Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
Dark Money Review: Nazi Oil, the Koch Brothers and a Rightwing
Revolution
Charles Kaiser
Sunday, January 17, 2016
The Guardian
Lots of American industrialists have skeletons in the family
closet. Charles and David Koch, however, are in a league of their own.
The father of these famous rightwing billionaires was Fred Koch,
who started his fortune with $500,000 received from Stalin for his assistance
constructing 15 oil refineries in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. A couple of
years later, his company, Winkler-Koch, helped the Nazis complete their third-largest oil refinery [1]. The
facility produced hundreds of thousands of gallons of high-octane fuel for the
Luftwaffe, until it was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1944.
In 1938, the patriarch wrote that “the only sound countries in the
world are Germany, Italy and Japan”. To make sure his children got the right
ideas, he hired a German nanny. The nanny was such a fervent Nazi that when
France fell in 1940, she resigned and returned to Germany. After that, Fred
became the main disciplinarian, whipping his children with belts and tree
branches.
These are just a handful of the many bombshells exploded in the
pages of Dark Money [2], Jane
Mayer’s indispensable new history “of the billionaires behind the rise of the
radical right” in the US.
A veteran investigative reporter and a staff writer for the New
Yorker [3], Mayer has combined her own research with the work of scores of
other investigators, to describe how the Kochs and fellow billionaires like
Richard Scaife have spent hundreds of millions to “move their political ideas
from the fringe to the center of American political life”.
Twenty years after collaborating with the Nazis, Fred Koch had
lost none of his taste for extremism. In 1958, he was one of the 11 original
members of the John Birch Society, an organization which accused scores of
prominent Americans, including President Dwight Eisenhower, of communist sympathies.
In 1960, Koch wrote: “The colored man looms large in the Communist
plan to take over America.” He strongly supported the movement to impeach chief
justice Earl Warren, after the supreme court voted to desegregate public
schools in Brown v Board of Education. His sons became Birchers too, although
Charles was more enamored of “antigovernment economic writers” than communist
conspiracies.
After their father died, Charles and David bought out their
brothers’ shares in the family company, then built it into the second largest
privately held corporation in America.
“As their fortunes grew, Charles and David Koch became the primary
underwriters of hardline libertarian politics in America,” Mayer writes.
Charles’s goal was to “tear the government out ‘at the root’.”
Another man who studied Charles thought “he was driven by some
deeper urge to smash the one thing left in the world that could discipline him:
the government”.
Much of what the American right has accomplished can be seen as a
reaction to the upheavals of the 1960s, when big corporations like Dow Chemical
(which manufactured napalm for the Vietnam War) reached the nadir of their
popularity.
In 1971, corporate lawyer (and future supreme court justice) Lewis
Powell wrote a 5,000-word memo that was a blueprint for a broad attack on the
liberal establishment. The real enemies, Powell wrote, “were the college
campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts
and sciences”, and “politicians”.
He argued that conservatives should control the political debate
at its source by demanding “balance” in textbooks, television shows and news
coverage – themes that were echoed in inflammatory speeches by Richard Nixon’s
vice-president, Spiro Agnew.
Ted Cruz at a Heritage Foundation event. Photograph:
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
The war on liberals was so effective that practically everyone
reacted to it: from the New York Times, which hired ex-Nixon speechwriter Bill
Safire to “balance” its op-ed page, to the Ford Foundation, which gave $300,000
to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in 1972. The impact was cumulative:
almost four decades later, Barack Obama was astonished by one of the first
questions asked to him, by a New York Times reporter, after he became
president: “Are you a socialist?”
The AEI was one of dozens of the new thinktanks bankrolled by
hundreds of millions from the Kochs and their allies. Sold to the public as
quasi-scholarly organizations, their real function was to legitimize the right
to pollute for oil, gas and coal companies, and to argue for ever more tax cuts
for the people who created them. Richard Scaife, an heir to the Mellon fortune,
gave $23m over 23 years to the Heritage Foundation, after having been the
largest single donor to AEI.
Next, the right turned its sights on American campuses. John M
Olin founded the Olin Foudation, and spent nearly $200m promoting “free-market
ideology and other conservative ideas on the country’s campuses”. It bankrolled
a whole new approach to jurisprudence called “law and economics”, Mayer writes,
giving $10m to Harvard, $7m to Yale and Chicago, and over $2m to Columbia,
Cornell, Georgetown and the University of Virginia.
The amount of spent money has been staggering. Between 2005 and
2008, the Kochs alone spent nearly $25m on organizations fighting climate
reform. One study by a Drexel University professor found 140 conservative
foundations [4] had spent $558m over seven years for the same purpose.
The next step for the radical right was to support the creation of
the Tea Party movement, through organizations like Americans for Prosperity,
which was funded by the Kochs.
“The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and Americans for
Prosperity provided speakers, talking points, press releases, transportation,
and other logistical support,” Mayer writes. As the writer Thomas Frank has
pointed out, the genius of this strategy was to “turn corporate self-interest
into a movement among people on the streets”.
The last element of this multi-pronged campaign saw the direct
investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in political campaigns at every
level, from president to city councillor. In 1996, a last-minute $3m campaign
of attack ads against Democrats in 29 races, a campaign which may have been
financed by the Kochs, was considered outrageous and extravagant. But after the
disappearance of virtually all restrictions on campaign contributions – another
result of rightwing lobbying and the supreme court’s Citizens
United decision [5] – $3m is now a tiny number.
In the 2016 elections, the goal of the Koch network of
contributors is to spend $889m, more than twice what they
spent in 2012 [6].
Four years ago, because Obama had the most sophisticated
vote-pulling operation in the history of American politics, and a rather
lackluster opponent, a Democratic president was able to withstand such a
gigantic financial onslaught. This time around, it’s not clear that any
Democrat will be so fortunate.
- Charles Kaiser [7] is a writer based in New York. He is the author
of 1968 in America, The Gay Metropolis and The Cost of Courage.
Source URL: https://portside.org/2016-01-18/dark-money-review-nazi-oil-koch-brothers-and-rightwing-revolution
Links:
[1] http://fortune.com/2016/01/14/executive-disputes-role-of-koch-brothers-father-in-nazi-oil-refinery/
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0307970655
[3] http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/jane-mayer
[4] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dark-money-funds-climate-change-denial-effort/
[5] http://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/jun/25/supreme-court-citizens-united-montana
[6] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/07/koch-brothers-database-2012-election
[7] http://charleskaiser.com/
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0307970655
[3] http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/jane-mayer
[4] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dark-money-funds-climate-change-denial-effort/
[5] http://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/jun/25/supreme-court-citizens-united-montana
[6] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/07/koch-brothers-database-2012-election
[7] http://charleskaiser.com/
- See more at: https://portside.org/print/node/10649#sthash.QbbB6waC.dpuf
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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