#christopher leonard

[universitybookstore]

New from Simon & Schuster and business reporter Christopher Leonard, Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.

[rjzimmerman]

Christopher Leonard's New Book Puts an Ever-Expanding 'Kochland' on the Map

Excerpt from this review of the book, “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America” written by Christopher Leonard:

Koch Industries eludes consumer boycotts by selling products that are inescapably entwined in the infrastructure of daily American life. As much as any single organization, Koch Industries has made any problems it is responsible for — intentionally, in Leonard’s telling — structural, problems that cannot be addressed through individual consumer action.

When it comes to environmental accountability, Leonard diagnoses structural issues inside the company in the 1990s that facilitated law breaking. In a fascinating chapter, Leonard offers readers an account of Koch Industries deliberately and repeatedly spewing contaminated wastewater into wetlands in Minnesota, a major violation of environmental law to which the company pled guilty in 1999.

“The company learned that violating regulations could put a dent in its profit margins, and responded accordingly,” Jennifer Szalai wrote in a New York Times review of Kochland. “It now imprints upon employees the need for ‘10,000 percent compliance’: obeying 100 percent of the laws 100 percent of the time.”

That narrative isn’t a perfect fit for the facts — just a year later, Koch pled guilty to falsifying documents and settled with the Justice Department for $20 million over benzene pollution in Corpus Christi, Texas, and an attempted cover-up, according to Greenpeace.

And 10 years later, a Koch subsidiary reached a deal with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Justice over environmental law-breaking that spanned seven states. Those violations resulted in a $1.7 million fine and $500 million in repair obligations, Greenpeace adds as it details both accidental spills or leaks and toxic pollution (at times with the permission of state regulators) that have sickened those living around the plants.

If anything, what Koch Industries seemed to learn from costly environmental fines and settlements is that it can be cheaper to change the law today than it is to pay the fine tomorrow. Leonard details how, for example, the Kochs began, via a nonprofit group, to sponsor free educational events for judges, hosted in luxurious locales, which organizers said by 2016 had attracted more than 4,000 state and federal judges from every part of the country.

[disillusioned41]

The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder Published 9/9/2019

Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries w/ Christopher Leonard 

Good morning on today’s show, journalist and author of "The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America," Christopher Leonard.

Just as Steve Coll told the story of globalization through ExxonMobil and Andrew Ross Sorkin told the story of Wall Street excess through Too Big to Fail, Christopher Leonard’s Kochland uses the extraordinary account of how one of the biggest private companies in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America. The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Goldman Sachs, Facebook, and U.S. Steel combined. Koch is everywhere: from the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall Street trading in all these commodities. But few people know much about Koch Industries and that’s because the billionaire Koch brothers want it that way. For five decades, CEO Charles Koch has kept Koch Industries quietly operating in deepest secrecy, with a view toward very, very long-term profits. He’s a genius businessman: patient with earnings, able to learn from his mistakes, determined that his employees develop a reverence for free-market ruthlessness, and a master disrupter. These strategies have made him and his brother David together richer than Bill Gates. But there’s another side to this story. If you want to understand how we killed the unions in this country, how we widened the income divide, stalled progress on climate change, and how our corporations bought the influence industry, all you have to do is read this book. Seven years in the making, Kochland reads like a true-life thriller, with larger-than-life characters driving the battles on every page. The book tells the ambitious tale of how one private company consolidated power over half a century—and how in doing so, it helped transform capitalism into something that feels deeply alienating to many Americans today.

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[willstafford]

An Imperfect Storm

THE TEMPEST The Bear Pit Theatre, Stratford upon Avon, Wednesday 6th May 2026 Shakespeare’s last great play is brought to life within the confines of the Bear Pit’s auditorium in this ambitious production by Caramba Theatre Company.  Director Mollie Taylor uses a range of performance styles to create the various aspects of the story: physical theatre for the ship that is wrecked at the…

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[chrisdleonard]

Strategic Alliance Agronomix Software & Progeny Drone

Today Agronomix Software, (Winnipeg, Canada) & Progeny Drone (Indiana, USA) announce Strategic Alliance

Agronomix Software & Progeny Drone launch strategic alliance on UAS data integration to accelerate plant breeding and agronomic research. September 2020 Leading Agricultural Research Software company teams with fast-growing startup on integrating outputs from its unique image stitching and data extraction application for images from Unoccupied Aerial Systems (UAS). Photo 97038978 © Yutta…

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[geejae42]

KOCHLAND Audiobook Excerpt by Simon & Schuster Audio Listen to an excerpt from KOCHLAND by Christopher Leonard and read by Jacques Roy.

[geejae42]

KOCHLAND Audiobook Excerpt by Simon & Schuster Audio Listen to an excerpt from KOCHLAND by Christopher Leonard and read by Jacques Roy.