Koch in Older Media

This is a roundup of coverage of Koch in Older Media (2010 and previous) that was started Monday, April 25, 2011.

2010
Dan Voorhis - Wichita Eagle 12/16/10 At Koch Industries, past recessions were great opportunities to pick up bargains.
 * Koch cautious in acquiring other businesses

Koch developed large new parts of its business by acquiring Farmland's fertilizer business in 2003 and DuPont's fibers business, now Invista, in 2004.

But this recession hasn't been nearly as productive, said Ron Vaupel, vice president for business development at Koch Industries....

But that's not to say that Koch has stopped acquiring good businesses that fit, he said. Koch has spent $2 billion this year, including the purchase of a maker of wood pulp fluff and a maker of oriented strand board.

Such purchases, Vaupel said, reflect Koch's discipline in growth. Since 2003, Koch Industries has spent $32 billion on acquisitions and another $10 billion in capital improvements....

Dan Voorhis - Wichita Eagle 12/16/10 ... Koch Industries, the world's third-largest maker and marketer of nitrogen fertilizer, has spent millions upgrading the plant in recent years. It is part of a much larger program of buying, leasing, upgrading and expanding fertilizer manufacturing, trading and distribution facilities worldwide. The company is building its position in North America and riding growth in the developing world's population and income....
 * Fertilizer helps Koch grow

Suzanne Goldenberg - Guardian 10/13/10 It likes to present itself as a grassroots insurgency made up of hundreds of local groups intent on toppling the Washington elite.
 * Tea Party movement: Billionaire Koch brothers who helped it grow

But the Tea Party movement, which is threatening to cause an upset in next month's midterm elections, would not be where it is today without the backing of that most traditional of US political supporters – Big Oil.

The billionaire brothers who own Koch Industries, a private company with 70,000 employees and annual revenues of $100bn (£62bn), used to joke that they controlled the biggest company nobody had ever heard of.

Not any more. After decades during which their fortune grew exponentially and they channelled millions of dollars to rightwing causes, Charles and David Koch are finally getting noticed for their part in the extraordinary growth of the Tea Party movement....

Spencer MacColl - Open Secrets Blog 9/21/10 ... Koch Industries, an oil refiner, is the nation’s second largest private company with about $100 billion in annual revenue. Soros is chairman of Soros Fund Management, a highly successful hedge fund that has provided financial and investment strategies to a variety of funds. As of June 30, 2009, the hedge fund had holdings valued at $4.2 billion.
 * Capital Rivals: Koch Brothers vs. George Soros

David and Charles Koch are tied at No. 24 on Forbes top billionaires list with a personal fortunes of $17.5 billion each. Soros is No. 35 on the list with a net worth of $14 billion.

The Koch brothers, Soros and their respective companies have spent millions of dollars on politics, ranging from federal lobbying to candidate support to bankrolling political committees, according to a Center for Responsive Politics review of their political activity.

The Kochs and Soros have also funded think tanks, foundations and political organizations -- money that is sometimes notoriously difficult to track.

These individuals aren’t exactly flying under the radar as the Kochs hold leadership positions and are featured on the websites for the Cato Institute, Reason Foundation and theMercatus Center among others. Soros also runs the Open Society Institute -- websiteSoros.org -- as well as the recently created Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Still these individuals have provided major funding to groups that aren't particularly transparent, such as Soros-backed Democracy Alliance, which doesn't provide information on the projects it funds....

Virginia Chamlee - Florida Independent 9/13/10 If its past is any indication, Georgia-Pacific certainly isn’t the environmental stalwart its website (.pdf) would have you believe. In 1995, the company allegedly lobbied members of Congress to avoid installing pollution gear at several of its plants. In 1996, the company settled a dispute with the EPA, agreeing to pay $26 million in environmental improvements in eight Southeastern states, including Florida. In addition to those improvements, the company was ordered to pay a $6 million fine to the U.S. Treasury. Georgia-Pacific has also been fined (.pdf) in the past for violating regulations of effluent waste in Canadian waters.
 * The ‘Kochtopus’ and Georgia-Pacific’s opposition to environmental regulation

In North Florida, Georgia-Pacific is a well-known polluter of Rice Creek, a tributary of theSt. Johns River. Unfortunately for the Palatka community and the Rice Creek ecosystem, there are few regulations in place to slow the mill’s effluent waste. An examination of the priorities of Georgia-Pacific’s owners suggests why.

A previous article written for The Florida Independent looked at the relationship between U.S. Rep. Ander Crenshaw, R-Jacksonville, and Koch Industries, the parent company of Georgia-Pacific. Koch donated $5,000 to Crenshaw’s 2008 campaign and, in late June, he and fellow Florida Rep. Allen Boyd, D-Tallahassee, proposed a rider that would cut off funding to the EPA, preventing proposed water quality standards from going into effect....

Barb Shelly - Kansas City Star 9/2/10 ... A spate of media accounts, including an exhaustive piece by writer Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, is fueling curiosity about the Wichita industrialists. But in Kansas, the Koch presence has been part of the landscape for years.
 * Koch family's money goes only so far in Kansas

And here’s the good news: In Kansas, the reddest of red states, libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch frequently don’t get their way....

Frank Rich - New York Times Opinion Pages 8/28/10 ... Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today....
 * The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party

Andrew Goldman - New York Magazine 7/25/10 Billionaire philanthropist David Koch is in his Madison Avenue office showing me one of his more unusual possessions, a mechanical-looking doodad on the coffee table next to the couch. “This is a plastic version of my artificial knees,” he says. “If you spent as many years as I did begging girls for favors, you’d have bad knees, too.” The 70-year-old Koch actually wore out his knees playing basketball. Until recently, he held the record for most points scored in a single game at M.I.T.: 41. “I played basketball when you could be white and be good,” he says. Koch has a seemingly limitless storehouse of such Elks club–inflected jokes, which are often followed by his loud, wheezy honk of a laugh. Koch is six foot five, with unusually long arms to match. Although the shirt he’s wearing is custom-made and his tie is Hermès (a gift from his late friend Winston Churchill Jr.), he could readily be mistaken for a mid-level executive at a large company in his native Kansas....
 * The Billionaire's Party: David Koch is New York’s second-richest man, a celebrated patron of the arts, and the tea party’s wallet

Roy Wenzl - Wichita Eagle 1/3/10 ... They avoid talking about themselves, their company, the extended family's involvement in politics, or Koch Industries' past appearances in headlines. But one consequence of never talking, Liz Koch said, is that no one but family and a few insiders know the statewide impact of the Fred C. and Mary R. Koch Foundation, which has given millions of dollars to help education, the poor, at-risk youth, the arts and environmental causes....
 * Liz Koch talks about foundation's benefits to Kansas

2009
Foster Natural Gas Report 12/18/09 The State of Alaska recently protested the rate filed with FERC by Koch Alaska Pipeline Co., LLC (Koch) (No. IS10-54), proposed to become effective 1/1/10, for the transportation of petroleum on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) on the grounds that the rate: (1) impermissibly includes imprudent and unlawful expenditures relating to the Strategic Reconfiguration Program (SRP); (2) may impermissibly include costs relating to the dismantling and removal of TAPS facilities from the right-of-way; (3) assumes a life of the line that is significantly shorter than the actual life of the line; (4) uses an improperly-composed proxy group that artificially inflates the rate of return on equity, (5) fails to adjust the equity return to account for differences in the tax treatment of distributions to Master Limited Partnership (MLP) unit-holders versus corporate dividends, (6) fails to adjust the equity return to account for "anomalous and aberrant" capital market conditions; (7) improperly calculates the capital structure for the oil pipeline proxy group by excluding the current portion of long-term debt from the computation of long-term debt; and (8) may not accurately calculate appropriate operating costs and test period adjustments to those costs....
 * It is TAPS again: Last two owners of Trans-Alaska System file rate increases that trigger protests and requests for consolidation