Koch Industries, now headed by Charles Koch and his brother David, was founded in Wichita, Kansas, in the 1920s. It currently has 70,000 employees.
Koch Industries was founded in the 1920s by patriarch Fred Koch, a U.S. engineer who developed a new method of converting oil into gasoline. He helped to build a refining network in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, then returned to the United States with a visceral hatred for Joseph Stalin and communism.
A fiercely libertarian ideology live on at Koch Industries' spartan headquarters in Wichita, Kan.
With around $100 billion in sales, Koch Industries is a heavyweight among U.S. oil trading firms, and one of the most secretive U.S. corporations.
Koch Industries owns a 4,000-mile U.S. pipeline network and three of the country's most profitable refineries. The company operates in 60 countries.
The Koch brothers, Chairman and CEO Charles and co-owner David Koch, are high-profile supporters of libertarian and anti-regulation U.S. politics. Among their campaigns is one to end the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's mandate for regulating greenhouse gas emissions. The Kochs fiercely deny global warming. A profile in the New Yorker magazine last year identified the brothers as behind-the-scenes operators who bankroll the U.S. Tea Party movement.
One of the groups funded by the Koch brothers is Americans for Prosperity. For the past five years, GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain has been the front man for the AFP propaganda operation. Most of Cain’s campaign staff comes from Americans for Prosperity. The U.S. Supreme Court in Noerr Motor Freight v. Eastern Railroad Presidents ruled that third-party propaganda fronts are legal but unethical.
Before AFP and his radio talk show careers, Cain was a Washington lobbyist for a restaurant trade association.
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