Koch Industries (and the Family) - Part 7

Frederick R Koch is the eldest of the four Koch brothers, and is a well known art and history collector, as well as a philanthropist.  Unlike his father and three brothers, who studied chemical engineering at MIT and pursued business careers. Frederick studied humanities at Harvard College.  He enlisted in the US Navy, and served in Millington, Tennessee and aboard the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga. After serving his time in the Navy, Frederick attended the Yale School of Drama, receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1961.  He has assembled large and important collections of rare books, literary and musical manuscripts, fine arts, photographs, and decorative arts.  He has also purchased as restored multiple famous buildings throughout Europe and the United States.
  William I Koch is the fraternal twin of David.  he studied chemical engineering at MIT and has his own company, Oxbow Carbon LLC.  The last estimate said the company was worth about $4 billion.  Oxbow LLC sells the following products: sulfur, sulfuric acid, fertilizer, coal, petroleum coke, calcined petroleum coke, metallurgical coke, activated carbon, and gypsum.  They provide logistics and transporting services for their products via rail, barge, and trucking.  They own a coal mine in Somerset, Colorado, alongside the Gunnison River - which is currently not operating due to seismic activity.  They have shipping terminals in Long Beach, California; Texas City, Texas; Tecop, Brazil; as well as three terminals in the Netherlands, three terminals in France, one terminal in Germany, one in Belgium, and one each in the United Kingdom and Mexico (on the Gulf coast).  Oxbow also sells "value added services,"  which includes calcining; bagging, screening and distribution; and briquetting their product to your specification.

 Perhaps I really don't have any good reason to dislike the Koch brothers, Koch Industries, or Oxbow Carbon LLC.  But it truly bothers me that they have their fingers in so many pies - I am not against their diversification of their businesses.  What bothers me is how much money is secretly and anonymously given to so many widely varied institutes, foundations, and grass-roots groups.  I'll never even make $500,000 in my lifetime (and I'm starting to push 60) - let alone the millions and billions these men play with.  Am I jealous of their prosperity?  I don't think so.  It would be nice to have a couple of million dollars, but then I'd have to worry about taxes and donations and people wanting things given to them.
   Perhaps because I grew up during the time the "Sunshine Laws" were passed in Florida, requiring transparency in governing, I believe that we should all know who is paying for political advertisements - not just the, "Hi. I'm Silly Smith and I want you to vote for me" ads, but the ones that urge people to support, or be against, specific items that will eventually affect the entire world.
   Yes, I'm a liberal Democrat.  I'm against the Keystone XL Pipeline, and I'm for Obamacare.  I want cleaner air for me and my grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  I don't believe we should despoil our world to get a dirtier type of energy (tar sands).  I believe we should re-use, re-cycle, and return.  We need to make better use of hydro-electricity, solar  and wind energies.
  I do not like the way the Koch brothers hide behind so many differently named "shield" and "shell" groups.  They should stand up and admit to which monies go where, how much money, and be done with it.  Or will they be thought to be megalomaniacs who want to take over the world?

I found all of this information in books, newspapers and magazines, as well as posted on the internet.

For further reading about the Koch brothers and Koch Industries, please sample the following:

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20120510/koch-industries-brothers-tar-sands-bitumen-heavy-oil-flint-pipelines-refinery-alberta-canada

http://www.channelingreality.com/Temp_Dir/Reason_Koch/Koch%20Oil.pdf

http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2014/06/daniel-schulman-koch-brothers

http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2014/05/frederick-koch-brothers

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/blood-and-oil/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2012/12/05/bad-blood-meet-bill-and-fred-the-other-two-koch-brothers/

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/02/koch-brothers-palm-springs-donor-list

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html?_r=0

http://webreprints.djreprints.com/3365550225628.pdf  -   Charles Koch's op-ed

Koch Industries (and the Family) - Part 6

In political and business circles, Charles and David Koch, and their very diversified companies, Koch Industries, are known as "the Koch-topus."  They seem to have a tentacle attached to almost every type of big business.  As they have a great deal of their money invested in crude oil and petroleum products, pipelines, chemicals and asphalt, they do not support the Clean Air Act, do not support the Kyoto Accord, and are constantly fighting against cleaner air standards, emission controls, the rulings of the Environmental Protection Agency, and they fight against funding for alternative energies - solar, wind, water.
    Bloomberg reports that from 1999 to 2003, Koch Industries was assessed "more than $400 million in fines, penalties and judgments."  Daniel Indiviglio, in a reaction article in The Atlantic, asserted that the Bloomberg article was biased and misleading, as the research team "found only eight instances of alleged misconduct ... over the span of 63 years."
   Koch Industries reported 300 oil spills in six states in the year 2000.  Koch paid the largest civil fine ever imposed for the illegal discharge of crude oil and petroleum products.  In a settlement with the US Justice Department and the state of Texas, the company paid a "$30 million civil penalty," agreed to improve it's leak -prevention programs, and donate $5 million to be spent on environmental projects.
   In 1996, an 8-inch-diameter steel Liquid Petroleum Gas pipeline operated by the Koch Pipeline Company ruptured and began to leak butane gas.  Two residents jumped into their truck and drove to a neighbors' to call 911.  Driving through the butane cloud, the truck exploded and the people were killed. Twenty-five families were later evacuated without injury.  In 1999, a Texas jury found that negligence had led to the rupture, and the victims' families were awarded $296 million - "the largest compensatory damages judgment in a wrongful death case filed against a corporation in US history."
   In 2000, a federal grand jury returned a 97-count indictment against Koch Industries and its individual employees for environmental crimes relating to excess emissions of 85 metric tons of benzene, a known carcinogen.  In 2001, Koch Industries was fined $20 million - $10 million was paid as a criminal fine, and $10 million was paid to clean the environment.

   On 26 March 2014, a joint letter was sent to David L. Robertson, the President and COO of Koch Industries.  The letter was signed by Representative Henry A Waxman, ranking member on the Committee of Energy and Commerce; the co-signer was Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of the Subcommittee on Oversight and the Senate Committee on Environmental and Public Works.  The full letter may be read at:  http://democrats.energycommerce.house.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Robertson-Koch-Industries-Keystone-XL-2014-3-26.pdf      - To my knowledge, it has yet to be answered.
    The Keystone XL Pipeline seems to be a touchy point for the Koch brothers and Koch Industries and their multiple subsidiaries...  First, a quick background on what the Keystone XL will do:  The Keystone Pipeline already exists.  What doesn't fully yet exist is its proposed expansion,the Keystone XL Pipeline.  The existing Keystone runs from the oil sand fields in Alberta, Canada into the US, ending in Cushing, Oklahoma.  The 1,700 new miles of pipeline would connect Cushing, OK (where there's currently a "bottleneck" in the pipeline) with the Gulf Coast of Texas; and a new section from Alberta down to Kansas.  While the pipeline is initially carrying US light crude oil, it is expected to carry more heavy Canadian oil harvested from tar sands over the next year, with a huge increase of tar sand oil once the Keystone XL opens.
   What are tar sands? Tar sands consist of heavy crude oil mixed with sand, clay and bitumen.  Extraction entails burning natural gas to generate enough heat and steam to melt the oil out of the sand.  It takes as many as five barrels of water to produce a single barrel of oil. In the Canadian boreal forest, just downstream from the Rocky Mountains, in Alberta, are the main deposits of the Canadian tar sands.  The region is estimated to contain some 2 trillion barrels of oil.  Getting to it, however, involves strip mining, and that will destroy an area larger than the state of Florida - 65,755 square miles, or 170,304 square kilometers.
   Across the US, oil refineries are seeking permits to expand their facilities to process heavy crude oil from tar sands. Processing tar sands oil will mean more asthma and respiratory diseases, more cancer, and more cardiovascular problems.  Many local communities are opposing these expansion requests.
   In Canada, the toxic burden on communities near the tar sands is already enormous.  In addition to direct human exposure, oil contamination in the local watershed has led to a huge rise in arsenic in moose meat - a dietary staple of the First Nations peoples - levels up to 33 times the acceptable levels for arsenic.  Drinking water has also been contaminated.

    The next, and last, installment will include more information, and some interesting reading about the Koch brothers and Koch Industries....

 

Koch Industries (and the Family) - Part 5

I applaud the efforts of the Koch family - on their own, a Dutch immigrant type-setter became a newspaper owner and railroad magnate.  The first American-born generation became millionaires with a new type of oil refining procedure, which they marketed to Russia and Germany.  Back in the US, the family solidified it's holdings and grew to a $100 million a year business.  When the business was turned over to the second generation, the decision was to diversify, and in another 40 years, the business has become a producer of more than $110 billion per year.  It is a privately owned and run business.  Charles Koch, the Chairman and CEO, says that the business will become a public interest "over my dead body."
   In the beginning of Part 1 of this post, I said that I disliked the Koch brothers because they hide behind a lot of different organizations.  I admit, their philanthropic gifts to universities, cities, and the arts are extremely welcome and much needed.  But I am the daughter of two two Democrats, and was raised in the South of the United States during the Civil Rights Movement.  My parents taught me that all people were equal - no matter the color of their skin, their religious beliefs, or any private practices.  I was not a better person than anyone else - and I needed to prove to the world, and myself, that I was a good person - holding no grudges, not prejudging anyone or anything, and listening closely to what was said, and left unsaid. (Honestly, a great deal of our current Republican rhetoric frightens me.  I would like for our country to have a balanced budget.  I would like to live in peace with all other countries.  I consider myself a "dove,"  but I will only give so much before I start to resist a push....)
   The Koch brothers have never claimed to be anything but a type of conservative Republican bordering on Libertarian. In the 2012 Presidential campaign, Charles and David Koch pledged, and gave, $60 million to defeat President Obama.  There were also another $274 million contributed against the President; it is reported that at least $86 million of those monies were given by Koch donor groups.
   After being increasingly criticized by opponents, Charles Koch wrote an opinion-editorial piece for the Wall Street Journal, (2 April 2014 - Charles Koch: I'm Fighting To Restore A Free Society) that describes his agenda.  Koch wrote that "our critics would have you believe we're un-American" and trying to "rig the system," and then he described his pursuit of "the principles of a free society."  He described his opponents as "Collectivists" who promised "heaven but deliver hell."  This article was placed into the United States Congressional Record.
   Below is a list of organizations that were created by one of the Koch family, have a Koch brother (Charles or David) sitting on the governing board, and/ or receive funding, both openly and anonymously, from the Koch brothers and Koch Industries:
  American Energy Alliance
  Cato Institute
  Mercatus Center (at George Mason University)
  Heritage Foundation
  American Enterprise Institute
  Federalist Society
  Institute for Justice
  Alexis de Tocqueville Institute
  Institute for Energy Research
  Manhattan Institute
  George C Marshall Institute
  Reason Foundation
  Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment
  American Legislative Exchange Council
  Fraser Institute
  Aspen Institute
  Citizens for a Sound Economy (which became...)
  Americans for Prosperity
  FreedomWorks
  Patients United Now
  Freedom Partners
  Competitive Enterprise Institute
  Paul T Conway's Generation Opportunity ( a youth mobilization group)
Look at political ads and ads that are for the Keystone XL Pipeline, and check for the above names.  I particularly dislike an advertisement running on television in Colorado (and, probably other states) where a pale woman with long blond hair, stands there, looking at the camera in seeming despair, and saying,  "...Obamacare. It just won't work."  She's a paid actress, and the ad is paid for by Americans for Prosperity.  Why not wait for another year or two to let the system start to work, before condemning it?  Oh. And don't forget the Koch PAC, either.

  Next up:  tar sands, the Keystone XL Pipeline, environmental violations, fines paid, and Koch Industries

Koch Industries (and the Family) - Part 4

... So Charles Koch took over the day-to-day running of Koch Industries back in 1966.  Charles had big plans; he began to push the limit of corporate growth by returning 90% of the company's profits back into the company till and by diversifying the company to the maximum.  The profits for Koch Industries in 1966 were $100 million. Following Charles' plans, in 2008, the company's profits were $100 billion.  I have to hand it to him - he knows how to make money!
  Currently, Charles Koch and his brother David each own 42% of the company, leaving 16% to others that their father trusted.  Charles and David bought out their other two brothers, for $1.1 billion apiece.  The latest figures released by the company states they have 50,000 employees in the United States and another 20,000 employees in other countries.  This is a list of the industries that Koch has invested in: asphalt, chemicals, commodities trading, energy, fibers, fertilizers, finance, mineral rights, natural gas. oil, plastics, petroleum, pulp and paper, and ranching.  They own 4,000 miles of pipelines in the United States and Canada; they refine 800,000 barrels of crude oil daily; they buy and sell almost all of the asphalt within the US; they are among the top 50 landowners (by size of property) in the United States; and they are among the top 10 cattle producers in the US.
  What, specifically, belongs under the umbrella of Koch Industries?  
  Georgia-Pacific - if you use Brawny paper towels, Angel Soft toilet tissue, Quilted Northern toilet tissue, Mardi Gras brand plates, napkins, cups, or utensils, Dixie plates and bowls, Sparkle paper towels, or any Vanity Fair brand paper products,  you contribute to the Koch brothers pockets.
  Invista - a fibers and polymer company; if you use anything containing Lycra, or anything treated with StainMaster, you pay the Kochs.
  Koch Pipeline Company, L P - they own over 4,000 miles of pipeline used to transport oil, natural gas, asphalt and chemicals.  These pipelines run through Wisconsin, Minnesota, Texas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and through Alberta, Canada.
  Flint Hills Resources, L P (aka The Koch Petroleum Group) - this company produces gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, other aviation fuels, ethanol,polymers, chemicals, base oils, and asphalt.  They own 13 asphalt terminals in six states: Alaska, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and North Dakota.
  Koch Fertilizer, L L C - they are one of the world's largest producers of nitrogen fertilizer.  They own, or have vested interests in nitrogen fertilizer plants in the United States, Canada, Trinidad & Tobago, Venezuela and Italy.  They own, or have vested interests, in ammonia producing facilities in Louisiana, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom.
  Koch Agricultural Company - they raise cattle on three ranches in three states as the Matador Cattle Company.  Their ranches are near Beaverhead, Montana; Matador, Texas; and Flint Hills, Kansas.

  Charles Koch certainly saw to the diversification of Koch Industries.
   More regarding Koch Industries, their PAC, the political groups they back, their environmental transgressions, and suggested reading still to come....
 

Koch Industries (and the Family) - Part 3

On one of his trips home to the US, Fred Chase Koch married Mary C. Robinson in 1932, in Kansas City, Missouri.  She was the daughter of a well-known physician, Ernest Franklin Robinson, who was one of the founders of the University of Kansas School of Medicine.  The couple had four sons:  Frederick, born in 1933; Charles, in 1935; and a set of twins in 1940, David and William.
  Having succeeded in securing the family fortune, Fred Koch joined with new partners to create the Wood River Oil and Refining Company in 1940.  Today that company is known as Koch Industries.  In 1946 the company purchased the Rock Island refinery and crude oil gathering system located near Duncan, Oklahoma. Wood River was later renamed the Rock Island Oil and Refining Company.  In 1956, Koch, along with eleven other prominent Wichita businessmen visited Moscow.  Fred Chase Koch returned to the United States and, immediately after that visit, began spouting anti-Communism rhetoric.
  Fred Koch started speaking out about the Communist threat in American.  He claimed that there was a massive Communist conspiracy to take control of the United States of America.  He stated that the Communist conspiracy was eroding the capitalist beliefs of American universities, churches, political parties, the US media, and that it was rampant in every branch of the United States government.  He stated , "The colored man looms large in the Communist plots to take over America," and that public welfare programs were a secret plan to attract rural African Americans and Puerto Ricans to eastern cities in order for them to vote for Communist causes and "getting a vicious race war started."  According to his son Charles, Fred Koch worked with "many Soviet engineers who were long-time Bolsheviks, who had helped bring on the Russian Revolution" and his father was deeply bothered that the Communist regime decided to purge his friends.
  On 9 December 1958, in Indianapolis, Indiana, a group of 12 men founded the John Birch Society.  The leader was Robert Welch, Jr, a retired candy manufacturer from Massachusetts; one of the other founding members was Fred  Koch.  The John Birch Society was named by Robert Welch after an American Baptist missionary (and United States military intelligence officer) who had been shot by Communist forces in China in August 1945, after the end of World War II.  Welch claimed that John Birch was an "unknown, but dedicated, anti-Communist" and that he was the first American casualty of the Cold War.  The John Birch Society claims to identify with Christian principles, seeks to limit governmental powers, and opposes wealth redistribution  and economic interventionism.  It opposes collectivism, totalitarianism, and communism.  It opposes socialism, as well, which it asserts is infiltrating the US government.
  The John Birch Society (JBS) opposed the civil rights movement, and claimed that the movement had communists in important positions. In late 1965, the JBS produced a flyer entitled "What's Wrong With Civil Rights?" that was distributed as a newspaper advertisement.  In the flyer, one of the answers was: "For the civil rights movement in the United States, with all of its growing agitation and riots and bitterness, and insidious steps towards the appearance of a civil war, has not been infiltrated by the Communists, as you now frequently hear.  It has been deliberately and almost wholly created by Communists patiently building up to this present stage for more than forty years."  The JBS opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, claiming it violated the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and overstepped individual states' rights to enact laws regarding civil rights.  The society opposes "one world government," and it has an immigration reduction view on immigration reform.  It opposes the United Nations, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Central America Free Trade Agreement, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and all other free trade agreements.  The JBS states that the US Constitution has been devalued in favor of political and economic globalization, and that this alleged trend is not accidental.
  In 1928, Koch traveled throughout the USSR looking for business opportunities; in 1956 he made his final trip to Russia.  In 1960, Fred published a book, A Business Man Looks at Communism, where he wrote that he found the Soviet Union "a land of hunger, misery, and terror."  In 1961, in a speech to the Women's Republican Club, Fred Chase Koch said, "Maybe you don't want to be controversial by getting mixed up in this anti-communist battle, but you won't be very controversial lying in a ditch with a bullet in your brain."  What a wonderful way to wake up a bunch of staid, quiet Republican wives!
  In 1966, Fred Chase Koch turned over the day-to-day management of Koch Industries to his son, Charles.  In 1967, Fred Koch passed away at the Bear River near Ogden, Utah.  His wife died in 1990.

      More to come about the Koch brothers and Koch Industries...

Koch Industries (and the Family) - Part 2

Harry and Mattie Koch's first born son was John Anton, who worked in the family newspaper business.  In 1900, Fred Chase was born.  Both sons appear to have shared their father's view of politics.  From 1917 through 1919, Fred attended Rice Institute; he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1922, with a degree in "Chemical Engineering Practice."  Fred began working immediately after graduation from MIT for the Texas Company in Port Arthur, Texas.  Soon afterwards, he was employed by the Medway Oil and Storage Company in County Kent, England. In 1925, Fred was back in the US, and invested money with his friend, and co-MIT graduate, P. C. Keith, in the Keith-Winkler Engineering Company in Wichita, Kansas.  Keith sold his interest in the company to his friend, Fred Koch, before the end of 1925.  At that time, the company became known as the Winkler-Koch Engineering Company.
  In 1927, Fred C. Koch developed and patented a more efficient thermal cracking process, refining gasoline from crude oil, at a much higher yield-rate than any other existing process.  He started to use his process, but the big oil companies filed a total of 44 lawsuits against Koch, and his company, for "patent infringement."  Koch could not use his new process in the United States until the law suits ended - but he could use the new process in other countries.
  Europe was still recovering from World War I.  The Weimar Republic, which elected an 80% Democratic representation in Germany's 1919 election, replacing the Imperial Government, was economically weak.  From 1919 until 1933 there was constant talk and negotiations between Germany and Russia to form an alliance to partition Poland between the two countries, returning their borders back to the 1914 lines.  The 1929 Wall Street Crash in the United States was a crushing blow to Germany, who had planned on recovering the country's wealth through the US stock market. In 1930, another election took place in Germany, and 19% of the elected representatives were members of the National Socialist German Worker's Party (which we came to know as the Nazi party).  Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany in 1933.
   In Russia, Lenin had died, and Josef Stalin had come into power.  Russia was, essentially, back in the Dark Ages when it came to refining crude oil.  Stalin had already begun his series of Five Year Plans, and a large one was to increase oil refining capacities within the country.  Between 1926 and 1929, the USSR purchased more than $20 million of United States-made oil equipment.  In 1929, Winkler-Koch Engineering Company signed a contract worth $5 million to build 15 oil refineries inside the USSR.  Winkler-Koch provided the equipment needed to build the plants, and oversaw the construction.  The first Winkler-Koch plants (2) were set up in Tuapse in 1930. The cracking unit performed commendably and became the preferred type in Russia.  In 1931, two cracking units were opened in Baku, two in Batumi, and six in Grozny.  In 1932, three plants opened in Yaroslavl.  Winkler-Koch made certain that they ran a tightly bound organization.  Fred Koch was on-site most of the time.  Koch pleased his clients by ensuring top-quality and by "helping the cause of socialism."  During this time, Fred Koch became a favorite friend of one of Stalin's immediate supporters, and was wined and dined throughout the USSR.  People from Russia were flown into Wichita, Kansas and given "hands on" training at the Winkler-Koch Company.  Koch also trained the friendly Germans for their Russian comrades, helping to increase the outpouring of jet fuel and gasoline production for what became the Third Reich.
   Fred Koch left Russia in 1933 and returned to the United States.  But he and his company continued doing engineering training and oil refinery work for, and inside, the USSR until 1956.  An Associated Press article in 1956 reported that Fred C. Koch and eleven prominent citizens of Wichita, Kansas "left for Moscow today, by plane, in an effort to convince the Russian people that Soviet propaganda about capitalists is untrue."  Was it a business meeting that went sour? No one knows the facts anymore, but 12 big American capitalists, going to treat with the Russian people sounds like a great cover for an "under-the-covers" business deal.  All we know, today, is that when Fred Koch returned to the United States, he suddenly had a great hatred for Russia and the Communist Party.
    More later.....

Koch Industries (and the Family) - Part 1

My sister's mother-in-law asked me Wednesday night why I dislike the Koch brothers and their business empire so much.  My response, finally, was that the family keeps the majority of it's machinations in business and politics behind closed doors and under a myriad of named groups that don't seem connected, unless one does research and "connects the dots."  I was putting off writing about the Koch brothers and their united Industries until I had done more research - because the deeper I dig, the uglier things appear to me - until I received a request of a political donation of $5 from a state candidate.  The accompanying letter stated that the group known as "Americans for Prosperity" has already spent more than $8 million in advertisements against this female candidate.  And who started the group named "Americans for Prosperity", and who dictates their stands on political and environmental details?  The Koch brothers - Charles Koch, the Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, and his younger brother (a twin), David H. Koch, who is the Executive Vice President of the company.  It's a privately owned company that made a profit of $115 billion in 2012.
  How did they arrive at such power and wealth?  Back in 1888, a Dutch immigrant from Friesland, arrived in the United States on the New Holland ship line.  He had spent a year in The Hague, and in Germany, as an apprentice printer.  He didn't like Chicago, Illinois and moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan; he didn't like Grand Rapids, either. Areas of east Texas were seeking settlers, and they advertised that there were several Dutch-type towns that would welcome industrious people from Holland.  Because of of the humidity of East Texas, Hotze Koch moved west to Quanah, Texas, where he was employed as a type-setter for one of three local newspapers.  He met the "love of his life," a Texas farmer's daughter, Margaret B. (Mattie) Mixson, and married her.  Hotze Koch became a Naturalized US citizen, taking the name of Harry Koch.
  Harry Koch worked hard, and bought one of the newspapers in Quanah, Texas. Then he bought a second paper, and was able to squeeze the third newspaper out of business.  He was now the proud owner of The Quanah Tribune-Chief; and he became the founding share-holder of a new railroad line, the Quanah, Acme and Pacific Railroad.  It's a wonderful story of a hard-working immigrant coming to the United States of America, and making his fortune - a true capitalist's dream.  But, wait just a minute.  Hotze was the second son of a medical doctor, whose father had married the daughter of a town Mayor.  Hotze's mother died giving birth to her eighth child; and, soon after, his father, Dr. Koch, with five living youngsters, married the only daughter of a well-to-do banker.  Somehow, I think that Hotze had some financial backing from his family in the Netherlands.
  In politics, Harry seemed to waver between conservative Republican and libertarianism. He wrote snappy editorials opposed to both the election and Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and was totally against FDR's New Deal.  Harry was especially voracious in his editorials against the creation of Social Security, bank regulation, retirement pensions and worker's rights (he absolutely hated the thought of a Union).  Harry was born in 1867, and came to the US at the age of 21.  He passed away in 1942; he and Mattie had produced two sons, John Anton and Fred Chase Koch.  Anton worked in his father's newspaper business.  Fred attended Rice Institute and MIT.  He became a chemical engineer and the founder of Koch Industries.
  More about the Koch family and Koch Industries will come....

Hail and Miscellany

As I was awaiting the bus, after walking Rosie yesterday morning, small rain drops began to fall.  The bus arrived soon thereafter, and once I in my seat, George, our driver, began singing one of his songs - "a rain song," he said.  It was a hauntingly beautiful song about young love in the country, watching rain fall while sheltering under a willow tree.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.  The short sprinkle ended before we reached the bus station.
  Once I got home, I started looking at apartments and rooms for lease, trying to help out both Britta (next door, with the service dog, cat, and birds) and Nancy, who has 3 cats.  Neither can afford to pay a lot, and living/renting in Boulder is expensive.  Out of 500 ads, I found 4 that met Nancy's criteria, and 3 that met Britta's.  *Ouch*    The darkness outside kept building, and, finally, there were a couple of peals of thunder - followed by hail and rain.  The hail ran between the size of large peas to almost golf-ball size, and fell for about 10 minutes, mixed with cold, pelting rain.  Quite a few folks playing tennis on the courts behind me actually yelped when the skies opened.  We've had occasional rain since then, and have a 75% chance of showers throughout today and tonight.  We need the precipitation, so I will not complain.
  This morning, I'm going straight to the Credit Union to wire funds to my cousin in Virginia.  She and her husband need a bit of a helping hand at the moment, and, as I have a little cash to spare, I'm sending it to her.  Then I'll go walk Rosie (taking my golf umbrella with me), and then Lucy.  After a stop at the library to pick up two books on hold, I'll come back to my kits.  Then, this evening, I'll be taking care of the Thore critters, and then going over to Rosie's for a couple of hours...  Then home and to bed.
   Some of the colts who raced in the Kentucky Derby came back with a few scratches, nicks, and cuts, but nothing was serious.  California Chrome is on his way to Pimlico for the Preakness.  Commanding Curve, who finished second, will skip the Preakness and aim for the Belmont.  And there are quite a few colts who will be jumping into the Preakness without having contested the Derby.  I'll let you know more, as the dust clears.
   And, finally...  Just who are the Koch brothers?  What do they own?  What's their background?  What is the history of their companies?  How many advertising groups are they behind?  Do they have their own PAC?  What, exactly, do they believe in?   All this, and more, in blogs to come.....