The Limits of the Koch Charm Offensive

koch_charlesCharles and David Koch and their Koch Industries conglomerate, long known for an unapologetic defense of unfettered capitalism and hard-right politics, are said to be going soft. The brothers are taking pains to associate themselves with more progressive policies such as criminal justice reform, while their corporation has been running feel-good ads highlighting its purported commitment to enlightened principles such as sustainability.

At the same time, the Kochs are depicting themselves as backers of supposedly responsible Republican presidential candidates and shunning iconoclastic front-runner Donald Trump.

The Koch charm offensive does have its limits. A slew of groups funded by the billionaires are at the forefront of the campaign against the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan and are doing their best to defend fossil fuels. When it comes to environmental policy, the Kochs are still in the stone age.

That position is not merely a matter of ideology. Their opposition to environmental and other safety regulations amounts to a defense of the way the Kochs do business.

This was made clear to me in some work I’ve been doing on a new research tool called Violation Tracker that my colleagues and I at Good Jobs First are preparing. Patterned on our Subsidy Tracker, the new resource will take company-specific data on regulatory violations and link the individual entries to the parent corporations of the culprits. This will allow us to present violation totals for large firms and show which of them are the most frequent offenders.

The initial version of Violation Tracker, which will be released this fall, will cover data from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety & Health Administration and a few other federal health and safety agencies. Coverage on wage and hour violations, financial sector transgressions and other forms of corporate misconduct will come later.

A preliminary tally of EPA and OSHA data from the past five years indicates that units of Koch Industries have been hit with more than $3.5 million in penalties. The biggest amount comes from Flint Hills Resources, the conglomerate’s oil refining arm. For example, in 2014 the company had to pay $350,000 and sign a consent decree to resolve EPA allegations that it was violating the Clean Air Act through flaring and leaking equipment.

Georgia-Pacific, the Koch Industries forest products company, received more than $600,000 in penalties during the five-year period. These included $60,000 in penalties proposed in January by OSHA in connection with worker exposure to formaldehyde and other dangerous substances.

In 2013 the fertilizer company Koch Nitrogen had to pay $380,000 to settle allegations that its facilities in Iowa and Kansas violated the Clean Air Act.

Regulatory violations by Koch businesses began before the five-year period that will be initially covered in Violation Tracker.

For instance, in 2000 the Justice Department and the EPA announced that Koch Industries would pay what was then a record civil environmental fine of $30 million to settle charges relating to more than 300 oil spills. Along with the penalty, Koch agreed to spend $5 million on environmental projects in Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma, the states where most of its spills had occurred. In announcing the settlement, EPA head Carol Browner said that Koch had quit inspecting its pipelines and instead found flaws by waiting for ruptures to happen.

Later in 2000, DOJ and the EPA announced that Koch Industries would pay a penalty of $4.5 million in connection with Clean Air Act violations at its refineries in Minnesota and Texas. The company also agreed to spend up to $80 million to install improved pollution-control equipment at the facilities.

In a third major environmental case against Koch that year, a federal grand jury in Texas returned a 97-count indictment against the company and four of its employees for violating federal air pollution and hazardous waste laws in connection with benzene emissions at the Koch refinery near Corpus Christi. The company was reportedly facing potential penalties of some $350 million, but in early 2001 the newly installed Bush Administration’s Justice Department negotiated a settlement in which many of the charges were dropped and the company pled guilty to concealing violations of air quality laws and paid just $10 million in criminal fines and $10 million for environmental projects in the Corpus Christi area.

In 2002 Koch Petroleum Group, the Koch entity involved in most of these environment problems, was renamed Flint Hills Resources. That name change was as cosmetic as the current charm offensive.

If the Kochs really want to improve their reputation, they should go beyond public relations and make fundamental alterations in their business practices.