August 25, 2011 10:26 PM UTC

So The Koch Brothers Know About This, Do They?

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• by: Colorado Pols

Earlier this week we briefly mentioned the “Running on Empty” tour by conservative group Americans for Prosperity, then making its way through the state of Montana with much anti “Big Oil” counter-protest banging and clanging–not exactly the intended outcome for AFP or its Colorado director, former CD-5 GOP congressional candidate Jeff Crank.

Well, as the Colorado Independent’s John Tomasic reports today, AFP arrived in Colorado yesterday with a fascinating new twist–stymieing counter-protesters with agreement?

The right and left protesters and counter-protesters gathered here off a sprawling suburban four-lane road and around a wall-less field house at the Boulder County Fairgrounds agreed on at least two things: that the group hosting the gathering, Americans for Prosperity, is suffering an image problem and that government subsidies to oil and gas companies have got to end… [Pols emphasis]

AFP is bankrolled by conservative politics string-pullers Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who run blockbuster oil and gas company Koch Industries. The Kochs have spent millions over the last decade battling government regulations on business and have become well-known as the political fights they have chosen have grown nastier and as the media focuses increasingly on their influence. They played a key roll through AFP in the battle against health care reform last year and in the battle to break public employee unions in Wisconsin this year.

AFP’s “Running on Empty” tour is making stops throughout the Colorado Front Range this week, arguing that high prices at the gas pump are tied to over regulation of the oil and gas industry in the Obama era…

“You see, we agree. If they looked on our website and listened to what we’re saying, we agree that the country should end all subsidies, that there should be a level playing field [among industries] and that government should stand aside.”

Counter protesters, who outnumbered the AFP crowd, agreed that a level playing field would be nice. Oil and gas is not only getting enormous tax breaks and subsidies now but they have been incentivized by the U.S. government for most of the last century, one way or another, with the government laying roadways coast to coast and stimulating the auto market (including special incentives for the SUV market) for years.

We can’t help but think that the message of ending oil industry subsidies, a recurring Democratic proposal, was not the intended message of AFP’s tour. The Republican majority in the U.S. House consistently opposes eliminating tax credits and other subsidies for oil and natural gas, and the current proposal faces an “uphill battle.” Cornered, some Republicans have expressed hypothetical support (since it polls catastrophically if they don’t), but more recently these tax breaks have been lumped in with the GOP’s dogmatic line against any “tax increases.”

And they are worth several billion dollars a year to oil companies like Koch Industries. Now we don’t know how much Jeff Crank gets paid every year, but we’re pretty sure his salary would not equal even one billion dollars unless multiplied by a lot.

There were reportedly lots of other problems with the AFP’s message yesterday, an amusing one on how gas prices have “doubled” since Obama became President. This conveniently omits the fact that gas was nearly $4 a gallon six months months before. But first, we needed to make sure the funders knew what was going on! It seems like this could be some kind of, well, a trap, so kidding aside, we hope the Koch brothers don’t dock Crank’s check over it.

Honestly, astroturfing up sympathy for the oil industry right now is just hard.