On May 17th, a black-tie
audience at the Metropolitan Opera House applauded as a tall,
jovial-looking billionaire took the stage. It was the seventieth annual
spring gala of American Ballet Theatre, and David H. Koch was being
celebrated for his generosity as a member of the board of trustees; he
had recently donated $2.5 million toward the company’s upcoming season,
and had given many millions before that. Koch received an award while
flanked by two of the gala’s co-chairs, Blaine Trump, in a peach-colored
gown, and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, in emerald green. Kennedy’s
mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, had been a patron of the ballet and,
coincidentally, the previous owner of a Fifth Avenue apartment that
Koch had bought, in 1995, and then sold, eleven years later, for
thirty-two million dollars, having found it too small.
The gala
marked the social ascent of Koch, who, at the age of seventy, has become
one of the city’s most prominent philanthropists. In 2008, he donated a
hundred million dollars to modernize Lincoln Center’s New York State
Theatre building, which now bears his name. He has given twenty million
to the American Museum of Natural History, whose dinosaur wing is named
for him. This spring, after noticing the decrepit state of the fountains
outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Koch pledged at least ten
million dollars for their renovation. He is a trustee of the museum,
perhaps the most coveted social prize in the city, and serves on the
board of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where, after he donated
more than forty million dollars, an endowed chair and a research center
were named for him.
One dignitary was conspicuously absent from
the gala: the event’s third honorary co-chair, Michelle Obama. Her
office said that a scheduling conflict had prevented her from attending.
Yet had the First Lady shared the stage with Koch it might have created
an awkward tableau. In Washington, Koch is best known as part of a
family that has repeatedly funded stealth attacks on the federal
government, and on the Obama Administration in particular.
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.”
A few weeks after the Lincoln Center
gala, the advocacy wing of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation—an
organization that David Koch started, in 2004—held a different kind of
gathering. Over the July 4th weekend, a summit called Texas Defending
the American Dream took place in a chilly hotel ballroom in Austin.
Though Koch freely promotes his philanthropic ventures, he did not
attend the summit, and his name was not in evidence. And on this
occasion the audience was roused not by a dance performance but by a
series of speakers denouncing President Barack Obama. Peggy Venable, the
organizer of the summit, warned that Administration officials “have a
socialist vision for this country.”
Five hundred people attended
the summit, which served, in part, as a training session for Tea Party
activists in Texas. An advertisement cast the event as a populist
uprising against vested corporate power. “Today, the voices of average
Americans are being drowned out by lobbyists and special interests,” it
said. “But you can do something about it.” The pitch made no mention of
its corporate funders. The White House has expressed frustration that
such sponsors have largely eluded public notice. David Axelrod, Obama’s
senior adviser, said, “What they don’t say is that, in part, this is a
grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil
billionaires.”
In April, 2009, Melissa Cohlmia, a company
spokesperson, denied that the Kochs had direct links to the Tea Party,
saying that Americans for Prosperity is “an independent organization and
Koch companies do not in any way direct their activities.” Later, she
issued a statement: “No funding has been provided by Koch companies, the
Koch foundations, or Charles Koch or David Koch specifically to support
the tea parties.” David Koch told
New York, “I’ve never been to a tea-party event. No one representing the tea party has ever even approached me.”
At
the lectern in Austin, however, Venable—a longtime political operative
who draws a salary from Americans for Prosperity, and who has worked for
Koch-funded political groups since 1994—spoke less warily. “We love
what the Tea Parties are doing, because that’s how we’re going to take
back America!” she declared, as the crowd cheered. In a subsequent
interview, she described herself as an early member of the movement,
joking, “I was part of the Tea Party before it was cool!” She explained
that the role of Americans for Prosperity was to help “educate” Tea
Party activists on policy details, and to give them “next-step training”
after their rallies, so that their political energy could be channelled
“more effectively.” And she noted that Americans for Prosperity had
provided Tea Party activists with lists of elected officials to target.
She said of the Kochs, “They’re certainly our people. David’s the
chairman of our board. I’ve certainly met with them, and I’m very
appreciative of what they do.”
Venable honored several Tea Party
“citizen leaders” at the summit. The Texas branch of Americans for
Prosperity gave its Blogger of the Year Award to a young woman named
Sibyl West. On June 14th, West, writing on her site, described Obama as
the “cokehead in chief.” In an online thread, West speculated that the
President was exhibiting symptoms of “demonic possession (aka
schizophrenia, etc.).” The summit featured several paid speakers,
including Janine Turner, the actress best known for her role on the
television series “Northern Exposure.” She declared, “They don’t want
our children to know about their rights. They don’t want our children to
know about a God!”
During a catered lunch, Venable introduced
Ted Cruz, a former solicitor general of Texas, who told the crowd that
Obama was “the most radical President ever to occupy the Oval Office,”
and had hidden from voters a secret agenda—“the government taking over
our economy and our lives.” Countering Obama, Cruz proclaimed, was “the
epic fight of our generation!” As the crowd rose to its feet and
cheered, he quoted the defiant words of a Texan at the Alamo: “Victory,
or death!”
Americans for Prosperity has worked closely with the
Tea Party since the movement’s inception. In the weeks before the first
Tax Day protests, in April, 2009, Americans for Prosperity hosted a Web
site offering supporters “Tea Party Talking Points.” The Arizona branch
urged people to send tea bags to Obama; the Missouri branch urged
members to sign up for “Taxpayer Tea Party Registration” and provided
directions to nine protests. The group continues to stoke the rebellion.
The North Carolina branch recently launched a “Tea Party Finder” Web
site, advertised as “a hub for all the Tea Parties in North Carolina.”
The
anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a
political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to “educate,” fund, and
organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private
agenda into a mass movement. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist
and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy
Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, said, “The
problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs
and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who
give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to
create a movement.” With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said,
“everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out
there—people who can provide real ideological power.” The Kochs, he
said, are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising
into their own policies.”
A Republican campaign consultant who
has done research on behalf of Charles and David Koch said of the Tea
Party, “The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It’s like they
put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs
come out of the mud—and they’re our candidates!”
The Kochs and
their political operatives declined requests for interviews. Instead, a
prominent New York public-relations executive who is close with the
Kochs put forward two friends: George Pataki, the former governor of New
York, and Mortimer Zuckerman, the publisher and real-estate magnate.
Pataki, a Republican who received campaign donations from David Koch,
called him “a patriot who cares deeply about his country.” Zuckerman
praised David’s “gentle decency” and the “range of his public
interests.”
The Republican campaign consultant said of the
family’s political activities, “To call them under the radar is an
understatement. They are underground!” Another former Koch adviser said,
“They’re smart. This right-wing, redneck stuff works for them. They see
this as a way to get things done without getting dirty themselves.” Rob
Stein, a Democratic political strategist who has studied the
conservative movement’s finances, said that the Kochs are “at the
epicenter of the anti-Obama movement. But it’s not just about Obama.
They would have done the same to Hillary Clinton. They did the same with
Bill Clinton. They are out to destroy progressivism.”
Oddly
enough, the fiercely capitalist Koch family owes part of its fortune to
Joseph Stalin. Fred Koch was the son of a Dutch printer who settled in
Texas and ran a weekly newspaper. Fred attended M.I.T., where he earned a
degree in chemical engineering. In 1927, he invented a more efficient
process for converting oil into gasoline, but, according to family lore,
America’s major oil companies regarded him as a threat and shut him out
of the industry. Unable to succeed at home, Koch found work in the
Soviet Union. In the nineteen-thirties, his company trained Bolshevik
engineers and helped Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil
refineries. Over time, however, Stalin brutally purged several of Koch’s
Soviet colleagues. Koch was deeply affected by the experience, and
regretted his collaboration. He returned to the U.S. In the headquarters
of his company, Rock Island Oil & Refining, in Wichita, he kept
photographs aimed at proving that some of those Soviet refineries had
been destroyed in the Second World War. Gus diZerega, a former friend of
Charles Koch, recalled, “As the Soviets became a stronger military
power, Fred felt a certain amount of guilt at having helped build them
up. I think it bothered him a lot.”
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.”
Koch
married Mary Robinson, the daughter of a Missouri physician, and they
had four sons: Freddie, Charles, and twins, David and William. John
Damgard, the president of the Futures Industry Association, was David’s
schoolmate and friend. He recalled that Fred Koch was “a real John Wayne
type.” Koch emphasized rugged pursuits, taking his sons big-game
hunting in Africa, and requiring them to do farm labor at the family
ranch. The Kochs lived in a stone mansion on a large compound across
from Wichita’s country club; in the summer, the boys could hear their
friends splashing in the pool, but they were not allowed to join them.
“By instilling a work ethic in me at an early age, my father did me a
big favor, although it didn’t seem like a favor back then,” Charles has
written. “By the time I was eight, he made sure work occupied most of my
spare time.” David Koch recalled that his father also indoctrinated the
boys politically. “He was constantly speaking to us children about what
was wrong with government,” he told Brian Doherty, an editor of the
libertarian magazine
Reason, and the author of “Radicals for
Capitalism,” a 2007 history of the libertarian movement. “It’s something
I grew up with—a fundamental point of view that big government was bad,
and imposition of government controls on our lives and economic
fortunes was not good.”
David attended Deerfield Academy, in
Massachusetts, and Charles was sent to military school. Charles, David,
and William all earned engineering degrees at their father’s alma mater,
M.I.T., and later joined the family company. Charles eventually assumed
control, with David as his deputy; William’s career at the company was
less successful. Freddie went to Harvard and studied playwriting at the
Yale School of Drama. His father reportedly disapproved of him, and
punished him financially. (Freddie, through a spokesperson, denied
this.)
In 1967, after Fred Koch died, of a heart attack, Charles
renamed the business Koch Industries, in honor of his father. Fred
Koch’s will made his sons extraordinarily wealthy. David Koch joked
about his good fortune in a 2003 speech to alumni at Deerfield, where,
after pledging twenty-five million dollars, he was made the school’s
sole “lifetime trustee.” He said, “You might ask: How does David Koch
happen to have the wealth to be so generous? Well, let me tell you a
story. It all started when I was a little boy. One day, my father gave
me an apple. I soon sold it for five dollars and bought two apples and
sold them for ten. Then I bought four apples and sold them for twenty.
Well, this went on day after day, week after week, month after month,
year after year, until my father died and left me three hundred million
dollars!”
David and Charles had absorbed their father’s
conservative politics, but they did not share all his views, according
to diZerega, who befriended Charles in the mid-sixties, after meeting
him while browsing in a John Birch Society bookstore in Wichita. Charles
eventually invited him to the Kochs’ mansion, to participate in an
informal political-discussion group. “It was pretty clear that Charles
thought some of the Birch Society was bullshit,” diZerega recalled.
DiZerega,
who has lost touch with Charles, eventually abandoned right-wing views,
and became a political-science professor. He credits Charles with
opening his mind to political philosophy, which set him on the path to
academia; Charles is one of three people to whom he dedicated his first
book. But diZerega believes that the Koch brothers have followed a
wayward intellectual trajectory, transferring their father’s paranoia
about Soviet Communism to a distrust of the U.S. government, and seeing
its expansion, beginning with the New Deal, as a tyrannical threat to
freedom. In an essay, posted on Beliefnet, diZerega writes, “As state
socialism failed . . . the target for many within these organizations
shifted to any kind of regulation at all. ‘Socialism’ kept being defined
downwards.”
Members of the John Birch Society developed an
interest in a school of Austrian economists who promoted free-market
ideals. Charles and David Koch were particularly influenced by the work
of Friedrich von Hayek, the author of “The Road to Serfdom” (1944),
which argued that centralized government planning led, inexorably, to
totalitarianism. Hayek’s belief in unfettered capitalism has proved
inspirational to many conservatives, and to anti-Soviet dissidents;
lately, Tea Party supporters have championed his work. In June, the
talk-radio host Glenn Beck, who has supported the Tea Party rebellion,
promoted “The Road to Serfdom” on his show; the paperback soon became a
No. 1 best-seller on Amazon. (Beck appears to be a fan of the Kochs; in
the midst of a recent on-air parody of Al Gore, Beck said, without
explanation, “I want to thank Charles Koch for this information.” Beck
declined to elaborate on the relationship.)
Charles and David also
became devotees of a more radical thinker, Robert LeFevre, who favored
the abolition of the state but didn’t like the label “anarchist”; he
called himself an “autarchist.” LeFevre liked to say that “government is
a disease masquerading as its own cure.” In 1956, he opened an
institution called the Freedom School, in Colorado Springs. Brian
Doherty, of
Reason, told me that “LeFevre was an anarchist figure
who won Charles’s heart,” and that the school was “a tiny world of
people who thought the New Deal was a horrible mistake.” According to
diZerega, Charles supported the school financially, and even gave him
money to take classes there.
Throughout the seventies, Charles
and David continued to build Koch Industries. In 1980, William, with
assistance from Freddie, attempted to take over the company from
Charles, who, they felt, had assumed autocratic control. In retaliation,
the company’s board, which answered to Charles, fired William.
(“Charles runs it all with an iron hand,” Bruce Bartlett, the economist,
told me.) Lawsuits were filed, with William and Freddie on one side and
Charles and David on the other. In 1983, Charles and David bought out
their brothers’ share in the company for nearly a billion dollars. But
the antagonism remained, and litigation continued for seventeen more
years, with the brothers hiring rival private investigators; in 1990,
they walked past one another with stony expressions at their mother’s
funeral. Eventually, Freddie moved to Monaco, which has no income tax.
He bought historic estates in France, Austria, and elsewhere, filling
them with art, antiques, opera scores, and literary manuscripts. William
founded his own energy company, Oxbow, and turned to yachting; he spent
an estimated sixty-five million dollars to win the America’s Cup, in
1992.
With Charles as the undisputed chairman and C.E.O., Koch
Industries expanded rapidly. Roger Altman, who heads the
investment-banking firm Evercore, told me that the company’s performance
has been “beyond phenomenal.” Charles remained in Wichita, with his
wife and two children, guarding his privacy while supporting community
charities. David moved to New York City, where he is an executive
vice-president of the company and the C.E.O. of its Chemical Technology
Group. A financial expert who knows Koch Industries well told me,
“Charles
is the company. Charles runs it.” David, described by
associates as “affable” and “a bit of a lunk,” enjoyed for years the
life of a wealthy bachelor. He rented a yacht in the South of France and
bought a waterfront home in Southampton, where he threw parties that
the Web site New York Social Diary likened to an “East Coast version of
Hugh Hefner’s soirées.” In 1996, he married Julia Flesher, a fashion
assistant. They live in a nine-thousand-square-foot duplex at 740 Park
Avenue, with their three children. Though David’s manner is more
cosmopolitan, and more genial, than that of Charles, Brian Doherty, who
has interviewed both brothers, couldn’t think of a single issue on which
the brothers disagreed.
As their fortunes grew, Charles and David
Koch became the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics
in America. Charles’s goal, as Doherty described it, was to tear the
government “out at the root.” The brothers’ first major public step came
in 1979, when Charles persuaded David, then thirty-nine, to run for
public office. They had become supporters of the Libertarian Party, and
were backing its Presidential candidate, Ed Clark, who was running
against Ronald Reagan from the right. Frustrated by the legal limits on
campaign donations, they contrived to place David on the ticket, in the
Vice-Presidential slot; upon becoming a candidate, he could lavish as
much of his personal fortune as he wished on the campaign. The ticket’s
slogan was “The Libertarian Party has only one source of funds: You.” In
fact, its primary source of funds was David Koch, who spent more than
two million dollars on the effort.
Many of the ideas propounded in the 1980 campaign presaged the Tea Party movement. Ed Clark told
The Nation that
libertarians were getting ready to stage “a very big tea party,”
because people were “sick to death” of taxes. The Libertarian Party
platform called for the abolition of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., as well
as of federal regulatory agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange
Commission and the Department of Energy. The Party wanted to end Social
Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control, and all personal and corporate
income taxes; it proposed the legalization of prostitution,
recreational drugs, and suicide. Government should be reduced to only
one function: the protection of individual rights. William F. Buckley,
Jr., a more traditional conservative, called the movement
“Anarcho-Totalitarianism.”
That November, the Libertarian ticket
received only one per cent of the vote. The brothers realized that their
brand of politics didn’t sell at the ballot box. Charles Koch became
openly scornful of conventional politics. “It tends to be a nasty,
corrupting business,” he told a reporter at the time. “I’m interested in
advancing libertarian ideas.” According to Doherty’s book, the Kochs
came to regard elected politicians as merely “actors playing out a
script.” A longtime confidant of the Kochs told Doherty that the
brothers wanted to “supply the themes and words for the scripts.” In
order to alter the direction of America, they had to “influence the
areas where policy ideas percolate from: academia and think tanks.”
After
the 1980 election, Charles and David Koch receded from the public
arena. But they poured more than a hundred million dollars into dozens
of seemingly independent organizations. Tax records indicate that in
2008 the three main Koch family foundations gave money to thirty-four
political and policy organizations, three of which they founded, and
several of which they direct. The Kochs and their company have given
additional millions to political campaigns, advocacy groups, and
lobbyists. The family’s subterranean financial role has fuelled
suspicion on the left; Lee Fang, of the liberal blog ThinkProgress, has
called the Kochs “the billionaires behind the hate.”
Only the
Kochs know precisely how much they have spent on politics. Public tax
records show that between 1998 and 2008 the Charles G. Koch Charitable
Foundation spent more than forty-eight million dollars. The Claude R.
Lambe Charitable Foundation, which is controlled by Charles Koch and his
wife, along with two company employees and an accountant, spent more
than twenty-eight million. The David H. Koch Charitable Foundation spent
more than a hundred and twenty million. Meanwhile, since 1998 Koch
Industries has spent more than fifty million dollars on lobbying.
Separately, the company’s political-action committee, Koch
PAC,
has donated some eight million dollars to political campaigns, more
than eighty per cent of it to Republicans. So far in 2010, Koch
Industries leads all other energy companies in political contributions,
as it has since 2006. In addition, during the past dozen years the Kochs
and other family members have personally spent more than two million
dollars on political contributions. In the second quarter of 2010, David
Koch was the biggest individual contributor to the Republican Governors
Association, with a million-dollar donation. Other gifts by the Kochs
may be untraceable; federal tax law permits anonymous personal donations
to politically active nonprofit groups.
In recent decades,
members of several industrial dynasties have spent parts of their
fortunes on a conservative agenda. In the nineteen-eighties, the Olin
family, which owns a chemicals-and-manufacturing conglomerate, became
known for funding right-leaning thinking in academia, particularly in
law schools. And during the nineties Richard Mellon Scaife, a descendant
of Andrew Mellon, spent millions attempting to discredit President Bill
Clinton. Ari Rabin-Havt, a vice-president at the Democratic-leaning Web
site Media Matters, said that the Kochs’ effort is unusual, in its
marshalling of corporate and personal funds: “Their role, in terms of
financial commitments, is staggering.”
Of course, Democrats give
money, too. Their most prominent donor, the financier George Soros, runs
a foundation, the Open Society Institute, that has spent as much as a
hundred million dollars a year in America. Soros has also made generous
private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including
Obama’s. But Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued that Soros’s giving
is transparent, and that “none of his contributions are in the service
of his own economic interests.” The Kochs have given millions of dollars
to nonprofit groups that criticize environmental regulation and support
lower taxes for industry. Gus diZerega, the former friend, suggested
that the Kochs’ youthful idealism about libertarianism had largely
devolved into a rationale for corporate self-interest. He said of
Charles, “Perhaps he has confused making money with freedom.”
Some
critics have suggested that the Kochs’ approach has subverted the
purpose of tax-exempt giving. By law, charitable foundations must
conduct exclusively nonpartisan activities that promote the public
welfare. A 2004 report by the National Committee for Responsive
Philanthropy, a watchdog group, described the Kochs’ foundations as
being self-serving, concluding, “These foundations give money to
nonprofit organizations that do research and advocacy on issues that
impact the profit margin of Koch Industries.”
The Kochs have gone
well beyond their immediate self-interest, however, funding
organizations that aim to push the country in a libertarian direction.
Among the institutions that they have subsidized are the Institute for
Justice, which files lawsuits opposing state and federal regulations;
the Institute for Humane Studies, which underwrites libertarian
academics; and the Bill of Rights Institute, which promotes a
conservative slant on the Constitution. Many of the organizations funded
by the Kochs employ specialists who write position papers that are
subsequently quoted by politicians and pundits. David Koch has
acknowledged that the family exerts tight ideological control. “If we’re
going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a
way that goes along with our intent,” he told Doherty. “And if they make
a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw
funding.”
The Kochs’ subsidization of a
pro-corporate movement fulfills, in many ways, the vision laid out in a
secret 1971 memo that Lewis Powell, then a Virginia attorney, wrote two
months before he was nominated to the Supreme Court. The antiwar
movement had turned its anger on defense contractors, such as Dow
Chemical, and Ralph Nader was leading a public-interest crusade against
corporations. Powell, writing a report for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,
urged American companies to fight back. The greatest threat to free
enterprise, he warned, was not Communism or the New Left but, rather,
“respectable elements of society”—intellectuals, journalists, and
scientists. To defeat them, he wrote, business leaders needed to wage a
long-term, unified campaign to change public opinion.
Charles Koch
seems to have approached both business and politics with the
deliberation of an engineer. “To bring about social change,” he told
Doherty, requires “a strategy” that is “vertically and horizontally
integrated,” spanning “from idea creation to policy development to
education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to
political action.” The project, he admitted, was extremely ambitious.
“We have a radical philosophy,” he said.
In 1977, the Kochs
provided the funds to launch the nation’s first libertarian think tank,
the Cato Institute. According to the Center for Public Integrity,
between 1986 and 1993 the Koch family gave eleven million dollars to the
institute. Today, Cato has more than a hundred full-time employees, and
its experts and policy papers are widely quoted and respected by the
mainstream media. It describes itself as nonpartisan, and its scholars
have at times been critical of both parties. But it has consistently
pushed for corporate tax cuts, reductions in social services, and
laissez-faire environmental policies.
When President Obama, in a
2008 speech, described the science on global warming as “beyond
dispute,” the Cato Institute took out a full-page ad in the
Times
to contradict him. Cato’s resident scholars have relentlessly
criticized political attempts to stop global warming as expensive,
ineffective, and unnecessary. Ed Crane, the Cato Institute’s founder and
president, told me that “global-warming theories give the government
more control of the economy.”
Cato scholars have been particularly
energetic in promoting the Climategate scandal. Last year, private
e-mails of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia, in
England, were mysteriously leaked, and their exchanges appeared to
suggest a willingness to falsify data in order to buttress the idea that
global warming is real. In the two weeks after the e-mails went public,
one Cato scholar gave more than twenty media interviews trumpeting the
alleged scandal. But five independent inquiries have since exonerated
the researchers, and nothing was found in their e-mails or data to
discredit the scientific consensus on global warming.
Nevertheless,
the controversy succeeded in spreading skepticism about climate change.
Even though the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
recently issued a report concluding that the evidence for global warming
is unequivocal, more Americans are convinced than at any time since
1997 that scientists have exaggerated the seriousness of global warming.
The Kochs promote this statistic on their company’s Web site but do not
mention the role that their funding has played in fostering such doubt.
In
a 2002 memo, the Republican political consultant Frank Luntz wrote that
so long as “voters believe there is no consensus about global warming
within the scientific community” the status quo would prevail. The key
for opponents of environmental reform, he said, was to question the
science—a public-relations strategy that the tobacco industry used
effectively for years to forestall regulation. The Kochs have funded
many sources of environmental skepticism, such as the Heritage
Foundation, which has argued that “scientific facts gathered in the past
10 years do not support the notion of catastrophic human-made warming.”
The brothers have given money to more obscure groups, too, such as the
Independent Women’s Forum, which opposes the presentation of global
warming as a scientific fact in American public schools. Until 2008, the
group was run by Nancy Pfotenhauer, a former lobbyist for Koch
Industries. Mary Beth Jarvis, a vice-president of a Koch subsidiary, is
on the group’s board.
Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and
science studies at the University of California, San Diego, is the
co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” a new book that chronicles various
attempts by American industry to manipulate public opinion on science.
She noted that the Kochs, as the heads of “a company with refineries and
pipelines,” have “a lot at stake.” She added, “If the answer is to
phase out fossil fuels, a different group of people are going to be
making money, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re fighting tooth
and nail.”
David Koch told
New York that he was unconvinced
that global warming has been caused by human activity. Even if it has
been, he said, the heating of the planet will be beneficial, resulting
in longer growing seasons in the Northern Hemisphere. “The Earth will be
able to support enormously more people because far greater land area
will be available to produce food,” he said.
In
the mid-eighties, the Kochs provided millions of dollars to George
Mason University, in Arlington, Virginia, to set up another think tank.
Now known as the Mercatus Center, it promotes itself as “the world’s
premier university source for market-oriented ideas—bridging the gap
between academic ideas and real-world problems.” Financial records show
that the Koch family foundations have contributed more than thirty
million dollars to George Mason, much of which has gone to the Mercatus
Center, a nonprofit organization. “It’s ground zero for deregulation
policy in Washington,” Rob Stein, the Democratic strategist, said. It is
an unusual arrangement. “George Mason is a public university, and
receives public funds,” Stein noted. “Virginia is hosting an institution
that the Kochs practically control.”
The founder of the Mercatus
Center is Richard Fink, formerly an economist. Fink heads Koch
Industries’ lobbying operation in Washington. In addition, he is the
president of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the president of
the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, a director of the Fred C.
and Mary R. Koch Foundation, and a director and co-founder, with David
Koch, of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation.
Fink, with his
many titles, has become the central nervous system of the Kochtopus. He
appears to have supplanted Ed Crane, the head of the Cato Institute, as
the brothers’ main political lieutenant. Though David remains on the
board at Cato, Charles Koch has fallen out with Crane. Associates
suggested to me that Crane had been insufficiently respectful of
Charles’s management philosophy, which he distilled into a book called
“The Science of Success,” and trademarked under the name Market-Based
Management, or M.B.M. In the book, Charles recommends instilling a
company’s corporate culture with the competitiveness of the marketplace.
Koch describes M.B.M. as a “holistic system” containing “five
dimensions: vision, virtue and talents, knowledge processes, decision
rights and incentives.” A top Cato Institute official told me that
Charles “thinks he’s a genius. He’s the emperor, and he’s convinced he’s
wearing clothes.” Fink, by contrast, has been far more embracing of
Charles’s ideas. (Fink, like the Kochs, declined to be interviewed.)
At
a 1995 conference for philanthropists, Fink adopted the language of
economics when speaking about the Mercatus Center’s purpose. He said
that grant-makers should use think tanks and political-action groups to
convert intellectual raw materials into policy “products.”
The
Wall Street Journal
has called the Mercatus Center “the most important think tank you’ve
never heard of,” and noted that fourteen of the twenty-three regulations
that President George W. Bush placed on a “hit list” had been suggested
first by Mercatus scholars. Fink told the paper that the Kochs have
“other means of fighting [their] battles,” and that the Mercatus Center
does not actively promote the company’s private interests. But Thomas
McGarity, a law professor at the University of Texas, who specializes in
environmental issues, told me that “Koch has been constantly in trouble
with the E.P.A., and Mercatus has constantly hammered on the agency.”
An environmental lawyer who has clashed with the Mercatus Center called
it “a means of laundering economic aims.” The lawyer explained the
strategy: “You take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding
think tank,” which “hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who
put out credible-seeming studies. But they all coincide perfectly with
the economic interests of their funders.”
In 1997, for instance,
the E.P.A. moved to reduce surface ozone, a form of pollution caused, in
part, by emissions from oil refineries. Susan Dudley, an economist who
became a top official at the Mercatus Center, criticized the proposed
rule. The E.P.A., she argued, had not taken into account that smog-free
skies would result in more cases of skin cancer. She projected that if
pollution were controlled it would cause up to eleven thousand
additional cases of skin cancer each year.
In 1999, the District
of Columbia Circuit Court took up Dudley’s smog argument. Evaluating the
E.P.A. rule, the court found that the E.P.A. had “explicitly
disregarded” the “possible health benefits of ozone.” In another part of
the opinion, the court ruled, 2-1, that the E.P.A. had overstepped its
authority in calibrating standards for ozone emissions. As the
Constitutional Accountability Center, a think tank, revealed, the judges
in the majority had previously attended legal junkets, on a Montana
ranch, that were arranged by the Foundation for Research on Economics
and the Environment—a group funded by Koch family foundations. The
judges have claimed that the ruling was unaffected by their attendance.
“Ideas
don’t happen on their own,” Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, a
Tea Party advocacy group, told me. “Throughout history, ideas need
patrons.” The Koch brothers, after helping to create Cato and Mercatus,
concluded that think tanks alone were not enough to effect change. They
needed a mechanism to deliver those ideas to the street, and to attract
the public’s support. In 1984, David Koch and Richard Fink created yet
another organization, and Kibbe joined them. The group, Citizens for a
Sound Economy, seemed like a grassroots movement, but according to the
Center for Public Integrity it was sponsored principally by the Kochs,
who provided $7.9 million between 1986 and 1993. Its mission, Kibbe
said, “was to take these heavy ideas and translate them for mass
America. . . . We read the same literature Obama did about nonviolent
revolutions—Saul Alinsky, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. We studied the
idea of the Boston Tea Party as an example of nonviolent social change.
We learned we needed boots on the ground to sell ideas, not candidates.”
Within a few years, the group had mobilized fifty paid field workers,
in twenty-six states, to rally voters behind the Kochs’ agenda. David
and Charles, according to one participant, were “very controlling, very
top down. You can’t build an organization with them. They run it.”
Around
this time, the brothers faced a political crisis. In 1989, the Senate
Select Committee on Indian Affairs investigated their business and
released a scathing report accusing Koch Oil of “a widespread and
sophisticated scheme to steal crude oil from Indians and others through
fraudulent mismeasuring.” The Kochs admitted that they had improperly
taken thirty-one million dollars’ worth of crude oil, but said that it
had been accidental. Charles Koch told committee investigators that oil
measurement is “a very uncertain art.”
To defend its reputation,
Koch Industries hired Robert Strauss, then a premier Washington
lobbyist; the company soon opened an office in the city. A grand jury
was convened to investigate the allegations, but it eventually
disbanded, without issuing criminal charges. According to the Senate
report, after the committee hearings Koch operatives delved into the
personal lives of committee staffers, even questioning an ex-wife.
Senate investigators were upset by the Kochs’ tactics. Kenneth Ballen,
the counsel to the Senate committee, said, “These people have amassed
such unaccountable power!”
By 1993, when Bill Clinton became
President, Citizens for a Sound Economy had become a prototype for the
kind of corporate-backed opposition campaigns that have proliferated
during the Obama era. The group waged a successful assault on Clinton’s
proposed B.T.U. tax on energy, for instance, running advertisements,
staging media events, and targeting opponents. And it mobilized anti-tax
rallies outside the Capitol—rallies that NPR described as “designed to
strike fear into the hearts of wavering Democrats.” Dan Glickman, a
former Democratic congressman from Wichita, who supported the B.T.U.
tax, recalled, “I’d been in Congress eighteen years. The Kochs actually
engaged against me and funded my opponent. They used a lot of resources
and effort—their employees, too.” Glickman suffered a surprise defeat.
“I can’t prove it, but I think I was probably their victim,” he said.
The
Kochs continued to disperse their money, creating slippery
organizations with generic-sounding names, and this made it difficult to
ascertain the extent of their influence in Washington. In 1990,
Citizens for a Sound Economy created a spinoff group, Citizens for the
Environment, which called acid rain and other environmental problems
“myths.” When the Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette investigated the matter, it discovered that the spinoff group had “no citizen membership of its own.”
In
1997, another Senate investigation began looking into what a minority
report called “an audacious plan to pour millions of dollars in
contributions into Republican campaigns nationwide without disclosing
the amount or source,” in order to evade campaign-finance laws. A shell
corporation, Triad Management, had paid more than three million dollars
for attack ads in twenty-six House races and three Senate races. More
than half of the advertising money came from an obscure nonprofit group,
the Economic Education Trust. The Senate committee’s minority report
suggested that “the trust was financed in whole or in part by Charles
and David Koch of Wichita, Kansas.” The brothers were suspected of
having secretly paid for the attack ads, most of which aired in states
where Koch Industries did business. In Kansas, where Triad Management
was especially active, the funds may have played a decisive role in four
of six federal races. The Kochs, when asked by reporters if they had
given the money, refused to comment. In 1998, however, the
Wall Street Journal
confirmed that a consultant on the Kochs’ payroll had been involved in
the scheme. Charles Lewis, of the Center for Public Integrity, described
the scandal as “historic. Triad was the first time a major corporation
used a cutout”—a front operation—“in a threatening way. Koch Industries
was the poster child of a company run amok.”
During
the Clinton Administration, the energy industry faced increased
scrutiny and regulation. In the mid-nineties, the Justice Department
filed two lawsuits against Koch Industries, claiming that it was
responsible for more than three hundred oil spills, which had released
an estimated three million gallons of oil into lakes and rivers. The
penalty was potentially as high as two hundred and fourteen million
dollars. In a settlement, Koch Industries paid a record
thirty-million-dollar civil fine, and agreed to spend five million
dollars on environmental projects.
In 1999, a jury found Koch
Industries guilty of negligence and malice in the deaths of two Texas
teen-agers in an explosion that resulted from a leaky underground butane
pipeline. (In 2001, the company paid an undisclosed settlement.) And in
the final months of the Clinton Presidency the Justice Department
levelled a ninety-seven-count indictment against the company, for
covering up the discharge of ninety-one tons of benzene, a carcinogen,
from its refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas. The company was liable for
three hundred and fifty million dollars in fines, and four Koch
employees faced up to thirty-five years in prison. The Koch Petroleum
Group eventually pleaded guilty to one criminal charge of covering up
environmental violations, including the falsification of documents, and
paid a twenty-million-dollar fine. David Uhlmann, a career prosecutor
who, at the time, headed the environmental-crimes section at the Justice
Department, described the suit as “one of the most significant cases
ever brought under the Clean Air Act.” He added, “Environmental crimes
are almost always motivated by economics and arrogance, and in the Koch
case there was a healthy dose of both.”
During the 2000 election
campaign, Koch Industries spent some nine hundred thousand dollars to
support the candidacies of George W. Bush and other Republicans. During
the Bush years, Koch Industries and other fossil-fuel companies enjoyed
remarkable prosperity. The 2005 energy bill, which Hillary Clinton
dubbed the Dick Cheney Lobbyist Energy Bill, offered enormous subsidies
and tax breaks for energy companies. The Kochs have cast themselves as
deficit hawks, but, according to a study by Media Matters, their
companies have benefitted from nearly a hundred million dollars in
government contracts since 2000.
In 2004, Citizens for a Sound
Economy was accused of illegitimately throwing its weight behind Bush’s
reëlection. The group’s Oregon branch had attempted to get Ralph Nader
on the Presidential ballot, in order to dilute Democratic support for
John Kerry. Critics argued that it was illegal for a tax-exempt
nonprofit organization to donate its services for partisan political
purposes. (A complaint was filed with the Federal Election Commission;
it was dismissed.)
That year, internal rivalries at Citizens for a
Sound Economy caused the organization to split apart. David Koch and
Fink started a new group, Americans for Prosperity, and they hired Tim
Phillips to run it. Phillips was a political veteran who had worked with
Ralph Reed, the evangelical leader and Republican activist, co-founding
Century Strategies, a campaign-consulting company that became notorious
for its ties to the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Phillips’s online
biography describes him as an expert in “grasstops” and “grassroots”
political organizing. The Kochs’ choice of Phillips signalled an even
greater toughness. The conservative operative Grover Norquist, who is
known for praising “throat slitters” in politics, called Phillips “a
grownup who can make things happen.”
Last year, Phillips told the
Financial Times
that Americans for Prosperity had only eight thousand registered
members. Currently, its Web site claims that the group has “1.2 million
activists.” Whatever its size, the Kochs’ political involvement has been
intense; a former employee of the Cato Institute told me that Americans
for Prosperity “was micromanaged by the Kochs.” And the brothers’
investment may well have paid off: Americans for Prosperity, in concert
with the family’s other organizations, has been instrumental in
disrupting the Obama Presidency.
In January, 2008, Charles Koch
wrote in his company newsletter that America could be on the verge of
“the greatest loss of liberty and prosperity since the 1930s.” That
October, Americans for Prosperity held a conference of conservative
operatives at a Marriott hotel outside Washington. Erick Erickson, the
editor-in-chief of the conservative blog RedState.com, took the lectern,
thanked David Koch, and vowed to “unite and fight . . . the armies of
the left!” Soon after Obama assumed office, Americans for Prosperity
launched “Porkulus” rallies against Obama’s stimulus-spending measures.
Then the Mercatus Center released a report claiming that stimulus funds
had been directed disproportionately toward Democratic districts;
eventually, the author was forced to correct the report, but not before
Rush Limbaugh, citing the paper, had labelled Obama’s program “a slush
fund,” and Fox News and other conservative outlets had echoed the
sentiment. (Phil Kerpen, the vice-president for policy at Americans for
Prosperity, is a contributor to the Fox News Web site. Another officer
at Americans for Prosperity, Walter Williams, often guest-hosts for
Limbaugh.)
Americans for Prosperity also created an offshoot,
Patients United Now, which organized what Phillips has estimated to be
more than three hundred rallies against health-care reform. At one
rally, an effigy of a Democratic congressman was hung; at another,
protesters unfurled a banner depicting corpses from Dachau. The group
also helped organize the “Kill the Bill” protests outside the Capitol,
in March, where Democratic supporters of health-care reform alleged that
they were spat on and cursed at. Phillips was a featured speaker.
Americans
for Prosperity has held at least eighty events targeting cap-and-trade
legislation, which is aimed at making industries pay for the air
pollution that they create. Speakers for the group claimed, with
exaggeration, that even back-yard barbecues and kitchen stoves would be
taxed. The group was also involved in the attacks on Obama’s “green
jobs” czar, Van Jones, and waged a crusade against international climate
talks. Casting his group as a champion of ordinary workers who would be
hurt by environmentalists, Phillips went to Copenhagen last year and
staged a protest outside the United Nations conference on climate
change, declaring, “We’re a grassroots organization. . . . I think it’s
unfortunate when wealthy children of wealthy families . . . want to send
unemployment rates in the United States up to twenty per cent.”
Grover
Norquist, who holds a weekly meeting for conservative leaders in
Washington, including representatives from Americans for Prosperity,
told me that last summer’s raucous rallies were pivotal in undermining
Obama’s agenda. The Republican leadership in Congress, he said,
“couldn’t have done it without August, when people went out on the
streets. It discouraged deal-makers”—Republicans who might otherwise
have worked constructively with Obama. Moreover, the appearance of
growing public opposition to Obama affected corporate donors on K
Street. “K Street is a three-billion-dollar weathervane,” Norquist said.
“When Obama was strong, the Chamber of Commerce said, ‘We can work with
the Obama Administration.’ But that changed when thousands of people
went into the street and ‘terrorized’ congressmen. August is what
changed it. Now that Obama is weak, people are getting tough.”
As
the first anniversary of Obama’s election approached, David Koch came
to the Washington area to attend a triumphant Americans for Prosperity
gathering. Obama’s poll numbers were falling fast. Not a single
Republican senator was working with the Administration on health care,
or much else. Pundits were writing about Obama’s political ineptitude,
and Tea Party groups were accusing the President of initiating “a
government takeover.” In a speech, Koch said, “Days like today bring to
reality the vision of our board of directors when we started this
organization, five years ago.” He went on, “We envisioned a mass
movement, a state-based one, but national in scope, of hundreds of
thousands of American citizens from all walks of life standing up and
fighting for the economic freedoms that made our nation the most
prosperous society in history. . . . Thankfully, the stirrings from
California to Virginia, and from Texas to Michigan, show that more and
more of our fellow-citizens are beginning to see the same truths as we
do.”
While Koch didn’t explicitly embrace the Tea Party movement
that day, more recently he has come close to doing so, praising it for
demonstrating the “powerful visceral hostility in the body politic
against the massive increase in government power, the massive efforts to
socialize this country.” Charles Koch, in a newsletter sent to his
seventy thousand employees, compared the Obama Administration to the
regime of the Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez. The Kochs’ sense of
imperilment is somewhat puzzling. Income inequality in America is
greater than it has been since the nineteen-twenties, and since the
seventies the tax rates of the wealthiest have fallen more than those of
the middle class. Yet the brothers’ message has evidently resonated
with voters: a recent poll found that fifty-five per cent of Americans
agreed that Obama is a socialist.
Americans for Prosperity,
meanwhile, has announced that it will spend an additional forty-five
million dollars before the midterm elections, in November. Although the
group is legally prohibited from directly endorsing candidates, it
nonetheless plans to target some fifty House races and half a dozen
Senate races, staging rallies, organizing door-to-door canvassing, and
running ads aimed at “educating voters about where candidates stand.”
Though
the Kochs have slowed Obama’s momentum, their larger political battle
is far from won. Richard Fink, interviewed by FrumForum.com this spring,
said, “If you look at where we’ve gone from the year 2000 to now, with
the expansion of government spending and a debt burden that threatens to
bankrupt the country, it doesn’t look very good at all.” He went on,
“It looks like the infrastructure that was built and nurtured has not
carried the day.” He suggested that the Kochs needed “to get more into
the practical, day-to-day issues of governing.”
In
1991, David Koch was badly injured in a plane crash in Los Angeles. He
was the sole passenger in first class to survive. As he was recovering, a
routine physical exam led to the discovery of prostate cancer. Koch
received treatment, settled down, started a family, and reconsidered his
life. As he told Portfolio, “When you’re the only one who
survived in the front of the plane and everyone else died—yeah, you
think, ‘My God, the good Lord spared me for some greater purpose.’ My
joke is that I’ve been busy ever since, doing all the good work I can
think of, so He can have confidence in me.”
Koch began giving
spectacularly large donations to the arts and sciences. And he became a
patron of cancer research, focussing on prostate cancer. In addition to
his gifts to Sloan-Kettering, he gave fifteen million dollars to New
York-Presbyterian Hospital, a hundred and twenty-five million to M.I.T.
for cancer research, twenty million to Johns Hopkins University, and
twenty-five million to the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston. In
response to his generosity, Sloan-Kettering gave Koch its Excellence in
Corporate Leadership Award. In 2004, President Bush named him to the
National Cancer Advisory Board, which guides the National Cancer
Institute.
Koch’s corporate and political roles, however, may pose
conflicts of interest. For example, at the same time that David Koch
has been casting himself as a champion in the fight against cancer, Koch
Industries has been lobbying to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying
formaldehyde, which the company produces in great quantities, as a
“known carcinogen” in humans.
Scientists have long known that
formaldehyde causes cancer in rats, and several major scientific studies
have concluded that formaldehyde causes cancer in human
beings—including one published last year by the National Cancer
Institute, on whose advisory board Koch sits. The study tracked
twenty-five thousand patients for an average of forty years; subjects
exposed to higher amounts of formaldehyde had significantly higher rates
of leukemia. These results helped lead an expert panel within the
National Institutes of Health to conclude that formaldehyde should be
categorized as a known carcinogen, and be strictly controlled by the
government. Corporations have resisted regulations on formaldehyde for
decades, however, and Koch Industries has been a large funder of members
of Congress who have stymied the E.P.A., requiring it to defer new
regulations until more studies are completed.
Koch Industries
became a major producer of the chemical in 2005, after it bought
Georgia-Pacific, the paper and wood-products company, for twenty-one
billion dollars. Georgia-Pacific manufactures formaldehyde in its
chemical division, and uses it to produce various wood products, such as
plywood and laminates. Its annual production capacity for formaldehyde
is 2.2 billion pounds. Last December, Traylor Champion,
Georgia-Pacific’s vice-president of environmental affairs, sent a formal
letter of protest to federal health authorities. He wrote that the
company “strongly disagrees” with the N.I.H. panel’s conclusion that
formaldehyde should be treated as a known human carcinogen. David Koch
did not recuse himself from the National Cancer Advisory Board, or
divest himself of company stock, while his company was directly lobbying
the government to keep formaldehyde on the market. (A board
spokesperson said that the issue of formaldehyde had not come up.)
James
Huff, an associate director at the National Institute for Environmental
Health Sciences, a division of the N.I.H., told me that it was
“disgusting” for Koch to be serving on the National Cancer Advisory
Board: “It’s just not good for public health. Vested interests should
not be on the board.” He went on, “Those boards are very important.
They’re very influential as to whether N.C.I. goes into formaldehyde or
not. Billions of dollars are involved in formaldehyde.”
Harold
Varmus, the director of the National Cancer Institute, knows David Koch
from Memorial Sloan-Kettering, which he used to run. He said that, at
Sloan-Kettering, “a lot of people who gave to us had large business
interests. The one thing we wouldn’t tolerate in our board members is
tobacco.” When told of Koch Industries’ stance on formaldehyde, Varmus
said that he was “surprised.”
The David H. Koch
Hall of Human Origins, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural
History, is a multimedia exploration of the theory that mankind evolved
in response to climate change. At the main entrance, viewers are
confronted with a giant graph charting the Earth’s temperature over the
past ten million years, which notes that it is far cooler now than it
was ten thousand years ago. Overhead, the text reads, “HUMANS EVOLVED IN RESPONSE TO A CHANGING WORLD.”
The message, as amplified by the exhibit’s Web site, is that “key human
adaptations evolved in response to environmental instability.” Only at
the end of the exhibit, under the headline “OUR SURVIVAL CHALLENGE,”
is it noted that levels of carbon dioxide are higher now than they have
ever been, and that they are projected to increase dramatically in the
next century. No cause is given for this development; no mention is made
of any possible role played by fossil fuels. The exhibit makes it seem
part of a natural continuum. The accompanying text says, “During the
period in which humans evolved, Earth’s temperature and the amount of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fluctuated together.” An interactive
game in the exhibit suggests that humans will continue to adapt to
climate change in the future. People may build “underground cities,”
developing “short, compact bodies” or “curved spines,” so that “moving
around in tight spaces will be no problem.”
Such ideas uncannily
echo the Koch message. The company’s January newsletter to employees,
for instance, argues that “fluctuations in the earth’s climate predate
humanity,” and concludes, “Since we can’t control Mother Nature, let’s
figure out how to get along with her changes.” Joseph Romm, a physicist
who runs the Web site ClimateProgress.org, is infuriated by the
Smithsonian’s presentation. “The whole exhibit whitewashes the modern
climate issue,” he said. “I think the Kochs wanted to be seen as some
sort of high-minded company, associated with the greatest
natural-history and science museum in the country. But the truth is, the
exhibit is underwritten by big-time polluters, who are underground
funders of action to stop efforts to deal with this threat to humanity. I
think the Smithsonian should have drawn the line.”
Cristián
Samper, the museum’s director, said that the exhibit is not about
climate change, and described Koch as “one of the best donors we’ve had,
in my tenure here, because he’s very interested in the content, but
completely hands off.” He noted, “I don’t know all the details of his
involvement in other issues.”
The Kochs have long depended on the
public’s not knowing all the details about them. They have been content
to operate what David Koch has called “the largest company that you’ve
never heard of.” But with the growing prominence of the Tea Party, and
with increased awareness of the Kochs’ ties to the movement, the
brothers may find it harder to deflect scrutiny. Recently, President
Obama took aim at the Kochs’ political network. Speaking at a Democratic
National Committee fund-raiser, in Austin, he warned supporters that
the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Citizens United case—which
struck down laws prohibiting direct corporate spending on campaigns—had
made it even easier for big companies to hide behind “groups with
harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity.” Obama said,
“They don’t have to say who, exactly, Americans for Prosperity are. You
don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation”—or even, he added,
“a big oil company.”
♦
From
there, it went into everything People liked best, about how Obama
interacted with the “three tall women.” He said "I've got three
opinionated, strong, tall women...If they get together, they can have
fun about my ears or being too loud, or how I dress."
