from Fire Dog Lake: NYT Gives Us David Koch, Public Benefactor |
| By: Scarecrow Monday January 10, 2011 8:58 am |
| Promoted on: Saturday March 5, 2011 10:33 am |
John D. Rockefeller
The New York Times’ Michael Cooper gives us a fawning tribute to billionaire David Koch, he of the infamous Koch Brothers and fifth most wealthy man in America, using the dedication of a cancer center at M.I.T. funded by Mr. Koch to extol his virtues as a great humanitarian and philanthropist. Oh, please.The Times editors and Mr. Koch, it seems, are worried about what people might think of a man whose industries despoil the earth, poison our air and water and cause massive public health problems that cause untold thousands of deaths every year, while using his great wealth and power to corrupt our politics and fund the most radical, anti-human corporate protectionism in America. How could anyone think ill of him?
David Koch
But Mr. Koch is a human being and he’s suffering from prostate cancer. Hence his dual need to find the cure and have others think well of him. So Michael Cooper and his editors oblige:
Mr. Koch, a billionaire who is perhaps best known for his family’s contributions to conservative causes, got a standing ovation from scientists, Nobel laureates and politicians of various political stripes as he opened the new David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he gave $100 million to help build. And in a brief, and rare, interview, Mr. Koch, 70, spoke of his hopes for the new center, his prostate cancer and the prank call heard around the world.
So, this is about Mr. Koch’s need to feel good about himself:
But he said that he felt he had been vilified for his support of conservative causes, which have ranged from opposition to the health care bill and pushing for small government and low taxes, to questioning whether climate change is caused by humans. He and his brother Charles are known, on the left, as the billionaires who bankrolled the public policy and citizen action groups that helped cultivate the Tea Party.
“I read stuff about me and I say, ‘God, I’m a terrible guy,’ ” he said. “And then I come here and everybody treats me like I’m a wonderful fellow, and I say, ‘Well, maybe I’m not so bad after all.’ ”
It’s very nice that Mr. Koch is trying to make up in some small (for him) way for the great (for the working people and the poor in America) damage he has done. But I, too, am a public benefactor, contributing considerable (for me) sums and effort to supply public school science teachers and librarians with a book published by the National Academies of Science aimed at improving science education. Hopefully, any damage I’ve done to working people and the poor is outweighed by my contribution.
Oh, well. You do what you can … I guess.
Speaking as someone who received a graduate fellowship in cancer research named for Mr. Koch, while working for the David H Koch professor in the Koch building at MIT, while being aware that he and his company are a tremendous force for evil in the world, you might say that I’ve been a bit conflicted on this subject.
But then, there is a fine history of this sort of thing. The Rhodes Scholarships are a great institution, providing us with some truly great scholars and captains of industry: does it devalue them today that Cecil Rhodes was a monster? Henry Ford was a vicious antisemite; should we denounce projects accepting funding funding from the Ford Foundation? Leland Stanford made his money in the transcontinental railroad – in other words, by expropriating land, including from native peoples, and brutally mistreating his labor force; should Stanford University be renamed?
On the other hand, the people I named in that paragraph have been dead for a minimum of seventy-odd years. When you’re taking money from a living monster, and helping them to feel good about themselves – as I did, in my small way – is that different? Christopher Hitchens, in his vehement manner, excoriated Mother Theresa for the blood-soaked money she graciously and gratefully accepted from Pinochet, among others, a denunciation I endorse. I know someone who took research funding from a foundation headed by George HW Bush, and who went to Kennebunkport to schmooze with donors in 2003. 2003 was a sad time to be an American, for reasons I won’t go into here, and this guy chose to go schmooze with the father, and undoubtedly some of the first and most generous financial supporters, of the man responsible; was he wrong to do so?
Surely, some of this has to do with degree of monstrosity. Pinochet, of course, left a metaphorical trail of blood wherever he went, and committed numerous and horrible actual crimes. George W Bush arguably fits this description as well. But surely George W Bush’s father is more of a tragic figure?
The Koch brothers are perhaps not in the same category as some of these more awful monsters. They work to achieve a horrible world, one in which plutocrats, many of inherited wealth, live lives unrestricted by taxation or regulation, polluting and abusing workers and neighbors as the whim strikes them – but they work towards this end by legal means, to the best of my knowledge. And they earned their money the old-fashioned way: they inherited it, and maintained it in a mostly legal (if enthusiastically polluting) fashion.
Fears that their philanthropy will serve to whitewash the reputation of the Koch brothers may also be overblown. At this point, people recognize the “Rhodes Scholarships” without remembering who Cecil Rhodes was; anyone looking into who Cecil Rhodes will rapidly become acquainted with the more negative aspects of his life. Henry Ford is today remembered mostly for three things: his contributions to the modern assembly line, for a pithy quote about the color black, and for his antisemitism. History will judge the Koch brothers, and to the extent that they are remembered at all, they will probably not be remembered kindly. The fact that they have their name on two of the five main biology research buildings at the campus of one (albeit important) university won’t change that.
The real problem is structural. The Koch brothers have been permitted to inherit unthinkable wealth and to do whatever they please with it. According to Wikipedia, at the time of their father’s demise, the estate tax had a top rate (on value after the first $10M) of 77%. I presume the Koch brothers didn’t pay anything like 77%. In the time since then, the value of their company has increased roughly 16-fold – as has the S&P 500. Literally, the Koch brothers received a Koch Industries-sized piece of the economy, and have managed to hold on to a Koch Industries-sized piece of the economy. For this accident of birth and record of non-dissolution they are perceived as being captains of industry, and they doubtless believe they have achieved great things. If our country had a more rigorous estate tax, or a wealth tax, the Koch brothers would have somewhat less money, the people they seek to victimize might have more power, and the institutions their philanthropic donations benefit might have less need of their money.