson of Rolling Stone revealed the catastrophic attack on clean energy in the grotesque Big Beautiful Bill, writing as follows:
“The latest version of the bill would be particularly catastrophic for wind and solar. Republicans not only want to significantly cut tax credits for these clean energy projects, they want to impose new taxes on them for the first time…
“The latest version of the bill slashes tax credits for wind and solar projects, while offering them for coal production. ‘Utterly insane and destructive,’ Elon Musk wrote of the bill on Saturday. ‘It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.’ ”
It’s all enough to make Americans sick to their stomach. But is it enough to turn out 50 million protestors at the next “No Kings” marches?
