mick silver
6th March 2015, 11:38 AM
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/charles-koch-overcriminalization-115512.html?ml=m_pm#.VPoB1SLnYqQ
t was something of a surreal moment. Charles de Ganahl Koch, the nerdy multibillionaire from Wichita who has become known as the Rasputin of the American Right, was trying to explain to me why he was getting into bed—politically speaking—with people like George Soros, his progressive archrival in the big-money-and-politics set, and Cory Booker, the liberal black senator and former mayor of beleaguered (and very Democratic) Newark, New Jersey.
The vast apparatus of foundations, advocacy groups, corporations and think tanks that Koch oversees and supports—what his critics darkly call the “Kochtopus”—was busy this winter launching programs and initiatives aimed at reeling in the worst excesses of one of the few industries larger than his own: the criminal justice-industrial complex. Koch had decided to help pull together a new coalition (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/us/politics/unlikely-cause-unites-the-left-and-the-right-justice-reform.html) of left-right advocacy groups in Washington, including the Hillary Clinton-aligned Center for American Progress, to fight what he calls the “overcriminalization of America.” He was underwriting a documentary screening at the Newseum about Weldon Angelos, a marijuana dealer serving a 55-year sentence that even Angelos’ judge called “unjust” and “cruel”—and helping to train attorneys to aid poor people across the country. In March, Koch’s general counsel, Mark Holden, plans to join with Van Jones, a former Obama administration official who took the liberal side on CNN’s since-canceled “Crossfire,” in mounting the #Cut50 Bipartisan Summit (http://www.cut50summit.org/uploads/4/4/0/5/44056097/sponsorship_deck.pdf), which will explore strategies for reducing America’s incarcerated population by 50 percent over the next 10 years. (Jones’s old CNN adversary, Newt Gingrich, is also involved.)A passionate prairie libertarian who as a young man reportedly wouldn’t permit a friend to bring an Ernest Hemingway novel into his house because “Hemingway was a communist (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-sons-of-wichita-by-daniel-schulman/2014/05/23/4bdbd3d4-e1e1-11e3-810f-764fe508b82d_story.html)” (the friend had to leave the book on the stoop, though Koch denies this happened), the 79-year-old Koch now evinces a much more relaxed attitude toward joining up with Soros and other liberals. “The more the merrier,” he told me. “One of my heroes was Frederick Douglass. He said, ‘I would unite with anyone to do right and with nobody to do wrong.’ We’ve worked with unlikely bedfellows. … But I would say we have gotten the most support in criminal justice reform.”
To anyone who followed the past several national political campaigns, it might seem that Charles Koch had wandered through the looking glass. This is, after all, the same Charles Koch who considers Democrats to be “collectivists (http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303978304579475860515021286),” who believes that President Barack Obama uses “Marxist models (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51978.html)” and whom Harry Reid blasted on the floor of the Senate as “power-drunk (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/04/28/the-senate-was-in-session-for-7-minutes-before-harry-reid-started-attacking-the-kochs/)” and “about as un-American as anyone that I can imagine (http://articles.latimes.com/2014/feb/26/news/la-pn-harry-reid-koch-brothers-unamerican-20140226).” But when we spoke in February, Koch insisted there is nothing strange or secretive or un-American about his criminal justice campaign—it all makes perfect sense. And he explained why.
***
America’s sixth-richest person (he’s tied with brother David, according to Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2015/03/02/forbes-billionaires-full-list-of-the-500-richest-people-in-the-world-2015/?utm_campaign=Forbes&utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=social&utm_channel=Lists&linkId=12638614)), Charles Koch has never spent a day in prison. But he has seen the inside of more courtrooms than he can count. Over the decades, lawsuits and threatened prosecution nearly tore both his family and company apart, even as Koch was brilliantly building the $250 million (http://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/07/magazine/brothers-at-odds.html) oil business left him by his father, Fred, into a $115 billion (http://www.forbes.com/companies/koch-industries/) empire. What changed things for him, Koch says, was a 1995 Texas case against Koch Industries. As Koch tells it, state prosecutors pressured a Koch employee he had fired into testifying in a criminal case against four other Koch workers, saying they had covered up a chemical-pollution infraction at one of Koch’s plants. The prosecutors offered Koch a deal: Cut the four employees loose to be charged and convicted, and Koch Industries wouldn’t suffer.
It might seem that Charles Koch had wandered through the looking glass.
Koch says he directed his lawyers to fight instead. It took six long years to get the case and all 97 felony charges dropped (though Koch paid a $10 million settlement). “The whole organization was immobilized. Everybody was terrified,” he remembers. The case immediately popped to mind when I asked him what really inspired his jump into criminal justice reform. “If that can happen with us, with our resources and what we did to defend our people, what happens to people in a company that doesn’t defend them? Or even worse, to poor people who get caught in something and have no recourse?” he says. As for why now, Koch has a simple, practical answer: The politics have changed, and “now, unlike the past, we have the opportunity to bring about real change.”Critics would say that the libertarian-minded Koch brothers have ample personal reasons to want to curtail the power and reach of the U.S. justice system. After all, it serves both their industrial and political purposes to reduce laws on the books that can constrain them. Thanks to a series of court rulings opening up the floodgates for political spending by outside groups and individuals, Koch money can now do almost as it pleases in politics; the Kochtopus would obviously like to do the same in court against the tree-huggers and labor unionists who so often seek to block them.http://images.politico.com/global/2015/02/27/booker-paul.jpg
Illustration by Steve Brodner
But Charles Koch isn’t the only one who has woken up to America’s self-perpetuating, out-of-control criminal justice system—a reminder of how far the best-intentioned government programs can, when left unchecked, do as much harm as good. And so this very rich right-winger has found himself fighting alongside the likes of Booker and Soros—even as Soros and the Kochs separately prepare to spend millions of dollars (http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/koch-2016-spending-goal-114604.html) opposing each other in next year’s presidential race. Indeed, an increasingly loud clamor of activists from both the left and right, from city halls to Capitol Hill, lawmakers to lawyers, are taking aim at what both sides now term “over-incarceration” and the general unforgivingness of America’s justice system. “The use of the criminal law to solve problems has just gone too far,” says Chris Stone, president of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. “This is not about the libertarian right or the left. It’s about common sense.”READ MORE
http://images.politico.com/global/2015/03/03/1-lead_51602850-2-1160_630x342.jpg (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/jeb-bush-everglades-115655.html?ml=m_ms)
History Dept. (http://www.politico.com/p/magazine/tag/history-dept)
Jeb in the Wilderness (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/jeb-bush-everglades-115655.html?ml=m_ms)By MICHAEL GRUNWALD
http://images.politico.com/global/2015/02/25/lead_sbc_lincolnagnew_630x342.jpg (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/judicial-elections-fundraising-115503.html?ml=m_ms)
On The Bench (http://www.politico.com/p/magazine/tag/on-the-bench)
When Big Money Met the Courts (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/judicial-elections-fundraising-115503.html?ml=m_ms)By SUE BELL COBB
Reform has long been paralyzed by a sense of helplessness about changing things—a helplessness driven by decades of politics that said anything that benefited criminals could and would be used against you on Election Day. The devastating 1988 “Willie Horton” ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC9j6Wfdq3o) that accused Michael Dukakis of being soft on crime froze debate and terrified politicians for nearly a quarter century. Yet in the past year—following nationwide protests against police tactics provoked by the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York—issues of race and criminal justice reform have finally returned to the national debate, resonant in a way they haven’t been since the late 1960s. And, just as surprisingly, this odd new coalition uniting liberals with libertarians has built bipartisan momentum to actually do something.In Washington, where so much seems paralyzed by partisanship, Senate leaders like Democrat Patrick Leahy and Republican Rand Paul have found common ground, becoming partners to relieve tough sentencing guidelines and ease the way for felons to re-enter society. The legislators, in turn, are recruiting—and being boosted by—an influx of money to push the reform agenda. “Are we ramping up? We absolutely are,” says Melissa Cohlmia, chief of corporate communications at Koch headquarters in Wichita.Michael Hirsh is national editor for Politico Magazine.
Continue Reading » (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/charles-koch-overcriminalization-115512_Page2.html)
Page:
1 (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/charles-koch-overcriminalization-115512.html)
2 (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/charles-koch-overcriminalization-115512_Page2.html)
3 (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/charles-koch-overcriminalization-115512_Page3.html)
4 (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/charles-koch-overcriminalization-115512_Page4.html)
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/charles-koch-overcriminalization-115512.html#ixzz3TdVFiQdz
t was something of a surreal moment. Charles de Ganahl Koch, the nerdy multibillionaire from Wichita who has become known as the Rasputin of the American Right, was trying to explain to me why he was getting into bed—politically speaking—with people like George Soros, his progressive archrival in the big-money-and-politics set, and Cory Booker, the liberal black senator and former mayor of beleaguered (and very Democratic) Newark, New Jersey.
The vast apparatus of foundations, advocacy groups, corporations and think tanks that Koch oversees and supports—what his critics darkly call the “Kochtopus”—was busy this winter launching programs and initiatives aimed at reeling in the worst excesses of one of the few industries larger than his own: the criminal justice-industrial complex. Koch had decided to help pull together a new coalition (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/us/politics/unlikely-cause-unites-the-left-and-the-right-justice-reform.html) of left-right advocacy groups in Washington, including the Hillary Clinton-aligned Center for American Progress, to fight what he calls the “overcriminalization of America.” He was underwriting a documentary screening at the Newseum about Weldon Angelos, a marijuana dealer serving a 55-year sentence that even Angelos’ judge called “unjust” and “cruel”—and helping to train attorneys to aid poor people across the country. In March, Koch’s general counsel, Mark Holden, plans to join with Van Jones, a former Obama administration official who took the liberal side on CNN’s since-canceled “Crossfire,” in mounting the #Cut50 Bipartisan Summit (http://www.cut50summit.org/uploads/4/4/0/5/44056097/sponsorship_deck.pdf), which will explore strategies for reducing America’s incarcerated population by 50 percent over the next 10 years. (Jones’s old CNN adversary, Newt Gingrich, is also involved.)A passionate prairie libertarian who as a young man reportedly wouldn’t permit a friend to bring an Ernest Hemingway novel into his house because “Hemingway was a communist (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-sons-of-wichita-by-daniel-schulman/2014/05/23/4bdbd3d4-e1e1-11e3-810f-764fe508b82d_story.html)” (the friend had to leave the book on the stoop, though Koch denies this happened), the 79-year-old Koch now evinces a much more relaxed attitude toward joining up with Soros and other liberals. “The more the merrier,” he told me. “One of my heroes was Frederick Douglass. He said, ‘I would unite with anyone to do right and with nobody to do wrong.’ We’ve worked with unlikely bedfellows. … But I would say we have gotten the most support in criminal justice reform.”
To anyone who followed the past several national political campaigns, it might seem that Charles Koch had wandered through the looking glass. This is, after all, the same Charles Koch who considers Democrats to be “collectivists (http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303978304579475860515021286),” who believes that President Barack Obama uses “Marxist models (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51978.html)” and whom Harry Reid blasted on the floor of the Senate as “power-drunk (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/04/28/the-senate-was-in-session-for-7-minutes-before-harry-reid-started-attacking-the-kochs/)” and “about as un-American as anyone that I can imagine (http://articles.latimes.com/2014/feb/26/news/la-pn-harry-reid-koch-brothers-unamerican-20140226).” But when we spoke in February, Koch insisted there is nothing strange or secretive or un-American about his criminal justice campaign—it all makes perfect sense. And he explained why.
***
America’s sixth-richest person (he’s tied with brother David, according to Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2015/03/02/forbes-billionaires-full-list-of-the-500-richest-people-in-the-world-2015/?utm_campaign=Forbes&utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=social&utm_channel=Lists&linkId=12638614)), Charles Koch has never spent a day in prison. But he has seen the inside of more courtrooms than he can count. Over the decades, lawsuits and threatened prosecution nearly tore both his family and company apart, even as Koch was brilliantly building the $250 million (http://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/07/magazine/brothers-at-odds.html) oil business left him by his father, Fred, into a $115 billion (http://www.forbes.com/companies/koch-industries/) empire. What changed things for him, Koch says, was a 1995 Texas case against Koch Industries. As Koch tells it, state prosecutors pressured a Koch employee he had fired into testifying in a criminal case against four other Koch workers, saying they had covered up a chemical-pollution infraction at one of Koch’s plants. The prosecutors offered Koch a deal: Cut the four employees loose to be charged and convicted, and Koch Industries wouldn’t suffer.
It might seem that Charles Koch had wandered through the looking glass.
Koch says he directed his lawyers to fight instead. It took six long years to get the case and all 97 felony charges dropped (though Koch paid a $10 million settlement). “The whole organization was immobilized. Everybody was terrified,” he remembers. The case immediately popped to mind when I asked him what really inspired his jump into criminal justice reform. “If that can happen with us, with our resources and what we did to defend our people, what happens to people in a company that doesn’t defend them? Or even worse, to poor people who get caught in something and have no recourse?” he says. As for why now, Koch has a simple, practical answer: The politics have changed, and “now, unlike the past, we have the opportunity to bring about real change.”Critics would say that the libertarian-minded Koch brothers have ample personal reasons to want to curtail the power and reach of the U.S. justice system. After all, it serves both their industrial and political purposes to reduce laws on the books that can constrain them. Thanks to a series of court rulings opening up the floodgates for political spending by outside groups and individuals, Koch money can now do almost as it pleases in politics; the Kochtopus would obviously like to do the same in court against the tree-huggers and labor unionists who so often seek to block them.http://images.politico.com/global/2015/02/27/booker-paul.jpg
Illustration by Steve Brodner
But Charles Koch isn’t the only one who has woken up to America’s self-perpetuating, out-of-control criminal justice system—a reminder of how far the best-intentioned government programs can, when left unchecked, do as much harm as good. And so this very rich right-winger has found himself fighting alongside the likes of Booker and Soros—even as Soros and the Kochs separately prepare to spend millions of dollars (http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/koch-2016-spending-goal-114604.html) opposing each other in next year’s presidential race. Indeed, an increasingly loud clamor of activists from both the left and right, from city halls to Capitol Hill, lawmakers to lawyers, are taking aim at what both sides now term “over-incarceration” and the general unforgivingness of America’s justice system. “The use of the criminal law to solve problems has just gone too far,” says Chris Stone, president of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. “This is not about the libertarian right or the left. It’s about common sense.”READ MORE
http://images.politico.com/global/2015/03/03/1-lead_51602850-2-1160_630x342.jpg (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/jeb-bush-everglades-115655.html?ml=m_ms)
History Dept. (http://www.politico.com/p/magazine/tag/history-dept)
Jeb in the Wilderness (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/jeb-bush-everglades-115655.html?ml=m_ms)By MICHAEL GRUNWALD
http://images.politico.com/global/2015/02/25/lead_sbc_lincolnagnew_630x342.jpg (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/judicial-elections-fundraising-115503.html?ml=m_ms)
On The Bench (http://www.politico.com/p/magazine/tag/on-the-bench)
When Big Money Met the Courts (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/judicial-elections-fundraising-115503.html?ml=m_ms)By SUE BELL COBB
Reform has long been paralyzed by a sense of helplessness about changing things—a helplessness driven by decades of politics that said anything that benefited criminals could and would be used against you on Election Day. The devastating 1988 “Willie Horton” ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC9j6Wfdq3o) that accused Michael Dukakis of being soft on crime froze debate and terrified politicians for nearly a quarter century. Yet in the past year—following nationwide protests against police tactics provoked by the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York—issues of race and criminal justice reform have finally returned to the national debate, resonant in a way they haven’t been since the late 1960s. And, just as surprisingly, this odd new coalition uniting liberals with libertarians has built bipartisan momentum to actually do something.In Washington, where so much seems paralyzed by partisanship, Senate leaders like Democrat Patrick Leahy and Republican Rand Paul have found common ground, becoming partners to relieve tough sentencing guidelines and ease the way for felons to re-enter society. The legislators, in turn, are recruiting—and being boosted by—an influx of money to push the reform agenda. “Are we ramping up? We absolutely are,” says Melissa Cohlmia, chief of corporate communications at Koch headquarters in Wichita.Michael Hirsh is national editor for Politico Magazine.
Continue Reading » (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/charles-koch-overcriminalization-115512_Page2.html)
Page:
1 (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/charles-koch-overcriminalization-115512.html)
2 (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/charles-koch-overcriminalization-115512_Page2.html)
3 (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/charles-koch-overcriminalization-115512_Page3.html)
4 (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/charles-koch-overcriminalization-115512_Page4.html)
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/charles-koch-overcriminalization-115512.html#ixzz3TdVFiQdz