2016 is the year to read Jane Mayer’s latest book: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. (Amazon is featuring it as a Book of the Month.) Published by Knopf-Doubleday, the book is a detailed dissection of the network of money the Kochs and their allies have used to convert America’s democracy into an oligarchy. Per the NY Times review,
...David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket in 1980, but when the campaign was over, he resolved never to seek public office again. That wouldn’t be necessary, he and his brother concluded; they could invest in the campaigns of others, and essentially buy their way to political power.
Thirty years later, the midterm elections of 2010 ushered in the political system that the Kochs had spent so many years plotting to bring about. After the voting that year, Republicans dominated state legislatures; they controlled a clear majority of the governorships; they had taken one chamber of Congress and were on their way to winning the other. Perhaps most important, a good many of the Republicans who had won these offices were not middle-of-the-road pragmatists. They were antigovernment libertarians of the Kochs’ own political stripe. The brothers had spent or raised hundreds of millions of dollars to create majorities in their image. They had succeeded. And not merely at the polls: They had helped to finance and organize an interlocking network of think tanks, academic programs and news media outlets that far exceeded anything the liberal opposition could put together.
emphasis added
Who are the Kochs, and where do they come from? The Guardian’s review has some of the back story. If it had been presented as a script for a movie, it would be dismissed as too unbelievable. Frankly, it does sound like getting into tinfoil hat territory — except it’s all on the record.
The father of these famous rightwing billionaires was Fred Koch, who started his fortune with $500,000 received from Stalin for his assistance constructing 15 oil refineries in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. A couple of years later, his company, Winkler-Koch, helped the Nazis complete their third-largest oil refinery. The facility produced hundreds of thousands of gallons of high-octane fuel for the Luftwaffe, until it was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1944.
In 1938, the patriarch wrote that “the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy and Japan”. To make sure his children got the right ideas, he hired a German nanny. The nanny was such a fervent Nazi that when France fell in 1940, she resigned and returned to Germany. After that, Fred became the main disciplinarian, whipping his children with belts and tree branches.
These are just a handful of the many bombshells exploded in the pages of Dark Money, Jane Mayer’s indispensable new history “of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right” in the US.
NPR buried an interview with Mayer in the early hours of Morning Edition; no transcript was available when I linked to it, but the audio was.
www.npr.org/…
Look deep enough, as Mayer has, and you’ll find dark money behind just about everything coming from the radical right. The GOP takeover of the states, the suborning of higher education, the media initiatives, the Trojan Horse think tanks — the Kochs and their allies have been at work on this for decades, and it is paying off. The Republican Party is effectively a hollow shell these days; dark money has become its owner. Despite the number of different GOP candidates vying for the Presidential nomination, with the possible exception of Donald Trump, there’s almost nothing in their economic agenda that doesn’t fit with what the Kochs want, including their total dismissal of Climate Change. From the Guardian:
The amount of spent money has been staggering. Between 2005 and 2008, the Kochs alone spent nearly $25m on organizations fighting climate reform. One study by a Drexel University professor found 140 conservative foundations had spent $558m over seven years for the same purpose.
Mayer makes the point that the Kochs are in this for the long haul. Win, lose — they just keep pushing their agenda. This should become one of the most talked-about books this year. If it doesn’t, well...