Come to my house and call me a bedbug to my face
Mascuppic Lake in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, home to many dark family stories but also a good place to haul some ass on a jetski.
I kind of didn’t want to talk about David Koch because there’s something about it that makes me imagine some Portlandia sketch where there’s a community meeting about a dog park or something and a person in a fleece hat keeps bringing up the Koch brothers. Which is to say there is a certain type of liberal who is obsessed with the Koch brothers and tries hangs all of the country’s problems on them.
That said, we can certainly hang a bunch of the country’s problems on them! And so, with his recent death at 79, let’s take a minute to acknowledge David Koch’s truly horrible legacy.
One reason I wanted to talk about the Kochs is that I just finished an article that has not been published yet, but it’s about the folly of celebrating philanthropy based on generosity or effectiveness, neither of which makes it an inherent good. Here is a preview:
Generosity is often framed in terms of voluntary redistribution, but we’ve seen how giving is not particularly effective at breaking up large fortunes. Some of the world’s most generous donors, Bloomberg, Gates, Buffett, and others, have watched their personal fortunes balloon since committing to give away that very money. Wealth once accumulated develops a gravitational pull that leaves generosity far too weak a tool when it comes to untangling inequality.
It feels relevant in the context of David Koch, because there’s a narrative out there that with his passing we shouldn’t be attacking him, due to his generosity toward things like art museums and cancer research. MIT, in particular, whitewashed his legacy, a posthumous thank you for the alum’s donations over the years. That kind of sanitization is a dangerous way to respond to any powerful person’s death.
Setting aside the fact that I struggle to call anyone who dies with $50 billion in his pockets particularly generous, philanthropy doesn’t absolve how their money was made, or what other damage was wrought in their lifetime.
In David Koch’s case, he and his brother used their money to advance their staunch libertarian beliefs, which also conveniently protected their enormous personal wealth. The Kochs used their giving extremely effectively in this regard, turning away from the fringe Libertarian Party in the 1980s and realizing they could elevate their extreme ideas in the mainstream (they were well to the right of Reagan) by building a massive network of donors to bankroll lobbying, think tanks, local advocacy, and dark money political donations.
Some of the Kochs’ greatest hits include funding to slash the social safety net and health care access, weaken unions, scuttle gun laws, and undo campaign finance rules. But I’d say their worst offenses involve their denial of climate change and gutting of environmental regulations. As Jane Mayer and Christopher Leonard have reported, the Kochs were some of the country’s worst polluters through their chemical and fossil fuel businesses, and much of their opposition to regulation directly protected their own profits. Fearing a costly crackdown on the fossil fuel industry, they spent decades opposing any regulation of greenhouse gases and any moderate Republican who was open to it, while sowing doubt about the scientific consensus on climate change. They helped to create a Republican orthodoxy that still blocks federal policy today. David Koch is gone, but we will all be suffering the consequences of his efforts for many years to come.
One more quick David Koch is horrible story, but with this one has a happy ending. A cool trick they picked up in the 2010s was to swoop into communities considering public transit investments—things like tunnels, new bus routes, light rail expansions, real scary stuff—and pump money into the opposition, tanking once-popular proposals on the basis that taxes and public transit are attacks on liberty.
But (as we saw with you know who’s takeover of the party) there are limits to the Kochs’ influence. Their most recent transit battle was in my hometown of Phoenix, Arizona (OK I’m actually from Mesa). On Tuesday, a Koch-funded effort to ban any new light rail or streetcar construction in the city lost in a landslide. Good job Phoenix. The Koch legacy casts a long and ugly shadow, but it is not all powerful.
Links
- London will begin piping heat from the subway into homes and businesses to conserve energy. Another “wasted heat” project diverts it from a sugar factory into a greenhouse that grows weed.
- “Call me a bedbug to my face.”
- The Southwest got a lot of snow, but the Colorado River and the people who depend on it are still in trouble. “You can put an ice cube — even an excellent ice cube — in a cup of hot coffee, but eventually it’s going to disappear.”
- Due to a scheduling oddity, Fenway charged just $5 for what turned out to be a single 12-minute inning. It was a fun/sad window into how accessible Fenway must have been at some point, and certainly no longer is.
- Facial recognition tools are “dangerous when they fail and harmful when they work.” Calling for a moratorium (actually how about we just make it illegal).
- There are, it turns out, laws when you are drinking Claws. My favorite flavor is black cherry.
- Surprising nobody, there are laws when drinking nutcracker, and New York cops are blitzing vendors of the summer drink popular in Black communities.
- And for the summer public drinking trifecta, there’s a war on partying gentrifiers on Southie Beach. “On the weekend, they stand there with their drinks and their phones and their glasses and they just pee.”
More Bacchus by Eddie Campbell. This is how you feel when you get this newsletter.
Watching
The second season of Mindhunter (or, The Murder Boys, as I call it) is just as gripping as the first. It occurred to me that the FBI agents behind the Behavioral Science Unit have been portrayed so often in fiction that they are basically folklore at this point, like Batman or Sherlock Holmes. This is a Roxy Music song used in the first episode’s cold open, but in the show it cuts off right before one of the best payoffs in rock history so you can listen to it here at around 3:00 and do like stupid fake guitar motions or whatever you feel like.
I also watched Us which was scary as shit and also really funny and the artistic use of I Got 5 On It and N.W.A. will go down in film history if there is any good in this world.
Reading
In the middle of The Power, by Naomi Alderman and it is great so far. I’ll probably write more about it later but it imagines a world in which all young women develop an electricity-based power that can basically fuck up anyone who messes with them. It’s a real page-turner but also a cutting look at the mechanics of all forms of power.
I read some stuff about how using Google navigation is making us all stupid and I cannot afford to get stupider I’m not trying to go to Jupiter over here. So I started driving in Boston without Google and it is a real adventure. It wasn’t pretty but I made it home from Brookline today. So if I’m late for something, cut me some slack at least I will be smart when I get there.
I hope all of your navigations on the road and in life are successful.
Tate