It’s About An Ideology Machine: A Short Summary of Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money”
I recommend Jane Mayer’s book all the time. The full title is “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.” Doubleday published it this year. Many of my friends and family do not have time to read her 400+ page book front-to-back. This is unfortunate, as the facts reported by Mayer need to be disseminated. So I’m trying here to distill the book as best I can. Read the table of contents. You’ll get a sense of the scope and time line of her analysis:
Mayer exposes the inner workings of a billionaire donor network intent on dismantling the American government from within. These ultra-wealthy few share a belief — rather, an interest — in “an ideological war aimed at freeing American business from the grip of government” (Mayer 120). The attacks are waged against Americans from all walks of life, at the expense of our public good, primarily to grow the wealth of a handful of scions.
What wealth it is! Mayer shines a light on the political legacies of brothers Charles and David Koch, whose father amassed a fortune building oil refineries for the Soviets and the Nazis (28–31). The brothers have a combined worth of over $80 billion. The company they inherited, called Koch Industries, Inc., is the second largest in America, with $100 billion in revenue this year. It is also one of the country’s biggest polluters, topping the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory database. In 2012, Koch Industries produced 950 million pounds of toxic waste, including the equivalent of 5 million cars’ worth of carbon dioxide (275). Never heard of them?
These two men have at their disposal an “ideology machine,” the Kochtopus (142). It is financed by what Mayer calls “dark money,” and is designed to absorb parts of society, like mass media outlets, industries, branches of government, courts, town commons, you name it.
Mayer details how, over decades, the Kochtopus, both in ideology and in infrastructure, was fulfilled by: Richard M. Scaife (deceased), John M. Olin (deceased), Richard “Dick” DeVos, Jr., Harry and Lynde Bradley (both deceased), and James Arthur “Art” Pope. Other core members of the network are counted as those who attend the Koch annual seminar.
Forget about the millionaires. There were 18 billionaires present at last year’s seminar: Charles Koch, David Koch, Sheldon Adelson, Harold Hamm, Stephen Schwarzman, Philip Anschutz, Steven Cohen, John Menard, Jr., Ken Griffin, Charles Schwab, Dick DeVos, Diane Hendricks, Ken Langone, Stephen Bechtel, Jr., Richard Farmer, Stan Hubbard, Joe Craft, and Elaine Marshall (381). Combined they are worth $222 billion. There are of course many professional political operatives and strategists who contributed to the creation of the Kochtopus.
Hard to say exactly how much money this network has poured into the American political system over the years.
Mayer estimates that the donor network spent $889 million on the 2016 presidential election alone, rivaling the two major political parties (377). During the 2012 election cycle, one man, Sheldon Adelson, “dumped nearly $150 million, $92 million of which was disclosed” (331). Between 2010 and 2015, the network “contributed over $760 million to mysterious and ostensibly apolitical nonprofits” (373), through which members influence our government. What is known about the funding and coordination is astounding. But it’s not just a spending battle over our government. It’s a battle over our minds.
People organize grassroots campaigns, big businesses organize Astroturf campaigns. DCI Group, a public relations firm founded in 1996, has “truly professionalized the modern use of phony ‘Astroturf’ campaigns on behalf of big-money interests” (191). Clients include ExxonMobil and the Teamsters. The Astroturf strategy came out of work Doug Goodyear and Tim Hyde did for the tobacco industry. They are both founders of DCI Group. In 1990, Hyde wrote a memo for R.J. Reynolds that described how
Instead of pitching cigarette sales, it would create fake ‘smokers’ rights groups’ who would agitate against smoking restrictions as a fundamental matter of liberty… The company needed to ‘create a movement’ that would ‘build broad coalitions around the issue-cluster of freedom, choice, and privacy.’ The company, Hyde wrote, ‘should proceed along two tracks.’ One was the ‘intellectual track within the DC-New York corridor,’ which could influence elite opinion with op-ed pieces, lawsuits, and expert think tank studies. The other was ‘a grassroots organization and largely local track,’ which would use front groups to simulate the appearance of popular political support (191).
Sound familiar? The Kochtopus uses the Astroturf strategy to foment dissent for all kinds of issues. They will pack town halls, produce attack ads, turn experts. So, a movement that appears to be a spontaneous expression of grassroots organizing might really be a campaign meant to misinform its audience. Moreover, since ad campaigns are designed using “polls, focus groups, micro-targeting data, and ‘perception analyzers,’” they are able to “distill a complicated subject into a simple, potent, and usually negative symbol” (253). At some time or another you have been targeted by one of these misinformation campaigns. The Kochtopus buys “boots on the ground” organizing and mass media to exert influence over public opinion.
Influence comes through seemingly apolitical think tanks, too. The Koch brothers were early funders of the Center for a Sound Economy, which mobilized popular support for corporate agendas, and eventually became “a prototype for the kinds of corporate-backed opposition campaigns that would proliferate after Obama was elected” (161). Mayer calls Americans for Prosperity its “successor” (244). The talking points for these kinds of campaigns are incubated by the likes of the Center for Competitive Politics, Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, &c &c.
Let’s look at a concrete example.
The inside front cover of Mayer’s book is an information visualization of $485.7 million of anonymous donor spending made between 2009 and 2013. Unlike 501(c)(3) non-profits, 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) “social welfare” non-profits allow for anonymous donations. This wave of anonymous spending funded TC4 Trust, Freedom Partners, and the Center to Protect Patients’ Rights. These three non-profits then funded 38 other organizations.
In 2012, Freedom Partners gave a $115 million grant to the Center to Protect Patient Rights (416). The Center was incorporated in 2009 by Sean Noble as nothing but a P.O. box outside of Phoenix. The Center received $3 million within two months of being incorporated and $62 million by the end of 2010 (189). To get so flush so fast, Mayer reports that Noble had been working closely with Randy Kendrick.
Kendrick is a major donor who, while attending the annual Koch summit in 2009, asked “what the group planned to do to stop Obama from overhauling America’s health-care system” (185). After discovering that there were no organizations battling Obama’s efforts to “overhaul” health care, they created the Center (187). The Center to Protect Patient Rights gave a $1.8 million grant to the Coalition to Protect Patient Rights, a “doctor-led coalition” incorporated by a DCI Group accountant (192).
The Coalition recruited “a former head of the America Medical Association named Donald Palmisano [who] appeared on the national media circuit to take swipes at Obama’s health-care proposal…” (192). Palmisano’s endorsement is a small fraction of a campaign funded by the Center to Protect Patient Rights. Still, it illustrates how, exactly, the Kochtopus delivers its message to be consumed by the American public — cloaked in expert debate.
The inside back cover is an information visualization, too. It demonstrates how one person, acting as the head of multiple foundations, can serve to braid business interests with foundation spending. Richard Fink, formerly an Executive Vice President at Koch Industries, happens to be the President of the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the President of the Knowledge and Progress Fund, and the President of the Claude R. Lambe Foundation.
Between 2009 and 2013, these three organizations gave $87.9 million to 40 non-profits, with more than half that amount going to George Mason University, the Charles Koch Institute, DonorsTrust, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute. Behind this spending lurks an intellectual agenda.
In 1976, Fink wrote an essay called “The Structure of Social Change”, which
approached the manufacture of political change like any other product…The first phase required an ‘investment’ in intellectuals whose ideals would serve as the ‘raw products.’ The second required an investment in think tanks that would turn 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 (142).
If “The Structure of Social Change” served as the blueprint for the Kochtopus, Hyde’s memo served as a tactical guide. Informing both documents, though, was Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” It was the call to arms for the corporate rights movement and
urged America’s capitalists to wage ‘guerrilla warfare’ against those seeking to ‘insidiously’ undermine them. Conservatives must capture public opinion, he argued, by exerting influence over the institutions that shape it, which he identified academia, the media, the churches, and the courts.
Powell, a Director at Philip Morris for much of his career, later served as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Mayer’s book is a history that describes the legacy of Powell’s Memo and Fink’s plan, how their thinking provided the foundational arguments for the “ideological war,” and ultimately served to justify the Kochtopus.
With the ideology, you have reason to create mass media campaigns, to subsidize “citizen groups” who organize Astroturf campaigns, reason to invest in intellectuals as “raw products” and think tanks as the marketplace for their products. All to exert control over public opinion and government institutions. How do they get away with it?
The Kochtopus uses a screen of corporate entities to hide donors’ identities, when necessary. Here’s what part of the Kochtopus looks like in the wild. It’s an infographic of political spending with “dark money”:
This shell game sidesteps campaign finance law limits on political spending and it obscures donor identities using “social welfare” non-profits. The aim, of course, is to advance the economic interests of the donor network. The consequence unravels the fabric of American government. Yes, many of the people responsible for this spending have a deep-seated ideological commitment to limited government. But the commitment to principles only goes so far. In the words of Phil Dubose, a Koch Industries manager:
‘They call themselves libertarians. For lack of a better word, what it means is that if you’re big enough to get away with it, you can get away with it. No government. If it’s good for their business, they think it’s good for America’ (377).
What’s good for their business might not be good for our government. The outcomes of local elections can impact donors’ wealth, especially when labor relations are at stake. The Koch brothers reside in Kansas and are therefore unable to cast votes for candidates running for offices in other states. The Kochs’ Political Action Committee, however, contributed in a big way to Scott Walker’s campaign for governor in 2010. They also contributed to 16 legislative races (all won). You can measure the influence of the Kochtopus in organizational support.
Americans for Prosperity “provided him [Walker] with a field operation and speaking platform at its Tea Party rallies…” (308), while the Bradley Foundation created the anti-union policy for the campaign trail. When Walker eventually introduced anti-union legislation, the “furious backlash” (a recall vote) was tempered by Americans for Prosperity, who organized pro-Walker rallies and aired thousands of pro-Walker television and radio ads (311). An independent counsel investigation into Walker’s campaign discovered e-mails about how to finance the anti-recall efforts, to “Take Koch’s money” (312), via the Wisconsin Club for Growth. The Koch brothers founded Americans for Prosperity in 2004. Had enough?
Take Operation REDMAP, the Redistricting Majority Project, created by Ed Gillespie, Sean Noble, and associates. They identified 105 Democratic candidates during the 2010 midterm election and “concentrated on governorships and state legislatures” (249). The candidates were given an index score to assess how likely they would be defeated. The goal was to beat these candidates and gain control of redistricting processes in 2011. Tens of millions of dollars were funneled to “an array of different front groups” to buy attack advertising.
He [Noble] chose a group called the 60 Plus Association…to air attack ads on Democrats in ‘Arizona’s First Congressional District, Florida’s Second and Twenty-Fourth, Indiana’s Second, Minnesota’s Eighth, New York’s Twentieth, Ohio’s Sixteenth, Pennsylvania’s Third, and Wisconsin’s Third and Eighth Congressional Districts.’ Meanwhile, he said, he used another group, Americans for Jobs Security, the same ‘business league’ he had deployed in the Scott Brown Race, to air ads in ‘New York’s Twenty-Fourth, North Carolina’s Second and Eighth, Ohio’s Eighteenth, and Virginia’s Ninth Congressional Districts’ (250).
$2 million of outside spending helped unseat Rick Boucher, 14-term Democratic congressman from Virginia’s Ninth Congressional District. According to Boucher, his Republican challenger, Morgan Griffith, had one key issue. Opposition to climate change. Mayer writes:
Griffith’s victory left Saltville — where the EPA had forced the Olin Corporation to take responsibility for remediating a river that was still too toxic to fish — represented a congressman who painted the EPA as the district’s greatest foe (242).
This kind of political subterfuge is what happens when environmental regulations threaten the business interests of the Kochtopus.
The Kochtopus intervenes in local ballot initiatives, school boards, judicial races, state legislatures, congressional races, in the press, on the campus, in your social media feed. To quote Lisa Graves, “They’re building a party from outside to take over the party — they’re doing it by market segments — it’s like a business plan” (369). It is social engineering at a massive scale.
I hope this summary creates a skepticism in your mind about Kochtopus-funded ideas.
For the entire history, go read Mayer’s book!
