Because of the prominent financial and political involvement
of the mysterious Koch brothers in the US election of November 4, 2014, it
seemed desirable to prepare and circulate a short story on who these brothers
really are, where they come from, what they believe, and what they are doing. This story follows below. It should be noted that the material is
all in my own words, but that I am not making any copyright claims. Use any of the material, and distribute
it as widely as you wish.
The Story
The activities of the “Koch Brothers” involve two mysterious
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)-trained billionaires who got extremely
rich in the petroleum industry and who devote many millions of dollars to help
ultra-right wing political candidates and causes, and almost equal amounts of
dollars to destroy candidates they consider uncooperative, whether or not these
candidates deserve destruction.
The public however really does not know what is going on. To understand the “Koch Brothers” one
must really get a glimpse of their family history.
That is difficult, for the members of the Koch family have
tried to be as unobtrusive as possible.
Only recently has a very thorough book been published about the Koch
brothers (ref. 1), and a documentary video has been made available: “The Koch
Brothers Exposed” (ref. 2). I have
the book and I have read it, but I have not yet seen the video, which
apparently is available from Amazon.com.
What follows may seem to be a long discussion, but my
objective has been to provide a detailed picture of a family that has been
almost hidden. I had to find many
of the details on the internet, and it is easy to confirm them on the internet. Almost all the details provided below
can be found in the book (ref. 1) or on the internet, but most of my MIT
experiences come from memories and contacts that I had to dig up
personally. The unobtrusiveness of
the Koch family members has probably been aimed at preserving privacy, anonymity,
and safety, all of which is essential for wealthy people. It has probably often been mistaken for
humility. For a very wealthy
student enrolled at MIT, anonymity can however last for no more than a few days. My MIT friends have assured me that at
MIT the Koch brothers were not considered humble, but were instead considered
arrogant.
The grandfather of the Koch brothers, Harry Koch (1867-1942),
came to the USA from the Netherlands at the age of 22, settled in Quanah in
west Texas, a small railroad town, and then prospered greatly by getting
involved in the railroad transportation volume going through the town. In Europe he had worked as a printer’s
apprentice, and in Texas he founded the Quanah Tribune-Chief newspaper, and
used the newspaper to help to grow his fortune. He was a founding shareholder of the Quanah, Acme, and
Pacific Railway. During the
depression, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President, in his newspaper
he wrote strongly felt columns opposing the New Deal, opposing the regulation
of the banks, opposing the trade unions, and opposing retirement pensions. These views reflect Harry Koch’s
Libertarian “philosophy,” in which the government must be run by big business,
the population must be at the mercy of big business, and nothing must prevent
big businesses from getting ever bigger and bigger: it must be a government
only of the wealthy, only by the wealthy, and only for the wealthy.
The Libertarian views of Harry Koch lived on virtually
intact in his son Fred C. Koch (1900-1967) and in his grandsons, the Koch
brothers, Charles, David, and Bill.
The fourth Koch brother, Fred, leads a private life collecting art and
restoring old buildings.
Harry’s son Fred started Koch Industries, Inc., at first
primarily in the petroleum refining industry. Three of the Koch brothers (Charles, David, and Bill), as
well as their father Fred, went to study at the Chemical Engineering Department
(Chem. Eng. Dept.) at MIT to learn about the processes involved in petroleum
refining.
The Koch brothers were at MIT at roughly the same time I was
at MIT. I never met or even heard
of any of them at the time, but that is understandable because they studied chemical
engineering and I studied mechanical engineering. I knew the MIT Chem. Eng. Dept. well, however. During my undergraduate and graduate
years at MIT, four of my housemates (Claudio Sonino, the late Adrian Reti,
Robert Kaiser, and the late Adel Fares Sarofim) were at the Chem. Eng. Dept. at
MIT, as were Frank Stewart and Thomas Unger (both of whom I knew well), and Sam
Bodman (who I ran into every now and then). The late Prof. Hoyt Clarke Hottel (1903-1998) was also at
the MIT Chem. Eng. Dept. and was a favorite professor of mine at MIT. He was the famous solar energy expert
of the Hottel-Whillier solar collector model, and now of the ASES Hoyt Clarke
Hottel Award.
I took Prof. Hottel’s course on “Furnace Design” around 1958
because there was no good course on radiation heat transfer in the Mech. Eng.
Dept. A critical part of Hottel’s
course involved the use in the design of many furnaces of the same radiation
properties of carbon dioxide gas that are currently causing global warming. Global warming was no mystery even in
the 1950s, since in 1896 (now nearly 120 years ago) the famous Scandinavian
chemist Svante Arrhenius had already predicted (ref. 3) that the carbon dioxide
gas produced by the continued combustion of fossil fuels would cause global
warming. It is almost certain that
the three Koch brothers took the same course of Hottel, since the petroleum
cracking process developed and used by the Koch family involves the use of high
temperature furnaces. Hottel was
at MIT’s Chem. Eng. Dept. for 76 years, from 1922 to 1998, and he must have
been well known to the three Koch brothers as well as to their father
Fred. From 1934 to 1968 he was the
Director of the Fuels Research Laboratory, and he was also for long the
Director of the MIT School of Chemical Engineering Practice, now called the MIT
David H. Koch School of Chemical Engineering Practice, almost certainly because
of a donation to MIT by David Koch.
The ultra right wing beliefs of Fred Koch were based in part
on what he saw in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The USSR needed equipment and
assistance, and Fred made a fortune satisfying those needs by supplying the
USSR with petroleum refineries. He
went there to deliver and install petroleum refineries that did not simply
distill crude oil into its separate fractions, but that also split the large
crude oil molecules by a high temperature “cracking process” that he had helped
to develop to produce more gasoline and other light fractions. He became a millionaire as a result, and
he saw the ugly communism of Stalin, in which the people were essentially
helpless slaves of a dictatorial government. Fred Koch had a government-assigned guide, Jerome Livschitz,
while he was in the USSR.
Livschitz was a fervent communist who had spent 12 years in the USA, and
who kept telling Fred that capitalism was doomed because communism would
triumph. On the day that Fred went
back to the USA, Livschitz told him that the days of capitalism in the USA were
numbered.
After some time back in the USA Fred learned that even
Livschitz had been executed, probably in one of Stalin’s purges that killed
large numbers of patriots and traitors alike. Fred’s fear that communism was really dangerously contagious
led him to become one of the Founding Members of the John Birch Society. One of the Koch brothers, Charles, also
became a Bircher, and later the Koch brothers helped to set up the Tea Party.
As part of the John Birch Society Fred Koch tried to
influence MIT. He learned that
Prof. Dirk Jan Struik of the MIT Math. Dept. had been associated with communism
in the past, and actively pressured MIT for many years to get them to fire
Struik. MIT did not do so.
On my (never finished) ScD program at MIT my minor was in
mathematics, and I must have taken about a dozen courses in mathematics,
including one taught by Prof. Dirk Jan Struik. Like me, Prof. Struik came from the Netherlands. Prof. Struik had studied mathematics in
the Netherlands at the University of Leiden, he later taught for a few years at
the Delft Technical University, he taught for about 30 years at MIT, and he
died at the age of 106. My father,
uncle, and grandfather all got degrees in engineering in the Netherlands at
Delft, and my brother and I got them at MIT. Struik was one of my favorite professors at MIT, and we
talked briefly several times in Dutch.
Struik considered smoking to be “the only really filthy
habit widely tolerated by humanity,” and I vividly remember that statement of
his. At the time I was still
addicted to cigarettes, and my father owned a tobacco plantation in the
province of Salta in Argentina in which he produced about 100,000 kg of
cigarette tobacco per year, but I agreed with Struik because I had already
gotten to hate the cigarettes to which I was still addicted. Struik never even mentioned Capitalism,
Communism, Socialism, Bolshevism, Naziism, or any other political school of
thought. He may have had sympathy
for left wing ideas (as many did and many still do), but he never preached
about it.
For Fred, the father of the Koch brothers, to try very hard
for years to get MIT to fire Prof. Dirk Jan Struik because he might brainwash
the students at MIT was paranoid lunacy, but that involved the type of
“philosophy” that was hammered into the Koch dynasty during many years by
grandfather Harry and father Fred.
As we saw in the “Un-American Activities Committee” of the US House of
Representatives, and in the behavior of Senator Joseph McCarthy, such paranoid
lunacy was widespread in the USA.
Much of the US Cold War policy was based on the assumption
that there was a “Domino Theory,” in which communism was extremely contagious
and could be easily transmitted from country to country to country, like a row
of falling dominoes. This was
shown to be false when communism in the USSR (and in most of the other
communist regimes around the world) collapsed without any outside
assistance. The population had gotten
sick and tired of communism, and the responsible leaders (like Gorbachev)
decided that communism was not working, and changed the rules to give people
more freedom of speech and more freedom of action (just Google “perestroika”
and “glasnost”).
In the USSR, many citizens had been sick and tired of
communism for a long time. The USSR had two important newspapers: Pravda (meaning the truth) and Izvestia (meaning the news), and for long a popular
underground saying in the USSR had been: “There is no Pravda in Izvestia, and there is no Izvestia
in Pravda.” There were not only dozens of such
anti-communist sayings and jokes, but there was a whole underground literature
of anti-communist self-published books (just Google “samizdat”). Examples
include The Gulag Archipelago and
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Krushchev started the
disintegration of communism by allowing the Denisovich book (about Gulag
concentration camp experiences) to be widely published after Stalin died, and
Gorbachev simply wrapped the disintegration process up.
Outsiders like Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul 2 really had
little to do with the end of communism and of the associated “Cold War,” and
the only countries that still more or less preserve communism involve
dictatorships with personality cults like Cuba and North Korea, in which
communism has become the life jacket for the dictator. Even in Vietnam, in which the USA
started a brutal war to end communism in Vietnam, the USA lost the war and got
kicked out of the country, after which Vietnam started its reform on its own
without any US “assistance” (refs. 4 - 7).
Communism has died, but that does not seem to have changed any
beliefs of the Koch family. These
beliefs should be put into a financial context. Based on a 40 hour work week, the financial net worth of
each of the two Koch brothers involved in the Koch Industries Corporation
(Charles and David) has been increasing by about $1.8 million per hour in the
40 hour week. What seem to be some
of the major concerns of these multi billionaires taking in many additional
millions of dollars per day?
That it should not be necessary to pay workers a federally
mandated minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, that the minimum wage should be
abolished, and that employers should be free to pay even much lower wages.
That Social Security payments (of about $2,642 per month at
most) should be reduced or eliminated, even though the payments involve fully
earned and paid for benefits.
That Medicare and Medicaid benefits should be reduced or
eliminated even though they involve fully earned and paid for benefits.
That the only acceptable political candidates are those who
deny climate change and support the petroleum industry, which is absolutely
determined to obstruct humanity’s energy transition from fossil fuels to
renewable energy, even though the world’s petroleum production is already going
down because of resource depletion (refs. 8 – 10), and the days of cheap oil
are gone.
These are by no means the only outlandish desires of the
Koch brothers.
It should be noted that at $7.25 per hour, 40 hours per week
and 52 weeks per year, it would take over 119 years for someone to earn the
$1,800,000 that the individual Koch brothers take in each hour. It should also be noted that the Koch
brothers are contributing several hundreds of millions of dollars in the
November 2014 elections to make sure that the $7.25 per hour minimum wage
worker will earn even less.
On climate change, the involvement of the Koch brothers must
be found on the internet. For
years Exxon Mobil and the Koch brothers were the two largest funders of the
so-called “climate change denial science.” In the early years of this century Exxon Mobil spent $8
million on “studies” that cast doubts on global warming (refs. 8, 11, 12), and
the Koch brothers also provided funding on “climate change denial science.” Then the Koch Foundation provided
partial funding for a study at Berkeley by Richard Muller (an academic global
warming denier), who finally had to admit that climate change was real, and
that it was primarily caused by human carbon dioxide emission activities. The visible funding of “climate change
denial science” by the Koch brothers has now gone down, but the funding by the
Donors Trust and the Donors Capital organizations has increased significantly,
and it is not possible to determine where this funding comes from. All the Members of Congress supported
by the Koch brothers clearly seem to be determined never even to acknowledge
that global warming actually exists.
Given the chemical engineering education the Koch brothers
got at MIT the global warming effects of extra carbon dioxide gas in the
atmosphere should be immediately obvious to them, as it is to me. The Koch brothers could get the full
details on the climatic impacts and sea level rise of global warming with two
or three phone calls to MIT professors and to some other technical people
around the country, and with a small budget for getting and keeping the
information updated. For them to
provide large amounts of funding for “climate change denial science” studies is
professionally totally inexcusable and a total disgrace.
The last few centuries of history has involved a very slow
and erratic process of establishing some security and safety nets for the poor
and the weak and the elderly. This
can make society wealthier and more stable because more people can contribute
and share, and it limits the frustrations that can lead to revolutions. The Libertarians and Tea Party members
want to do away with all of that, to establish a dog-eat-dog process of
uncontrolled social Darwinism.
The Koch brothers’ approach? Trick and deceive and mislead the voters so as to get them
to vote against their own interest.
On Global Warming?
Make sure to support only candidates who cast doubts on the things students
learn in the Chemical Engineering Department at MIT.
On questions of economics and taxation? Provide staggering amounts of funding
to candidates who will vote your way, and finance a campaign of unlimited and treacherous
destruction against any candidate who stands in your way.
The recent Supreme Court decision to make corporations into
“people” who can contribute any amount of money to political candidates and
causes (i.e. in political bribes and in political warfare) can only be
considered an example of extremely partisan judicial malpractice. Corporations are simply artificial
institutions created by and licensed by the government on the condition that
they will benefit society, with only the legislative and the executive branches
establishing and enforcing the laws and the rules to ensure that. The courts should serve as independent umpires,
and not make the rules. The Koch
Industries Corporation instead seems to have declared war on society, and the
Supreme Court has improperly given the Koch Industries Corporation the power to
do so.
The Koch brothers may have provided MIT (and some other
institutions) with large donations, but they are a disgrace to MIT’s Chemical
Engineering Department in which they learned their trade by acting as if they
learned nothing, and they are an ominous menace to the less well to do members
of humanity. Not incidentally, they
are also a serious obstacle to the renewable energy field.
What Now?
In the 1970s some 80% of the US population favored renewable
energy, but few knew what it would look like. Now about 92% of the population not only favors renewable
energy, but is very enthused about it.
Almost everybody now knows what it looks like, for they have seen the
wind turbines, the photovoltaic panels, the solar heat collectors, the passive
solar buildings, etc. The
renewable energy industry is already very large and growing rapidly, and the
age of fossil fuels is clearly winding down.
Our challenge this November is to ensure that the 92% of the
population that prefers renewable energy goes to the polls. In addition, we
need to help voters in voting with the health and wellbeing of their families,
communities, nation, and planet in mind rather than voting based on the
misguided multi-hundred-million-dollar flood of falsehoods coming from the Tea
Party and the Koch brothers.
It should be noted that the above material is all in my
own words, and that I am not making any copyright claims. Use any of the
material, and distribute it as widely as you wish.
References
1. Daniel
Schulman: “Sons of Wichita – How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most
Powerful and Private Dynasty,” Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group,
NY, 2014. This book is required
reading for anyone who wants to understand the role of energy in politics.
2. Robert
Greenwald: “The Koch Brothers Exposed,” A video that one can get from
Amazon.com, and that I have not yet seen.
3. Svante
Arrhenius: “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature
of the Ground,” Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science (London,
Edinburgh, and Dublin), Fifth Series, Vol. 41, pp 237-276, April, 1896. Arrhenius was a famous Scandinavian
chemist who got the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1903. Being fully aware of the radiation heat transfer behavior of
carbon dioxide gas, he must have wondered if the continued combustion of fossil
fuels could increase the surface temperature of our planet. He ran the calculations very carefully,
found that our carbon dioxide emissions would indeed cause global warming, and
reported this. Nobody has ever
proved Arrhenius wrong, and many must have tried to do so. This was the first study on global
warming. Just Google “Arrhenius
and global warming” to learn more.
4. Daniel
Ellsberg, Whistle Blower: “The Pentagon Papers,” Gravel Edition, Beacon Press,
Boston, 1971.
5. David
Halberstam: “The Best and the Brightest,” Random House, NY, 1972.
6. Neil Sheehan:
“A Bright Shining Lie - John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam,” Random House,
NY, 1989.
7. There are
also many dozens of other books on the disastrous and unnecessary US war in
Vietnam.
8. R. B. Swenson and F. de Winter: “The
Production Peaks in Petroleum and Natural Gas: Information, Misinformation,
Awareness, and Implications,” Proc. of the 2005 Solar World Congress of ISES,
Orlando, Florida, USA, August 6-12, 2005.
This paper is on the internet at: http://www.ecotopia.com/ises/2005/oilgasproduction.pdf
9. F. de Winter
and R. B. Swenson: “A Wake-Up Call,” Solar Today, March/April 2006, pp 15-19. This is the first of four articles in
that issue of Solar Today on the transition humanity must make from fossil
fuels to renewable energy. All
four articles are on the internet at: http://www.ecotopia.com/ases/solartoday/dawnofthesolarera.pdf
10. C. J.
Campbell, Ed.: “Peak Oil Personalities,” Inspire Books, Skibbereen, County
Cork, Ireland, 2011, ISBN: 978-1-908378-06-4 (sold in the USA by Amazon). This book has the biographies of 27 of the
principal people who have been trying to warn humanity about peak oil and its
impacts. It also has Dr. Campbell’s
estimate on the then current status of the world’s oil fields in the year 2011.
11. E. Kolbert:
“The Climate of Man, 3,” The New Yorker, May 9, 2005, page 61.
12. C. Mooney:
“Some Like it Hot,” Mother Jones Magazine, May – June 2005,
pp 36 - 43.
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