Dark Money
"We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few,but we can’t have both." That was Louis Brandeis, the great Supreme Court justice, about eighty years ago. The gap in income inequality has only grown exponentially since then, and once people become rich they want to stay that way. Mayer points out that these plutocrats dabbling in politics say they have the best interests of the country in mind, but amazingly those interests also align with their bottom line: "they argued for “limited government,” drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services
for the needy, and much less oversight of industry, particularly in the environmental arena. They said they were driven by principle, but their positions dovetailed seamlessly with their personal financial interests.
Most of this book is about Charles and David Koch, owners of the second-largest privately owned company in America, billionaires several times over, with a vast number of companies (they are hard to boycott--they own companies as banal as Dixie Cups). But mostly they made their money in oil, which is why they fight tooth and nail against any politician who suggests that fossil fuels causes climate change. Their companies have been fined millions for polluting the environment.
The first section of the book is a biography of the Kochs and a few other "donors," like Richard Mellon Scaife. But the Kochs are interesting enough on their own. They are another example of how the lunatic fringe has become uncontroversial. Their father was a founding member of the John Birch Society, a group so radical what William F. Buckley was against them. Mayer has some interesting tidbits, such as: "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." Or that Charles Koch's favorite game as a child was king of the hill, which others said hadn't changed.
Money from conservative billionaires has created many right-wing thing tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. These are the hatcheries of extremely conservative ideas, mostly hinged on getting rid of regulations and lowering taxes, which of course helps billionaires keep and get more money. But actually backing candidates was something new. The Kochs initially weren't even Republicans, as they were not conservative enough. David, the richest resident of New York City (even more than Michael Bloomberg) was the vice-presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party in 1980, and as you recall, he was running against Ronald Reagan.
But as the Republican Party swung more to the Koch's point of view, they began funneling money toward candidates. The lid was blown off after the Supreme Court's infamous Citizens United case: "The Court held that so long as businesses and unions didn’t just hand their money to the candidates, which could be corrupt, but instead gave it to outside groups that were supporting or opposing the candidates and were technically independent of the campaigns, they could spend unlimited amounts to promote whatever candidates they chose. To reach the verdict, the Court accepted the argument that corporations had the same rights to free speech as citizens."
What's interesting is that this doesn't always work. Twice Barack Obama foiled the dark money men, much to their consternation. But they had great success in mid-term elections and, as Mayer points out in a late chapter, at the state level. North Carolina's blatantly racist gerrymandering produced a firm grip on the state legislature, where it has wreaked havoc since (it even tried to stop a Democratic governor from taking office).
The book was published before the 2016 election, but Trump does come up near the end--he blasted the Kochs, not going to their meetings where politicians go to be bought. Trump had enough money not to need the Kochs, but I imagine they are not unhappy with his policies.
The influence of money like this is clearly damaging American democracy, with the principle of one man, one vote. Since election cycles now last years, the need for money is paramount (the British do it right--announce an election and six weeks later it's over). The future seems doomed.
Mayer's book is easily accessible, even for someone like me, who knows nothing of economics. She maintains a hint of sarcasm as she points out the Koch's hypocrisy (their fortune grew leaps and bounds during the supposedly horrible presidency of Obama) and she gets into the story herself, after she writes a piece about the Kochs for The New Yorker, and discovered they were trying to find dirt on her.
The Koch Brothers, and those like them, are the biggest threat to Democracy since the Nazis.
Comments
Post a Comment