Courtesy of Pam Martens
Charles Koch, Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries
As Congress and 17 intelligence agencies of the U.S. government have investigated Russia engaging in interference in U.S. presidential elections, here is what has been going on right under the nose of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Justice Department and all those intelligence agencies: one of the largest privately-owned companies in the world, Koch Industries, which has a massive financial interest in being allowed to continue to pollute the environment with its fossil fuels businesses, is allowed to simultaneously run a political campaign funding network as well as a political data mining and voter targeting operation on an unprecedented scale.
The Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, billionaire Charles Koch, sits atop this political juggernaut and has been given far too much cover by mainstream media. As television networks struggle to explain the spread of hate and divisiveness in America, the operations of i360 should be center stage.
Much is already known about the Koch political network and the hundreds of millions of dollars it has pumped into political campaigns for right-wing candidates willing to adopt a climate science denial position. But few Americans are aware of the creepy and Orwellian reach of Koch Industries’ i360 data mining and voter targeting operations.
Take i360’s Rabbit Ears project for starters. Koch Industries, a fossil fuels/climate science denial/$100 billion multi-national company is allowed to spy on your TV viewing habits, carefully record that data, then use that information to target your biases and inner demons to persuade you to vote for the Republican candidate their campaign financing network is supporting. This is how the i360 website explains the functioning of its Rabbit Ears:
“Seamlessly integrated into the RABBIT EARS platform, i360’s political audience segments enable to analyze television viewing behavior for 40 different segments of the population including voting behavior and issue alignment. Each audience segment has been matched to the historical viewership data from a collection of Set-Top boxes (STBs) from providers across the nation to help you better understand what your target is watching and how you can reach them.”
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