Dark Money Quotes

“Pundits, opponents, and disillusioned supporters would blame Obama for squandering the promise of his administration. Certainly he and his administration made their share of mistakes. But it is hard to think of another president who had to face the kind of guerrilla warfare waged against him almost as soon as he took office. A small number of people with massive resources orchestrated, manipulated, and exploited the economic unrest for their own purposes. They used tax-deductible donations to fund a movement to slash taxes on the rich and cut regulations on their own businesses. While they paid focus groups and seasoned operatives to frame these self-serving policies as matters of dire public interest, they hid their roles behind laws meant to protect the anonymity of philanthropists, leaving more folksy figures like Santelli to carry the message.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“Total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs. —Isaiah Berlin”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“The [carried-interest] loophole was in essence an accounting trick that enabled hedge fund and private equity managers to categorize huge portions of their income as ‘interest,’ which was taxed at the 15 percent rate then applied to long-term capital gains. This was less than half the income tax rate paid by other top-bracket wage earners. Critics called the loophole a gigantic subsidy to millionaires and billionaires at the expense of ordinary taxpayers. The Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, estimated that the hedge fund loophole cost the government over $6 billion a year—the cost of providing health care to three million children. Of that total, it said, almost $2 billion a year from the tax break went to just twenty-five individuals.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“the polluters had triumphed by overturning the campaign-finance laws. “There was a huge change after Citizens United,” he contends. “When anyone could spend any amount of money without revealing who they were, by hiding behind amorphous-named organizations, the floodgates opened. The Supreme Court made a huge mistake. There is no accountability. Zero.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“In 2013, there were over a hundred thousand private foundations in the United States with assets of over $800 billion. These peculiarly American organizations, run with little transparency or accountability to either voters or consumers yet publicly subsidized by tax breaks, have grown into 800-billion-pound Goliaths in the public policy realm.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“Theodore Roosevelt, assailed the idea, declaring, “No amount of charity in spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“Opponents of climate change reform got their wish. “Gridlock is the greatest friend a global warming skeptic has, because that’s all you really want,” Morano later acknowledged. “There’s no legislation we’re championing. We’re the negative force. We are just trying to stop stuff.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“Advancing the agenda of America’s wealthiest winners under such circumstances would ordinarily be a hard sell. After all, in 2011, twenty-four million Americans were still out of work. The Great Recession had wiped out some $9 trillion in household wealth. But after forty years, the conservative nonprofit ecosystem had grown quite adept at waging battles of ideas. The think tanks, advocacy groups, and talking heads on the right sprang into action, shaping a political narrative that staved off the kind of course correction that might otherwise have been expected.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“The Kochs were part of a national explosion of dark money. In 2006, only 2 percent of “outside” political spending came from “social welfare” groups that hid their donors. In 2010, this number rose to 40 percent, masking hundreds of millions of dollars. Campaign-finance reformers were apoplectic but powerless. “The political players who are soliciting these funds and are benefiting from the expenditure of these funds will know where the money came from,” argued Paul S. Ryan, senior counsel at the liberal Campaign Legal Center. “The only ones in the dark will be American voters.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“In contrast, for the 2016 election, the political war chest accumulated by the Kochs and their small circle of friends was projected to be $889 million, completely dwarfing the scale of money that was considered deeply corrupt during the Watergate days.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“The whole ideological assembly line that Richard Fink and Charles Koch had envisioned decades earlier, including the entire conservative media sphere, was enlisted in the fight. Fox Television and conservative talk radio hosts gave saturation coverage to the issue, portraying climate scientists as swindlers pushing a radical, partisan, and anti-American agenda. Allied think tanks pumped out books and position papers, whose authors testified in Congress and appeared on a whirlwind tour of talk shows. “Climate denial got disseminated deliberately and rapidly from think tank tomes to the daily media fare of about thirty to forty percent of the U.S. populace,” Skocpol estimates.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“Economic inequality in the country in 2007 had reached the level of the Gilded Age in the 1890s. The gap between the top 1 percent of earners in America and everyone else had grown so wide that the top 1 percent of the population owned 35 percent of the nation’s private assets and was pocketing almost a quarter of all earnings.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“In his history, Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent, Martin notes that the passage of the income tax in 1913 was regarded as calamitous by many wealthy citizens, setting off a century-long tug-of-war in which they fought repeatedly to repeal or roll back progressive forms of taxation. Over the next century, wealthy conservatives developed many sophisticated and appealing ways to wrap their antitax views in public-spirited rationales. As they waged this battle, they rarely mentioned self-interest, but they consistently opposed high taxes that fell most heavily on themselves.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“Among other strategies, he set up a “charitable lead trust” that enabled him to pass on his estate to his sons without inheritance taxes, so long as the sons donated the accruing interest on the principal to charity for twenty years. To maximize their self-interest, in other words, the Koch boys were compelled to be charitable. Tax avoidance was thus the original impetus for the Koch brothers’ extraordinary philanthropy. As David Koch later explained, “So for 20 years, I had to give away all that income, and I sort of got into it.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“In 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency’s database revealed Koch Industries to be the number one producer of toxic waste in the country.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“For years, the family funded legal challenges to various campaign-finance laws. Ground zero in this fight was the James Madison Center for Free Speech, of which Betsy DeVos became a founding board member in 1997. The nonprofit organization’s sole goal was to end all legal restrictions on money in politics. Its honorary chairman was Senator Mitch McConnell, a savvy and prodigious fund-raiser. Conservatives”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“While Obama’s health-care bill was useful in riling up Tea Party protesters, his environmental and energy policies were the real target of many of the multimillionaires and billionaires in the Koch circle. For most of the world’s population the costs of inaction on climate change were far greater than those of action. But for the fossil fuel industry, as Mann put it, “it’s like the switch from whale oil in the nineteenth century. They’re fighting to maintain the status quo, no matter how dumb.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“The Kochs were also directing millions of dollars into online education, and into teaching high school students, through a nonprofit that Charles devised called the Young Entrepreneurs Academy. The financially pressed Topeka school system, for instance, signed an agreement with the organization which taught students that, among other things, Franklin Roosevelt didn’t alleviate the Depression, minimum wage laws and public assistance hurt the poor, lower pay for women was not discriminatory, and the government, rather than business, caused the 2008 recession. The program, which was aimed at low-income areas, also paid students to take additional courses online.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“The Kochs were unusually single-minded, but they were not alone. They were among a small, rarefied group of hugely wealthy, archconservative families that for decades poured money, often with little public disclosure, into influencing how Americans thought and voted. Their efforts began in earnest in the second half of the twentieth century. In addition to the Kochs, this group included Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon banking and Gulf Oil fortunes; Harry and Lynde Bradley, midwesterners enriched by defense contracts; John M. Olin, a chemical and munitions company titan; the Coors brewing family of Colorado; and the DeVos family if Michigan, founders of the Amway marketing empire. Each was different, but together they formed a new generation of philanthropist, bent on using billions if dollars from their private foundations to alter the direction of American politics.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“A consequence, however, was that the tax code turned many extraordinarily wealthy families, intent upon preserving their fortunes, into major forces in America’s civic sector. In order to shelter themselves from taxes, they were required to invent a public philanthropic role. In the instance of both the Kochs and the Scaifes, the tax law ended up spurring the funding of the modern conservative movement.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“Charles Koch’s mentor, the quasi-anarchist Robert LeFevre, had taught the Kochs that “government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.” Their extreme opposition to the expansions of the federal government that had taken place during the Progressive Era, the New Deal era, the Great Society, and Obama’s presidency had helped to convince voters that Washington was corrupt and broken and that, when it came to governing, knowing nothing was preferable to expertise. Charles Koch had referred to himself as a “radical,” and in Trump he got the radical solution he had helped to spawn. —”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“The real enemies, he suggested, were “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences,” and “politicians.” Powell called on corporate America to fight back. He urged America’s capitalists to wage “guerilla 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 as academia, the media, the churches, and the courts.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“In addition to the Kochs, this group included Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon banking and Gulf Oil fortunes; Harry and Lynde Bradley, midwesterners enriched by defense contracts; John M. Olin, a chemical and munitions company titan; the Coors brewing family of Colorado; and the DeVos family of Michigan, founders of the Amway marketing empire. Each was different, but together they formed a new generation of philanthropist, bent on using billions of dollars from their private foundations to alter the direction of American politics.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, warned in his zeitgeist-shifting book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that without aggressive government intervention economic inequality in the United States and elsewhere was likely to rise inexorably, to the point where the small portion of the population that currently held a growing slice of the world’s wealth would in the foreseeable future own not just a quarter, or a third, but perhaps half of the globe’s wealth, or more. He predicted that the fortunes of those with great wealth, and their inheritors, would increase at a faster rate of return than the rate at which wages would grow, creating what he called “patrimonial capitalism.” This dynamic, he predicted, would widen the growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots to levels mimicking the aristocracies of old Europe and banana republics.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“The tax-exempt organization quietly cemented a deal with Glenn Beck, the incendiary right-wing Fox News television host who at the time was a Tea Party superstar. For an annual payment that eventually topped $1 million, Beck read “embedded content” written by the FreedomWorks staff. They told him what to say on the air, and he blended the promotional material seamlessly into his monologue, making it sound as if it were his own opinion. The arrangement was described on FreedomWorks’ tax disclosures as “advertising services.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“They had forced Obama to play their budget game. Instead of talking about jobs and spending, he was talking about the deficit and bargaining with them over how many trillions to cut. “We led. They reacted to us,” exulted Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican whip. The donors were excited, too. Just the fact that Obama had been thrown on the defensive convinced those whose fortunes had helped pay for the Ryan plan that their investment was worth it.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“As tensions built in the increasingly calamitous debt ceiling stalemate, two sources say, Boehner traveled to New York to personally beseech David Koch’s help. One former adviser to the Koch family says that “Boehner begged David to ‘call off the dogs!’ He pointed out that if the country defaulted, David’s own investments would tank.” A spokeswoman for Boehner, Emily Schillinger, confirmed the visit but insisted, “Anyone who knows Speaker Boehner knows he doesn’t ‘beg.’ ” But the spectacle of the Speaker of the House, who was among the most powerful elected officials in the country, third in line in the order of presidential succession, traveling to the Manhattan office of a billionaire businessman to ask for his help in an internecine congressional fight captures just how far the Republican Party’s fulcrum of power had shifted toward the outside donors by 2011.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“The flood of money from Amway’s founders failed, though, to quash an investigation by the Canadian government into a tax-fraud scheme in which both DeVos and Van Andel were criminally charged in 1982. The scandal exploded when Kitty McKinsey and Paul Magnusson, then reporters for the Detroit Free Press, shocked readers accustomed to DeVos and Van Andel’s professions of patriotism and religiosity with an exposé tracing an elaborate, thirteen-year-long tax scam directly to the bosses’ offices. At its highest levels, they revealed, Amway had secretly authorized a scheme creating dummy invoices to deceive Canadian customs officials into accepting falsely low valuations on products the company imported into Canada. Amway had thus fraudulently lowered its tax bills by $26.4 million from 1965 until 1978. Amway”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, predicted that “with the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures” would be easier than ever. This, he suggested, would prevent corruption because “citizens can see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“The gap between the top 1 percent of earners in America and everyone else had grown so wide by 2007 that the top 1 percent of the population owned 35 percent of the nation’s private assets and was pocketing almost a quarter of all earnings, up from just 9 percent twenty-five years earlier.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right