SUBMITTED BY ELAINE MAGLIARO

According to Democracy Now!, Republicans don’t want people to see Robert Greenwald’s “chilling” updated documentary about Charles and David Koch—two of the world’s richest men. Democracy Now! reported earlier today that this past Monday “Republican Rep. Candice Miller of Michigan tried to block an event at the Capitol unveiling the film, “Koch Brothers Exposed: 2014 Edition.” She claimed that the documentary film “could violate House rules and “‘cross the line into partisan politics.’” Evidently, Miller unsuccessfully argued “that showing the documentary was an inappropriate use of taxpayer-funded facilities.” The film event proceeded as planned on Tuesday. The updated documentary is said to reveal “how the Koch brothers have used their vast fortunes to oppose government programs such as Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, as well as obstruct efforts to raise the minimum wage, tackle climate change and expand voting rights.”

KOCH BROTHER EXPOSED 2014 [OFFICIAL TRAILER]

From the Brave New Films Website:

…Billionaires David and Charles Koch have been handed the ability to buy our democracy in the form of giant checks to the House, Senate, and soon, possibly even the Presidency. The last time we exposed the Koch Brothers’ dealings to the world we here at Brave New Films wound up in their crosshairs. They produced online ad campaigns attacking us, but, it takes more than a banner ad to slow us down.

We’ve reissued Koch Brothers Exposed in an updated version, Koch Brothers Exposed: 2014 Edition, to shine a light on them. We’ve delved even deeper into where their money is going, who their money is hurting, and how much they are making during this whole process leading up to the 2014 Elections…

This morning—during his interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!—Robert Greenwald explained his reason for making a new documentary about Charles and David Koch:

The reason really was Citizens United, both the fact of Citizens United, the way the Koch brothers played a role in changing the law because they hadn’t liked it, so now they helped bring about Citizens United, and, of course, what we’re seeing now, which is just extraordinary, the sums of money, the literally hundreds of millions of dollars, spent in so many different ways.

Look, we have an amazing team of researchers. They’ve spent—they’ve literally been working 18, 20 hours a day trying to get the numbers, get the facts. So in addition to what’s public, there’s so much money that they hide. There’s the so-called Koch Bank. There are trusts set up. And we’re still tearing out our hair about how much more money that we’re not even knowing about.

So the film was an effort to talk about that and to bring up the new information—as you showed, the minimum wage clip, to update some of the information about how the Kochs give money to colleges with strings attached and the Catholic professors objecting to the money being given to Catholic University, to bring up some of the victories, where in North Carolina the local school board finally threw the Koch candidates out and brought—turned back their efforts to resegregate the schools. So there are some victories in all of this.

KOCH BROTHERS EXPOSED: 2014 Edition – Director Robert Greenwald discusses the new film on MSNBC

Further Reading

Koch Brothers Exposed: The Chilling New Documentary Republicans Don’t Want You to See (Democracy Now!)

11 things the Koch brothers don’t want you to know: Robert Greenwald’s updated documentary reveals the poster boys for the 1 percent are even worse than you thought (Salon/AlterNet)