We’ve often seen this movie before, from the fevered imagination of liberal Hollywood: the paranoid thriller. Shadowy cabals of monied men are intent in controlling everything. Politicians are their lackeys. The laws are written to their order. Critics are silenced. The media is manipulated by slick propaganda machines. Democracy has been replaced by oligopoly, free markets by a rigged game, a free press by managed news. Think “The Parallax View,”” Network,” “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “Meet John Doe,” “The Ghost Writer,” “Enemy of the State,” “The Pelican Brief.”
Well, guess what? It’s all true, as demonstrated in “Dark Money” by New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer. Brilliantly researched, impressively thorough, she details how a hundred very rich men and women, many heirs to private companies, have devoted vast sums and patient decades to taking over the government of the United States of America for their own purposes.
The leaders of the pack are Charles and David Koch, net worth $80 billion. But other pioneers included the late Richard Mellon Sciafe, John Olin, Lynde and Harry Bradley. The cabal today includes hedge-fund titans like Steven Cohen, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, Wisconsin chain store titan John Menard and North Carolina variety store heir Art Pope.
What unites them is a species of pseudo-conservatism that William F. Buckley once scorned as “anarcho-totalitarianism.” The Koch patriarch made money building oil refineries for Hitler and Stalin, but he sought a society with no government for the many and all power in the hands of the wealthy few. He was a founding member of the John Birch Society that regarded Eisenhower as a communist because he believed in public works and taxation.
Their extreme libertarianism wants the government to do virtually nothing but protect the country from foreign enemies and personal property from all threats or restrictions. So, they oppose all taxes, the minimum wage, unions, gun control, regulation of environmental pollution, food and drug safety and so on. They essentially seek to return to the Gilded Age before Progressive Era reforms reined in the excesses of Robber Barons like them.
Not believing government has any right to tell them how to do business, members of the cabal have racked up an impressive record of tax evasion, bribery, environmental pollution, money laundering, fraud, insider trading and workplace safety violations. Their resources are so great as to allow them to be serial scofflaws because they can afford the best lawyers and the piddling fines attached to their lawbreaking. They also use hired muscle to intimidate witnesses, and to seek dirt on critics. An operative posing as an FBI agent silenced a witness to a polluting facility, and Mayer herself was investigated by private eyes and a phony smear campaign was mounted calling her a plagiarist.
In the beginning the members of the cabal tried to run candidates espousing their principles, but voters did not warm to cutting taxes on the superrich and eliminating Social Security and Medicare. So they have since proceeded by stealth, greatly empowered by the Citizens United case that opened the floodgates to election buying. They have created an immense infrastructure to turn back history by shifting the direction of government. Ironically much of their work is funded with profits from defense and other government contracts and via charitable tax breaks for money given to foundations and think tanks that under the law are supposed to be devoted to “social welfare” rather than political ends. Nothing could be further from the truth.
To put a patina of scholarship on their power grab and make their self-aggrandizing policies palatable to non-billionaires they have created tools like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and dozens of others. These are the propaganda arm of their campaign. Similar efforts have put institutes on college campuses that fund professors and sponsor required courses in the “economic philosophy” of Ayn Rand and the hoax of climate change. Some 283 campuses are now subjecting their students to this program of brainwashing.
Americans for Progress and a plethora of other advocacy arms fund campaign propaganda to discredit and defeat progressive candidates and insufficiently right-wing Republicans in primaries. By this means the candidates for high office are increasingly those in sync with cabal policies. These include House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senators Ted Cruz and Joni Ernst, Governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Pat McCrory of North Carolina and many others
They have created a byzantine network of false fronts to allow hundreds of millions of untaxed charitable contributions to be siphoned to campaigns while their actual origin and the motives of the donors remain hidden. They have pioneered so-called Astroturf groups that pose as grassroots organizations speaking for their people. In fact, they are another arm of the cabal aimed at working their will. The Tea Party is one of their creations.
After the failure of both John McCain and Mitt Romney to defeat President Obama, they decided the GOP was too incompetent to rely on for results. In effect they have now created a shadow party that decides who will seek office, funds them and once in office owns them. When John Boehner couldn’t get his caucus to agree not to shut down government and default on its debt obligations, he was forced to seek an audience with David Koch to beg him to make his minions back off. Thus, the new Republican majorities in the House and Senate no longer answer to Republican leadership or their constituents. They answer to the donors who put them in office.
In furtherance of a complete government takeover, the cabal a decade ago embraced a state by state strategy where buying election wins is relatively cheap. It has paid huge dividends. Between 2010 and 2014, this strategy cost Democrats 900 seats in state legislatures and eleven governorships. The GOP now controls 68 of 98 state legislative chambers and holds both houses and the governorship in 23 states for total control. My adopted state of North Carolina was one of the first to be selected as a “model state” which would be subjected to the full treatment. Cabal member Art Pope helped turn both state chambers Republican for the first time since McKinley was President, elect a malleable energy executive as governor and have himself made budget director. The result has been a reign worthy of Robespierre.
The state assembly was taken over in 2010 and in 2011 the unelected Pope and a professional gerrymander wizard sat down at computer terminals to redesign congressional districts. As a result a purple state’s congressional delegation went from six Democrats, seven Republicans to nine Rs, 4 Ds. The tax code was completely redesigned based on a plan devised by the John Locke Foundation, a Pope founded and funded think tank. Corporate taxes were cut deeply while the earned-income tax credit for the poor was eliminated. So was the estate tax. Benefits for the poor, the middle class and the unemployed were cut, access to abortion was limited, concealed guns were permitted in bars, on playgrounds and campuses. Restrictions on voting by students, minorities and the poor were enacted. Federal funds for Medicaid were rejected.
Public school teacher pay was cut from a middling 21st highest in the nation to an abysmal 46th. Teachers’ assistants and preschool programs were eliminated. The once-admired University system got similar treatment. The voting records of professors were investigated to try to identify academics with a political bias. Tuition was raised, faculty laid off, and budgets and scholarship assistance were cut. Pope gave a $500,000 donation to North Carolina State University, contingent on the teaching of “free-market economics.” And his John Locke Foundation provided lesson plans for high school history teachers that “downplayed the role of social movements and government while celebrating what it called the ‘personal creation of wealth.’”
The process has been repeated in states across the country. In this year’s election, the cabal will spend close to $1 billion to tighten its grip on executive, legislative and judicial power at federal, state and local levels. This may have begun as a philosophical crusade, but it is now an utterly cynical enterprise aimed at the self-aggrandizement of the members of the cabal who profit mightily from not having to pay for compliance with environmental or workplace regulations and who benefit from lower tax rates and myriad loopholes including the carried-interest rate for hedge fund income.
The Kochs have contributed tens of millions to weaken government oversight of their business and to keep their taxes low since Obama was elected, meanwhile their net worth has increased by $28 billion. A hedge fund member of their cabal, Bob Mercer has been accused of avoiding $6 billion in taxes between 2000 and 2013.
Their goal has been the unfettered, untaxed, unregulated exercise of power by the oligarchs, low wages, no safety net or government benefits for everyone else. And they have been successful, largely by misdirection. Their candidates rarely mention tax breaks for fat cats or eliminating Social Security and Medicare. Instead they warn against big government, high taxes, gun control and death panels.
Fred Koch built an oil industry infrastructure for the master of the big lie, Adolph Hitler. His sons and their network have utilized the big lie over the years to remake a government of the people into a government by and for the plutocrats. Fred Koch feared the collectivization of the Soviet Union. His sons preside over an oligopoly more powerful than that of Putin’s Russia.
If this were happening to someone else’s country, it would be comic. In ours, it evokes the tragic emotions of pity and terror. “Dark Money” is essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of our democracy or who is befuddled by our bizarre politics. There is at work what Adam Smith called “an invisible hand,” but it is not free markets at work, but an oligarchic conspiracy. If that sounds extreme, read the book. It is worse than you think, and it may be too late to change power so entrenched and well-funded.