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Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right Hardcover – Jan. 19 2016

by Jane Mayer (Author)

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Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers?
     The conventional answer is that a popular uprising against “big government” led to the ascendancy of a broad-based conservative movement. But as Jane Mayer shows in this powerful, meticulously reported history, a network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system.
     The network has brought together some of the richest people on the planet. Their core beliefs—that taxes are a form of tyranny; that government oversight of business is an assault on freedom—are sincerely held. But these beliefs also advance their personal and corporate interests: Many of their companies have run afoul of federal pollution, worker safety, securities, and tax laws.
     The chief figures in the network are Charles and David Koch, whose father made his fortune in part by building oil refineries in Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany. The patriarch later was a founding member of the John Birch Society, whose politics were so radical it believed Dwight Eisenhower was a communist. The brothers were schooled in a political philosophy that asserted the only role of government is to provide security and to enforce property rights.
     When libertarian ideas proved decidedly unpopular with voters, the Koch brothers and their allies chose another path. If they pooled their vast resources, they could fund an interlocking array of organizations that could work in tandem to influence and ultimately control academic institutions, think tanks, the courts, statehouses, Congress, and, they hoped, the presidency. Richard Mellon Scaife, the mercurial heir to banking and oil fortunes, had the brilliant insight that most of their political activities could be written off as tax-deductible “philanthropy.”
     These organizations were given innocuous names such as Americans for Prosperity. Funding sources were hidden whenever possible. This process reached its apotheosis with the allegedly populist Tea Party movement, abetted mightily by the Citizens United decision—a case conceived of by legal advocates funded by the network.
     The political operatives the network employs are disciplined, smart, and at times ruthless. Mayer documents instances in which people affiliated with these groups hired private detectives to impugn whistle-blowers, journalists, and even government investigators. And their efforts have been remarkably successful. Libertarian views on taxes and regulation, once far outside the mainstream and still rejected by most Americans, are ascendant in the majority of state governments, the Supreme Court, and Congress. Meaningful environmental, labor, finance, and tax reforms have been stymied.
     Jane Mayer spent five years conducting hundreds of interviews-including with several sources within the network-and scoured public records, private papers, and court proceedings in reporting this book. In a taut and utterly convincing narrative, she traces the byzantine trail of the billions of dollars spent by the network and provides vivid portraits of the colorful figures behind the new American oligarchy.
     Dark Money is a book that must be read by anyone who cares about the future of American democracy.

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464 pages
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English
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Doubleday
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Jan. 19 2016
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16.51 x 3.81 x 24.13 cm
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0385535597
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978-0385535595
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Between 1981 and 1986, the top income tax rate was cut from 70 percent to 28 percent. Meanwhile, taxes on the bottom four-fifths of earners rose. Economic inequality, which had flatlined, began to climb.
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The glue that bound them together, however, was antipathy toward government regulation and taxation, particularly as it impinged on their own accumulation of wealth.
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Income in America during the mid-1970s was as equally distributed as at any time in the country’s history.
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Product description

Review

A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2016

"Mayer is. . . a writer whose reporting can leave a reader breathless. . . . I urge you to read Dark Money."
—Bill Moyers

"Jane Mayer's Dark Money is utterly brilliant and chilling — no matter how much you think you already know. . . . Read it!"
—Naomi Klein, bestselling author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate

“Jane Mayer’s Dark Money. . . is absolutely necessary reading for anyone who wants to make sense of our politics. Lay aside the endless punditry about Donald’s belligerence or Hillary’s ambition; Mayer is telling the epic story of America in our time. It is a triumph of investigative reporting, perhaps not surprising for a journalist who has won most of the awards her profession has to offer.... She’s a pro, and she’s given the world a full accounting of what had been a shadowy and largely unseen force. . . . Remarkable.”
—The New York Review of Books

"The book is written in straightforward and largely unemotional prose, but it reads as if conceived in quiet anger. Mayer believes that the Koch brothers and a small number of allied plutocrats have essentially hijacked American democracy, using their money not just to compete with their political adversaries, but to drown them out. . . . Dark Money emerges as an impressively reported and well-documented work. . . . The importance of Dark Money [flows] from its scope and perspective. . . . It is not easy to uncover the inner workings of an essentially secretive political establishment. Mayer has come as close to doing it as anyone is likely to come anytime soon. . . . She makes a formidable argument.”
—From the cover of the Times Book Review

“Revelatory. . .persuasive, timely and necessary. . . . Only the most thoroughly documented, compendious account could do justice to the Kochs’ bizarre and Byzantine family history and the scale and scope of their influence.”
—The New York Times

About the Author

Jane Mayer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of three bestselling and critically acclaimed narrative nonfiction books. She co-authored Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984–1988, with Doyle McManus, and Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, with Jill Abramson, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, was named one of The New York Times’s Top 10 Books of the Year and won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Goldsmith Book Prize, the Edward Weintal Prize, the Ridenhour Prize, the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. For her reporting at The New Yorker, Mayer has been awarded the John Chancellor Award, the George Polk Award, the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, and the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence presented by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Mayer lives in Washington, D.C.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER ONE

Radicals: A Koch Family History

Oddly enough, the fiercely libertarian Koch family owed part of its fortune to two of history’s most infamous dictators, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. The family patriarch, Fred Chase Koch, founder of the family oil business, developed lucrative business relationships with both of their regimes in the 1930s.

According to family lore, Fred Koch was the son of a Dutch printer and publisher who settled in the small town of Quanah, Texas, just south of the Oklahoma border, where he owned a weekly newspaper and print shop. Quanah, which was named for the last American Comanche chief, Quanah Parker, still retained its frontier aura when Fred was born there in 1900. Bright and eager to get out from under his overbearing old-world father, Fred once ran away to live with the Comanches as a boy. Later, he crossed the country for college, transferring from Rice in Texas to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, he earned a degree in chemical engineering and joined the boxing team. Early photographs show him as a tall, formally dressed young man with glasses, a tuft of unruly curls, and a self-confident, defiant expression.

In 1927, Fred, who was an inveterate tinkerer, invented an improved process for extracting gasoline from crude oil. But as he would later tell his sons bitterly and often, America’s major oil companies regarded him as a business threat and shut him out of the industry, suing him and his customers in 1929 for patent infringement. Koch regarded the monopolistic patents invoked by the major oil companies as anticompetitive and unfair. The fight appears to be an early version of the Kochs’ later opposition to “corporate cronyism” in which they contend that the government and big business collaborate unfairly. In Fred Koch’s eye, he was an outsider fighting a corrupt system.

Koch fought back in the courts for more than fifteen years, finally winning a $1.5 million settlement. He correctly suspected that his opponents bribed at least one presiding judge, an incompetent lush who left the case in the hands of a crooked clerk. “The fact that the judge was bribed completely altered their view of justice,” one longtime family employee suggests. “They believe justice can be bought, and the rules are for chumps.” Meanwhile, crippled by lawsuits in America during this period, Koch took his innovative refining method abroad.

He had already helped build a refinery in Great Britain after World War I with Charles de Ganahl, a mentor. At the time, the Russians supplied England with fuel, which led to the Russians seeking his expertise as they set up their own oil refineries after the Bolshevik Revolution.

At first, according to family lore, Koch tore up the telegram from the Soviet Union asking for his help. He said he didn’t want to work for Communists and didn’t trust them to pay him. But after securing an agreement to get paid in advance, he overcame his philosophical reservations. In 1930, his company, then called Winkler-Koch, began training Russian engineers and helping Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries under the first of Stalin’s five-year plans. The program was a success, forming the backbone of the future Russian petroleum industry. The oil trade brought crucial hard currency into the Soviet Union, enabling it to modernize other industries. Koch was reportedly paid $500,000, a princely sum during America’s Great Depression. But by 1932, facing growing domestic demand, Soviet officials decided it would be more advantageous to copy the technology and build future refineries themselves. Fred Koch continued to provide technical assistance to the Soviets as they constructed one hundred plants, according to one report, but the advisory work was less profitable.

What happened next has been excised from the official corporate history of Koch Industries. After mentioning the company’s work in the Soviet Union, the bulk of which ended in 1932, the corporate history skips ahead to 1940, when it says Fred Koch decided to found a new company, Wood River Oil & Refining. Charles Koch is equally vague in his book The Science of Success. He notes only that his father’s company “enjoyed its first real financial success during the early years of the Great Depression” by “building plants abroad, especially in the Soviet Union.”

A controversial chapter is missing. After leaving the U.S.S.R., Fred Koch turned to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Hitler became chancellor in 1933, and soon after, his government oversaw and funded massive industrial expansion, including the buildup of Germany’s capacity to manufacture fuel for its growing military ambitions. During the 1930s, Fred Koch traveled frequently to Germany on oil business. Archival records document that in 1934 Winkler-Koch Engineering of Wichita, Kansas, as Fred’s firm was then known, provided the engineering plans and began overseeing the construction of a massive oil refinery owned by a company on the Elbe River in Hamburg.

The refinery was a highly unusual venture for Koch to get involved with at that moment in Germany. Its top executive was a notorious American Nazi sympathizer named William Rhodes Davis whose extensive business dealings with Hitler would eventually end in accusations by a federal prosecutor that he was an “agent of influence” for the Nazi regime. In 1933, Davis proposed the purchase and conversion of an existing German oil storage facility in Hamburg, owned by a company called Europäische Tanklager A.G., or Eurotank, into a massive refinery. At the time, Hitler’s military aims, and his need for more fuel, were already well-known. Davis’s plan was to ship crude petroleum to Germany, refine it, and then sell it to the German military. The president of the American bank with which Davis dealt refused to have anything to do with the deal, because it was seen as supporting the Nazi military buildup, but others extended the credit. After lining up the American financing, Davis needed the Third Reich’s backing. To gain it, he first had to convince German industrialists of his support for Hitler. In his effort to ingratiate himself, Davis opened an early meeting with Hermann Schmitz, the chairman of I.G. Farben—the powerful and well-connected chemical company that soon after produced the lethal gas for the concentration camps’ death chambers—by saluting him with a Nazi “Heil Hitler.” When these efforts didn’t produce the green light he sought, Davis sent messages directly to Hitler, eventually securing a meeting in which the führer walked in and ordered his henchmen to approve the deal. On Hitler’s orders, the Third Reich’s economic ministers supported Davis’s construction of the refinery. In his biography of Davis, Dale Harrington draws on eyewitness accounts to describe Hitler as declaring to his skeptical henchmen, “Gentlemen, I have reviewed Mr. Davis’s proposition and it sounds feasible, and I want the bank to finance it.” Harrington writes that during the next few years Davis met at least half a dozen more times with Hitler and on one occasion asked him to personally autograph a copy of Mein Kampf for his wife. According to Harrington, by the end of 1933 Davis was “deeply committed to Nazism” and exhibited a noticeable “dislike for Jews.”

In 1934, Davis turned to Fred Koch’s company, Winkler-Koch, for help in executing his German business plan. Under Fred Koch’s direction, the refinery was finished by 1935. With the capacity to process a thousand tons of crude oil a day, the third-largest refinery in the Third Reich was created by the collaboration between Davis and Koch. Significantly, it was also one of the few refineries in Germany, according to Harrington, that could “produce the high-octane gasoline needed to fuel fighter planes. Naturally,” he writes, “Eurotank would do most of its business with the German military.” Thus, he concludes, the American venture became “a key component of the Nazi war machine.”

Historians expert in German industrial history concur. The development of the German fuel industry “was hugely, hugely important” to Hitler’s military ambitions, according to the Northwestern University professor Peter Hayes. “Hitler set out to create ‘autarchy,’ or economic self-sufficiency,” he explained. “Gottfried Feder, the German official in charge of the program, reasoned that even though Germany would have to import crude oil, it would be able to save foreign exchange by refining the products itself.”

In the run-up to the war, Davis profited richly from the arrangement, engaging in elaborate scams to keep the crude oil imports flowing into Germany despite Britain’s blockade. When World War II began, the high-octane fuel was used in bombing raids by German pilots. Like Davis, the Koch family benefited from the venture. Raymond Stokes, director of the Centre for Business History at the University of Glasgow in Scotland and co-author of a history of the German oil industry during the Nazi years, Faktor Öl (The oil factor), which documents the company’s role, says, “Winkler-Koch benefited directly from this project, which was designed to help enable the fuel policy of the Third Reich.”

Fred Koch often traveled to Germany during these years, and according to family lore he was supposed to have been on the fatal May 1937 transatlantic flight of the Hindenburg, but at the last minute he got delayed. In late 1938, as World War II approached and Hitler’s aims were unmistakable, he wrote admiringly about fascism in Germany, and elsewhere, drawing an invidious comparison with America under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. “Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. Koch added, “The laboring people in those countries are proportionately much better off than they are any place else in the world. When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.”

When the United States entered World War II in 1941, family members say that Fred Koch tried to enlist in the U.S. military. Instead, the government directed him to use his chemical engineering prowess to help refine high-octane fuel for the American warplanes. Meanwhile, in an ironic turn, the Hamburg refinery that Winkler-Koch built became an important target of Allied bombing raids. On June 18, 1944, American B-17s finally destroyed it. The human toll of the bombing raids on Hamburg was almost unimaginable. In all, some forty-two thousand civilians were killed during the long and intense Allied campaign against Hamburg’s crucial industrial targets.

Fred Koch’s willingness to work with the Soviets and the Nazis was a major factor in creating the Koch family’s early fortune. By the time he met his future wife, Mary Robinson, at a polo match in 1932, the oilman’s work for Stalin had put him well on his way to becoming exceedingly wealthy.

Robinson, a twenty-four-year-old graduate of Wellesley College, was tall, slender, and beautiful, with blond hair, blue eyes, and an expression of amusement often captured in family photographs. The daughter of a prominent physician from Kansas City, Missouri, she had grown up in a more cosmopolitan milieu. Koch, who was seven years older than she, was so smitten he married her a month after they met.

Soon, the couple commissioned the most fashionable architect in the area to build an imposing Gothic-style stone mansion on a large compound on the outskirts of Wichita, Kansas, where Winkler-Koch was based. Reflecting their rising social status, the estate was baronial despite the flat and empty prairie surrounding it, with stables, a polo ring, a kennel for hunting dogs, a swimming pool and wading pool, a circular drive, and stone-terraced gardens. Some of the best craftsmen in the country created decorative flourishes such as wrought-iron railings and a stone fireplace carved with a whimsical snowflake motif. Within a few years, the Kochs also purchased the sprawling Spring Creek Ranch near Reece, Kansas, where Fred, who loved science and genetics, bred and raised cattle. Family photographs show the couple looking glamorous and patrician, hosting picnics and pool parties, and riding on horseback, dressed in jodhpurs and polo gear, surrounded by packs of jolly friends.

In the first eight years of their marriage, the couple had four sons: Frederick, known by the family as Freddie, was born in 1933, Charles was born in 1935, and twins, David and William, were born in 1940. With their father frequently traveling and their mother preoccupied with social and cultural pursuits, the boys were largely entrusted to a series of nannies and housekeepers.

It is unclear what Fred Koch’s views of Hitler were during the 1930s, beyond his preference for the country’s work ethic in comparison with the nascent welfare state in America. But he was enamored enough of the German way of life and thinking that he employed a German governess for his first two sons, Freddie and Charles. At the time, Freddie was a small boy, and Charles still in diapers. The nanny’s iron rule terrified the little boys, according to a family acquaintance. In addition to being overbearing, she was a fervent Nazi sympathizer, who frequently touted Hitler’s virtues. Dressed in a starched white uniform and pointed nurse’s hat, she arrived with a stash of gruesome German children’s books, including the Victorian classic Der Struwwelpeter, that featured sadistic consequences for misbehavior ranging from cutting off one child’s thumbs to burning another to death. The acquaintance recalled that the nurse had a commensurately harsh and dictatorial approach to child rearing. She enforced a rigid toilet-training regimen requiring the boys to produce morning bowel movements precisely on schedule or be force-fed castor oil and subjected to enemas.

The despised governess ruled the nursery largely unchallenged for several years. In 1938, the two boys were left for months while their parents toured Japan, Burma, India, and the Philippines. Even when she was home, Mary Koch characteristically deferred to her husband, declining to intervene. “My father was fairly tough with my mother,” Bill Koch later told Vanity Fair. “My mother was afraid of my father.” Meanwhile, Fred Koch was often gone for months at a time, in Germany and elsewhere.

It wasn’t until 1940, the year the twins were born, when Freddie was seven and Charles five, that back in Wichita the German governess finally left the Koch family, apparently at her own initiative. Her reason for giving notice was that she was so overcome with joy when Hitler invaded France she felt she had to go back to the fatherland in order to join the führer in celebration. What if any effect this early experience with authority had on Charles is impossible to know, but it’s interesting that his lifetime preoccupation would become crusading against authoritarianism while running a business over which he exerted absolute control.

Fred Koch was himself a tough and demanding disciplinarian. John Damgard, David’s childhood friend, who became president of the Futures Industry Association, recalled that he was “a real John Wayne type.” Koch emphasized rugged pursuits, taking his sons big-game hunting in Africa and filling the basement billiard room with what one cousin remembered as a frightening collection of exotic stuffed animal heads, including lions and bears and others with horns and tusks, glinting glassy-eyed from the walls. In the summer, the boys could hear their friends splashing in the pool at the country club across the street, but instead of allowing the boys to join them, their father required them to dig up dandelions by the time they were five, and later to dig ditches and shovel manure at the family ranch. Fred Koch cared about his boys but was determined to keep them from becoming what he called “country-club bums,” like some of the other offspring of the oil moguls with whom he was acquainted. “By instilling a work ethic in me at an early age, my father did me a big favor, although it didn’t seem like a favor back then,” Charles has written. “By the time I was eight, he made sure work occupied most of my spare time.”

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Doubleday (Jan. 19 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385535597
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385535595
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 794 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.51 x 3.81 x 24.13 cm

Best Sellers Rank: #174,628 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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sean s.

The Anti-Elon Musks

Reviewed in Canada on February 18, 2016

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Countless polls indicate that a vast majority of North Americans want a much greater focus on clean energy sources, especially solar, versus dirty energy sources such as coal and oil. And as Naomi Klein points out in her book This Changes Everything, Mark J. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, and Mark A. Delucci, a research scientist, have already authored a ground-breaking, detailed roadmap for how 100 percent of the world's energy, for all purposes, could be supplied by wind, water and solar resources, by as early as 2030 (Scientific American, November 2009). Nonetheless, the rapid adoption of clean energy seems to face barriers at every turn. How is it possible that widely popular technologies that may save humanity from catastrophic climate chaos are being blocked?

Jane Mayer a New York Times bestselling author, answers this question in Dark Money. A few years ago she published a shocking article in the New Yorker on the billionaire Koch brothers (“Covert Operations”), outlining their unrelenting attack on President Obama, on any measures to protect the environment, and on progressive values in general. In Dark Money she tells the full story of these anti-Elon Musks.

“Among the better-known financiers who participated or sent representatives to Koch donor summits during Obama’s first term were Steven A. Cohen, Paul Singer and Stephen Schwarzman… Cohen’s spectacularly successful hedge fund, SAC Capital Advisors, was at the time the focus of an intense criminal investigation into insider trading. Prosecutors described his firm as ‘a veritable magnet for market cheaters’. Forbes valued Cohen’s fortune at one point at $10.3 billion… Paul Singer, whose fortune Forbes estimated at $1.9 billion, ran the hugely lucrative hedge fund Elliott Management. Dubbed a vulture fund by critics, it was controversial for buying distressed debt in economically failing countries at a discount and then taking aggressive legal action to force the strapped nations to pay him back at a profit…

The hedge fund run by another of the Kochs’ major investors, Robert Mercer, seemed a possible government target. The IRS was investigating whether his firm improperly avoided paying billions of dollars in taxes, a charge the firm denied. Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot was enmeshed in a prolonged legal fight over his decision as chairman of the compensation committee of the New York Stock Exchange to pay his friend, Dick Grasso, the head of the exchange, $139.5 million. Philip Anschutz, a founder of Qwest Communications, whom Fortune magazine dubbed America’s ‘greediest executive’ was fighting an uphill battle on a tax matter… Anschutz, a conservative Christian who bankrolled movies with biblical themes. had a fortune Forbes estimated at $11.8 billion as of 2015… Richard DeVos, co-founder of Amway, had pleaded guilty to a criminal scheme in which he had defrauded the Canadian government of $22 million in customs duties. Forbes estimated his fortune at $5.7 billion… Energy magnates were heavily represented in the Koch network. One prominent member was Corbin Robertson Jr., whose family had built a billion-dollar oil company. Robertson had bet big on coal, so big he reportedly owned what Forbes called the ‘largest private hoard in the nation – 21 billion tons of reserves… Another coal magnate active in the Kochs’ donor network was Richard Gilliam, head of Cumberland Resources… Among the ‘frackers’ in the group were J. Larry Nichols, co-founder of Devon Energy, and Harold Hamm. As Hamm, a sharecropper’s son took his place as the 37th richest person in America with a fortune estimated at $8.2 billion as of 2015, and campaigned to preserve tax loopholes for oil producers, his company gained notoriety for a growing record of environmental and workplace safety violations…

It was in fact striking how many members of the Koch network had serious past or ongoing legal problems. Sheldon Adelson, founding chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, whose fortune Forbes estimated at $31.4 billion, was facing a bribery investigation by the Justice Department… The legal problems of Richard Farmer, the chairman of Cintas Corporation, included an employee’s gruesome death. Farmer too ranked among the Koch group’s billionaire donors, with a fortune that Forbes estimated at $2 billion… Given the participants’ unanimous espousal of free-market self-reliance, the network also included a surprising number of major government contractors, such as Stephen Bechtel Jr. whose personal fortune Forbes estimated at $2.8 billion… etc. etc. ad nauseam.

Despite the ugly reality portrayed in Dark Money, it should be kept in mind that a few billionaires actually use their power to encourage progressive causes, most notably Elon Musk, Tom Steyer and Li Hejun, and they are supported by other postmaterialist leaders such as President Barack Obama and his cabinet minister Julian Castro, as well as our own Prime Minister Trudeau and his cabinet minister Melanie Joly.

Nonetheless, Mayer proves that the challenge for progressives is daunting. For anyone who wants to understand the true nature of power in our era, this book is a must-read.

32 people found this helpful

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Len

An emerging oligarchy in the U.S.

Reviewed in Canada on November 7, 2016

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The richest 20 Americans own more wealth than the bottom $152 million Americans combined. Amongst those are the Koch brothers, Charles and David are worth a total of about $82 billion, up from a net worth of $19 billion in 2008 when President Obama was first elected. In January of 2009, they organized a meeting whereby a group like-minded billionaires would use their wealth and influence to curtail any significant reforms Obama might be able to make in the area of progressive taxation, raising minimum wages, public health care and broadening environmental protection laws, an issue of much concern to the Koch brothers who were heavily involved in oil and gas and the extraction of natural resources. Apparently, billions are not enough for these characters. Greed know no limits.
Dark money comes from their investment in “Social Welfare” organizations that in turn use that money to support the election of candidates who profess the policies that will protect their interests. The reason that the money is “dark” is that it’s virtually untraceable. So, they can use tax deductible funds to facilitate causes in their own, monetary self-interest. The problem with undue influence being pressed on politicians in the United States was compounded by the Supreme Court’s decision in 2010 to end to restrictions on the amount of money corporations and unions could spend on getting their candidates elected. This led to another ruling that ended any restrictions individuals could make to political action committees (PACs) so long as there was on coordination with a candidate’s campaigns. Elections at all levels have become increasingly more expensive. Suddenly, campaign funds provided by individuals with phenomenal such as the Koch brothers could not be ignored. Without their support, a candidate might be unable to raise the funds necessary to defend themselves from candidate who did. Some of argued that these individuals constitute an emerging oligarchy in the United States.

13 people found this helpful

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Wyenotgo

... couple hundred pages it gets to be a bit tiresome: simple information overload

Reviewed in Canada on May 13, 2017

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The only reason I don't give this one a 5 star rating is that it's a rant and after a couple hundred pages it gets to be a bit tiresome: simple information overload. Mayer had already made her point several times over. But she is to be forgiven that minor transgression, bearing in mind that the book is not intended to be a piece of literature; she is an investigative journalist. Another quibble is that while the origin of the Koch brothers' fortune via Stalin and Hitler taints them, has little to do with their nefarious activities in essentially buying elections. The most disturbing revelation is the gerrymandering of electoral districts and buying of judges; those acts have the potential of permanently damaging America's precious democracy, making it possible for big money to keep the power they have already bought at the expense of the American people. That in turn could very well place the nation into a long term downward decline as the "brightest and best" realize that the cards are stacked against them. Given the climate created by a cadre of billionaires, were I a bright and ambitious recent grad with a freshly minted masters degree in political science or international affairs, faced with the necessity of cozying up to the Koch brothers and accepting their "dark" money in order to embark on a career in public affairs, I'm pretty sure that I would be looking to Geneva, Berlin, Brussels, London, Hong Kong or almost anywhere but Washington.
Depressing, worrisome and not boding well for the future of the USA. The outlook and actions of a populace that discovers it has been sold out cannot be predicted but as history has shown, it can get very ugly.

2 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Delivery and book condition, excellent

Reviewed in Canada on February 2, 2023

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Book looks NEW, as in unread/unopened.
Super pleased

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Peter R. Whitis, MD

the gift of Dark Money

Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2016

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Dark Money by Jane Mayer

Ms. Mayer has written a non-fiction murder story. A story that is being told everyday in our mainstream media and on the inter-net. It is a story of murder of political institutions (Congress, the GOP, Supreme Court) of academic institutions (universities and law schools seduced by grants and research monies) of the democratic approach to resolving conflict by compromise (organized disruption of public meetings), of the government of the United States (“government is the problem not the solution”) of science (deliberate lies and covering up of anthropomorphic climate changes), Machiavellian gerrymandering of voting districts, false claims of voter fraud when the biggest fraud was the gerrymandered districts. The list of “murders “ is long. The criminals unpunished, in many cases rewarded. The “Kochtopus” has been growing for years and is now poised to consume whatever remains of the “last best hope on Earth.”

And, now that they have been exposed, the secrecy that they revered for years is no longer effective, the Kochs and their billionaire brethren have worked up a new brand. Disconcerted by the revelations of their huge contributions to sway the elections and the consequent low opinion held by a majority of Americans about money corrupting politics, the Kochs are embarking on a “Well-Being” campaign. The most substantive “part of this image building has been a drive for criminal justice reform,” as Bill McKibben reports. [The New York Review, March 10, 2016.] Regardless of the new image plan, the Kochs plan to spend $889 million on the forthcoming national election, an unheard of amount of money spent on a political campaign.

Dark Money is a well researched book crammed with the details of the Kochtopus spreading throughout the country, destroying anything and anyone in the way. We’ve heard and read snatches of this before but Jane Mayer pulls it all together. Ms. Mayer ends the story in all its destructive details. We are all headed for Gomorrah by this account. The killers will be left to sift through the climate’s warm ruins and ruminate over the deposed values of a broad-based prosperity in the ashes. Knowing what we are facing from oligarchy rule to climate warming disinformation, we have to take it from here. And, all across this country, empowered Americans are doing just that. This is the gift of Dark Money.

Dark Money by Jane Mayer

Ms. Mayer has written a non-fiction murder story. A story that is being told everyday in our mainstream media and on the inter-net. It is a story of murder of political institutions (Congress, the GOP, Supreme Court) of academic institutions (universities and law schools seduced by grants and research monies) of the democratic approach to resolving conflict by compromise (organized disruption of public meetings), of the government of the United States (“government is the problem not the solution”) of science (deliberate lies and covering up of anthropomorphic climate changes), Machiavellian gerrymandering of voting districts, false claims of voter fraud when the biggest fraud was the gerrymandered districts. The list of “murders “ is long. The criminals unpunished, in many cases rewarded. The “Kochtopus” has been growing for years and is now poised to consume whatever remains of the “last best hope on Earth.”

And, now that they have been exposed, the secrecy that they revered for years is no longer effective, the Kochs and their billionaire brethren have worked up a new brand. Disconcerted by the revelations of their huge contributions to sway the elections and the consequent low opinion held by a majority of Americans about money corrupting politics, the Kochs are embarking on a “Well-Being” campaign. The most substantive “part of this image building has been a drive for criminal justice reform,” as Bill McKibben reports. [The New York Review, March 10, 2016.] Regardless of the new image plan, the Kochs plan to spend $889 million on the forthcoming national election, an unheard of amount of money spent on a political campaign.

Dark Money is a well researched book crammed with the details of the Kochtopus spreading throughout the country, destroying anything and anyone in the way. We’ve heard and read snatches of this before but Jane Mayer pulls it all together. Ms. Mayer ends the story in all its destructive details. We are all headed for Gomorrah by this account. The killers will be left to sift through the climate’s warm ruins and ruminate over the deposed values of a broad-based prosperity in the ashes. Knowing what we are facing from oligarchy rule to climate warming disinformation, we have to take it from here. And, all across this country, empowered Americans are doing just that. This is the gift of Dark Money.

Dark Money by Jane Mayer

Ms. Mayer has written a non-fiction murder story. A story that is being told everyday in our mainstream media and on the inter-net. It is a story of murder of political institutions (Congress, the GOP, Supreme Court) of academic institutions (universities and law schools seduced by grants and research monies) of the democratic approach to resolving conflict by compromise (organized disruption of public meetings), of the government of the United States (“government is the problem not the solution”) of science (deliberate lies and covering up of anthropomorphic climate changes), Machiavellian gerrymandering of voting districts, false claims of voter fraud when the biggest fraud was the gerrymandered districts. The list of “murders “ is long. The criminals unpunished, in many cases rewarded. The “Kochtopus” has been growing for years and is now poised to consume whatever remains of the “last best hope on Earth.”

And, now that they have been exposed, the secrecy that they revered for years is no longer effective, the Kochs and their billionaire brethren have worked up a new brand. Disconcerted by the revelations of their huge contributions to sway the elections and the consequent low opinion held by a majority of Americans about money corrupting politics, the Kochs are embarking on a “Well-Being” campaign. The most substantive “part of this image building has been a drive for criminal justice reform,” as Bill McKibben reports. [The New York Review, March 10, 2016.] Regardless of the new image plan, the Kochs plan to spend $889 million on the forthcoming national election, an unheard of amount of money spent on a political campaign.

Dark Money is a well researched book crammed with the details of the Kochtopus spreading throughout the country, destroying anything and anyone in the way. We’ve heard and read snatches of this before but Jane Mayer pulls it all together. Ms. Mayer ends the story in all its destructive details. We are all headed for Gomorrah by this account. The killers will be left to sift through the climate’s warm ruins and ruminate over the deposed values of a broad-based prosperity in the ashes. Knowing what we are facing from oligarchy rule to climate warming disinformation, we have to take it from here. And, all across this country, empowered Americans are doing just that. This is the gift of Dark Money.

Dark Money by Jane Mayer

Ms. Mayer has written a non-fiction murder story. A story that is being told everyday in our mainstream media and on the inter-net. It is a story of murder of political institutions (Congress, the GOP, Supreme Court) of academic institutions (universities and law schools seduced by grants and research monies) of the democratic approach to resolving conflict by compromise (organized disruption of public meetings), of the government of the United States (“government is the problem not the solution”) of science (deliberate lies and covering up of anthropomorphic climate changes), Machiavellian gerrymandering of voting districts, false claims of voter fraud when the biggest fraud was the gerrymandered districts. The list of “murders “ is long. The criminals unpunished, in many cases rewarded. The “Kochtopus” has been growing for years and is now poised to consume whatever remains of the “last best hope on Earth.”

And, now that they have been exposed, the secrecy that they revered for years is no longer effective, the Kochs and their billionaire brethren have worked up a new brand. Disconcerted by the revelations of their huge contributions to sway the elections and the consequent low opinion held by a majority of Americans about money corrupting politics, the Kochs are embarking on a “Well-Being” campaign. The most substantive “part of this image building has been a drive for criminal justice reform,” as Bill McKibben reports. [The New York Review, March 10, 2016.] Regardless of the new image plan, the Kochs plan to spend $889 million on the forthcoming national election, an unheard of amount of money spent on a political campaign.

Dark Money is a well researched book crammed with the details of the Kochtopus spreading throughout the country, destroying anything and anyone in the way. We’ve heard and read snatches of this before but Jane Mayer pulls it all together. Ms. Mayer ends the story in all its destructive details. We are all headed for Gomorrah by this account. The killers will be left to sift through the climate’s warm ruins and ruminate over the deposed values of a broad-based prosperity in the ashes. Knowing what we are facing from oligarchy rule to climate warming disinformation, we have to take it from here. And, all across this country, empowered Americans are doing just that. This is the gift of Dark Money.

Dark Money by Jane Mayer

Ms. Mayer has written a non-fiction murder story. A story that is being told everyday in our mainstream media and on the inter-net. It is a story of murder of political institutions (Congress, the GOP, Supreme Court) of academic institutions (universities and law schools seduced by grants and research monies) of the democratic approach to resolving conflict by compromise (organized disruption of public meetings), of the government of the United States (“government is the problem not the solution”) of science (deliberate lies and covering up of anthropomorphic climate changes), Machiavellian gerrymandering of voting districts, false claims of voter fraud when the biggest fraud was the gerrymandered districts. The list of “murders “ is long. The criminals unpunished, in many cases rewarded. The “Kochtopus” has been growing for years and is now poised to consume whatever remains of the “last best hope on Earth.”

And, now that they have been exposed, the secrecy that they revered for years is no longer effective, the Kochs and their billionaire brethren have worked up a new brand. Disconcerted by the revelations of their huge contributions to sway the elections and the consequent low opinion held by a majority of Americans about money corrupting politics, the Kochs are embarking on a “Well-Being” campaign. The most substantive “part of this image building has been a drive for criminal justice reform,” as Bill McKibben reports. [The New York Review, March 10, 2016.] Regardless of the new image plan, the Kochs plan to spend $889 million on the forthcoming national election, an unheard of amount of money spent on a political campaign.

Dark Money is a well researched book crammed with the details of the Kochtopus spreading throughout the country, destroying anything and anyone in the way. We’ve heard and read snatches of this before but Jane Mayer pulls it all together. Ms. Mayer ends the story in all its destructive details. We are all headed for Gomorrah by this account. The killers will be left to sift through the climate’s warm ruins and ruminate over the deposed values of a broad-based prosperity in the ashes. Knowing what we are facing from oligarchy rule to climate warming disinformation, we have to take it from here. And, all across this country, empowered Americans are doing just that. This is the gift of Dark Money.

Dark Money by Jane Mayer

Ms. Mayer has written a non-fiction murder story. A story that is being told everyday in our mainstream media and on the inter-net. It is a story of murder of political institutions (Congress, the GOP, Supreme Court) of academic institutions (universities and law schools seduced by grants and research monies) of the democratic approach to resolving conflict by compromise (organized disruption of public meetings), of the government of the United States (“government is the problem not the solution”) of science (deliberate lies and covering up of anthropomorphic climate changes), Machiavellian gerrymandering of voting districts, false claims of voter fraud when the biggest fraud was the gerrymandered districts. The list of “murders “ is long. The criminals unpunished, in many cases rewarded. The “Kochtopus” has been growing for years and is now poised to consume whatever remains of the “last best hope on Earth.”

And, now that they have been exposed, the secrecy that they revered for years is no longer effective, the Kochs and their billionaire brethren have worked up a new brand. Disconcerted by the revelations of their huge contributions to sway the elections and the consequent low opinion held by a majority of Americans about money corrupting politics, the Kochs are embarking on a “Well-Being” campaign. The most substantive “part of this image building has been a drive for criminal justice reform,” as Bill McKibben reports. [The New York Review, March 10, 2016.] Regardless of the new image plan, the Kochs plan to spend $889 million on the forthcoming national election, an unheard of amount of money spent on a political campaign.

Dark Money is a well researched book crammed with the details of the Kochtopus spreading throughout the country, destroying anything and anyone in the way. We’ve heard and read snatches of this before but Jane Mayer pulls it all together. Ms. Mayer ends the story in all its destructive details. We are all headed for Gomorrah by this account. The killers will be left to sift through the climate’s warm ruins and ruminate over the deposed values of a broad-based prosperity in the ashes. Knowing what we are facing from oligarchy rule to climate warming disinformation, we have to take it from here. And, all across this country, empowered Americans are doing just that. This is the gift of Dark Money.

Dark Money by Jane Mayer

Ms. Mayer has written a non-fiction murder story. A story that is being told everyday in our mainstream media and on the inter-net. It is a story of murder of political institutions (Congress, the GOP, Supreme Court) of academic institutions (universities and law schools seduced by grants and research monies) of the democratic approach to resolving conflict by compromise (organized disruption of public meetings), of the government of the United States (“government is the problem not the solution”) of science (deliberate lies and covering up of anthropomorphic climate changes), Machiavellian gerrymandering of voting districts, false claims of voter fraud when the biggest fraud was the gerrymandered districts. The list of “murders “ is long. The criminals unpunished, in many cases rewarded. The “Kochtopus” has been growing for years and is now poised to consume whatever remains of the “last best hope on Earth.”

And, now that they have been exposed, the secrecy that they revered for years is no longer effective, the Kochs and their billionaire brethren have worked up a new brand. Disconcerted by the revelations of their huge contributions to sway the elections and the consequent low opinion held by a majority of Americans about money corrupting politics, the Kochs are embarking on a “Well-Being” campaign. The most substantive “part of this image building has been a drive for criminal justice reform,” as Bill McKibben reports. [The New York Review, March 10, 2016.] Regardless of the new image plan, the Kochs plan to spend $889 million on the forthcoming national election, an unheard of amount of money spent on a political campaign.

Dark Money is a well researched book crammed with the details of the Kochtopus spreading throughout the country, destroying anything and anyone in the way. We’ve heard and read snatches of this before but Jane Mayer pulls it all together. Ms. Mayer ends the story in all its destructive details. We are all headed for Gomorrah by this account. The killers will be left to sift through the climate’s warm ruins and ruminate over the deposed values of a broad-based prosperity in the ashes. Knowing what we are facing from oligarchy rule to climate warming disinformation, we have to take it from here. And, all across this country, empowered Americans are doing just that. This is the gift of Dark Money.

Dark Money by Jane Mayer

Ms. Mayer has written a non-fiction murder story. A story that is being told everyday in our mainstream media and on the inter-net. It is a story of murder of political institutions (Congress, the GOP, Supreme Court) of academic institutions (universities and law schools seduced by grants and research monies) of the democratic approach to resolving conflict by compromise (organized disruption of public meetings), of the government of the United States (“government is the problem not the solution”) of science (deliberate lies and covering up of anthropomorphic climate changes), Machiavellian gerrymandering of voting districts, false claims of voter fraud when the biggest fraud was the gerrymandered districts. The list of “murders “ is long. The criminals unpunished, in many cases rewarded. The “Kochtopus” has been growing for years and is now poised to consume whatever remains of the “last best hope on Earth.”

And, now that they have been exposed, the secrecy that they revered for years is no longer effective, the Kochs and their billionaire brethren have worked up a new brand. Disconcerted by the revelations of their huge contributions to sway the elections and the consequent low opinion held by a majority of Americans about money corrupting politics, the Kochs are embarking on a “Well-Being” campaign. The most substantive “part of this image building has been a drive for criminal justice reform,” as Bill McKibben reports. [The New York Review, March 10, 2016.] Regardless of the new image plan, the Kochs plan to spend $889 million on the forthcoming national election, an unheard of amount of money spent on a political campaign.

Dark Money is a well researched book crammed with the details of the Kochtopus spreading throughout the country, destroying anything and anyone in the way. We’ve heard and read snatches of this before but Jane Mayer pulls it all together. Ms. Mayer ends the story in all its destructive details. We are all headed for Gomorrah by this account. The killers will be left to sift through the climate’s warm ruins and ruminate over the deposed values of a broad-based prosperity in the ashes. Knowing what we are facing from oligarchy rule to climate warming disinformation, we have to take it from here. And, all across this country, empowered Americans are doing just that. This is the gift of Dark Money.

12 people found this helpful

Freh

Special interests funnel dark money through tax-free foundations to hide their identities while acting against the public good

Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2017

Verified Purchase

Market societies unrestrained by government inevitably experience relentlessly increasing inequality. The wealthy beneficiaries of inequality then have the resources to perpetuate and enhance this unfortunate cycle by capturing government and public opinion. In Dark Money, Jane Mayer shows how this cycle is made worse by a system that allows unlimited funding of campaigns, lobbying, and propaganda by dark money that maintains secrecy and avoids taxes. Thus the superrich are able to maintain public postures of high-minded innocence while secretly providing massive financing for programs that further increase inequality by favoring their interests at the expense of everyone else.

The dark money that is a key component of this process is money funneled through nonprofit organizations that can receive unlimited donations from corporations and individuals and spend funds to influence elections but are not required to disclose their donors. The main vehicles for this process are tax-free, nonprofit private 501 (c) foundations which were originally said to be for charity, social welfare, and education but not for politics. Super PACs like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and business organizations like the Chamber of Commerce are also major vehicles for the use of dark money.

The history of private foundations began in 1909 with John D. Rockefeller’s request to set up a tax-free foundation. This request was first denied by congress because of its undemocratic nature. However, it was later approved by the New York state legislature with limitation to education, science, and religion. Over time, the numbers of private foundations and the issues they served multiplied rapidly so that by 2013, there were over a hundred thousand foundations with assets over $800 billion. The supposedly nonpolitical nature of these foundations was progressively undermined so that by the time of the Citizens United decision of 2010, they could be the source of enormous unlimited tax-free secret special interest political funding.

The transition of non-profit foundations from charitable organizations to political tools of the superrich accelerated in the 1970s. In 1971, Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer, tobacco defender, and future Nixon-appointed Supreme Court justice, wrote a special memorandum for the business league. He called for “guerilla warfare” against what he saw as the anti-business threat posed by “perfectly respectable elements of society,” including “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and politicians.” Public opinion was to be captured by exerting influence over these institutions and the courts, by demanding balance in textbooks, television, and news, and by donors demanding a say in university hiring and curriculum.

This was followed in 1976 by Charles Koch of the extremist libertarian Koch brothers laying out a road map for future takeover of American politics. His intent was to overturn the post WWII view of government as a force for good (including regulation of business, progressive taxation, and worker’s rights) and instead argue for limited government, drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry. Campaign contributions and lobbying were to be supplemented by a secretive long-term plan to capture public opinion by 1) investing in intellectuals, 2) investing in think tanks, and 3) subsidizing “citizens” groups that gave the appearance of public support.

In 2003, the Koch brothers began their “donor summits,” which were secretive meetings of large numbers of superrich donors for archconservative causes. By 2014, the impressive list of 300 or so secretive donors in this group included 18 billionaires with combined assets of $222 billion as well as numerous sub-billionaires, top Republican politicians, conservative media stars, and even two Supreme Court justices (all listed in the book). Goals now included winning the presidency, capturing the House and Senate, cementing control of congress by gerrymandering, capturing state legislative bodies, governorships, and supreme courts, and controlling the Republican Party. For the 2016 elections, the donor summit group alone pledged $889 million.

When Powell and the Kochs formulated their strategies, America’s greatest corporate fortunes were already poised to enlist their private foundations for the cause. Early participation by the Scaife, Olin, Coors, Koch, Bradley and other Family Foundations, which controlled hundreds of millions of dollars, and by scores of Fortune 500 corporations was only the tip of the iceberg. The powerful leaders of these families and corporations eventually funded hundreds of additional foundations in what was cynically called the “philanthropy plan” to change academia, the media, the courts, regulation, taxation, politics, government, and public opinion.

The effectiveness of this secret dark money was greatly facilitated by organization of these foundations into multiple additional layers. Donors at the top could contribute family, foundation, and corporate money to the next layer of foundations, some of which were mere conduits, or to organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and super PACs. These foundations and organizations could then disguise the self-serving nature of these donations by redirecting them to their actual targets without revealing the donor’s identities. The scope of this process became unlimited after the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United decision that removed all restrictions on the size of the contributions to this system.

The enormous resources of this system are distributed to innumerable activities and organizations thoroughly interspersed in American life to maximize influence on politics and public opinion. Many examples of the numerous additional non-family foundations funded by the Kochs and others are listed and characterized in the book. Business Associations and PACs that hide donor’s identities are also listed and characterized in the book. Many examples of the numerous ideological think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute funded by the Kochs, Scaife, and others are listed and characterized in the book. The establishment of right wing media outlets and organizations like the Tea Party and the sponsorship of media stars like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Glenn Beck are discussed in the book.

Numerous partisan university institutes and activities were funded. A network of 5,000 scholars was established in 400 colleges and universities. Koch foundations alone funded pro-corporate programs in 283 colleges and universities. Twenty-four right wing academic centers were privately funded, such as George Mason University’s Koch-funded Mercatus Center and Institute for Humane Studies. The conservative Olin Foundation funded Harvard Law School’s influential Center for Law, Economics, and Business. The Olin foundation and later Scaife and the Kochs funded the Federalist Society, which grew to 150 law school chapters and 42,000 right-leaning lawyers. The Olin Foundation backed the Collegiate Network which funded a string of right wing newspapers on college campuses.

The book’s depiction of how extensively these many organizations and activities penetrate American life cannot be recounted in a brief review. A few examples may suffice to illustrate the depth of resources and breadth of scope involved: 1) Richard Scaife, the billionaire heir to Mellon Banking, Gulf Oil, and Alcoa Aluminum, estimated that he spent $1 billion on philanthropy, of which $670 million was to influence public opinion by bankrolling 133 of conservatism’s most important movements. 2) A carefully staged ten year legal campaign using the “social welfare” corporations Citizens United and Speech Now succeeded in removing campaign financial restrictions to increase the influence of the superrich. 3) From 2003 to 2010, 140 conservative foundations contributed $558 million as 5,299 grants to 91 nonprofit organizations to promote denial of climate change. Three-fourths of these funds were untraceable due to use of conduits. In addition, efforts were made to discredit, defund, and fire leading climate scientists.

4) Finally, even complete right wing takeover of targeted state governments is not out of reach. This has actually happened for all three branches of government in Wisconsin. In 2010, Scott Walker was elected governor after promotion at the Koch’s Americans for Prosperity Tea Party rallies and with support from Koch Industries (second largest campaign contributor) and the Republican Governor’s Association (also supported by the Kochs) to work around state contribution limits. The out-of-state Kochs also contributed to sixteen legislative candidates who all won, helping conservatives control both houses of the legislature. In addition, the state Supreme Court majority was captured by funneling $10 million (which exceeded campaign contributions for all candidates combined) through the Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce to elect three conservative justices in 2007, 2008, and 2011 and to replace the liberal chief justice with a conservative. This provided the final step to victory when the right wing packed state Supreme Court upheld the right-wing program passed by Walker and the legislature by a partisan 4 to 3 vote. Similar abuses have occurred with the 2012 Walker recall election and state redistricting.

13 people found this helpful

Traveler

One of the Most Important Books on Modern American Politics

Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2016

Verified Purchase

Jane Mayer’s Dark Money is the carefully-researched, well-written story of how the American “conservative movement” and the Republican Party became little more than a well-financed storefront operation and sales force for plutocracy, sponsoring and placing political figures that are just sock-puppets for wealthy donors who dictate their policies. This is a political force that uses racism, misogyny, nativist xenophobia, media manipulation and sheer human gullibility, along with heaps of cash and other tools, to accomplish its ends. It is the story of how a few hundred extremely wealthy individuals and families, in a determined effort to avoid taxation and evade government prosecution of their own often financially-corrupt and polluting business enterprises, are engaged in a decades-long ongoing coup d’etat as much against the American people as against our government.

The billionaires involved—principally but by no means exclusively the brothers Charles and David Koch; Richard Mellon Scaife; John M. Olin and the Bradley brothers—were raised within families of astounding wealth and privilege. They inherited hundreds of millions of dollars, plus businesses that produced yet more income. They also appear to have disliked and feared two things: taxation that would mitigate and reduce their family wealth; and being called legally to account for the public health, environmental and financial violations of their enterprises. They turned those fears into an ideology whose basic premise was: we should be able to do whatever we want, and any restriction on that is not only unjustified but un-American. They equated their personal interests and preferences with the good of the nation, and they funded a movement to raise their own self-interest to the status of a political crusade and an ideological war of principle. They lied to themselves and everyone else. As Thomas Frank wrote in What’s the Matter With Kansas, “Libertarianism is supposed to be all about principle, but what it is really about is political expedience. It is basically a corporate front, masked as a philosophy” (quoted from Dark Money, p. 123).

A primary vehicle for putting the plutocratic campaign into practice was an ingenious tax dodge. It involved creating foundations and funneling money through nonprofit organizations (usually of the donors’ own creation) in such a way that the funds were tax-deductible. So, in lieu of paying more taxes, they used the money instead on a form of fake "philanthropy", claiming a social benefit for what were really investments in their own self-interest--very affordable investments with an enormous payoff. Basically, they bought staff to come up with "research” and “studies" that justified and promoted a disguised plutocracy; and followed that up with “policy” shops that would develop and advocate for specific legal and judiciary measures that would enshrine their interests into law. Finally, they created and funded staged “citizens’ groups” (like the Tea Party) that would give their campaign an appearance of popular support. They also learned that they could get the support of some of the victims of these policies by giving them something non-financial that they wanted, whether that was support for their religious preferences, sanction for their hatreds or whatever.

The Kochs have tried to obscure their influence and that of their billionaire donor network, by hiding behind a web of "nonprofit" organizations with innocuous names, seeming to represent popular interests but actually funded and controlled by the Kochs and their fellow plutocrats. They even have a central donation organization, the "DonorsTrust", set up to obscure further the identities of the donors while funneling money to the campaign.

The Kochs seem to have been good at identifying talent who could carry out their plans without revealing their direct involvement. The “conservative movement” is just another growth industry to which many people attached their careers when it became clear that the billionaires calling the shots would spend lavishly on it. The conservative publication National Review and the careers of many professional conservative journalists and scholars benefited greatly from this industry. The donors put literally billions of dollars into this effort over decades, which enabled them to buy an awful lot of conservatism.

I enjoyed the many stories, anecdotes, incidents and quotes through which Mayer tells her tale. The fact that it is done in both journalistic and scholarly style, with many, many named people saying very telling things, made it a researcher’s delight. My own copy is filled with underlined passages and bookmarked pages.

This is an eminently quotable book, with extensive end-note references. For instance, Steve Clemons, formerly an analyst at the Nixon Center, is quoted on page 82 saying: “Funders increasingly expect policy achievements that contribute to their bottom line….We’ve become money launderers for monies that have real specific policy agendas behind them.” On the Citizens United decision, Mayer writes on page 248 that: “…the Kochs were part of a national explosion of dark money. In 2006, only 2 percent of ‘outside’ political spending came from ‘social welfare’ groups that hid their donors. In 2010, the number rose to 40 percent, masking hundreds of millions of dollars.” And on page 249, there is a note about a meeting in April of 2010 in Karl Rove’s living room at his house in Northeast Washington, DC. Mayer quotes Kenneth Vogel, from his book Big Money, describing the meeting as “the birthplace of a new Republican Party—one steered by just a handful of unelected operatives who answered only to the richest activists who funded them.” Perhaps my favorite quote in the book is from Karl Rove who, right after the 2010 Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case, met with Republican donors at the Dallas Petroleum Club, to plot out how best to take advantage of the decision. Rove told the gathering: “People call us a vast right-wing conspiracy, but we’re really a half-assed right-wing conspiracy. Now…..it is time to get serious.” (p. 242)

Jane Mayer has done a service to us all with this remarkable book. Get it, read it and tell everyone you know about it.

6 people found this helpful

College Stealth

Mildly Depressing

Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2016

Verified Purchase

This book is a hard read; not because of Lexile score interest, but because it raises a huge warning flag with regards to some of the funding that has been going into the recent elections. I got the Kindle edition of this book at 11 C.S.T. and stayed up all night reading it, it took about seven hours. I’ve made it a point for the last eight months to pick a book off of the new releases and just read it; it’s been my own personal challenge to read whatever, regardless of the topic or the political bent. This one was very fascinating and interesting with providing insight into how much money has been circulating in politics and for how long.

I sense that this book will be a contentious one for many who read it, or even look at the title, but hear me out, I’m just a middle or the road person reading it for the sake of reading it. It’s certainly told with a liberal bias, but before it is declared unpalatable because of that, or all lies, there are some really worthwhile components to consider. The book is not anti-republican, rather it highlights the funding of anti-government movements and intentional divisions within the republican party as a result of libertarian ideas held by the Koch brothers. It moves past the republican party and focuses on the ultra-conservative anti-establishment ideas of a few of the 1% in creating a scenario that is wholly advantageous to them. It also highlights some who stood up against the Koch’s in regards to some ideologies, such as John Kaisch, who ceased to be invited to the larger mover and shaker events hosted by the Koch brothers.

Throughout the book, every time a major economic player is introduced, Mayer underscores that introduction with a reference to a specific court battle or lawsuit due to fraud that that particular individual is facing. I understand that it is used to underscore why specific persons being referenced may have a disdain against the government, but in some situations, knowing the pending lawsuits for fraud are not advantageous to moving the story forward. This would be my one major criticism with the work. There is also some Koch family background that serves to paint a high level of dysfunction within the Koch family; as brothers apparently bickered even over their mother’s will that requested that they not sue one another, upon which they promptly sued. Yet, the family background does serve well to highlight where the wealth of the Koch brothers originated from and ideologies of anti-government that came from their father who was also a member of ultra conservative groups while alive.

What the book does well is outline initial stamina in the 1970’s and continues to the present day of the sheer amount of money that has been funneled into elections as a result of the Koch brothers and a few other billionaires into elections. The money is so vast that it can invest in its own equipment and maintain itself as its own political machine. The money is often couched in donations to non-profits, which Mayer does an excellent job of outing their purpose and efficiency. It chronicles the efforts of some to whittle away at local and national elections through seemingly unrelated think-tanks and book publications that seek to radicalize the right as much as possible. The mention of “dark money” is money that is untracked or goes into a donors’ black hole, which later is utilized in whatever way the organization sees as useful.

Having read some of the more recent political dialogue books lately, such as Glen Beck and Dick Cheney; I’d say that Mayer does a much stronger job of identifying the origin of some of the comments and narrative in the book. However, she does note that she is unable to credit all of her sources and there are a few citations that simply cross reference to political blogs.

Overall, it’s an excellent read, albeit doing little to couch the authors bias and has a bit of a magazine sensationalist piece that is drawn out. It’s a book that makes me feel physically ill; which, if emotion is the goal of the writer, it’s been done. It is a vital, well cross-referenced read, that chronicles the long growing investment of big business into politics, which has reached the plateau of influence in the election game. Koch brother money, along with other billionaire investors, are certainly something all citizens should be aware of; and fearful of at the same time.

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Robin E. Levin

The Kochtopus

Reviewed in the United States on March 26, 2016

Verified Purchase

Have you wondered about what has happened to our country during the past forty years or so? Have you wondered how it is that nearly all of the wealth created has come to be in the hands of a very few extraordinarily wealthy people? Have you wondered why the American middle class has gone into profound and precipitous decline? Have you wondered why our government is in a state of gridlock and critical problems such as the sorry state of our infrastructure and the catastrophic threat of global warning are not addressed? Have you wondered why, in many states, scientific gerrymandering has become the norm? Have you wondered why the United States falls so far behind other first world countries in providing our citizens with amenities that countries like Canada, France, the Netherlands and Australia take for granted: amenities like universal healthcare, paid maternity leave, affordable higher education, and subsidized child care? Have you wondered why our minimum wage is half what it is in other first world countries? Have you wondered why you, as a middle class wage earner pay a higher percentage of your income in taxes than Mitt Romney or Warren Buffet do?
Wonder no more! In her book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the rise of the Radical Right, Jane Mayer describes the process of the corruption of the American political and economic systems by a tsunami of donations by billionaires in excruciating detail.
“During the 1970s, a handful of the nation’s wealthiest corporate captains felt overtaxed and over-regulated and decided to fight back. Disenchanted with the direction of modern America, they launched an ambitious, privately funded war of ideas to radically change the country. They didn’t want to merely win elections; they wanted to change how Americans thought. Their ambitions were grandiose—to “save” America as they saw it, at every level, by turning the clock back to the Gilded Age before the advent of the progressive era.”
“The weapon of choice of these wealthy activists was philanthropy. Their aim was to invest in ideology like venture capitalists, leveraging their fortunes for maximum strategic impact. Because of the anonymity that charitable organizations provided, the full scope of these efforts was largely invisible to the public.”
The most abundant source of both money and organizing in this effort over the years has been the billionaires Charles and David Koch. They have avidly recruited other billionaire to their cause in order to maximize their impact, but the genius behind all of these efforts is theirs. They have created a plethora of innocuous sounding organizations through which to channel their funds. Center for Patient’s Rights (attacking Obamacare), Americans for Job Security, Americans for Prosperity, Real Jobs NC, Public Notice, The 60 Plus Association, the Independent Woman’s Forum, American Commitment and many more.
One of the main targets of the Kochs’ wrath is environmental regulation. It’s scarcely any wonder because, according to the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory Database, Koch industries was the number one producer of toxic waste in the U.S.-950 million pounds of hazardous waste in 2012 alone.
Another target of the Kochs is academia. They have made a concerted effort create beachheads in our nation’s universities, and institute courses that promulgated their ideas. “Private academic centers within colleges and universities were ideal devices by which rich conservatives could replace the faculty’s views with their own. ‘Money talks loudly on college campuses’” As one student put it “We learned that Keynes was bad, the free-market was better, that sweatshop labor wasn’t so bad, that the hands-off regulations in China were better than those in the U.S.” Their economic text book was co-written by Russell Sobel, the former recipient of Koch funding at West Virginia University who had taught that safely regulations hurt coal miners.
Billionaire funded organizations such as True the Vote are also behind the efforts to make voting more difficult for poor and minority voters. True the Vote was supported by the Bradley Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, and the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity.
The Koch machine has so many tentacles that is has been called the Kochtopus. It has affected American political and economic life at every level, voting, academia, taxation, the environment, social welfare, and the work place, always in the direction of benefiting the extremely wealthy at the expense of the middle class and poor.
If you have even the slightest trace of social consciousness, what you read in this book will infuriate you. If you read no other book this year, you should read this one.

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Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right Hardcover – Jan. 19 2016

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