Koch Industries, the financial power behind the Tea Party, is a protean multinational that makes a lot of things you may be using, from Lycra to Brawny paper towels. It’s in forest products, fibers for fabrics, ranching, chemicals, petroleum refining, commodities trading in oil and petroleum products, and other enterprises. It’s in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe and Asia.
Historically, Koch has had its reasons for wanting to shrink the U.S. government, with which it’s often been at odds. To help understand why Koch is pushing the proposition that government is the problem, that regulations inhibit prosperity, that the government would take over the national life if it could—and to understand whose interests the Tea Party’s anger is being harnessed to serve—a little history is instructive. For decades one division or another of Koch Industries has been targeted by the federal government and the courts for environmental or other infractions. Here’s a short list from a recent Bloomberg News report and other sources:
*In 1999, a jury in Texas found Koch negligent for letting a butane pipeline corrode so badly that it eventually blew up and killed two teenagers. Koch had to pay $296 million in damages for wrongful death. (The explosion was not the only disaster involving Koch’s Texas pipelines; a year earlier, the company had paid $10.5 million to compensate commercial fisherman for damaged equipment and alleged lost catches after a Koch pipeline spilled oil near Corpus Christi.)
*In 2001 Koch paid $20 million in fines and penalties to the federal government for lying to regulators about emissions of benzene, a known carcinogen, from a refinery in Corpus Christi. The company falsified emissions figures although workers, who later testified against Koch, had given its officials the true figures and warned them about giving the government false reports.
*Also in 2001, Koch paid the federal government $25 million as settlement in a case involving the theft of crude oil from federal lands, and from Native Americans on Native American land, between 1985 and 1989. Federal agents had caught the company underreporting the amount and quality of oil it had bought and then underpaying the government the royalties it owed on the oil.
And Koch violated the intent, if not the specifics, of U.S. laws against doing business in Iran by having German and Italian subsidiaries furnish Iran with oil refining equipment for its petrochemical industry while taking care to steer clear of American law by not involving its American employees. Koch subsidiaries were selling to Iran as recently as 2006.
Koch says it has corrected all its noncompliant practices. A Koch spokeswoman told Bloomberg News, “Given the regulatory complexity of our business, we will, like any business, have issues that arise… We take steps to correct and address the issues in order to insure compliance.”
