The Koch network is reorganizing under a new name [Stand Together] and with new priorities

COMMENTARY (BuriedTruth).  Don't be fooled! Despite the stated altruistic objectives of "Stand Together," the abhorrent past history of influence and deception by the Koch brothers precautions one to firmly suspect that "Stand Together" is a sophisticated charade, masking sleazy, Machiavellian intentions!

Billionaire Charles Koch and Brian Hooks, the Chairman of the network [Stand Together] Koch founded, speak at their summer meeting in Colorado Springs in 2017.
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• Today's announcement puts meat on the bones of what Koch outlined in broad strokes at the January gathering of his supporters outside Palm Springs, Calif. Uneasy with President Trump and the Republican Party's drift toward nativism, protectionism and populism, the 83-year-old signaled a turn away from partisan politics to focus more on goals that cut across ideologies. Koch has also described himself as less interested in electoral politics than his brother David, who was the Libertarian Party's nominee for vice president in 1980 and who stepped away from the network last year because of ailing health. This is also happening against the backdrop of growing hostility on the right toward billionaires and the business community. These forces have led other entities, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to also disentangle their brands from the GOP.

• Brian Hooks, who has chaired the network and will continue to lead the new Stand Together organization on a day-to-day basis, was adamant during a lengthy interview that this is "not a branding exercise" for marketing purposes but reflects a "natural evolution."

  "For too many years, we've let people define us. Going forward, we're going to define ourselves," he said at his office in Arlington, Va. "This is really about helping to better define who we are. It's a reflection of who we've become."

• Koch and Hooks identify these as their five top priorities going forward: Empower everyone to find fulfilling work. Help neighbors beat poverty and addiction. Ensure excellent education for every person. Build a stronger economy that works for all. Bridge divides and build respect for one another.

  They plan to take a "comprehensive approach" in pursuing those broad goals, which involves leveraging relationships across four key institutions: the education field, the business world, community organizations and politics/policymaking. Together, for example, the Koch community already funds more than 1,000 professors at 350 universities. "Our North Star hasn't changed," said Hooks. "We're here to break down the barriers that are preventing people from realizing their potential. ... Those barriers will be different for each person."

• The nomenclature is changing, as well. Officials will no longer call it a "network." Now it's a "philanthropic community." Members of the Koch "community" have always referred to one another as "investors." The idea was that they were investing money with a specific outcome in mind, and that the return on their investments -- whether in politics or philanthropy -- could be measured. Now, they will be referred to as "partners" because "investors" has too transactional of a ring. These "investors" have gathered twice a year -- California in the winter, Colorado in the summer -- for "seminars" to discuss strategy. Starting next month, "partners" will attend these gatherings, and they'll be known as "summits."

• A totally redesigned website went live this morning. "Greater your good" is the group's new slogan, and it may be the catchphrase of a forthcoming ad campaign. "That's the promise made between us and our incredible partners who are dedicated to the betterment of themselves and others," Koch writes in his letter, which Hooks co-signed. "This requires that we do much more -- helping social entrepreneurs increase their effectiveness by orders of magnitude. It means living by the lessons we've learned from our own experience, from that of our partners, and from movements throughout history that have benefitted millions of people: Empower those closest to the problems, to help solve them. Progress comes when millions of people get engaged: bottom up, not top down. ... Unite with anyone, despite our differences, to unleash the potential in everyone."

• Sitting out the 2016 presidential election, Koch strongly criticized Trump -- and the GOP nominee responded in kind. The Trump administration, populated with several former Koch lieutenants, has done a lot that he likes, especially the 2017 tax cuts, deregulation and the confirmation of judges. But Koch concluded that many of the congressional Republicans who have benefited from the network's spending over the past decade took their support for granted. As a result, the Koch groups became much more selective about which candidates they backed in the 2018 midterms. The result of all this is that the biannual get-togethers have become less overtly political since Trump's takeover of the GOP. Dozens of elected Republicans used to fly in. In January, only three were invited: Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse and Utah Sen. Mike Lee.

• To be sure, Koch and his groups are not getting out of politics. They're just trying to engage more effectively. "You can't ask anybody about politics and not find somebody who is frustrated," said Hooks. "Everybody is frustrated about politics. The general answer to that frustration that we've heard usually takes two forms. One is, 'I'm done with it. I'm going to walk away.' The other is, 'Well, I'm not sure what to do so I'll just double down on it.' Neither of those are acceptable. You can't walk away from politics because policy matters too much, and, if you want to change the policy, you've got to be engaged in politics. But if you double down, it's the definition of insanity, right? Doing the same thing and expecting something different.

  "So we've rejected both of those," he added. "We're not going to continue to do the same thing that we've done, and we're not going to walk away. What we're committed to doing is offering people a different way to stay engaged in policy and in politics but to do it in a way that unites people to actually get things done."

• Criminal justice is the model. Liberal activist Van Jones protested outside the Koch donor conference in 2011, but he was the poster boy of the session in January. Jones worked closely with Koch Industries general counsel Mark Holden to push the First Step Act, a sweeping overhaul of the criminal justice system that Trump signed into law during the lame-duck session.

  Hooks said they'll keep searching for nontraditional, unexpected partners. Koch-backed groups have been partnering with liberal entities on everything from protecting the "dreamers" to accelerating the end of the war in Afghanistan. "It's not just Van Jones, but I'll tell you what: It does take some risk takers like Van Jones to say, 'Hey, this stuff works,'" Hooks explained. "In a sense, all of us have had to make a choice, right? What do we care more about? Do we care more about helping people to actually break barriers or some of these old attachments? I think more and more people are making the right choice on that."

• Koch remains a boogeyman to the left, of course, as well as an occasional punching bag of the president. Several Democratic presidential candidates mention "the Koch brothers" in their stump speeches, including top-tier contenders like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Hooks acknowledges that. He declined to detail private conversations but said he and his team have been in touch with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. "We're talking to more people than we've ever talked to," he said. "We haven't totally built that trust yet [with Democrats], but there's a willingness to engage."

• Stand Together, the new entity, still plans to stay out of the presidential race in 2020, and, unlike in the past, there is no public target for spending on policy and politics in the coming election cycle. I asked Hooks how they're going to deal with liberal ideas that have been gaining traction, such as Warren's proposed wealth tax of 2 percent a year on all incomes over $50 million, Sanders's Medicare-for-all plan or Andrew Yang's advocacy for a universal basic income.

  "It's not as though we don't care about those issues. We do. We just want to be effective in how we engage on them," Hooks said. "I think the best way to challenge a bad idea is with a good idea. In the absence of good ideas, people are prone to gravitate towards bad ideas -- even ideas that have been proven failures for decades every time they've been tried. None of these are new ideas. We'll continue to make the case for what we see as the best policy in every arena where that case needs to be made, but ultimately there's a real problem that people are concerned about, and we think the best way to address that is by offering an actionable alternative. That's what this future initiative does."

• There has been a degree of turnover inside the network, though how much is unclear because the identities of donors and their levels of support are closely guarded. Some donors who are unhappy with the general shift have diverted their political spending to other groups or otherwise drifted from the network, but new supporters who like the less partisan endeavors have also gotten involved for the first time. Officials said more people are now members than ever before, meaning they'll give at least $100,000 this year, and there was higher attendance at the January gathering than any previous meeting.

  "Stand Together ought to be the most important movement in the country, and we would love to find a way to help make that happen," wrote Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, who attended the January seminar, in an email.

  Forbes estimates Koch's net worth at $50 billion, making him the 11th richest person in the world. His son Chase, who is in his early 40s and appears more interested in transforming education and business than politicking, has taken on an increasingly active role. Based in Wichita, where he works for his dad as an executive at Koch Industries, he oversees a New Leaders Initiative focused on engaging younger donors from emerging fields. About 60 of them gathered for a recent weekend together in Santa Fe, N.M.

  Hooks said longtime boosters have been supportive. "We really always try to push the envelope, and the response has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic," he said. "People are fired up. Everybody is seeing the same studies and the same evidence of the challenges that we are facing. At the same time, a lot of people are seeing a ton of upside from the changes that are happening in society. This is a critical point for us: We want to be very sober-minded about the magnitude of the challenge, but we also want to recognize that with change comes tremendous benefits."

• Hooks, 41, has emerged as a trusted confidant of Koch and doesn't come from the partisan background that past people in his position did. After eight years as Executive Director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which receives significant Koch funding, Hooks became President of the Charles Koch Foundation in 2014 and has taken on growing responsibilities.

  During our sit-down, he said that the declining life expectancy numbers over the past three years have profoundly shaped internal conservations about what Stand Together should focus on. The most recent data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that life expectancy in the United States declined again in 2017 for the third year in a row. This appalling performance has not been seen in the United States since 1915 through 1918. That included World War I and a flu pandemic that killed 675,000 Americans. In other developed nations, life expectancy has marched steadily upward for decades. Drug overdoses, the opioid epidemic and rising suicide rates are major factors.

  "Those aren't an anomaly. For a significant percentage of people in the country, the odds are now against them. They're likely to do worse than their parents. That's never happened before in our country," Hooks said. "This is the biggest challenge that's facing our country. Not just in a generation, but in generations. ... We've decided, as a philanthropic community, that we need to put everything we've got behind addressing this challenge, and the way that we do that is by helping to activate as many people across the country as possible. ...

  "When you look at the problems that we're trying to address, a lot of the reason that we see life expectancy going down is because people left behind tend to turn to drugs or alcohol, and they're dying," he added. "If we're going to solve this problem, if we're going to help make sure that too many people aren't left behind, you've got to address addiction. ... It's not going to happen by the stroke of a pen in Washington. To address a problem as significant and as complex as this, it's going to take bottom-up efforts. And it's not going to happen overnight."

  Last year, the Stand Together Foundation gave money to 117 organizations. This year, 140 organizations are getting grants. Ten new partnerships will be announced later today in Atlanta. There are plans to add an additional 70 recipients each year. One of the biggest partners is a group called the Phoenix that helps recovering addicts by using physical fitness. Koch officials helped the group devise a plan to scale up into new cities.

• Another project is called Cafe Momentum. It started as a Dallas restaurant that employs formerly incarcerated young people and teaches them job skills. Now it's expanding into Nashville. Shaun Alexander, the former running back for the Seattle Seahawks and Washington Redskins, learned about the concept when he attended his first Koch seminar in January. He made some introductions and helped forge a partnership with the NFL. Alexander dreams of a Cafe Momentum in all 32 cities with a professional football team.

  Alexander said he and his wife were impressed by the "business-like approach to social change" that they saw from Koch in Palm Springs. "They vet thousands of organizations that have touched families impacted by unfortunate situations," he said in a statement. "We immediately got involved because we want to be teammates with like-minded people who are committed to unleashing the potential of everyone."

• Hooks said improving the criminal justice system, and increasing life expectancy, requires pulling multiple levers across government, higher education, business and community organizations. "We have a tendency to see these huge problems in society and to think that the only way to solve them is from some heavy-handed, top-down, one-size-fits-all approach," he said. "People think some big institution is going to solve big problems, whether it's big philanthropy, big government, big what-have-you. But everything that we've learned has shown that this is not actually how you solve these big problems. Social progress all happens one individual at a time. It's one social entrepreneur helping a community, finding a better way to do something and then having that catch fire and gain momentum and become a nationwide movement."

  They are also supporting research on drug policy at Ohio State University to help states decriminalize marijuana in the smartest ways possible. "A lot of states now are beginning to decriminalize marijuana so a lot of people who shouldn't go to jail are no longer going to jail," he said. "That's where our comprehensive strategy comes in. Certainly, government has a role. Ensuring good government policy is part of the strategy that we bring to any one of these problems."

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