DAVID KOCH, INDUSTRIALIST WHO FUNDED CONSERVATIVES, DIES AT 79
David Koch, the industrialist and libertarian who used his fortune to transform American politics while also donating more than $1 billion to philanthropic causes, has died. He was 79. The death was confirmed by Koch’s spokeswoman Cristyne Nicholas.
Koch, whose net worth of about $59 billion tied him with his brother as the world’s seventh-richest person, derived most of his wealth from a 42 percent stake in Wichita, Kan.-based Koch Industries, which has annual revenue of about $110 billion. It is one of the nation’s largest closely held companies.
He and his brother Charles, 83, became better known for pushing their views than for their business acumen, pumping millions into conservative causes and candidates. The operation they built includes more than 700 donors who give $100,000 or more a year and a group called Americans for Prosperity that has chapters in 36 states. It’s rivaled only by the Republican Party in its influence on the conservative agenda in the U.S. Story,
David Koch, a billionaire industrialist and philanthropist whose fortune and hard-edge libertarianism had a profound effect on American politics while making him an uncommonly polarizing figure, has died. He was 79.
Koch, who had suffered from prostate cancer for many years, announced in 2018 that he was stepping down from his positions at Koch Industries and the Koch political and philanthropic networks. His death was announced in a statement from Koch Industries. Information about the date and place of death was not immediately available.
Koch and an older brother, Charles, transformed the Wichita, Kan.-based family company, which they had taken over from their father Fred in the 1960s, into a global conglomerate with interests in everything from petroleum and ranching to a wide variety of consumer products, such as Dixie cups and Stainmaster carpeting.
Koch Industries became the second-largest privately held company in the United States, and, by 2018, Charles and David Koch were estimated to be worth in the neighborhood of $60 billion each.
Patron of charities
As a patron of charities, David Koch ranked among the most open-handed donors of his era, disbursing more than $1 billion to cultural and medical nonprofit organizations. But it was through a network of well-financed advocacy groups that the Koch brothers achieved their greatest distinction, spreading an uncompromising anti-government gospel that moved the Republican Party steadily to the right.
They had inherited a deep mistrust of big government from their father, a founding member of the arch-conservative John Birch Society. David Koch said he fervently believed that minimal government led to more prosperity and freedom for all people.
“It’s something I grew up with,” he told journalist Brian Doherty, editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, “a fundamental point of view that big government was bad, and imposition of government controls on our lives and economic fortunes was not good.”
In 1980, David Koch was the Libertarian Party’s nominee for vice president on a ticket with corporate lawyer Ed Clark. He aligned himself with a platform that called for the abolition of all corporate and personal income taxes, Medicare and child labor laws. When the ticket flopped at the ballot box, garnering 1 percent of the popular vote, the brothers pinned their political ambitions on the ascendant Reagan-era GOP.
The Kochs’ chief instruments were Americans for Prosperity, a nonprofit group founded in 2004 and technically dedicated to “social welfare,” and a series of semiannual conclaves that attracted some of the wealthiest conservative donors in the country. In the 2016 election cycle, the Koch network spent nearly $900 million, not much less than the total laid out by the Republican Party.
“It’s hard to think of another set of individuals who have had such an impact on our political system who haven’t been elected officials,” said Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, a Columbia University political scientist who has studied the Kochs.
Over time, evidence of the Kochs’ influence could be found in almost every corner of the political landscape. One of their most effective stratagems was the bankrolling of right-wing primary candidates for House and Senate seats. Among the beneficiaries was Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, an obscure state senator who was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2014 with the backing of the Kochs.
On the state and local levels, Koch money was credited with helping Republicans install majorities in 31 state legislatures by 2018.
The Kochs’ lobbying network consistently opposed mass-transit initiatives around the country, arguing that they were a government boondoggle. Critics were quick to point out that a continued reliance on the automobile benefited the Koch family’s business interests, which were heavily involved in carbon-based energy.
The Koch brothers also poured money into think tanks and other groups that promoted their agenda, including the denial of climate-change science. Greenpeace, which dubbed Koch Industries the “kingpin of climate science denial,” once ranked the company above ExxonMobil in working to scuttle legislation meant to reduce or reverse climate change.
With their opposition to government regulation, especially when it came to the environment, the Koch brothers were often accused of promoting naked self-interest under the cloak of a high-minded commitment to free-market ideology. Koch Industries came under frequent criticism for its environmental record. In 2000, the company was fined $30 million for oil leaks from its pipelines and petroleum facilities, at the time the largest fine ever levied by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Koch made no apologies for his opposition to government regulation, but insisted that the company took pollution seriously and bristled at being portrayed as a villain by Greenpeace and other environmental groups. “They’re attacking us as environmental criminals,” he lamented to New York magazine, “wanting to put me and Charles in jail.”
On some issues, including same-sex marriage and legalized abortion, both of which he supported, Koch hued to his libertarian outlook and departed from traditional Republican orthodoxy.
And when it came to businessman and reality TV star Donald Trump, who derided candidates who sought Koch money as “puppets,” the brothers made little secret of their distaste and refrained from supporting his presidential campaign in 2016.
Still they managed to seed the Trump administration with a healthy number of their allies, among them Marc Short, a former high-ranking operative in the Koch network who was White House director of legislative affairs for about a year and a half. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s congressional district covered Wichita when he was in the House, and he was widely known as the “congressman from Koch.” Vice President Mike Pence and former Environmental Protection Agency director Scott Pruitt were major beneficiaries of the Koch political machine.
Opposed Obamacare
To be sure, the Koch network was not always successful in its efforts. The brothers orchestrated a bruising campaign against the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, which was signed into law in 2010. Over the next two years, their network doled out $200 million to undercut Obamacare, efforts that ultimately led to the 16-day shutdown of the federal government in 2013.
Among Democrats, the Kochs became a shorthand reference to the malign influence of money in politics. “These two brothers are about as un-American as anyone I can imagine,” then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., railed in 2014.
For many people, the affable and outgoing David Koch was the public face of the brothers’ political activity. At the same time, it was generally understood that Charles Koch, who served as the head of Koch Industries, was the driving force behind the scenes.