Will OWS Protestors Clean Up Their Act?

Mom told us that if you wanted to succeed in life, the key was to make yourself useful, or make something useful.

“Like toilet paper,” she said.  “Everyone needs toilet paper.”

The Occupy Wall Street squatters, bored with chanting slogans, littering Zuccotti Park, making out in sleeping bags, and getting stoned in the same old place, plan to parade up to the East Side to picket the homes of millionaires, including billionaire businessman David H. Koch (pronounced “coke”), whose parents apparently taught David and his siblings the same lesson about making themselves “useful.”

How ironic that the defecating protestors are planning to protest – and probably defecate - in front of Koch’s home.  They couldn’t have picked a better mansion.  This “evil” capitalist businessman and his family have made their fortune producing toilet paper.  Toilet paper, paper towels, napkins:   Angel Soft, Mardi Gras, Quilted Northern, Sparkle, Soft N Gentle, Brawny, Sparkle.  They also produce Dixie products and are the owners of Chiquita Brands, the famous banana grower.  The protestors will be right at home squatting in front of Koch’s home; as far as Koch will know, the protestors are just another bunch of bananas.

Koch is actually sympathetic to one of their causes.  When he ran on the Libertarian ticket as Vice President in 1980, with Ed Clark, one of their platforms was to legalize marijuana.  The Clark–Koch ticket also promised to abolish Social Security, the Federal Reserve Board, welfare, minimum-wage laws, corporate taxes, agricultural and business price supports and subsidies, and U.S. Federal Agencies, including the SEC, EPA, ICC, FTC, OSHA, FBI, CIA, and DOE.

Koch, the second-richest New York City resident, is a noted philanthropist.  Since 2000, David H. Koch Charitable Foundation has pledged or contributed more than $750 million to further cancer research, enhance medical centers, support educational institutions, sustain arts and cultural institutions, and conduct public policy studies.   Since 2006, the Chronicle of Philanthrophy has listed Koch as one of the world's top 50 philanthropists.

He contributed $7 million to PBS’ show, Nova.  He’s a contributor to the Smithsonian Institution, including a $20 million donation to the American Museum of Natural History in New York for its dinosaur exhibit and $15 million to the National Museum of Natural History in Washington for the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins.   Perhaps the current protestors will pose for a performance artist exhibit on arrested development.

Among other charities, he has contributed to Lincoln Center, Sloan-Kettering, The New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, home of the New York City Opera and the New York City Ballet.  He donated a cool $100 million to Lincoln Center, although the anthropologically correct progressives would not approve.  They disapprove of Western composers in general, and operas in particular, because operas tell stories of foreign lands in the audience’s own language (well, back in the 18^th and 19^th century they did), exploiting the foreign culture, set to music the Progressives absolutely detest.  Not even Carmen moves them.
Koch was born in Wichita, Kansas.  His father was a chemical engineer and David went on to earn his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering at MIT in 1963.  He became president of Koch Engineering in 1971.

According to Koch, he gave his own Vice Presidential campaign $100,000 a month after being chosen as Ed Clark’s's running mate. “We'd like to abolish the FEC and all the limits on campaign spending anyway," Koch told New York magazine's Rinker Buck in 1980. When asked why he ran, Koch replied: "Lord knows I didn't need a job, but I believe in what the Libertarians are saying. I suppose if they hadn't come along, I could have been a big Republican from Wichita. But hell—everybody from Kansas is a Republican.”

He broke with the Libertarian Party in 1984 when it supported eliminating all taxes and Koch has since been a Republican.  David Koch supports policies that promote individual liberty and free market principles. He supports gay marriage and stem-cell research. He is against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) and was against the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.  He’s skeptical about anthropogenic global warming.

He opposed the Iraq war, saying that the war has "cost a lot of money, and it's taken so many American lives.  I question whether that was the right thing to do. In hindsight that looks like it was not a good policy,” he told an interviewer.

David Koch dislikes President Obama's policies. “He's the most radical president we've ever had as a nation... and has done more damage to the free enterprise system and long-term prosperity than any president we've ever had.”   Koch believes that Obama's father's economic socialism explains what Koch views as Obama's belief in “antibusiness, anti-free enterprise influences.”  He believes Obama himself is a “hardcore socialist” who is “marvelous at pretending to be something other than that.”

Halloween is the most useful time to pretend to be what you’re not.  But by all means, let them hike up to the East Side and have a chat with Koch.  He can teach them what it means to be a useful citizen rather than a useless idiot and clean up their act.

If they want something for free, maybe he’ll donate free toilet paper to their cause.