David Koch Quotes

By this point in history—after the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and in the midst of layers of ecological crises—free market fundamentalists should, by all rights, be exiled to a similarly irrelevant status, left to fondle their copies of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in obscurity. They are saved from this ignominious fate only because their ideas about corporate liberation, no matter how demonstrably at war with reality, remain so profitable to the world’s billionaires that they are kept fed and clothed in think tanks by the likes of Charles and David Koch, owners of the diversified dirty energy giant Koch Industries, and ExxonMobil.

Charles and David were the sons of Freddy Koch, who had tried to have Chief Justice Earl Warren impeached after the unanimous Brown decision, which declared “separate but equal” schools unlawful in America. Right

In 2010, the brilliant investigative journalist Jane Mayer alerted Americans to the fact that two billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch, had poured more than a hundred million dollars into a “war against Obama.

Rowley said what others never dared to admit: “Far too many libertarians have been seduced by Koch money into providing intellectual ammunition for an autocratic businessman.” It had reached the point, he came to believe by 2012, that there was no hope that any of those who participated in the “free market think tanks” would “speak out.” He was blunt about the reason why: “Too many of them benefit financially from the pocket money doled out by Charles and David Koch.

Among other strategies, he set up a “charitable lead trust” that enabled him to pass on his estate to his sons without inheritance taxes, so long as the sons donated the accruing interest on the principal to charity for twenty years. To maximize their self-interest, in other words, the Koch boys were compelled to be charitable. Tax avoidance was thus the original impetus for the Koch brothers’ extraordinary philanthropy. As David Koch later explained, “So for 20 years, I had to give away all that income, and I sort of got into it.

Of course Soros is a criminal mastermind whose NGOs suckered millions around the world into raving socialist frenzy. Never mind that his wealth and media “empire” are minuscule compared to the triumvirate of Murdoch, Koch and Saudi co-owners of Fox.

This kind of compartmentalizing—separating one’s livelihood from one’s social aspirations—is part of the reason David Koch, the hidden hand behind a lot of ultraconservatives and, reportedly, the Tea Party movement in the United States, transforms himself into a respected arts patron by funding a theater at Lincoln Center, or why at Swiss bank that helps U.S. depositors avoid paying taxes generously supports symphony halls and the ballet. It’s almost as if there are moral scales, and by tossing some loot on one side, you can balance out the precarious situation your reputation might be getting into on the other.

As tensions built in the increasingly calamitous debt ceiling stalemate, two sources say, Boehner traveled to New York to personally beseech David Koch’s help. One former adviser to the Koch family says that “Boehner begged David to ‘call off the dogs!’ He pointed out that if the country defaulted, David’s own investments would tank.” A spokeswoman for Boehner, Emily Schillinger, confirmed the visit but insisted, “Anyone who knows Speaker Boehner knows he doesn’t ‘beg.’ ” But the spectacle of the Speaker of the House, who was among the most powerful elected officials in the country, third in line in the order of presidential succession, traveling to the Manhattan office of a billionaire businessman to ask for his help in an internecine congressional fight captures just how far the Republican Party’s fulcrum of power had shifted toward the outside donors by 2011.

CAN WE TRUST ANYTHING THE NEW YORK TIMES SAYS ABOUT IMMIGRATION? In 2008, the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim Helu, saved the Times from bankruptcy. When that guy saves your company, you dance to his tune. So it’s worth mentioning that Slim’s fortune depends on tens of millions of Mexicans living in the United States, preferably illegally. That is, unless the Times is some bizarre exception to the normal pattern of corruption—which you can read about at this very minute in the Times. If a tobacco company owned Fox News, would we believe their reports on the dangers of smoking? (Guess what else Slim owns? A tobacco company!) The Times impugns David and Charles Koch for funneling “secret cash” into a “right-wing political zeppelin.”1 The Kochs’ funding of Americans for Prosperity is hardly “secret.” What most people think of as “secret cash” is more like Carlos Slim’s purchase of favorable editorial opinion in the Newspaper of Record. It would be fun to have a “Sugar Daddy–Off” with the New York Times: Whose Sugar Daddy Is More Loathsome? The Koch Brothers? The Olin Foundation? Monsanto? Halliburton? Every time, Carlos Slim would win by a landslide. Normally, Slim is the kind of businessman the Times—along with every other sentient human being—would find repugnant. Frequently listed as the richest man in the world, Slim acquired his fortune through a corrupt inside deal giving him a monopoly on telecommunications services in Mexico. But in order to make money from his monopoly, Slim needs lots of Mexicans living in the United States, sending money to their relatives back in Oaxaca. Otherwise, Mexicans couldn’t pay him—and they wouldn’t have much need for phone service, either—other than to call in ransom demands. Back in 2004—before the Times became Slim’s pimp—a Times article stated: “Clearly . . . the nation’s southern border is under siege.”2 But that was before Carlos Slim saved the Times from bankruptcy. Ten years later, with a border crisis even worse than in 2004, and Latin Americans pouring across the border, the Times indignantly demanded that Obama “go big” on immigration and give “millions of immigrants permission to stay.”3

In 1992, David Koch likened the brothers’ multipronged political strategy to that of venture capitalists with diversified portfolios. “My overall concept is to minimize the role of government and to maximize the role of the private economy and to maximize personal freedoms,

The next morning, readers of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal opened their papers to see a full-page ad paid for by the Cato Institute, the think tank that Charles Koch had founded and on whose board David Koch sat. The ad directly challenged Obama’s credibility.

This faction hoped to use their wealth to advance a strain of conservative libertarian politics that was so far out on the political fringe as recently as 1980, when David Koch ran for vice president of the United States on the Libertarian Party ticket, it received only 1 percent of the American vote. At the time, the conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. dismissed their views as “Anarcho-Totalitarianism.

David Koch’s 1980 campaign served as a bridge between LeFevre’s radical pedagogy and the Tea Party movement. Indeed the Libertarian Party’s standard-bearer that year, Clark, told The Nation that libertarians were getting ready to stage “a very big tea party,” because people were “sick to death” of taxes.

As Koch put it, “My brother Charles collects money. David used to collect girls, but not anymore. Fred collects castles. And I collect everything.

Charles and David brought their political resources to bear as never before during the 2012 election, which Charles called “the mother of all wars.” Yet they emerged from the crucible of the campaign having gained little more than a reputation as cartoonish robber barons, all-powerful political puppeteers who with one hand choreographed the moves of Republican politicians and with the other commanded the Tea Party army. As with all caricatures, this one bore only a faint resemblance to reality.

David “liked having a lot of women around,” according to one of his 1980s-era girlfriends. He at one point had his eye on Marla Maples, whom Donald Trump left his first wife to marry. (“Marla’s a babe,” David told New York magazine in 1990. “I wish Donald hadn’t gotten there first.”)

As he stood at the lectern beaming, delegates from the various chapters of Americans for Prosperity reported in, one by one, describing how they had organized “dozens of tea parties” in their regions as they stood beside oversized vertical signs marking their states. Strobe lights crisscrossed the auditorium as excitement surged. It was hard not to notice that twenty-nine years after David Koch left the national political stage in utter defeat, he had succeeded in financing something that looked a lot like a presidential nominating convention, with himself as the winner.

In 1990 alone, the article noted, the three main private foundations controlled by Charles and David Koch disbursed $4 million to such ostensibly nonpartisan but politically motivated groups.

One associate said Koch had confided that he gave away approximately 40 percent of his income each year, which he estimated at about $1 billion. This of course left him with an annual income of some $600 million and considerably helped ease his tax burden, but he enjoyed the role, a family member said, in part because it bought him respectability. There was another side to his spending, however, that was then still largely secret. While David was happy to put his name on some of the country’s most esteemed and beloved cultural and scientific institutions and to take a public bow at the ballet, his family’s prodigious political spending was a much more private affair.

You might ask: How does David Koch happen to have the wealth to be so generous? Well, let me tell you a story. It all started when I was a little boy. One day, my father gave me an apple. I soon sold it for five dollars and bought two apples and sold them for ten. Then I bought four apples and sold them for twenty. Well, this went on day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, until my father died and left me three hundred million dollars!

change, had been a featured guest at a fund-raiser that David Koch hosted for about seventy of the

We have to ask ourselves one single question, according to Koch: “What will give us better result for less energy?” or, in a more common phrase: “How do we get the most bang for our buck?”   If

Richard Koch, the author of Living the 80/20 Way, Work Less, Worry Less, Succeed More, Enjoy More, made similar observations in his book, and had a simple proposition in regards to handling our money.   He

Koch was not one for grand plans. He just made constant adjustments. He always used the word 'stewardship' to describe his leadership style. He'd inherited something great and he didn't screw it up. p259

When powerful ideologies are challenged by hard evidence from the real world, they rarely die off completely. Rather, they become cult-like and marginal. A few true believers always remain to tell one another that the problem wasn't with the ideology; it was the weakness of leaders who did not apply the rules with sufficient rigor. By this point in history free-market fundamentalists should be exiled to a similarly marginal status...They are saved from this fate only because their ideas...remain so profitable to the worlds billionaires that they are kept fed and clothed in think tanks by the likes of Charles and David Koch and ExxonMobil.

Nine of the men in the room—including Koch, Bunker, Oliver, and Andrews—signed up and agreed to join an advisory council for Welch’s operation.

2. MIGRATE YOUR PRODUCT LEK had to move away from ‘standard’ strategy towards analysis of competitors. This led to ‘relative cost position’ and ‘acquisition analysis’. Your task is to find a unique product or service, one not offered in that form by anyone else. Your raw material is, of course, what you and the rest of your industry do already. Tweak it in ways that could generate an attractive new product. The ideal product is: ★ close to something you already do very well, or could do very well; ★ something customers are already groping towards or you know they will like; ★ capable of being ‘automated’ or otherwise done at low cost, by using a new process (cutting out costly steps, such as self-service), a new channel (the phone or Internet), new lower-cost employees (LEK’s ‘kids’, highly educated people in India), new raw materials (cheap resins, free data from the Internet), excess capacity from a related industry (especially manufacturing capacity), new technology or simply new ideas; ★ able to be ‘orchestrated’ by your firm while you yourself are doing as little as possible; ★ really valuable or appealing to a clearly defined customer group - therefore commanding fatter margins; ★ difficult for any rival to provide as well or as cheaply - ideally something they cannot or would not want to do. Because you are already in business, you can experiment with new products in a way that someone thinking of starting a venture cannot do. Sometimes the answer is breathtakingly simple. The Filofax system didn’t start to take off until David Collischon provided ‘filled organisers’ - a wallet with a standard set of papers installed. What could you do that is simple, costs you little or nothing and yet is hugely attractive to customers? Ask customers if they would like something different. Mock up a prototype; show it around. Brainstorm new ideas. Evolution needs false starts. If an idea isn’t working, don’t push it uphill. If a possible new product resonates at all, keep tweaking it until you have a winner. At the same time . . .

Step 6: When Filofax grew enormously in the 1980s as an expensive, aspirational product, the absence of a generic niche description became a problem for the leader. People began to use ‘filofax’ to describe the category, which meant that every competitor could describe their product as a filofax (note the lower case f ). In 1986 David Collischon wisely coined the term ‘personal organiser’ to describe the category and encouraged everyone to use the term. Marketing experts are adamant that it is easier for us to think first about a category generally, and then about the brand. ‘I need a personal organiser to keep all my bits of paper.What brand should I ask for in the shop? Well, Filofax is the best known.’ This is an easier and more natural way of thinking than, ‘I need a Filofax.’ The clear benefit of a personal organiser was that it helped people be better organised . If the term ‘personal organiser’ had not gained widespread currency the benefit of the new category would have been much less clear, and Filofax’s brand name would have become devalued. Contrast the confusion caused in the electronic-organiser niche. When this developed in the 1990s, the leading brand was PalmPilot. But what was the category name? As Al and Laura Ries comment, ‘Some people call the Palm an electronic organiser. Others call the Palm a handheld computer. And still others, a PDA (personal digital assistant). All of these names are too long and complicated. They lack the clarity and simplicity a good category name should possess. If . . . a personal computer that fits on your lap is called a laptop computer, then the logical name for a computer that fits in the palm of your hand is a palm computer . . . Of course, Palm Computer pre-empted Palm as a brand name, leaving a nascent industry struggling to find an appropriate generic name . . . Palm Computer should have been just as concerned with choosing an appropriate generic name as it was in choosing an appropriate brand name.’9

I met a lot of people in the property business [developers, as they are called in the United States], and asked them why they did what they did…They said it was to make money. I said, “Don’t you want to do something else? Build better buildings?” Their idea of doing something better for society was to give money to the opera.20 This kind of compartmentalizing—separating one’s livelihood from one’s social aspirations—is part of the reason David Koch, the hidden hand behind a lot of ultraconservatives and, reportedly, the Tea Party movement in the United States, transforms himself into a respected arts patron by funding a theater at Lincoln Center, or why a Swiss bank that helps US depositors avoid paying taxes generously supports symphony halls and the ballet.

What came out of this meeting was a heightened awareness of how much common ground the Left and Right share when it comes to criminal justice reform. Libertarians see the overreach of the criminal justice system as yet one more example of government run amok, while progressives hate how these policies devastate communities of color and divert resources away from things like education. In early 2015, a new Left-Right group emerged—the Coalition for Public Safety—the likes of which had rarely been seen in Washington, backed with $5 million in Arnold Foundation funding. The Ford Foundation and Koch Industries also put in money, the first time these polar opposite funders had ever worked on the same side. The coalition sought to advance bipartisan legislation in Congress, as criminal justice increasingly became one of the few areas where lawmakers could work across the aisle.

There’s something heroic about wealthy crusaders who aim to spend down their fortunes to improve society—that is, assuming you like what they’re doing. If you don’t, that sense of urgency can be unnerving. How many liberals, for example, would be thrilled if the Koch brothers announced that they intended to give away their vast fortune as quickly as possible to make “America a better place”?

Robert Bruelle, a sociologist who studied funding for work that denied climate change, found that a sizeable chunk of this money—some $78 million between 2003 and 2010—was moved anonymously through DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund. The amount of money going through these groups, Bruelle found, increased dramatically after ExxonMobil and Koch Industries pulled back from publicly backing policy work that questioned whether climate change was real. But he couldn’t say whether it was these donors who fueled the surge of DonorsTrust with secret donations, since the group doesn’t have to reveal who’s using its services. Its donor-advised funds are like numbered Swiss bank accounts. “We just have this great big unknown out there about where all the money is coming from,” Bruelle said. Dark money moving through DonorsTrust has also fueled the Project on Fair Representation, the group seeking to dismantle the Voting Rights Act. And DonorsTrust has been the conduit for anonymous funding for groups sounding the alarm about Islamic threats within the United States. Some $18 million went to Clarion, a group that has been described as a leading purveyor of Islamophobia in the United States.

State schools have been among the biggest beneficiaries of Koch largesse—which has occasionally caused controversy. Florida State University was embroiled in a flap after it was alleged in 2011 that a Koch grant had come with stipulations about what faculty could be hired and fired by the school’s economics department. The controversy caused a stir, and made national news. But it didn’t dampen FSU’s willingness to take $800,000 in additional Koch grants in 2016. Far bigger sums are flowing to other schools, like Montana State University, which landed a Koch $5.7 million grant the same year to fund research critical of government regulation.

Research and development conducted by private companies in the United States has grown enormously over the past four decades. We have substantially replaced the publicly funded science that drove our growth after World War II with private research efforts. Such private R&D has shown some impressive results, including high average returns for the corporate sector. However, despite their enormous impact, these private R&D investments are much too small from a broader perspective. This is not a criticism of any individuals; rather, it is simply a feature of the system. Private companies do not capture the spillovers that their R&D efforts create for other corporations, so private sector executives in established firms underinvest in invention. The venture capital industry, which provides admirable support to some start-ups, is focused on fast-impact industries, such as information technology, and not generally on longer-run and capital-intensive investments like clean energy or new cell and gene therapies. Leading entrepreneur-philanthropists get this. In recent years, there have been impressive investments in science funded by publicly minded individuals, including Eric Schmidt, Elon Musk, Paul Allen, Bill and Melinda Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, Jon Meade Huntsman Sr., Eli and Edythe Broad, David H. Koch, Laurene Powell Jobs, and others (including numerous private foundations). The good news is that these people, with a wide variety of political views on other matters, share the assessment that science—including basic research—is of fundamental importance for the future of the United States. The less good news is that even the wealthiest people on the planet can barely move the needle relative to what the United States previously invested in science. America is, roughly speaking, a $20 trillion economy; 2 percent of our GDP is nearly $400 billion per year. Even the richest person in the world has a total stock of wealth of only around $100 billion—a mark broken in early 2018 by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in close pursuit. If the richest Americans put much of their wealth immediately into science, it would have some impact for a few years, but over the longer run, this would hardly move the needle. Publicly funded investment in research and development is the only “approach that could potentially return us to the days when technology-led growth lifted all boats. However, we should be careful. Private failure is not enough to justify government intervention. Just because the private sector is underinvesting does not necessarily imply that the government will make the right investments.

In the twenty-first century, rank-and-file Republicans attack their enemies as the puppets of the billionaire George Soros while rank-and-file Democrats attack their enemies as the puppets of the billionaires Charles and David Koch. We’re told that only the fringe believes in the Enemy Above, yet tales of his machinations have become a routine part of partisan politics. The Devil’s cleverest trick is to persuade you that hardly anyone believes he exists.

Consider a startling visual illusion known as the “Lilac chaser,” which you can find on the web.15 Twelve blurry pink disks are arranged in a circle, like the numbers on a clock, against a grey background. One of the disks briefly blinks off and on again, before the adjacent disk disappears and reappears, then the next one, and so on. This missing disk, or “hole,” travels continuously around the circle. Yet, when you steadily fixate on the cross at the center of the circle, you see only a single greenish disk, moving along the circle, while the eleven stationary pink disks are gone! Remarkable, you see what’s not there, while not seeing what is there! The late vision scientist David Marr expressed it succinctly: “Perception is the construction of a description.”16 This includes not only visual and other sensory percepts but also interoceptive percepts, fears, and other feelings. All