Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktLooks like the Koch brothers may have a little trouble on their hands. This Bloomberg News piece is a little long for my taste and so it loses some of it’s explosive value but it does give us an inside view of their corporate business culture. Does anyone else find it odd that so many large corporations are just allowed to pay their penalties and fines and then just go on about their merry way as if they’ve been absolved of their crimes and misdemeanors?
Internal company documents show that the company made those sales through foreign subsidiaries, thwarting a U.S. trade ban. Koch Industries units have also rigged prices with competitors, lied to regulators and repeatedly run afoul of environmental regulations, resulting in five criminal convictions since 1999 in the U.S. and Canada.
From 1999 through 2003, Koch Industries was assessed more than $400 million in fines, penalties and judgments. In December 1999, a civil jury found that Koch Industries had taken oil it didn’t pay for from federal land by mismeasuring the amount of crude it was extracting. Koch paid a $25 million settlement to the U.S.
Phil Dubose, a Koch employee who testified against the company said he and his colleagues were shown by their managers how to steal and cheat — using techniques they called the Koch Method.
The New York Times had a piece up yesterday dealing with the new voter ID laws being passed in so many states. My favorite line in the piece calls them a solution in search of a problem.
Five states passed laws this year scaling back programs allowing voters to cast their ballots before Election Day, the Brennan Center found. Ohio passed a law eliminating early voting on Sundays, and Florida eliminated it on the Sunday before Election Day — days when some African-American churches organized “souls to the polls” drives for members of their congregations. Maine voted to stop allowing people to register to vote on Election Day — a practice that had been credited with enrolling some 60,000 new voters in 2008. Voters in Maine and Ohio are now seeking to overturn the new laws with referendums.
The biggest impact, the Brennan Center said, will be from laws requiring people to show government-issued photo identification to vote. This year, 34 states introduced legislation to require it — a flurry of activity that Jennie Bowser, a senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures, called “pretty unusual.” Before this year, only two states, Indiana and Georgia, had “strict” photo identification requirements for voters, according to the conference. This year, five more states — Wisconsin, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas — passed laws to join their ranks.
Under the Texas law, licenses to carry concealed handguns would be an acceptable form of identification to vote, but not student ID cards.
A new immigration law in Alabama has parents withdrawing their children from school in fear.
McKendrick said he understands the pressures that the families are under and the fear that the new law has created.
“You may hear information and not be sure how valid it is,” he said. “I can understand why parents would be leery of anything that they hear and just try to protect their children and stay in this country.”
Lost class time isn’t the only thing worrying school officials. Funding for Alabama schools is dependent on the number of students it has, and Thompson said a mass exodus would dry up funds, which would hurt all students. She estimated that the district would lose $2 million if the 231 students who were absent on Thursday decided to stay away for good.
“When one student drops out, it affects the funding for the entire system,” she said.
And from the Left Coast Bureau:
Filed under: Koch Industries, Koch Method, trade ban, voter ID laws | Tagged: Occupy Los Angeles |
All Things in Moderation 
"Under the Texas law, licenses to carry concealed handguns would be an acceptable form of identification to vote, but not student ID cards."Hmmm…sounds like ACORN needs to make a push to get a whole lot of new people licensed to carry concealed handguns.
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From the article: "Her superiors removed her from the inquiry in August 2008 and fired her in June 2009, calling her incompetent, even after Koch’s investigators substantiated her findings"Gawd. This is just stupid. If you feel your internal auditor is making a stink about things they shouldn't, you should move them elsewhere, with a sweet bump in pay and a nicer office, where they might then decide that whatever they discovered is being handled by someone, and, anyway, look at their sweet new office. You fire them, you give them lots of time and motivation to prepare to sue you, to contact the media, then sue you, and talk to the media, or do an anonymous document dump, which then encourages someone else you fired or let go who knows something about how you did things to contact the media . . . I'm generally unsympathetic to any corporation doing business with America's enemies, but when they're that stupid in terms of managing their own internal affairs, they deserve what they get. First, you shouldn't be paying bribes for contracts, or doing other illegal things. That's strike one. When someone on your side notices, and audits, and then you fire that person (and might as well tell them: now, take everything you know and run to the DoJ and the press, okay?) that's strike two and three and maybe four. Although it could be used to make a case that the folks running those divisions are simply too incompetent to follow the law.
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"This wasn’t Koch Industries’ first brush with complaints of improper competition. In October 2000, the FBI secretly recorded the telephone calls of Troy Stanley Sr., director of textile staples at KoSa, then a Luxembourg company with its main office in Charlotte, North Carolina."Civil liberties! Spying on American citizens! Fascist police state!: )
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"The truck stalled after the couple drove into a fog-like cloud, says Danielle’s father, Danny Smalley, who watched them drive away. It was butane vapor, leaking from a corroded steel pipeline. Seconds later, as Danielle restarted the truck, the gas ignited into a fireball, burning Danielle and Jason to death."Do they teach writing in j-school anymore? Seriously, why didn't this open up the article? Gripping human drama. Instead, I guess they saved it for the end to he the crescendo . . . but you could at least open with the event, then conclude with the lawsuit, the parent, etc. Writing! Sheesh.
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""Under the Texas law, licenses to carry concealed handguns would be an acceptable form of identification to vote, but not student ID cards.""This is easy to address. Hand out concealed carry permits with student IDs! Done and done. I used to print up Student ID cards for fun. I understand why they are not acceptable identification.
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KevinI thought that was a very poorly written and hodge podge train of thought article. You'd think Bloomberg could do a little better. I'm sure they've been researching it for quite awhile. Don't they have editors? While it's not going to endear Koch Industries to very many people it wasn't much of an expose, they need to hire Matt Taibbi, that guy can write.
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Kev, FYI: All incoming commerce, including telcons and email, is subject to search. If it comes across a border or over an ocean, it requires no warrant. That is well established law.There are technical problems with winnowing domestic from foreign email, but I am sure NSA is up to it, by now. But perhaps not.Assume all your email and phone conversations are subject to surveillance.
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Yeah, it's definitely not going to end Koch. The only thing that ends even rampantly corrupt corporations is generally, like Enron, it turning out that the company has huge debts and no money.
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" If it comes across a border or over an ocean, it requires no warrant. That is well established law."Heh! I know, I'm being snarky, and punchy. It's Monday, I've got a cold, not a lot of sleep. I may be strange today. Just a warning.
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"This is just stupid. If you feel your internal auditor is making a stink about things they shouldn't, you should move them elsewhere, with a sweet bump in pay and a nicer office, where they might then decide that whatever they discovered is being handled by someone, and, anyway, look at their sweet new office"I don't know, Kevin – is it stupidity or arrogance?
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Well, if it's arrogance, it's still stupid. There is a long and storied tradition of buying people off and firing them up, and also plenty of examples of the punished and fired employee finally costing them more (by multimillions) than it would have to move them to another division with a 20k bump in pay. I mean, it's stupid to keep putting your company at risk by tolerating fraud or corruption at multiple levels, but if you're doing it and you can't even do the corruption right . . . sheesh!
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I think I'll just pass on the anti-Koch muckraking. I already know the media hates Koch. I'm not too interested in the rest.As for voter ID, NYT and Brennan Center … say … again who really cares? Not me. That they are against it tells me enough.
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qb, maybe tomorrow you could put some links up that you like, lol.
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lms,That was kind of sour and negative-Nancy of me, wasn't it? ; )My excuse: I was busy!
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