Clif Hostetler's Reviews > Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right [Audio]

This book shines a light on dark money. It’s called dark money because it is of unknown origin (i.e. secret), unlimited in its amount, intended for political purposes, and in the United States it’s legal and often tax deductible. This book based on thorough research turns the darkness into a bit lighter shade of dark.

The conservative shift in American politics, and its continuing movement toward the radical right didn’t just happen. This book makes it clear that it was paid for by wealthy interests. These payments were made via circuitous channels designed to obscure their origin and encourage the impression that the changes were grass-root in their origin.

This book follows the trajectory of political influence of Charles and David Koch, the wealthy owners of Koch Industries, the second largest privately held company in the United States. Over the past thirty years they have helped finance and organize an interlocking network of think tanks, academic programs and news media outlets that far exceeds anything the liberal opposition could manage.

By the midterm elections of 2010 the Republicans dominated state legislatures, controlled a clear majority of the governorships, taken one chamber of Congress, and were on their way to winning the other. But even more significant is that many of these Republicans were not middle-of-the-road pragmatists. Uncoincidentally they were antigovernment libertarians of Kochs’ own political stripe. From the perspective of those who oppose these changes they are nothing less than a hijack of American democracy.

The author Jane Mayer spent five years working on Dark Money, which began with an article she published in The New Yorker in 2010. Research for this book was done without the cooperation of Charles or David Koch nor many others in their network of funders. But she has obviously used what sources were available to connect the available clues to determine how their money had been used. In the end Dark Money appears to be well written and thoroughly documented.

The so-called Tea Party loomed larger than their numbers would have otherwise over national news because of the influence of dark money.

If the estimates were correct the actual number of hard core Tea Party activist was not by historical standards all that large. But the professionalization of the underground infrastructure, the growth of sympathetic and in some cases subsidized media outlets, and the concentrated money pushing the message from the fringe to center stage were truly consequential.

Toward the end of the book the rise of the influence of the Koch brothers is summarized in the following quotation:

Charles Koch's trajectory had been a longer climb, but it was hard not to marvel about how far he too had come from the days when he had haunted the John Birch Society Book Store in Wichita and teetered with the Freedom School and the Libertarian Party on the outermost fringe of political irrelevance. The force of his will combined with his fortune had made him one of the most formidable in modern American politics. Few had waged a more relentless or more effective assault on American's belief in government. He and his brother had built and financed a private political machine that had helped cripple a twice elected Democratic president and begun to supplant the Republican Party. Educational institutions and think tanks all over the country promoted his world view. Doubling as a talent pipeline, a growing fleet of non-profit groups mobilized public opinion behind his agenda. The groups trained candidates and provided the technological and financial assistance necessary to run state-of-the-art campaigns. The money they could put behind their chosen candidates was seemingly limitless. Congressmen, senators, and presidential hopefuls now flocked to their secret seminars like supplicants eager to please them in hopes of earning their support.

Interesting story about what happened to Mayer when her subjects found out she was on to them:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/27/nyr...
Here's a report of political spending for 2015 (nearly 1 billion before one vote was cast):
http://billmoyers.com/story/candidate...

Link to a list of groups created and sustained by Koch Family Foundations