sokpupet
Active member
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- Sep 16, 2010
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- Centrist
The Koch family has an image, albeit fabricated, as benevolent billionaires. . Some history of an important family in US politics:
~snip
"I could hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half." -- Jay Gould, Wall Street financier, 1886
~snip
The story of how the Koch family amassed its socialist wealth starts at the turn of the 20th century with the birth of Fredrick C. Koch. Fred was born in a tiny town in north Texas town to a Dutch immigrant and newspaper publisher. The historical record is not clear about the family’s wealth, but it appears that great-granddaddy Koch was not hurting for cash, because Fred Koch turned out to be a smart kid and was able to study at MIT and graduate with chemical engineering degree. A few years later, in 1925, Fred started up the Winkler-Koch Engineering Company with a former classmate, quickly developing and patenting a novel process to refine gasoline from crude oil that had a highe-yield than anything on the market. It was shaping up to be an American success story, where anything was possible with a bit of elbow grease and good ol’ ingenuity.
The sky was the limit—until the free market rained on Fred’s parade.
"I could hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half." -- Jay Gould, Wall Street financier, 1886