The Koch Brothers' Toxic Empire

Few figures in today's political scene represent a bigger threat to average Americans and a functioning democracy than Charles and David Koch.  Between trying to buy Congress, dismantle safety and environmental regulations, and restoring the worse excesses of the Gilded Age, they seek to make average Americans little better than serfs eking out a meager living while the Kochs luxuriate with their billions of dollars.  If there is such a thing as the sin of greed, the Kochs truly embody it.   A long piece in Rolling Stone looks at not only the Koch brothers' political machinations but also their toxic industries from which their wealth flows.  It also traces their family's racist and far right views over the years.  These men are despicable and any decent Christian ought to be opposing their policies rather than embracing them as the Christofascists have done.  Here are article highlights:

The enormity of the Koch fortune is no mystery. Brothers Charles and David are each worth more than $40 billion. The electoral influence of the Koch brothers is similarly well-chronicled. The Kochs are our homegrown oligarchs; they've cornered the market on Republican politics and are nakedly attempting to buy Congress and the White House. Their political network helped finance the Tea Party and powers today's GOP. Koch-affiliated organizations raised some $400 million during the 2012 election, and aim to spend another $290 million to elect Republicans in this year's midterms. So far in this cycle, Koch-backed entities have bought 44,000 political ads to boost Republican efforts to take back the Senate.

What is less clear is where all that money comes from. Koch Industries is headquartered in a squat, smoked-glass building that rises above the prairie on the outskirts of Wichita, Kansas. The building, like the brothers' fiercely private firm, is literally and figuratively a black box. Koch touts only one top-line financial figure: $115 billion in annual revenue, as estimated by Forbes. By that metric, it is larger than IBM, Honda or Hewlett-Packard and is America's second-largest private company after agribusiness colossus Cargill. The company's stock response to inquiries from reporters: "We are privately held and don't disclose this information."

But Koch Industries is not entirely opaque. The company's troubled legal history – including a trail of congressional investigations, Department of Justice consent decrees, civil lawsuits and felony convictions – augmented by internal company documents, leaked State Department cables, Freedom of Information disclosures and company whistle­-blowers, combine to cast an unwelcome spotlight on the toxic empire whose profits finance the modern GOP.

Under the nearly five-decade reign of CEO Charles Koch, the company has paid out record civil and criminal environmental penalties. And in 1999, a jury handed down to Koch's pipeline company what was then the largest wrongful-death judgment of its type in U.S. history, resulting from the explosion of a defective pipeline that incinerated a pair of Texas teenagers.

The volume of Koch Industries' toxic output is staggering. According to the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Political Economy Research Institute, only three companies rank among the top 30 polluters of America's air, water and climate: ExxonMobil, American Electric Power and Koch Industries. Thanks in part to its 2005 purchase of paper-mill giant Georgia-Pacific, Koch Industries dumps more pollutants into the nation's waterways than General Electric and International Paper combined. The company ranks 13th in the nation for toxic air pollution. Koch's climate pollution, meanwhile, outpaces oil giants including Valero, Chevron and Shell.

The toxic history of Koch Industries is not limited to physical pollution. It also extends to the company's business practices, which have been the target of numerous federal investigations, resulting in several indictments and convictions, as well as a whole host of fines and penalties.

Koch Industries is not a major oil producer. Instead, the company has woven itself into every nook of the vast industrial web that transforms raw fossil fuels into usable goods. Koch-owned businesses trade, transport, refine and process fossil fuels, moving them across the world and up the value chain until they become things we forgot began with hydrocarbons: fertilizers, Lycra, the innards of our smartphones.
The company controls at least four oil refineries, six ethanol plants, a natural-gas-fired power plant and 4,000 miles of pipeline.

Koch's hunger for growth is insatiable: Since 1960, the company brags, the value of Koch Industries has grown 4,200-fold, outpacing the Standard & Poor's index by nearly 30 times. On average, Koch projects to double its revenue every six years. Koch is now a key player in the fracking boom that's vaulting the United States past Saudi Arabia as the world's top oil producer, even as it's endangering America's groundwater.

Koch is also long on the richest – but also the dirtiest and most carbon-polluting – oil deposits in North America: the tar sands of Alberta. . . . . Over the past dozen years, the company has quietly acquired leases for 1.1 million acres of Alberta oil fields, an area larger than Rhode Island. By some estimates, Koch's direct holdings nearly double ExxonMobil's and nearly triple Shell's.

Fred [David and Charles' father] also became a major benefactor and board member of the John Birch Society, the rabidly anti-communist organization founded in 1958 by candy magnate and virulent racist Robert Welch. Bircher publications warned that the Red endgame was the creation of the "Negro Soviet­ Republic" in the Deep South. In his own writing, Fred described integration as a Red plot to "enslave both the white and black man."

Koch wasn't just cutting corners on its pipelines. It was also violating federal environmental law in other corners of the empire. Through much of the 1990s at its Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota, Koch spilled up to 600,000 gallons of jet fuel into wetlands near the Mississippi River. Indeed, the company was treating the Mississippi as a sewer, illegally dumping ammonia-laced wastewater into the river – even increasing its discharges on weekends when it knew it wasn't being monitored. Koch Petroleum Group eventually pleaded guilty to "negligent discharge of a harmful quantity of oil" and "negligent violation of the Clean Water Act," was ordered to pay a $6 million fine and $2 million in remediation costs, and received three years' probation. This facility had already been declared a Superfund site in 1984.

The Smalley trial underscored something Bill Koch had said about the way his brothers ran the company: "Koch Industries has a philosophy that profits are above everything else." A former Koch manager, Kenoth Whitstine, testified to incidents in which Koch Industries placed profits over public safety. As one supervisor had told him, regulatory fines "usually didn't amount to much" and, besides, the company had "a stable full of lawyers in Wichita that handled those situations." When Whitstine told another manager he was concerned that unsafe pipelines could cause a deadly accident, this manager said that it was more profitable for the company to risk litigation than to repair faulty equipment. The company could "pay off a lawsuit from an incident and still be money ahead," he said, describing the principles of MBM to a T.

The jury was emphatic, awarding Smalley $296 million – then the largest wrongful-death judgment in American legal history. He later settled with Koch for an undisclosed sum and now runs a pipeline-safety foundation in his daughter's name. He declined to comment for this story. "It upsets him too much," says an associate.

There is much, much more.  Read the entire article and you will be both disgusted and outraged.

Supreme Court Hands Obama a Victory - and Cuccinelli a Defeat - on EPA Rules

Of late the U.S. Supreme Court seems almost schizophrenic as it hands down socially liberal rulings such as United States v. Windsor  yet then swings toward reactionary rulings such as those striking down provisions of the Voting Rights Act or most recently eliminating affirmative action.  Now, the Court has again handed down a ruling that slams Republicans - including failed GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli - while handing Barack Obama a victory.  The ruling?   The justices upheld the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the smog from coal plants.  The New York Times looks at the ruling.  Here are highlights:

In a major victory for the Obama administration, the Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the smog from coal plants that drifts across state lines from more than two dozen Midwestern and Appalachian states to the East Coast.

The 6-to-2 ruling bolsters the centerpiece of President Obama’s environmental agenda: a series of new regulations aimed at cutting pollution from coal-fired power plants. Republicans and the coal industry have criticized the regulations, which use the Clean Air Act as their legal authority, as a “war on coal.” The industry has waged an aggressive legal battle to undo the rules.

Legal experts said the decision, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, signals that the Obama administration’s efforts to use the Clean Air Act to fight global warming could withstand legal challenges.

In June, the E.P.A. is expected to propose a sweeping new Clean Air Act regulation to cut emissions of carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping greenhouse gas that scientists say is the chief cause of climate change. Coal plants are the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

“It’s a big win for the E.P.A., and not just because it has to do with this rule,” said Jody Freeman, director of the environmental law program at Harvard. “It’s the fact that it’s setting the stage and creating momentum for what’s to come.”

The Supreme Court decision is only the latest blow to coal. Also on Tuesday, a Federal District Court ordered the E.P.A. to propose by Dec. 1 a new nationwide regulation to rein in smog pollution from coal-fired power plants and other major polluters. This rule would come on top of the regulation covering cross-state air pollution.

“Today’s Supreme Court decision is a resounding victory for public health and a key component of E.P.A.’s efforts to make sure all Americans have clean air to breathe,” Gina McCarthy, the E.P.A. administrator, said in a statement. She added that “the court’s finding also underscores the importance of basing the agency’s efforts on strong legal foundations and sound science.”

The interstate air pollution regulation, also known as the “good neighbor” rule, has pitted Rust Belt and Appalachian states like Ohio, Michigan and Kentucky against East Coast states like New York and Connecticut.

Republicans in Congress denounced the decision.  “This is just the latest blow to jobs and affordable energy,” Representative Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan and the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Representative Edward Whitfield, Republican of Kentucky, said in a statement. Both are from states that rely heavily on cheap coal-fired electricity.

Kudos to the Court.  For years the Adirondacks in New York where my family has a summer home have suffered from acid rain and negative effects arising from air pollution generated by out of state coal fired plants.  Hopefully, the EPA regulations will make a positive difference.

Ken Cuccinelli: Unfit for Any Elected Office

I do not hide my opinion that Ken Cuccinelli - the all but crowned Republican Party of Virginia nominee for governor of Virginia - belongs in a mental ward rather than the governor's mansion - or any elected office for that matter.  The man is insane but in a scary scheming way that one might associate with Adolph Hitler or Josef Stalin.  And his new book, “The Last Line of Defense,”highlights Cuccinelli's insanity and extremism.  A piece in Bacon's Rebellion does a good take down of both Cuccinelli and his insane screed.  Here are excerpts:

Ken Cuccinelli’s book, “The Last Line of Defense,” is the presumptive Republican nominee’s opening salvo in his quest to become Governor of the Old Dominion. It is a strange politico manifesto for a campaign. Ken refrains from writing about topics near and dear to his heart such as trans-vaginal inspections and gay bashing, but neither does he address any of the Commonwealth’s problems such as road congestion, K-12 school performance and spending, competition between coal and the increase of shale derived natural gas, and how the state will be affected by the sure-to-come large defense cuts. Instead, Cuccinelli presents himself as a knight in defense of Virginia against its biggest threat, not international terrorism or cheap Chinese imports, but the government of the United States of America, especially the Affordable Health Care Act and the Environmental Protection Agency.

In tackling complex issues such as health care and the environment one would expect a tome full of scientific, economic, and political analysis appropriately footnoted and explained to support his arguments. Ken opines on all these issues without a footnote, end note or bibliography. The Cuccinelli Doctrine of research states, “If Ken says it, it must be true.”

The tone of the work is set literally within the first few pages. On the second page he states: “I call the biggest set of lawbreakers in America the Obama administration.” Attempts to criminalize the political opposition is a tactic often practiced by dictatorships of the Right or Left. 

 Cuccinelli, who writes that the only reason for a social safety net is to make citizens dependent on government, thus assuring the reelection of certain politicians. Continuing this line of logic, he states that several popular sections of the Affordable Health Care Act came into force simply to placate the electorate. Ken states that one of these was a provision preventing private insurers from discriminating against those with pre-existing conditions. He states that this is a good way to put private sector insurance companies out of business.

Cuccinelli’s book confirms that he is unfit to serve in elected office. He is a practitioner of politics at its lowest level of integrity. His political ancestors include John C. Calhoun, Joseph McCarthy, and J. Lindsey Almond. Hopefully, the Republicans will have a second look and nominate a true Conservative grounded in ethics and in touch with reality.