Puppet masters
The blandly alliterative subtitle of Jane Mayer’s new book describes it as “The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.” That’s true, I suppose, but it undersells the scope and consequence of her reporting.
“Dark Money” is more than just a work of political journalism — it’s a vital portrait of a nation that, as perhaps never before, is being shaped by a few very rich, very conservative businessmen.
Led by a pair of controversial oil heirs who get a righteous dissing at every Bernie Sanders rally, this tiny group of tycoons has created a funding network that skillfully — and often stealthily — pushes an antitax, pro-corporate agenda. In the process, they’ve exerted a transformative influence on government at the local, state and national levels — and changed the way Americans think, talk and vote.
Though Mayer’s story is broadly familiar, she adds countless new details and important context along the way. And by synthesizing so much in a single volume, she’s written one of the essential books about our political system’s unparalleled capacity for perpetuating income inequality.
Mayer focuses on Charles and David Koch, titans of the fossil fuel and chemical industries, and a few others who’ve attended the brothers’ Southern California fundraising retreats. The Kochs, worth a combined $80 billion, have fought government oversight of their businesses at every turn, and subsidized crusades to slash taxes for the super wealthy.
Koch Industries has long been among the country’s biggest polluters, Mayer writes, and “between 1980 and 2005 … developed a stunning record of corporate malfeasance.” This hasn’t stopped the Kochs from making a mint from Washington: In a recent 10-year period, Mayer says, Koch “companies benefited from nearly $100 million in government contracts.”
A New Yorker staffer, Mayer published a memorably unflattering article about the Kochs in 2010, and she spent five years working on this book. For her trouble, Mayer says, she was the target of an unsuccessful smear campaign that appears to have been engineered by Koch allies.
Even as it covers some old ground, “Dark Money” is packed with revelations about the Koch network’s “nonpolitical” organizations, the unseemly past of the family business and the moneyed right’s impact on the already baffling 2016 campaign.
Mayer reveals that the Koch fortune was partially derived in shameful circumstances: “Fred Chase Koch, founder of the family oil business, developed lucrative business relationships with” Josef Stalin’s and Adolf Hitler’s governments, and “as World War II approached and Hitler’s aims were unmistakable, he wrote admiringly about fascism in Germany.” Unsurprisingly, the elder Koch’s link to the Third Reich “has been excised from the official corporate history.”
Though they de-emphasize their influence, Fred Koch’s sons have been farright fixtures for decades. Charles, Mayer writes, was once a member of the conspiracy-minded John Birch Society, and David was the 1980 vice presidential candidate on a Libertarian Party ticket so reactionary that “conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. dismissed their views as ‘Anarcho-Totalitarianism.’ ”
Exploiting the outrageous tax loopholes created for affluent “philanthropists,” they’ve since poured many millions into right-leaning think tanks. Less well known is their support for conservative high school and college courses.
“By 2015, according to an internal list, the Charles Koch Foundation was subsidizing pro-business, antiregulatory, and anti-tax programs in 307 different institutions of higher education,” Mayer writes.
Then there’s Charles Koch’s Young Entrepreneurs Academy, which, Mayer writes, has provided highschoolers with conservative talking points: “The finan- cially pressed Topeka school system … signed an agreement with the organization which taught students that, among other things, Franklin Roosevelt didn’t alleviate the Depression, minimum wage laws and public assistance hurt the poor, lower pay for women was not discriminatory, and the government, rather than business, caused the 2008 recession.”
Mayer also demonstrates how the Kochs’ behind-thescenes backing of ostensibly grass-roots groups like the Tea Party has shaped the debate over taxes and federal spending. And she chronicles the well-funded gerrymandering schemes that have ensured Republican majorities in state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives.
Bolstered by court rulings that eliminated many limits on political contributions, the Koch network is reportedly prepared to spend almost $900 million during the 2016 campaign.
Their huge outlay has enabled the brothers to push the terms of the debate increasingly rightward. If, say, Marco Rubio wins this year’s Republican presidential nomination, he’ll be the second straight GOP candidate who once appeared to accept the reality of man-made climate change, only to shift course in an apparent attempt to please his fossil-fuel-industry backers.
Alas, Rubio’s views aren’t uncommon. The percentage of Americans who say manmade climate change is real decreased by 14 points between 2008 and 2010 — a period during which, according to Mayer’s reporting, corporate interests were devoting tens of millions a year to combatting the leading science on the subject.
“Dark Money” offers a few other glimpses of the rich and out of touch that are nothing short of dumbfounding.
Consider, for instance, the private equity mogul who made $398 million in 2006, yet was so troubled by the Obama administration’s attempts to close a tax loophole that he compared it to “when Hitler invaded Poland.” Then there’s the conservative think tank sponsor and clothing heiress who, Mayer reports, “tried to legally adopt her ex-husband in order to … enlarge her portion of the family trust.”
And let’s not forget the 2010 Smithsonian exhibition funded by the Kochs themselves, which comically downplayed global warming. “An interactive game suggested that if the climate on earth became intolerable,” Mayer writes, “people might build ‘underground cities’ and develop ‘short, compact bodies’ or ‘curved spines’ so that ‘moving around in tight spaces will be no problem.’ ”
Maybe the Kochs aren’t content with shaping American politics — it seems they’d also like to rewrite the laws of nature.