The Koch brothers are the poster boys for the top 1%. Their money and power fuel the growing inequality in America. They’re among the most powerful, they’re knocking down the working and the middle class and they’re stomping on the poor people. The Koch family has been defining the lives of the ordinary, working Americans, under the radar, for more than 50 years. They inherited their wealth and their penchant for secrecy from their father Fred, who made his fortune in the oil business in the Soviet Union of the 1930’s.

Stalin himself brought Fred Koch into the Soviet Union for building pipelines and teaching them how to be oil engineers. Fred came back to the United States after taking money from the Soviets and used that money to start his own oil empire in the US, amassing some 200 million dollars. With his wealth and power he began to wage a systematic attack on the American values, including funding the John Birch Society. It’s a far right, racist organization that sells communist conspiracies everywhere. They even accused President Dwight Eisenhower of being a Soviet spy.

Fred Koch was against the civil rights movement, saying that it is communist threat and that the white children should not go to school with black children, because that would lead to mongrelization of the races. This is the climate that the two brothers, Charles and David, grew up in at home and then they inherited a big pile of money from daddy Fred, and then they put that into their own organization and they built it up to where it’s now – a 100-billion-a-year enterprise.

Koch industries is the second largest privately held corporation in the country. They have holdings that range from oil and gas, to paper products, forestry, consumer goods, plastics and ranching. They have operations in 45 states. The most important thing is not that they have wealth, it’s that they’re using their wealth to ride roughshod over the American people.