Kochland
The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America
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Narrated by:
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Jacques Roy
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Written by:
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Christopher Leonard
About this listen
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 the biggest private company 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 US 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 listen to this audiobook.
Seven years in the making, Kochland comes across like a true-life thriller, with larger-than-life characters driving the battles at every moment. The audiobook 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.
©2019 Christopher Leonard (P)2019 Simon & Schuster AudioYou may also enjoy...
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What the critics say
"Business reporter Christopher Leonard's emphatic, decade-long investigative research has yielded an in-depth examination of the secretive privately held Wichita-based Koch Industries. Jacques Roy provides a masterful narration.... [His] low-key professorial tone eases the listener through a highly complex market-based business portrait. It would be challenging to find a clearer discussion of how dark money may wield profound influence on American politics." (AudioFile Magazine)
“Deeply and authoritatively reported...[Kochland] marshals a huge amount of information and uses it to help solve two enduring mysteries: how the Kochs got so rich, and how they used that fortune to buy off American action on climate change.” (Jane Mayer, The New Yorker)
“Superb.... Among the best books ever written about an American corporation.... Not since Andrew Ross Sorkin’s landmark Too Big to Fail (2009) have I said this about a book, but Kochland warrants it: If you’re in business, this is something you need to read.” (Bryan Burrough, The New York Times Book Review)