Billionaire industrialist David Koch has died

Honestly, it's hard to feel bad about someone who made life appreciably worse for a large number of people dying.

I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.
-Clarence Darrow

I disagree, I think the details of how the trusts are set up and who runs them will matter quite a bit. For example, who decides whether they support Trump or not, or other politicians? From what I've read, Koch didn't support Trump before.

I am a compassionate, caring person who believes there is good in everyone, but the Koch brothers are the kind of people who make me question my values and wonder if I'm not being too charitable. They have done immeasurable harm to many and have achieved their success through fraud and exploitation.

Under oath, Charles [Koch] admitted that the company had improperly taken approximately $31 million worth of crude oil over a three-year period from Indian lands but argued that it had been accidental. He told investigators that oil measurement is “a very uncertain art.” The committee, however, produced evidence showing that none of the other companies buying oil from Indian land at the time had substantial problems with measurements. In fact, the other companies, most of which were far better known, had secretly turned Koch in, because they regarded it as cheating.

Dubose took the stand and testified about what he and other employees called “the Koch Method.” As he later described it, “They were just mis-measuring crude oil from the Indian reservations as they did all over the U.S. If you bought crude, you’d shorten the gauge. They’d show you how. They had meters in the field. They’d recalibrate them, so if it showed a barrel, they’d say it was just three-quarters of a barrel when they were buying it. You did it in different ways. You cheated. If we sold a barge with fifteen hundred barrels, you’d say it was two thousand. It all involved weights and measurements, and they had their thumb on the scale. That was the Koch Method.”

The above quotes and the excerpt below are from Jane Mayer's Dark Money, which is a must-read if you are interested in the Koch brothers and their influence on American politics. There is a lot I could have quoted, but the following story acts as a case study for how they operated, including flagrant malfeasance, prioritizing money over human life, and using surveillance against legal opponents. It's worth noting that this story is not a one-off. There are plenty of others like it. This story represents standard operating procedure for them.

Emphasis is mine:

While a few legal violations could be understood as misfortunate accidents, Koch Industries’ pattern of pollution was striking not just for its egregiousness but also for its willfulness. As the company was settling the oil spill case that O’Connell brought, its Pine Bend Refinery in Rosemount, Minnesota, pleaded guilty to still more violations of the Clean Water Act. The refinery paid an $8 million fine for dumping a million gallons of ammonia-contaminated wastewater onto the ground, along with negligently spilling some 600,000 gallons of fuel into a protected natural wetland and the nearby Mississippi River. Earlier the refinery had already paid a $6.9 million fine to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to settle charges stemming from the same violations. In this pollution case, like that in Corpus Christi, government authorities accused Koch of trying to cover up its offenses, in this instance by surreptitiously dumping extra pollutants on weekends and late at night in order to evade monitoring, and later falsifying the records. A former employee, Thomas Holton, who had worked at the Pine Bend Refinery, told the Minnesota Star Tribune, “There were times when…yeah, we lied. We did do that. And I won’t cover that up.”

These misdeeds paled, however, in comparison with what befell two teenagers in the rural town of Lively, Texas, some fifty miles southeast of Dallas, on August 24, 1996. That afternoon, Danielle Smalley, a newly minted high school graduate, was at home in the family trailer, packing her things for college. A friend, Jason Stone, was over, to talk about the farewell party they were planning for her that night. Smalley’s father, Danny, a mechanic, was home too, watching sports on television. A faint but increasingly nauseating gassy smell was the only sign that something was amiss. After they could find no source, Danielle and Jason decided to drive to a neighbor’s house to report a possible gas leak. The family had no phone of their own. Borrowing Danny Smalley’s truck, they set out, but the truck stalled a few hundred yards away. When Danielle, who was at the wheel, tried to restart it, the ignition lit an invisible cloud of butane gas that was leaking from a corroded, underground Koch pipeline that ran not far from the house, setting off a monstrous blast. A towering fireball utterly consumed the truck. Danielle and Jason burned to death.

Koch Industries offered Danny Smalley, Danielle’s father, money to drop the wrongful death lawsuit he subsequently brought against the company. Like Doreen Carlson, however, the surviving family member wanted more than cash.

The pretrial maneuvering was fierce, with Koch Industries reportedly hiring a fleet of top-flight lawyers and a private investigator to tail Smalley. Smalley’s lead lawyer, Ted Lyon, meanwhile, suspected his law office was being bugged. He hired a security firm to inspect, which discovered that tiny transmitters had been planted in his office. “I’m not saying the Kochs did it,” the lawyer later said. “I just thought it was very interesting that it happened during the period we were litigating the case.”

As the two sides prepared for trial, a chilling picture of corporate negligence emerged. An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board found that Koch Pipeline Company, the unit in charge, knew that the pipeline was corroded and had neither made all of the necessary repairs nor told the forty or so families living near the explosion site how to handle an emergency. An expert witness for the Smalleys described the pipeline as “Swiss cheese.” The explosion, according to the witness, Edward Ziegler, a certified oil industry safety expert, resulted from “a total failure of a company to follow the regulations, keep their pipeline safe and operate it as the regulations require.”

For three years, the company had in fact stopped using the old pipeline in favor of a newer one. But the company decided to revive the older pipeline when it realized it could make an additional $7 million annually by patching it and using it to carry liquid butane. Bill Caffey, an executive vice president at Koch Industries, admitted in a deposition, “Koch Industries is definitely responsible for the death of Danielle Smalley,” but he stressed that he had believed that the pipeline was safe when he authorized its use. He praised Charles Koch as admirably focused on complying with safety and other regulations but acknowledged there were financial pressures. “We were to work on reducing wasteful spending,” he explained. A former employee, Kenoth Whitstine, testified in a deposition that when he brought concerns to his boss at the company about another corroding pipeline, which he feared could cause a fatal accident if ruptured, he was told that it would be cheaper to pay off damages from a lawsuit than make the repairs.

Finally getting the chance he had waited for, Danny Smalley took the stand as the last witness in the trial and delivered an enraged soliloquy denouncing the Kochs as caring only about money. As he later told 60 Minutes, “They said, ‘We’re sorry, Mr. Smalley, that your child lost her life and Jason lost his life.’ Sorry doesn’t get it. They’re not sorry. The only thing they looked at was the bottom dollar. How much money would they lose if they shut the pipeline down. They didn’t care, all they wanted was the money.”

If the Kochs’ cavalier safety practices were a gamble, they lost when the jury rendered its verdict. On October 21, 1999, it found Koch Industries guilty not just of negligence but of malice, too, because it had known about the extreme hazard its decaying pipeline had posed. In his suit, Danny Smalley had asked for $100 million in damages from the company, a staggering sum. The jury, however, imposed a fine almost three times larger, demanding Koch Industries pay him $296 million. At the time, it was the largest wrongful death award on record.

How about donating more money to fund climate change denial than pretty much any other single organization in history?

My favorite is when they "donated" money to the University of Arizona and ASU to create new "schools" that are effectively state-funded Koch propoganda: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/04/22/professor-a-disturbing-story-about-the-influence-of-the-koch-network-in-higher-education/?noredirect=on

Climate change denialism and obfuscation, which the Kochs established, root and branch, for the continued profits of their petroleum extraction-based industries.

I'm looking forward to the new "Kochland" documentary coming out shortly.

The only sympathy I can muster towards the Kochs is for their horrific upbringing (read Sons of Wichita), and living with the name "Koch", which in the U.S. is pronounced "cock".

I've been very curious to hear NPR's take on his death. They definitely whitewashed his life on the brief snippet I heard, calling him a philanthropist and saying he 'attacked Democrats and supported conservatives'. No surprise though, Koch Industries is definitely an NPR donor.

it sullied your opinion of the show

Very much so, although I have a good idea why it was so softball. I don't really hold it against them as they produce a lot of good information, but it's a shame they were so milquetoast in their interview.

They lob softballs because it's where their bread is buttered. The Kochs fund tons of economics departments, you don't make enemies of them without compromising your ability to get published or have partnerships with many major research universities.