‘Dark Money,’ by Jane Mayer

[MADem]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/books/review/dark-money-by-jane-mayer.html?action=click&contentCollection=Politics&module=MostPopularFB&version=Full®ion=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article

Nineteen eighty was a year of hope for conservatives in America, but it was a hope diminished by decades of consistent failure at the grass roots. Republicans hadn’t controlled either chamber of Congress, or a majority in state legislatures, for a quarter-century. Most governors were Democrats, as had been true since 1970. Not only was the Republican Party overmatched at winning elections, but those with the strongest ideological convictions — “movement conservatives,” as they liked to call themselves — were a faint voice even within Republican ranks.

But at the end of that year two things happened. One, as we all know, was the election of Ronald Reagan as president. The other was an utterly private event whose significance would not be noticed for years. Charles and David Koch, the enormously rich proprietors of an oil company based in Kansas, decided that they would spend huge amounts of money to elect conservatives at all levels of American government. David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket in 1980, but when the campaign was over, he resolved never to seek public office again. That wouldn’t be necessary, he and his brother concluded; they could invest in the campaigns of others, and essentially buy their way to political power.

Thirty years later, the midterm elections of 2010 ushered in the political system that the Kochs had spent so many years plotting to bring about. After the voting that year, Republicans dominated state legislatures; they controlled a clear majority of the governorships; they had taken one chamber of Congress and were on their way to winning the other. Perhaps most important, a good many of the Republicans who had won these offices were not middle-of-the-road pragmatists. They were antigovernment libertarians of the Kochs’ own political stripe. The brothers had spent or raised hundreds of millions of dollars to create majorities in their image. They had succeeded. And not merely at the polls: They had helped to finance and organize an interlocking network of think tanks, academic programs and news media outlets that far exceeded anything the liberal opposition could put together.

It is this conservative ascendancy that Jane Mayer chronicles in “Dark Money.” 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.

A staff writer for The New Yorker, ­Mayer spent five years working on “Dark Money,” which originated with an article on the Koch family she published in the magazine in 2010. Neither Charles nor David Koch agreed to talk to her, and several of the most important figures in their political network were unavailable. But she reached hundreds of sources who did want to talk: longtime conservative campaign operatives, business associates, political opponents and political finance scholars. Some of these sources spoke on the record and some did not, but all in all “Dark Money” emerges as an impressively reported and well-documented work.....

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http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/17/dark-money-review-nazi-oil-the-koch-brothers-and-a-rightwing-revolution


Dark Money review: Nazi oil, the Koch brothers and a rightwing revolution
New Yorker writer Jane Mayer examines the origins, rise and dominance of a billionaire class to whom money is no object when it comes to buying power

...The father of these famous rightwing billionaires was Fred Koch, who started his fortune with $500,000 received from Stalin for his assistance constructing 15 oil refineries in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. A couple of years later, his company, Winkler-Koch, helped the Nazis complete their third-largest oil refinery. The facility produced hundreds of thousands of gallons of high-octane fuel for the Luftwaffe, until it was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1944.

In 1938, the patriarch wrote that “the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy and Japan”. To make sure his children got the right ideas, he hired a German nanny. The nanny was such a fervent Nazi that when France fell in 1940, she resigned and returned to Germany. After that, Fred became the main disciplinarian, whipping his children with belts and tree branches....Twenty years after collaborating with the Nazis, Fred Koch had lost none of his taste for extremism. In 1958, he was one of the 11 original members of the John Birch Society, an organization which accused scores of prominent Americans, including President Dwight Eisenhower, of communist sympathies.

In 1960, Koch wrote: “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America.” He strongly supported the movement to impeach chief justice Earl Warren, after the supreme court voted to desegregate public schools in Brown v Board of Education. His sons became Birchers too, although Charles was more enamored of “antigovernment economic writers” than communist conspiracies.

....“As their fortunes grew, Charles and David Koch became the primary underwriters of hardline libertarian politics in America,” Mayer writes. Charles’s goal was to “tear the government out ‘at the root’.”

Unreal. What assholes!

[bobthedrummer]

1. Koch Daddy and the Nazis, a Revealing History from Jane Mayer (Lisa Graves 1-12-16 CMD)

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/01/13014/koch-daddy-and-nazis-revealing-timeline

[MADem]

2. What a list!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Revealing is too mild a term--that Koch daddy was, indeed, an asshole...

1929 The stock market crashes, beginning a worldwide depression. Before the crash, Fred Koch's Koch-Winkler firm signs contracts to build refineries in the Soviet Union, even though the U.S. broke diplomatic relations with Russia following the communist revolution more than a decade earlier. The contract is worth $5 million is 1929 dollars.

1930 By the spring, more than 3.1 million Americans are unemployed.

1931 In February, there are food riots, with starving Americans standing in breadlines at the peak of winter. The unemployment rate rose to more than 15%.

Japan begins its military expansion, invading China.

Italy, under Fascist Party leader and Prime Minister Bennito Mussolini, conquers Libya.

1932 Fred Koch, flush with his money from Stalin's Soviet Union, meets Mary Robinson and marries her. They commision the building of the family mansion in Wichita, Kansas.

The U.S. unemployment rate hits 23%.

In November, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt wins the White House over the incumbent, Republican Herbert Hoover--with the support of laborers, the black vote, and immigrant communities of citizens.

Meanwhile, Japan completes its take-over of Manchuria and enslaves the population by putting millions into forced labor.

Soviet police confiscate food in farming regions in Ukraine, as peasants faced starvation and famine along with forced collectivization.

1933 Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany and he begins consolidating power, with President Hindenburg in a figurehead role.

Roosevelt begins implementing the "New Deal," for example, creating the Federal Emergency Relief Agency to help stock food kitchens and provide blankets to homeless families in addition to creating new programs, like the Civilian Conservation Corps, to employ Americans in expanding U.S. infrastructure. Congress also passes the Glass-Steagall banking rules to prevent gambling by banks.

Hitler bans Jews and non-Aryans from practicing law in Germany. He urges the boycott of Jewish businesses and also bans trade unions.

Frederick R. Koch is born to Fred and Mary Koch.

Germany and Japan leave the League of Nations.

1934 Fred Koch works with U.S. businessman and Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis to begin building a large refinery in Hamburg, Germany, after Hitler personally approves the plan, according to Mayer.

With Hindenburg's death, Hitler declares himself the "Fuhrer" of Germany and seizes complete control of the government.

- See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/01/13014/koch-daddy-and-nazis-revealing-timeline#sthash.ZrpNrZTQ.dpuf

[bobthedrummer]

3. Yep.

[kristopher]

4. K&R

[red dog 1]

5. K&R...Thanks for posting, MADem

Great interview with Jane Mayer today on Fresh Air (NPR)
She discusses her book about the Koch's.."Dark Money"

From the Fresh Air interview:

"In recent years the Kochs have put together something called "Freedom Partners"...You can't see who belongs to it...But it has a wing that gives directly to candidates. They've given tens of millions of dollars over the years to campaigns..And what they've said is, in the coming 2016 election cycle, of the $889 million that they hope their group will raise, they hope to spend about $300 million of that directly on elections."


Mayer goes on to say:

"The story now is the money on the far right.....That's where most of it is collected, and it's in the hands of the Koch network because they've built something that, as they tell their own donors, is unique....It's not just campaign money....It's a full-service operation....It's a pipeline that runs from universities and colleges, where they recruit kids....They've got programs now in somewhere between 200 and 300 colleges and universities...It goes from there to state think tanks IN EVERY STATE IN AMERICA...It's Koch industries itself, which is a tremendous company with $115 billion in revenues which lobbies members of Congress to push it's point of view...And then it's all the dark money organizations.....So they're all kind of working in concert to create a phenomenal machine."


Listen to the complete interview:
http://www.npr.org/2016/01/19/463551038/dark-money-delves-into-how-koch-brothers-donations-push-their-political-agenda