When misanthropy and philanthropy go hand in hand

In a society that trumpets its faith in equal opportunity, freedom and the power of the people — government of the people, by the people and for the people, and all that — it’s ironic that again and again, we discover that some of the most powerful people in America are men (invariably men) who we’ve never heard of — men such as Charles and David Koch. It isn’t modesty that makes them keep out of sight.

Their father built his wealth by helping create an oil industry for Joseph Stalin. Later, Jane Mayer tells us in her New Yorker feature:

In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover. Members considered President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Communist agent. In a self-published broadside, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties.” He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” he warned. Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech that prefigures the Tea Party’s talk of a secret socialist plot, Koch predicted that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”

The principal heirs of the Koch fortune who now run Koch Industries (“the largest company that you’ve never heard of”), Charles and David Koch, have been described as “the billionaires behind the hate,” for helping spawn the Tea Party movement and “the Standard Oil of our times,” for their efforts to thwart government regulation.

With his brother Charles, who is seventy-four, David Koch owns virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars. The company has grown spectacularly since their father, Fred, died, in 1967, and the brothers took charge. The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made David and Charles Koch — who, years ago, bought out two other brothers — among the richest men in America. Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry — especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies — from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program — that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

In a statement, Koch Industries said that the Greenpeace report “distorts the environmental record of our companies.” And David Koch, in a recent, admiring article about him in New York, protested that the “radical press” had turned his family into “whipping boys,” and had exaggerated its influence on American politics. But Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”

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3 thoughts on “When misanthropy and philanthropy go hand in hand

  1. scott

    “Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill, ”

    Forbes would consider this a private company, but it and Cargill are not private companies but better termed private utilities. Utilities aren’t private but are examples of socialism. The most pernicious form of socialism is socialism for private firms. Socialism for the benefit of people is benign though vilified.

    Don’t think I’ve described my 3 markets not free markets theory here; briefly there’s the free market, with ample competition and alternatives, the professional market, where fiduciary duties aka laws of agency govern; here there’s no alternative but competition and lastly the utility/monopoly market.

    The monopoly utility market is what Cargill, ADM, Monsanto, fall into as well as war contractors, road construction, banks, oil, gas, water, electric, telephony/television among others. These markets are either essential or serve gov’t. In the case of the first up to road construction these companies get their exclusive contracts from lobbying gov’t. Their profit margin should be capped at 10% as has been the historic figure.

    Actually the food companies listed are perversions of those markets as we should break up those firms under anti-trust law. Food is a market with ample alternatives so no monopoly should exist. Yet, disastrous policy, thanks to lobbying has perverted these markets accordingly.

  2. scott

    I LOVE how libertarians enjoy ignoring my 3 market theory suggesting that the restaurateur and the war contractor are both just average Joes, slugging it out in the free market.

    Ayn Rand’s John Galt is the biggest beneficiary of socialism in all of recorded literature. What’s disgusting is their jealously of the pennies we give the poor while they are paid billions with little accountability or oversight. Their homes should be burned, seriously, these people are enemies of the American people.

    Especially since we don’t need ANY military to defend our country. No nation, no team of nations could mobilize an invasion of this country that our gangs and rednecks couldn’t repel. Think about it, how would you operationally invade? It would be impossible to sever and control the country with an invading force. Our own military might be able to occupy us, but they don’t face the logistical challenges an invading army would. If you think I’m nuts, consider we bombed Iraq back to the stone age, invaded a bit, then bombed and starved them for a dozen years, then bombed them backer to the stone age, and then invaded. We’ve never been able to dictate anything there. This same thing happened in Vietnam, South America and Afghanistan.

  3. Funonymous

    Mark Ames and Yasha Levine as http://www.exiledonline.com have reported extensively on the Koch Family and their Libertarian War against anything that effects their profits over a year ago, I can’t imagine that Mayer did not come across any of their articles, which reported on the same facts over a year ago, in her research.

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