(2018-12-11) How The Koch Brothers Broke Democracy Stuck Taxpayers With The Bill

How The Koch Brothers Broke Democracy & Stuck Taxpayers With The Bill. The background for this piece is Jane Mayer’s extraordinary book Dark Money, which came out earlier this year. The subtitle says it all: The Hidden History Of The Billionaires Behind The Rise Of The Radical Right.

The principle characters in Mayer’s book are Charles and David Koch. Taken together, they are the richest people on the face of the Earth. They are also the sons of Fred Koch, who made his fortune supplying gasoline and diesel fuel to Josef Stalin and later Adolf Hitler. In December, 1958, the elder Koch became one of the founders of the John Birch Society.

According to Mayer, the Kochs were making little headway with their ultra right wing ideas until they figured out how to turn the tax code to their advantage.

They created their own “charities,” then funded them lavishly with money that qualified for tax deductions. Non-profits with patriotic sounding names like the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Americans For Prosperity, and the Cato Institute have become powerful lobbying groups supported by non-taxable contributions.

Writing in The Guardian this week, columnist George Monbiot prefaced a story about how the Kochs have exported their ultra right wing agenda to the UK with this summary. “Dark money is among the greatest current threats to democracy. It means money spent below the public radar, that seeks to change political outcomes. It enables very rich people and corporations to influence politics without showing their hands.

“In a rare public statement, in an essay published in 1978, Charles Koch explained his objective. ‘Our movement must destroy the prevalent statist paradigm.’ As Jane Mayer records in her book Dark Money, the Kochs’ ideology — lower taxes and looser regulations — and their business interests ‘dovetailed so seamlessly it was difficult to distinguish one from the other.’

Over the years, she notes, ‘the company developed a stunning record of corporate malfeasance’. Koch Industries paid massive fines for oil spills, illegal benzene emissions and ammonia pollution. In 1999, a jury found that Koch Industries had knowingly used a corroded pipeline to carry butane, which caused an explosion in which two people died.

“The Kochs’ chief political lieutenant, Richard Fink, developed what he called a three-stage model of social change. Universities would produce ‘the intellectual raw materials.’ Think tanks would transform them into ‘a more practical or usable form.’ Then ‘citizen activist’ groups would ‘press for the implementation of policy change.’

To these ends the Kochs set up bodies in all three categories themselves, such as the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, the Cato Institute and the “citizens’ group” Americans for Prosperity. But for the most part they funded existing organisations that met their criteria.

Koch-inspired and funded groups have led the campaign to gerrymander voting districts in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and North Carolina.

Republic is another way of saying a representative democracy. Since all 330 million Americans cannot assemble in one place for a national conversation, they elect people to represent their interests. But the Kochs have broken the link between the people and their representatives.