Fred Koch

Fred's father Harry was born to a comfortable Texas family and was himself a fairly successful businessman who founded several small companies, one of them a newspaper, in which he wrote fervent editorials against trade unions, pensions, bank regulation, and FDR's New Deal.  Harry died in 1942, by which point it should have been obvious that he'd been wrong about everything.  Koch is a fairly common German name--there are several other companies named Koch, none evidently related.  (In this version, Koch rhymes with Coke--either the drink or the refined coal product)

Fred Chase Koch, born 23 Sept 1900, went to MIT where he got a degree in chemical engineering.  He managed to take control of an existing petroleum engineering firm in 1925, and this became the core of Koch Industries.  In 1927 he invented a cheaper method of separating gasoline from crude oil, which allowed small companies like his own to compete.  The big companies spent several years in the courts trying to prevent him from doing business in the US, and succeeded for several years until he managed to prevail in the courts.  The people suing him were horribly dishonest (one bribed a judge) and he learned that winning sometimes requires lying, cheating and stealing.  While he was fighting in court, he began to sell the process in the Soviet Union.  While there, he found that it was a land of "hunger, misery and terror" and came to despise Joe Stalin.

What he didn't realize is that Russia had always been a land of hunger, misery and terror, long before the communist takeover, and that was why the revolution had succeeded.  Stalin was just exploiting the preexisting conditions and chose to not change that aspect.  Communism made the life of most Russians considerably better than it had been.  Better leaders could have made it better yet, but they didn't.  Extreme policies are inherently unstable--whether they are extremely capitalistic or extremely communistic, and only through brutal force can they be kept in place.  This reinforced his ideas about winning and power: to win, you need to be able to fight as dirty as necessary, and you need to be more powerful than your opponents, be they unions or the government itself.

When Koch's legal troubles were finally settled just before WWII, Koch began expanding his company.  It soon became a conglomerate, mostly in the oil business, including pipelines, drilling equipment and refining equipment, acquiring some, and growing some.

In 1958, Koch and 11 other extremely conservative businessmen, led by Robert Welch, founded the John Birch Society to promote their extreme agenda.  This was very similar to the agenda pushed by Fred's father--opposition to trade unions, pensions, bank regulation, etc.  By 1958, it was pretty obvious that these things that they wanted to destroy had all worked, spectacularly well.  They had not harmed America's prosperity or world power at all, rather they had helped, and where they had been adopted in Europe, Japan and Australia, they were beginning to work as well.  The Birch Society added opposition to the Civil Rights Act and immigration, and were particularly outspoken about (mostly imaginary) communist infiltrators.   More reasonable conservatives, such as Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley were quite outspoken about the Birchers and warned that such fringe movements would damage the credibility of the conservative movement as a whole, and the John Birch Society subsided to the ranks of loonies and pamphleteers.

Fred died in 1967, just as his political movement was reaching its nadir.  The company he'd founded had become quite large and powerful though, and unlike most, had never felt the urge to go public--all the profits went exactly where Fred and his heirs wanted.  Consequently its doings remain largely a secret.  He left it to his sons, Fred Jr., Charles, and twins David and Bill.  Fred Jr was never interested in the business and Bill, not as right wing as Dave and Charles but still very conservative, had a falling out with the others in the 1990s, but Charles and David still run Koch Industries and are the leading exponents of their father's political movement.  They are the 4th and 5th richest people in America and 6th and 7th in the world.  Together, the Kochs are the second richest non-royal family in the world, behind only Sam Walton's descendants.  They have given more to right wing political causes than anyone else in history, including being the sponsors of the movie and advertising campaign that led to the Citizens United decision--which has allowed them to keep the vast majority of their political spending secret.

Fred and his boys may not understand this, but what they are advocating is restoring Feudalism.  They think they are advocates of Laissez-Faire, but without oppressive force, such systems are totally unstable.  There are always a few cheaters, and the moment somebody is allowed to get ahead by cheating, soon everybody else needs to cheat in order to compete.  Regulation is an attempt to keep markets fair, and public institutions like schools, pensions, and so forth allow everybody, including the disenfranchised, to participate in the market.  What the Kochs are striving for is a market where only the cheaters can prosper.