Top Quotes: “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right” — Jane Meyer

Background: Mayer is one of the great investigative journalists of our time (she was part of some of the early #MeToo stories) and she’s focused much of her energy on corruption and money in politics. This book outlines the way in which the Koch brothers and a tiny but incredibly wealthy group of billionaires have taken control of political narratives, think tanks, and politicians themselves to advocate for retaining as much of their wealth as possible at the expense of the rest of us. It’s a crucial read!

Introduction

“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.” — Louis Brandeis

“More billionaires participated anonymously in the Koch planning sessions during the first term of Obama’s Presidency than existed in 1982, when Forbes began listing the richest Americans.”

“One shared characteristic of many of the donors in the Kochs’ network was private ownership of their businesses, making them the ‘invisible rich’ with limited public disclosures and no stockholder scrutiny. It’s striking how many members had serious past or ongoing legal problems.”

The War of Ideas: 1970–2008

“Fred Koch’s willingness to work with the Soviets and the Nazis was a major factor in creating the family’s early fortune. Under Fred Koch’s direction, his company finished the third largest refinery in the Third Reich, which was one of few refineries in Germany that could produce the higher octane gas needed to fuel fighter planes.”

“Private foundations have very few legal restrictions and are only required to donate at least 5% of their assets every year to non-profits. They have little transparency or accountability to either voters or consumers, yet are publicly subsidized by tax breaks. There’s over 100,000 of the in the U.S. with assets of over $800 billion.”

“In the ’70s, with funding from a handful of hugely wealthy donors, as well as some major corporate support, a whole new form of ‘think tank’ emerged that was more engaged in selling predetermined ideology to politicians and the public than undertaking scientific research.”

“He wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”

“Charles Koch’s main political lieutenant laid out a 3-phase takeover of American politics. The first required an investment in intellectuals whose ideas serve as the ‘raw products.’ The second required an investment in think tanks that would form the ideas into marketable policies. And the third phase required the subsidization of ‘citizens’ groups’ that would, along with special interests, pressure elected officials to implement the policies.”

“What made the Koch family’s growing financial role in American politics extraordinary was not just its willingness to flout the rules but the way it merged all forms of political spending — campaign, lobbying, and philanthropic — into one investment aimed at paying huge financial dividend to the donors.”

“The Koch-founded Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University was founded to cultivate and subsidize a farm team of the next generation’s libertarian scholars. Anxious at one point that the war of ideas was proceeding too slowly, Koch demanded better metrics with which to monitor the number of times they mentioned the free-market icons Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman.”

“The strategy is to take corporation money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank, which hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible-sounding studies. But they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests of their founders.”

Secret Sponsors: 2009–2010

“The Tea Party movement was one in which a small amount of people with massive resources orchestrated, manipulated, and exploited economic unrest for their own purposes. Behind the street theatre were some of the country’s wealthiest businessmen who saw an amazing opportunity at long last mobilize popular support for their own agendas.”

“It’s a major accomplishment for sponsors like the Kochs that they’ve turned corporate self-interest into a movement among people on the streets.”

“A billionaire-funded tax-exempt organization gave Glenn Beck ‘embedded content’ written by their staff — they told him what to say on the air, and he blended the promotional material into his monologue, making it sound as if it was his own opinion, for an annual payment that eventually topped $1 million.”

“As late as 2003, 75% of Republicans supported strict environmental regulations. Over half a billion dollars were spent by fossil fuel industry billionaires between 2003 and 2010 to change that by spreading false doubt about climate change.”

“One of the first major attacks on climate change research came from an aerospace engineer, not a climate scientist, who, without disclosing it, had accepted more than $1.2 million from the fossil fuel industry. Some of the payments for his papers were marked as ‘deliverables’ by the fossil fuel companies.”

“After Citizens United, the percent of ‘outside political spending’ that came from ‘social welfare’ groups that hid their donors and were allowed to engage in politics because of a loophole rose from 2% to 40%.”

Privatizing Politics: 2011–2014

“Contrary to predictions, the Citizens United decision hadn’t triggered a dial wave of corporate political spending. Instead, it had empowered a few extraordinarily rich individuals with extreme and self-serving agendas. The superrich had become the country’s political gatekeepers — the 1% of the 1% was shaping the limits of acceptable discourse, one conversation at a time.”

“North Carolina not taking advantage of the free Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion has been projected to cost residents between 455 and 1,145 lives per year.”

“Republicans in the North Carolina state senate passed a bill requiring high school students to study conservative principles as part of American history in order to graduate in 2015.”

“The American Legislative Exchange Council is a conservative corporate ‘bill mill’ in which thousands of businesses pay expensive dues to attend closed-door conferences with local officials — during which they draft model legislation that state legislators consequently introduce as their own. On average, ALEC produced 1,000 bills per year, some 200 of which became state laws.”

“ALEC is in many ways indistinguishable from a corporate lobbying operation but it defines itself as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) ‘educational’ organization. The Kochs’ ambition is not just to support elected politicians, whom they regard as mere ‘actors’ playing out a script but to ‘supply the themes and words for the scripts.’”