Thursday, August 25, 2011

America Hating Conservative Koch Brothers Puts Over 4 Million Americans in Danger




















America Hating Conservative Koch Brothers Puts Over 4 Million Americans in Danger

Recent Greenpeace analysis of lobbying disclosure records reveals that since 2005, Koch Industries has hired more lobbyists than Dow and Dupont to fight legislation that could protect over 100 million Americans from what national security experts say is a catastrophic risk from the bulk storage of poison gasses at dangerous chemical facilities such as oil refineries, chemical manufacturing facilities, and water treatment plants. Koch lobbyists even outnumber those at trade associations including the Chamber of Commerce and American Petroleum Institute. Only the American Chemistry Council deployed more.

In 2010 Koch Industries and the billionaire brothers who run it were first exposed as a major funder of front groups spreading denial of global warming in a Greenpeace report, which sparked an expose in the New Yorker. Since then, the brothers have been further exposed as a key backer of efforts to roll back environmental, labor, and health protections at the state and federal levels. Through enormous campaign contributions, an army of lobbyists, and funding of think tanks and front groups, David and Charles Koch push their agenda of a world in which their company can operate without regard for the risks they pose to communities, workers, or our environment.

Today, in a new expose, Greenpeace has shown how Koch Industries has quietly played a key role in blocking yet another effort to protect workers and vulnerable communities - comprehensive chemical security legislation. The Report is called "Toxic Koch: Keeping Americans at risk of a Poison Gas Disaster."

Since before the September 11, 2001 attacks, security experts have warned of the catastrophic risk that nearly every major American city faces from the bulk storage of poison gasses at dangerous chemical facilities such as oil refineries, chemical manufacturing facilities, and water treatment plants. Nevertheless, ten years later, thousands of facilities still put more than 100 million Americans at risk of a chemical disaster. According to the company's own reports to the EPA, Koch Industries and its subsidiaries Invista, Flint Hills, and Georgia Pacific operate 57 dangerous chemical facilities in the United States that together put 4.4 million people at risk.
But wait a minute these people run a business and employy people shouldn't they be able to do anything they want. In America we punish people who hurt other people, especially killers. The Koch brothers and their philsophy of conservatism says that killing some people is OK in the name of unregulated capitalism. Running a safe business might mean the Koch brothers might be worth 800 or 950 million instead of being billionaires. So not in the name of business or capitalism, but in the name of greed let them kill some Americans. Regular Americans would prefer the kind of good capitalism where greedy bastards like the Koch brothers make a few dollars less.