Jesse Lava, a documentarian sympathetic to the Occupy Wall Streeters, joked that the Koch brothers eat “soft-boiled babies” for breakfast, but when the Kochs released the audio of his comments, he replied with “shame on them” for their criticism of his other taped remarks.
Lava, campaign director for Brave New Foundation, left a voice mail message for Charles Koch in which he asked about a factory the Kochs own which Lava believes “has caused cancer for a lot of people in the community.” After leaving his message, Lava failed to hang up his phone, and so his cannibalism jokes were recorded on the answering machine.
“What do you think Charles Koch eats for breakfast?” a second person is heard asking Lava on the tape. “Babies?” Lava answers, to laughter. “I agree, babies,” his friend says. “Like, soft-boiled babies,” Lava adds, continuing with the joke. “Scrambled babies.”
When the Kochs released the audio, they added a text faulting Lava for “exploit[ing] his own family to further his agenda,” because Lava said in the message that the issue is “very personal” for him due to deaths by cancer in his family.
Lava denounced the Kochs for releasing the audio and their criticism of him in the subtitles. “[W]hile smearing me and diminishing the importance of my family may be preferable to them than actually looking into the problems in Crossett, that is not what will help make our country a stronger, healthier place,” he wrote today. “Shame on them.”
Lava framed the issue in the language of the Occupy protesters. “From the Koch brothers’ vantage point as billionaires with mansions all over the country, politics may be an abstraction or a game,” he charged. “But to the 99 percent, it’s no game. It’s personal.” (Cancer is a disease of personal interest to David Koch, a cancer survivor who donates to cancer research.)
As for the substance of Lava’s charge that the Koch factory is causing cancer:The Kochs counter that “the chemicals used in GP’s processes are strictly regulated and monitored to help ensure that they are used safely and with no harmful human exposure,” on their website, KochFacts.com. “Indeed, the Environmental Protection Agency has recognized GP for its compliance record, and from 2000 to 2010, Georgia-Pacific reduced its total emissions by 34 percent,” the Kochs add.
Lava suspects that the libertarian Kochs have managed to gain control of the EPA, “When you’ve got lawmakers in your pocket, is it any great victory to say that the laws permit you to emit high levels of cancer-causing pollutants?” he wrote today.
Brave New Foundation says on its site that the fact “that the EPA is giving the green light to toxic pollution by the Koch brothers, or anyone else, is less a gold star for the Koch brothers than it is an indictment of our political system, which affords the wealthiest 1 percent a blank check at the expense of the bottom 99 percent.”
The EPA is one of President Obama’s favorite regulatory agencies.
