There's nothing inherently fascist about this; what's more fascist is being willing to tolerate it and any other repugnant means of securing power. Which is where Fred Koch, the father of the Koch brothers, enters the picture. His business was built upon the funding of the most notorious totalitarians of the 20th century. As reported by the Guardian:
[He] started his fortune with $500,000 received from Stalin for his assistance constructing 15 oil refineries in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. A couple of years later, his company, Winkler-Koch, helped the Nazis complete their third-largest oil refinery. The facility produced hundreds of thousands of gallons of high-octane fuel for the Luftwaffe, until it was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1944.
In 1938, the patriarch wrote that “the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy and Japan”. To make sure his children got the right ideas, he hired a German nanny. The nanny was such a fervent Nazi that when France fell in 1940, she resigned and returned to Germany.The linked article is worth checking out for its tracing of the changes in our political discourse that the sons of David Koch help foment:
In 1971, corporate lawyer (and future supreme court justice) Lewis Powell wrote a 5,000 word memo that was a blueprint for a broad attack on the liberal establishment. The real enemies, Powell wrote, “were the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences”, and “politicians”.
He argued that conservatives should control the political debate at its source by demanding “balance” in textbooks, television shows and news coverage” – themes that were echoed in inflammatory speeches by Richard Nixon’s vice-president, Spiro Agnew.
The war on liberals was so effective that practically everyone reacted to it: from the New York Times, which hired ex-Nixon speechwriter Bill Safire to “balance” its op-ed page, to the Ford Foundation, which gave $300,000 to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in 1972. The impact was cumulative: almost four decades later, Barack Obama was astonished by one of the first questions asked to him, by a New York Times reporter, after he became president: “Are you a socialist?* * *
So what is fascism? The Oxford English Dictionary gets to the heart of it: "A nationalist political movement that controlled the government of Italy from 1922 to 1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini." Let's turn to Mussolini's own words to see first what Fascism is not:
We control political forces, we control moral forces we control economic forces, therefore we are a full-blown Corporative state. We stand for a new principle in the world, we stand for sheer, categorical, definitive antithesis to the world of democracy, plutocracy, free-masonry, to the world which still abides by the fundamental principles laid down in 1789. (Speech before the new National Directory of the Party, April 7, 1926, in Discorsi del 1926, Milano, Alpes, 1927, p. 120).To whomever needs a refresher, the Bill of Rights was adopted and sent to the states for ratification in 1789.
So what does Fascism stand for?
The Ministry of Corporations is an institution in virtue of which, in the centre and outside, integral corporation becomes an accomplished fact, where balance is achieved between interests and forces of the economic world. [ . . . ] [A]ll economic organizations, acknowledged, safeguarded and supported by the Corporative State, exist within the orbit of Fascism; in other terms they accept the conception of Fascism in theory and in practice. (speech at the opening of the Ministry of Corporations, July 31, 1926, in Discorsi del 1926, Milano, Alpes, 1927, p. 250).If one had to speak for David Koch, it would be safe to assume that his chief concern was the profitability of his business interests. It thus makes sense that he'd support a system of government that merged the interests of the state and its "acknowledged, safeguarded and supported economic organizations."
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Each corner of the American professional triad - Medicine, Law and Business - has ethical duties defined by obligations. In medicine, the doctor's obligation is to the patient: to do them no harm and to deal confidentially with them. In law, the lawyer's obligation is similar: act in the client's best interests and deal confidentially with them. In business, the obligation is to the shareholder. And it is different:
Shkreli was painfully clear: His job isn’t making patients better. It’s making the most dollars.
“My shareholders expect me to make the most profit,” Shkreli said, a theme that he returned to again and again. “That’s the ugly, dirty truth.”
“I’m going to maximize profits,” Shkreli added later. “That’s what people [in healthcare] are afraid to say.”
It's no secret that the governing ethical principle in business is profit maximization. It just takes someone like Martin Shkreli to be so blunt about it. But David Koch is a better exemplar of this ethical principle pursed in full: not only aiding hostile, totalitarian foreign governments in order to maximize profits but openly seeking to establish a government that serves his professional value - profit maximization - above all else, including "the fundamental principles laid down in 1789."
I must note a the first step to establishing a government such as Mussolini's was the expansion of "corporate personhood" witnessed in Citizens United. In the coming election, my only interest as a voter is to elect a president whose nominees to the the Supreme Court will overturn this decision once they have a chance. If the corporation and the individual are given the same rights, there is no question which of the two has the power, money and resources to enforce its will.
