The story below is what happens when you let social idiots take over a country for reasons of profit alone. As I said before... money is a medium much akin to a highway and is not meant to be lived upon like ones home. To think that the Koch philosophy of MBM and letting people do as they please and that somehow magically during the Depression that businesses would rise to the top is sheer lunacy. It seems their empire is kept together by government subsidies, ruthlessness, and magical thinking. The fact that they got away with the death of Smalley with a 200 million dollar fine... something that shouldve been billions of dollars worth... is astounding. The Tea party, a front for their fascist movement much akin to the libertarians and now the GOP, is not pulling wool over my eyes. They will now erode even our most cherished American values of PARKS/SCHOOLS/INFRASTRUCTURE/EPA/GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY/ETC. Do we want morons who splash crude oil downstream to downplay an oil spill or people who ignore dangerous pipelines that are described as swiss cheese or people who manipulate our elections and invoke voter id laws to invoke their fascist ideologue with the argument that ids would prevent voter fraud... meanwhile they funnel trillions of DARK MONEY to our national and local elections... which is far more dangerous than cases of voter fraud. rollingstone/politics/news/inside-the-koch-brothers-toxic-empire-20140924?page=4 “To fight this threat, the Kochs funded a grassroots uprising – one that foreshadowed the emergence, decades later, of the Tea Party. The effort was run through Citizens for a Sound Economy, to which the brothers had spent a decade giving nearly $8 million to create what David Koch called a sales force to communicate the brothers political agenda through town hall meetings and anti-tax rallies designed to look like spontaneous demonstrations.” (oh look... its the TEA party... basically the libertarian party only with a new name. It seems the entire GOP has been infiltrated too!) “Koch entered the 1990s on a pipeline-buying spree. By 1994, its network measured 37,000 miles. According to sworn testimony from former Koch employees, the company operated its pipelines with almost complete disregard for maintenance. As Koch employees understood it, this was in keeping with their CEOs trademarked business philosophy, Market¬Based Management. For Charles, MBM – first communicated to employees in 1991 – was an attempt to distill the business practices that had grown Koch into one of the largest oil businesses in the world. To incentivize workers, Koch gives employees bonuses that correlate to the value they create for the company. Salary is viewed only as an advance on compensation for value, Koch wrote, and compensation has an unlimited upside. (Ayn rand philosophy taking over an entire country by people who contracted to Joseph Stalin and were Nazi sympathizers... and they also control the TEA party and GOP? Uhmmmm I dont think so.) “On paper, MBM sounds innovative and exciting. But in Kochs hyperaggressive corporate culture, it contributed to a series of environmental disasters. Applying MBM to pipeline maintenance, Koch employees calculated that the opportunity cost of shutting down equipment to ensure its safety was greater than the profit potential of pushing aging pipe to its limits. The fact that preventive pipeline maintenance is required by law didnt always seem to register. Dubose, a 26-year Koch veteran who oversaw pipeline areas in Louisiana, would testify about the companys lax attitude toward maintenance. It was a question of money. It would take away from our profit margin. The testimony of another pipeline manager would echo that of Dubose: Basically, the philosophy was If it aint broke, dont work on it. “When small spills occurred, Dubose testified, the company would cover them up. He recalled incidents in which the company would use the churn of a tugboats engine to break up waterborne spills and just kind of wash that thing on down, down the river. On land, Dubose said, They might pump it [the leaked oil] off into a drum, then take a shovel and just turn the earth over. When larger spills were reported to authorities, the volume of the discharges was habitually low-balled, according to Dubose.” “Managers pressured employees to falsify pipeline-maintenance records filed with federal authorities; in a sworn affidavit, pipeline worker Bobby Conner recalled arguments with his manager over Conners refusal to file false reports: He would always respond with anger, Conner said, and tell me that I did not know how to be a Koch employee. Conner was fired and later settled a wrongful-termination suit with Koch Gateway Pipeline. Dubose testified that Charles was not in the dark about the companys operations. He was in complete control, Dubose said. He was the one that was line-driving this Market-Based Management at meetings. “Before the worst spill from this time, Koch employees had raised concerns about the integrity of a 1940s-era pipeline in South Texas. But the company not only kept the line in service, it increased the pressure to move more volume. When a valve snapped shut in 1994, the brittle pipeline exploded. More than 90,000 gallons of crude spewed into Gum Hollow Creek, fouling surrounding marshlands and both Nueces and Corpus Christi bays with a 12-mile oil slick. By 1995, the EPA had seen enough. It sued Koch for gross violations of the Clean Water Act. From 1988 through 1996, the companys pipelines spilled 11.6 million gallons of crude and petroleum products. Internal Koch records showed that its pipelines were in such poor condition that it would require $98 million in repairs to bring them up to industry standard.” “Koch wasnt just cutting corners on its pipelines. It was also violating federal environmental law in other corners of the empire. Through much of the 1990s at its Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota, Koch spilled up to 600,000 gallons of jet fuel into wetlands near the Mississippi River. Indeed, the company was treating the Mississippi as a sewer, illegally dumping ammonia-laced wastewater into the river – even increasing its discharges on weekends when it knew it wasnt being monitored. Koch Petroleum Group eventually pleaded guilty to negligent discharge of a harmful quantity of oil and negligent violation of the Clean Water Act, was ordered to pay a $6 million fine and $2 million in remediation costs, and received three years probation. This facility had already been declared a Superfund site in 1984.” “On the day before Danielle Smalley was to leave for college, she and her friend Jason Stone were hanging out in her familys mobile home. Seventeen years old, with long chestnut hair, Danielle began to feel nauseated. Dad, she said, we smell gas. It was 3:45 in the afternoon on August 24th, 1996, near Lively, Texas, some 50 miles southeast of Dallas. The Smalleys were too poor to own a telephone. So the teens jumped into her dads 1964 Chevy pickup to alert the authorities. As they drove away, the truck stalled where the driveway crossed a dry creek bed. Danielle cranked the ignition, and a fireball engulfed the truck. You see two children burned to death in front of you – you never forget that, Danielles father, Danny, would later tell reporters. Unknown to the Smalleys, a decrepit Koch pipeline carrying liquid butane – literally, lighter fluid – ran through their subdivision. It had ruptured, filling the creek bed with vapor, and the spark from the pickups ignition had set off a bomb. Federal investigators documented both severe corrosion and mechanical damage in the pipeline. A National Transportation Safety Board report would cite the failure of Koch Pipeline Company LP to adequately protect its pipeline from corrosion. “Installed in the early Eighties, the pipeline had been out of commission for three years. When Koch decided to start it up again in 1995, a water-pressure test had blown the pipe open. An inspection of just a few dozen miles of pipe near the Smal¬ley home found 538 corrosion defects. The industrys term of art for a pipeline in this condition is Swiss cheese, according to the testimony of an expert witness – essentially the pipeline is gone. Koch repaired only 80 of the defects – enough to allow the pipeline to withstand another pressure check – and began running explosive fluid down the line at high pressure in January 1996. A month later, employees discovered that a key anti¬corrosion system had malfunctioned, but it was never fixed. Charles Koch had made it clear to managers that they were expected to slash costs and boost profits. In a sternly worded memo that April, Charles had ordered his top managers to cut expenditures by 10 percent through the elimination of waste (Im sure there is much more waste than that) in order to increase pre-tax earnings by $550 million a year.” “The Smalley trial underscored something Bill Koch had said about the way his brothers ran the company: Koch Industries has a philosophy that profits are above everything else. A former Koch manager, Kenoth Whitstine, testified to incidents in which Koch Industries placed profits over public safety. As one supervisor had told him, regulatory fines usually didnt amount to much and, besides, the company had a stable full of lawyers in Wichita that handled those situations. When Whitstine told another manager he was concerned that unsafe pipelines could cause a deadly accident, this manager said that it was more profitable for the company to risk litigation than to repair faulty equipment. The company could pay off a lawsuit from an incident and still be money ahead, he said, describing the principles of MBM to a T.” “At trial, Danny Smalley asked for a judgment large enough to make the billionaires feel pain: Let Koch take their child out there and put their children on the pipeline, open it up and let one of them die, he told the jury. And then tell me what thats worth. The jury was emphatic, awarding Smalley $296 million – then the largest wrongful-death judgment in American legal history. He later settled with Koch for an undisclosed sum and now runs a pipeline-safety foundation in his daughters name. He declined to comment for this story. It upsets him too much, says an associate.” Artificially constraining oil supplies is not the only source of dark, unregulated profit for Koch Industries. In the years after George W. Bush branded Iran a member of the Axis of Evil, the Koch brothers profited from trade with the state sponsor of terror and reckless would-be nuclear power. For decades, U.S. companies have been forbidden from doing business with the Ayatollahs, but Koch Industries exploited a loophole in 1996 sanctions that made it possible for foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies to do some business in Iran. In the ensuing years, according to Bloomberg Markets, the German and Italian arms of Koch-Glitsch, a Koch subsidiary that makes equipment for oil fields and refineries, won lucrative contracts to supply Irans Zagros plant, the largest methanol plant in the world. And thanks in part to Koch, methanol is now one of Irans leading non-oil exports. Every single chance they had to do business with Iran, or anyone else, they did, said Koch whistle-blower George Bentu. Having signed on to work for a company that lists integrity as its top value, Bentu added, You feel totally betrayed. Everything Koch stood for was a lie. rollingstone/politics/news/inside-the-koch-brothers-toxic-empire-20140924?page=4
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 02:05:41 +0000
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