(p 149)
The company [Koch Industries] was expanding at a breathtaking rate into a global conglomerate with vast chemical, trading and refining interests. But growing at an equally astonishing pace were its legal conflicts. Rather than making peace with the government overseers who frustrated his libertarian ideals, Charles declared war. As he portrayed it, his defiance was a stand for high principle...[He wrote in the Libertarian Review in 1978:]"We should not cave in,..resist wherever and to whenever extent you legally can. And do so in the name of justice."
It is difficult to disentangle Charles's philosophical opposition to regulations from his financial interest in avoiding them....Critics such as Thomas Frank, the author of What's the Matter with Kansas?...saw it differently.
(p 150)
"Libertarianism is supposed to be all about principles, but what it's really about is political expedience. It's basically a corporate front, masked as a philosophy."
What is indisputable is that whatever the motivations were, in the quarter century between 1980 and 2005, under Charles Koch's leadership, his company developed a stunning record of corporate malfeasance...
Sally Barnes-Soliz, a Koch Industries environmental technician...blew the whistle on the company for lying about illegal quantities of benzene that it was leaking into the air. ... Rather than comply with a new 1995 federal regulation requiring reductions in such emissions, Koch Industries had tried to conceal its output in a report that it was required to file with the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission. ... She [Ms Barnes-Soliz] carefully re-tabulated the refinery's benzene emissions and found the company had released fifteen times more than the legal limit. ...
(p 151)
She was thus shaken when she saw the subsequent report submitted by Koch to the Texas authorities. It falsified the benzene emissions to 1/149th of the amount she had calculated.
[After she reported this...] Koch Industries in Corpus Christi was hit with a ninety-seven-count on September 28, 2000, charging it with covering up the discharge of ninety-one metric tons of benzene. The company faced the potential of $352 million in fines, and four Koch employees faced potentially long prison sentences and fines of $1.75 million each. The company fought back hard in the courts...but the presiding judge rejected its arguments...Prosecutors testified that the Kochs' Corpus Christi refinery earned $176 million in profits during 1995 alone.
Eventually, Koch Industries pleaded guilty to one felony charge of "concealment of information" about its benzene emissions and paid $10 million in fines, and made another $10 million payment for projects to improve the environment (p 152) in Corpus Christi. ... the career prosecutor [called the suit] "one of the most significant cases ever brought under the Clean Air Act....Environmental crimes are almost always motivated by economics and arrogance, and in the Koch case there was a healthy dose of both."
(p 156)
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....
Koch Industries' pattern of pollution was striking not just for its egregiousness but also for its willfulness. As the company