Rating: 9
Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America
Christopher Leonard | 2019
As long as I can remember I’ve had shadowy and unfavorable associations with the word “Koch” without entirely knowing why. All I knew was that it was associated with an oil company and some midwestern brothers. As I try to better understand why passing climate legislation in the United States is such an arduous task, “Koch” regularly appears in my readings as a starting point for an explanation. I read Kochland hoping to understand more about this private company that influences so many realms of American manufacturing and politics. In just under six hundred pages Christopher Leonard answered all my questions while creating an outstanding account of this murky empire. Kochland’s main narrative is about Charles Koch, a Kansan businessman who took over his father’s profitable yet moderately sized company and built it into a corporate, cultural, and political behemoth. Leonard describes how Market-Based Management—Charles Koch’s almost religious-like business philosophy that is ingrained in all Koch employees—allowed Koch to consistently outperform competitors and insatiably grow. Koch encouraged every employee to behave as an entrepreneur by constantly surveying new business opportunities, to focus on profits above all, and to embrace untraditional methods (like using computers in the 70s). Koch’s refusal to take Koch Industries public (thereby keeping his company’s financial information secret) and his disdain for government regulation ultimately led to his political endeavors. In order to protect his fossil fuel business interests, Koch has invested hundreds of millions over the years into think tanks and other organizations to promote doubt in climate change among voters in order to dismantle climate policy. Kochland is an excellent book that will both inspire an admiration for Charles Koch’s unique and effective business strategies and instill disgust for his role in the genesis of the modern disinformation movement.
“Charles Koch had a pithy piece of wisdom that he liked to share with his political operatives. It was a saying about whales and harpoons. “The whale that comes above sea level gets harpooned,” is how one person remembered it.
The allegory was clear. It was safer to remain below the surface. It was better for Koch’s political operations to remain anonymous. This helped explain the complexity of Charles Koch’s emerging political organization, the endlessly complicated interlocking network of shell organizations and secret donations. It also explained the security and secrecy around the donor meetings that Charles Koch hosted twice a year.”
“In this way, Trump’s focus on denying the reality of climate change could be seen as an echo of Koch Industries’ years of work to politicize the issue by casting doubt on the science and portraying carbon emission rules as a government conspiracy against liberty. The politics that Koch stoked in 2010 became the policies that Trump enacted in 2017.”