Today's Must Read

Mother Jones has an article describing the sordid history of the the Koch family's involvement in politics, The Making of the Kochtopus.  (Also, they have a fairly complete list of their web of shell organizations here.)

These people have been a cancer on the American body politic for half a century:

The John Birch Society likes to point out that its members were tea partiers before the tea party existed. And indeed, some of today's conservative fears—from a socialist president to a United Nations-driven "one-world government"—wouldn't have sounded out of place in the early 1960s, when Birch Society leader Robert Welch commanded a right-wing movement that Republican establishmentarians viewed as a mortal threat.

The connective tissue linking the Birchers of the past to today's tea partiers meanders through the libertarian movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and de

tours into the tobacco wars of the 1980s and the Hillarycare battle of the 1990s. At the nexus of this throughline is the Koch family, which for more than six decades has helped to finance and cultivate the ideological uprising that has now, at long last, established itself at the very heart of Republican power.

Patriarch Fred Koch—a leader of the successful effort to make Kansas a right-to-work state in the late 1950s—was a founding member of the John Birch Society. Fred was in the room the day in 1958 when Welch addressed a small group of prominent conservatives to plan a movement that would place its weight on "the political scales in this country as fast and as far" as possible. Charles Koch, a Birch Society member like his father, would later join a group of fellow Birchers committed to growing the Freedom School, a Colorado-based educational center founded by a controversial libertarian guru named Robert LeFevre.

Through the Freedom School—which taught free-market dogma and whose leader postulated that any rights the government conferred, it had first robbed you of—passed many of the luminaries who founded the modern libertarian movement, not least of them Charles and David Koch. Together, the brothers would go on to play a pivotal role in bringing the libertarian ideology (a "radical philosophy," Charles readily admitted) to the masses.

 They have been very evil for a very long time.