New job, same message for anti-tax lobbyist

Wisconsin’s top anti-tax lobbyist has a new gig, but he’ll keep on playing the same old anti-government tune.

Jeffrey Schoepke had been tax lobbyist for Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce (WMC), where he carried the message for the state’s most potent anti-tax, anti-tax government organization. A few weeks ago, Schoepke left WMC to become government affairs manager (aka chief lobbyist) for Koch Companies Public Sector LLC.

Koch Industries (pronounced ‘coke’) is a familiar name in the anti-government movement. Its top leaders organized and bankrolled Americans for Prosperity, the national lobby that sponsored the Tea Day protests, along with many other reactionary causes including opposition to national health care reform and opposition to smokefree workplace legislation.

Koch is one of the largest private corporations in the US, with operations ranging from carpet fibers to fertilizers, paper towels to chemicals, finance to ranching, pipelines to pollution equipment. Its brand names include such standards as Lycra, Dacron, Cordura, Dixie, Brawny and Quilted Northern.

Koch’s Wisconsin operations include six Georgia-Pacific factories that make paper and packaging products; the C. Reiss Coal Company to supply coal to four Wisconsin power plants; and a variety of pipelines that cross the state delivering fuels and other petrochemicals.

Koch family members have been long-time benefactors of right-wing politics. The company’s founder, Fred Koch, was a member of the John Birch Society. His descendants have funded such anti-government players as the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy and the Heartland Institute. [See www.sourcewatch.org for an overview of Koch.]

Government action prolongs recession rather than shortens them, claims CEO Charles Koch. Only corporations, not government, are capable of “lifting us out of these troubling times,” he wrote on the company’s web site. Current policies, he warns, leave America “facing the greatest loss of liberty and prosperity since the 1930s.”