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Maraya1969

(22,441 posts)
Thu Oct 22, 2015, 09:32 PM Oct 2015

The Koch brothers are psychopaths



This declassified document which looks like it was printed originally in The New Yorker (?) tells a horrid story of the Kochs trying to hide all the benzene they feed into the atmosphere, how they got one senator to convince people that getting rid of ozone would cause more skin cancers and so many other things that they have done. The kind of things that make it hard for me to sleep at night.
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https://foia.state.gov/searchapp/DOCUMENTS/HRCEmail_August_Web/IPS-0092/DOC_0C05771774/C05771774.pdf

"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 grou

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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."

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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 reelectiion. 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.)
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The Koch brothers are psychopaths (Original Post) Maraya1969 Oct 2015 OP
They're terrorists plain and simple. Initech Oct 2015 #1
Yea. What floored me was that landmark case where they Maraya1969 Oct 2015 #2

Maraya1969

(22,441 posts)
2. Yea. What floored me was that landmark case where they
Thu Oct 22, 2015, 11:25 PM
Oct 2015

were caught with faulty equipment and a line broke and spilled benzene all over the place. They actively try and stop environmentalists because of money.

Sad people.

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