"People's rights were violated... they never got their due process."

Not all property rights are created equal.

Charles Koch sees nothing wrong with the government confiscating private property, as long as he stands to make a profit.



9/1/10

By Yasha Levine
The New York Observer
Copyright 2010

Although highly diversified, Koch Industries' vast network of oil and gas pipelines remains the company's core business and main source of revenue.

The exact size of their pipeline network is not known, but some estimate that Koch Industries operates anywhere between 35,000 and 50,000 miles of pipelines between Texas and Canada—enough plumbing to wrap around the globe twice or zigzag between New York and Los Angeles 15 times.

How did the Kochs manage to build up a pipeline network of this magnitude? By getting the government to use its tyrannical powers of eminent domain forcibly seize private property on Koch Industries' behalf.

As far as libertarians are concerned, eminent domain is a socialist tyranny straight out of the Leninist playbook, as it recognizes the government as the real owner of all land and vests it with the power to expropriate private property for alleged public good.

At the most fundamental level, libertarians believe that eminent domain invalidates the notion of private property rights, threatening not just prosperity, but freedom. Charles Koch is clear on this. "Countries that clearly define and protect individual private property rights stimulate investment and grow," he writes in his book The Science of Success. "Those that threaten and confiscate private property lose capital and decline."

But not all property rights are created equal. Koch Industries oil pipeline recently built in Minnesota shows that Charles Koch does not see an is anything wrong with the government confiscating private property, as long as he stands to make a profit.

Completed in 2008, the 304-mile line now carries crude oil from the Canadian border to a Koch Industries refinery near the Twin Cities area via a two-foot-wide pipe. Company PR execs pitched the pipeline as a public benefit project, as it would increase Minnesota's gasoline supply.

But the 1,000-plus landowners who were forced to handover their private property so that Koch Industries could run its pipeline didn't quite see it that way. "People's rights were violated, and they never got their due process," a farmer whose fields were going to be cut in two by the pipeline told a newspaper in 2007. "It's wrong. People's property is one of the most important things to their livelihood."

© 2010 The New York Observer: www.observer.com

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How do the 'libertarian' Koch Brothers benefit from corporate welfare? Let us count the ways...

7 Ways the Koch Bros. Benefit from Corporate Welfare

9/1/10

By Yasha Levine
The New York Observer
Copyright 2010

Mainstream America is finally getting to know the billionaire brothers backing the libertarian movement, thanks to a pair of dueling profiles in New York and The New Yorker. Now that we've heard about their charitable giving, David's 240-foot mega-yacht and role as patrons of the Tea Party movement, it's time to ask a more serious question: How libertarian are they?

The short answer...not very.

Charles and David Koch, the secretive billionaire brothers who own Koch Industries, the largest private oil company in America, have spent millions bankrolling free-market think tanks and pro-business politicians in order, as David Koch has put it, "to minimize the role of government, to maximize the role of private economy and to maximize personal freedoms." But a closer look at their dealings reveals that for the past 35 years the brothers have never shied away from using government subsidies to maximize their own profits, even while endeavoring to limit government spending on anything else.

[CLICK TO SEE THE 7 WAYS THE KOCHS BENEFIT FROM GOVERNMENT LARGESSE.]

n 1977, Charles Koch founded the Cato Institute, an influential libertarian think tank, with the aim of injecting free-market ideas into the mainstream. The Kochs would go on to establish and fund a vast network of overlapping think tanks, institutes, foundations, media outlets, and lobby groups that would vilify centralized government and promote laissez-faire capitalism as the only route to economic prosperity. The Mercatus Center, Americans for Prosperity, Reason Magazine, the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation are just a few of the right-wing organizations that run on Koch cash today.

Koch Industries is America's second-largest private corporation, with revenue of $100 billion in 2009, and 80,000 employees in 60 countries. According to Charles Koch, Koch Industries has grown 2,000-fold since he took over from his dad in 1967, transforming a middling oil transportation and refinement operation into a corporate mini-state involved in oil, petrochemicals, paper, agriculture and financial services.

Seventy-four-year-old Charles G. Koch, who runs the company from a compound in Wichita, Kansas, has attributed the company's success to an unshakable belief in the power of the free-markets—a belief that he says can be traced back to an "intellectual epiphany" he experienced at a conference more than 40 years ago. There, Koch realized that free-market economics were an objective reality "as immutable as the laws that work in science," he explained in 2006.

In its recent profile, the New Yorker called Charles and David Koch "the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America." But the magazine failed to mention that their free market philanthropy belies the immense profit they have made from corporate welfare.

IN DEPTH: An illustrated history of the Koch Bros.' socialist links and penchant for government handouts.

© 2010 The New York Observer: www.observer.com

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To view the Trans-Texas Corridor Blog click HERE