mathbabe

You have to check out this Bloomberg article about Koch Industries. Although it rambles a bit at times, it’s absolutely mesmerizing and horrible. Here’s the main premise, which bizarrely comes near the end of the article:

For six decades around the world, Koch Industries has blazed a path to riches — in part, by making illicit payments to win contracts, trading with a terrorist state, fixing prices, neglecting safety and ignoring environmental regulations. At the same time, Charles and David Koch have promoted a form of government that interferes less with company actions.

The phrase “our organization does not reward failure” comes from a book in 2007 written by one of the Koch brothers where he somehow fails to discuss a pipeline explosion that had recently killed two teenagers in Oklahoma:

The 570-mile-long pipeline carrying liquid butane from Medford, Oklahoma, to Mont Belvieu, Texas had corroded so badly that one expert, Edward Ziegler, likened it to Swiss cheese. The company didn’t give 40 of the 45 families near the explosion site — including the Smalley and Stone families — any information about what to do in case of an emergency, the NTSB wrote.

The article is complete, in that it even has a spiteful twin brother of one of the Koch brothers appearing to give away his brothers for stealing.

The Senate held hearings in May 1989 after Bill Koch, David Koch’s twin brother, told a U.S. Senate special committee on investigations that Koch Industries was stealing oil on American Indian reservations, cheating the federal government of royalties.

The investigators caught Koch Oil’s employees falsifying records so that the company would get more crude than it paid for, shortchanging Indian families, Elroy said. Koch’s records showed that the company took 1.95 million barrels of oil it didn’t pay for from 1986 to 1988, according to data compiled by the Senate.

One thing that fascinating to me is that there are two whistle-blowers in the story, both women who were essentially fired for having ethics (one reported on bribes and the other on toxic gas dumping, both sued the company after leaving). Doesn’t it seem like women are more often whistle-blowers? Especially if you consider the fact that high ranking people in these kinds of companies with access to the kind of information that whistle-blowers need to uncover fraud are typically men.

These Koch brothers are seriously despicable, and really all they seem to care about is the ability to make money without having to worry about rules, even basic rules of morality. They currently largely bankroll the Tea Party. It’s a scary thought that I could someday live in a country whose president owes a favor to these guys.