Among his charitable donations which were over a billion dollars:
$185 Million to M.I.T.
$150 Million to Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
$100 Million New York-Presbyterian Hospital
Another $66.7 Million to Sloan-Kettering
$26.5 Million to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center
$26.2 Million Hospital for Special Surgery in New York
$20 Million to Johns Hopkins for Cancer Research
$10 Million to Food Allery Institute at Mt. Sinai
I wouldn’t be surprised if he left some more money to charity in his will.
I’m sure the OP contributed some Doritos stains to his keyboard. Though not believing in Global Warming is idiotic, it started well before he was alive, and will likely continue long after he is gone, you can’t lay that all at his feet.
And so fucking what? Koch Industries poisons the people in communities where they do business. Save their tax write-offs, er, contributions and just stop poisoning people, and stop trying to undermine the American political system. It’s too late to spare David Koch, but doing that would improve the living Koch brother’s legacy.
Yeah, and he also single-handedly undermined American democracy to an extent from which it may never recover. I suggest you familiarize yourself with Dark Money by the investigative journalist Jane Myer for just one account of this unprecedented malfeasance. From the NYT review:
The book is written in straightforward and largely unemotional prose, but it reads as if conceived in quiet anger. Mayer believes that the Koch brothers and a small number of allied plutocrats have essentially hijacked American democracy, using their money not just to compete with their political adversaries, but to drown them out.
Anyone who defends the Kochs in light of these revelations just because they donated a small fraction of their enormous wealth – much of it for self-serving reasons – is either an ignoramus or a traitorous soulless asshole.
So your pathetic attempt to defend this idiocy is “he wasn’t the only one”? No, but he was one of the biggest funders around of the dangerous anti-science denialist conspiracy. And Koch Industries was the repeatedly the subject of the biggest fines for reckless environmental violations in history. That alone says much about the character of the Koch brothers, and the character of anyone who defends them.
While I’m not a fan: the brothers spent a lot of money and time to improve (in their view) the world. Some part (all?) could be seen as self-serving. But they are involved. Which is the only way the system works.
Spare your ire for the people that are politically aligned with you and don’t spend as much to influence their world. They are worth exactly nil. All talk and only looking out for number one. If everyone who professes to be a progressive spent half the effort (never mind the money) changing the political landscape in the US, nobody would ever have heard “President” and “Trump” in the same sentence. The Kochs are clear what they stand for (however wrong in my eyes) and are equally clear and committed in making that a reality. Their money is not funding weird shit like Cambridge Analytic or buying Russian dirt. To call them evil is just partisan bullshit.
If there’s one thing I hate it’s the notion that billionaires who fuck billions of people can buy their reputation back through philanthropy. I don’t give two shits if he donated to cancer research - that’s the least he could have done considering how badly his industrial facilities have polluted communities in which they’ve done business. He funded climate change denial propaganda. He used dark money to seriously undermine the American political system.
No, you don’t make up for that by funding cancer research or buying a spot on PBS. For the last fucking time: it’s far, far better to tax the shit out of oligarchs like the Kochs and let us decide how that money should be redistributed rather than to have a handful of super wealthy individuals like the Kochs take anywhere from a quarter to half of what we earn and save, and then use the tax code to buy their reputation back.
Fuck the Kochs and their “philanthropy”. Stop screwing humanity.
Yeah, and Al Capone ran a soup kitchen during the Great Depression. So what?
Human beings are human beings, not cartoonish supervillains. Most people will act decently at least some of the time. But very few have the means and desire to negatively affect the lives of billions for decades to come.
This is ridiculous. People who spend their money pushing ignorance and destruction are better than people who do nothing politically?
Yes, we should all be involved, and yes, people who aren’t involved perhaps should be criticized. But I’d rather someone do nothing rather than manipulating the system to their own benefit and the detriment of most others.
Also, criticizing someone’s politics may be partisan, but it’s not always bullshit. You want to talk about the way the system works? That’s how the system works - by discussion, and discussion includes criticism. It does not work by oligarchs corrupting it with money.
If anybody is interested, here is a fairly comprehensive obituary of David Koch in the NY Times.
While 1 billion plus in charitable giving shouldn’t be taken lightly, that amount pales in comparison to the total wealth of the Koch brothers.
And as I posted in another thread, I live within fairly easy driving distance from Wichita. Should D Koch be buried in Wichita, I’ll be available for both dancing and pissing. Perhaps at the same time.
As reprehensible as David was, his brother Charles is even worse. Some charitable types have even suggested that David may have had some rudiments of a human-like conscience, though that’s going a bit far IMO. But whatever dancing and pissing and celebration occurs over David, keep some in reserve because Charles deserves even better.
More from Bill Maher (from last Friday’s show): “… at least he lived long enough to see the Amazon catch fire … mourners are being asked in lieu of flowers to just leave their car engine running … he has asked to be cremated and have his ashes blown into a child’s lungs … he and his brother have done more than anybody to fund climate science deniers, so fuck him, the Amazon is burning up, I’m glad he’s dead …”
I actually have contempt for billionaire philanthropy, because it enables the billionaire class to buy their reputation and rehabilitate their image. Yet nothing changes: the fundamental inequalities still exist, and philanthropy allows them to engage in yet more capitalistic propaganda. The problem with philanthropy is that the philanthropists decide on our behalf which causes are really worth funding and which ones have social value, and which ones aren’t (don’t). It’s better to have a more egalitarian economic system in the first place, but people like the Kochs don’t want that and they use their philanthropy fraudulently to dress up their misdeeds.
Criticism is one thing. That’s not bullshit. (I agree with most of it)
And that is not what I wrote.
In the context of US politics, spending money under your own name to push your politics is hardly “corrupting”. I would worry more about faceless lobbyists spending on both sides of the aisle. What the Kochs are doing is refreshingly honest by comparison.