Book Review: Dark Money (2016) by Jane Mayer

There is no getting around or understating the fact that Charles and David Koch, the multi-billionaire brothers from Kansas, have been engaged in a campaign of unarmed insurrection against the American state since the 1980s. Through their underwriting of dozens (hundreds?) of advocacy groups, think tanks, academic institutions, and political campaigns they have advanced the cause of what could be called the abridgment of American democracy. They have spent hundreds of millions of their own dollars to achieve this, and have solicited/badgered their plutocratic peers into giving as much and more to support their goal of reducing the role of government to something resembling that of a concierge at a luxury hotel--a mere functionary tasked with keeping the unwashed out of the lobby and satisfying every whim of the guests.

Jane Mayer has done a remarkable and tenacious job of showing all the roots and branches of the Koch brothers propaganda war. Aided by like-minded billionaires such as Sheldon Adelson, Richard Mellon Scaife, John Menard, and a torch- and pitchfork-bearing mob of mere centimillionaires, the fruit of the tree planted by the Kochs and watered with the furious tears of anti-tax tycoons is that slouching beast known as the Republican Party. What was once upon time a conservative, but mostly rational, political party has now become the marionette and mouthpiece for a cabal who seek to turn the political/capitalist clock back to roughly 1900, which, in their view, was a golden age of capitalism unfettered by unions, taxes or government regulations.

Mayer makes it very clear that the Kochs and their allies don't just want a diminution of the government's role in society and the economy, they want it banished from the playing field altogether. The John Birch Society was the incubator for this extreme philosophy back in the '60s, but it took the Kochs to give it mainstream appeal and respectability through the GOP. The Kochs achieved this by creating an entire ecosystem of advocacy and political organizations that promoted and funded policies and politicians that were in accord with their fanatical worldview. The proof of their success is that the GOP is now not so much a political party as it is a counter-revolutionary movement seeking to rollback all progressive policies enacted since the end of World War Two.

Although taxation and government regulations are the main targets of this Koch-led guerilla war, they work equally hard at deconstructing democracy through the gerrymandering of congressional districts and by curtailing voters rights. The Kochs and their allies are mostly concerned with enriching themselves, but they also want to create a new American state in which corporations become the fourth branch of government, surpassing in power the legislative, executive and judicial. It's arguable that that has been the case in the U.S. for quite some time already, but America's billionaires want to rig the democratic game so that their power cannot be challenged by the judiciary or through the ballot box. Politicians have been for sale for a long time, but the Kochs want to take things to the next level by disenfranchising the poor and establishing legal precedents that give corporations and the wealthy de facto control over the electoral process.

What the Kochs are up to sounds, at times, like some kind of conspiracy theory spawned by social media, but Jane Mayer is meticulous in uncovering all the layers in this proto-parallel government that's made up of interlocking foundations, charitable trusts, PACs and advocacy groups. This kind of detailed reporting always risks being tedious, but Mayer is wonderful at balancing facts and figures with a strong sense of narrative structure.

The question that comes to mind from reading this book is why has the U.S. lead the developed world, especially in the postwar era, in producing so many wealthy people with an ideological blood lust for less government and more, far more, profits? I think there are two possible answers. The first is that, as Calvin Coolidge observed in the '20s, "The business of America is business." The foundation myths of the United States like to dwell on warm and fuzzy concepts such as freedom, democracy, opportunity and escape from persecution. It's more accurate, if less romantic, to say that most people came to America for one reason only: to make money. People didn't uproot themselves and make dangerous sea voyages to an unseen, unknown land for the chance to vote or engage in free speech. They came because America offered economic opportunities that couldn't be found in their own countries. America was populated from the beginning with people who had an intrepid desire to better themselves financially, and this became the country's dominant cultural theme. And for some of the richest Americans, financial self-aggrandizement became a quasi-religious impulse; in fact, in the last several decades capitalism and Christianity have become officially linked in many evangelical churches through the so-called prosperity gospel. The Kochs and others of their ilk see themselves as saintly warriors in the holy war against government.

The flip side to the American dream was slavery, and this institution, which shows capitalism in its rawest form, has affected American's view of labour and capital to this day. Slavery, and the Jim Crow-era that followed up until the 1960s, produced a permanent economic underclass that could be identified by race. Blacks were deemed an inferior race, and it followed that their poverty was a natural by-product of an inherent lack of intelligence and ambition. To be black was to be poor, and to be poor was to be black. For white America, economic failure was regarded as a failing on a personal level; it marked one out as a lesser being, it made you black. It wasn't seen as an inevitable by-product of capitalism. In Europe, the working classes, who weren't tripped up by racial questions, grasped the fact that economic hardship and inequality was simply part of the capitalist equation, and they organized and backed unions and political parties that fought directly for their interests. In the U.S., the racial fear of poverty and economic disadvantage was a prime reason a true worker's party (on a national level) never emerged. So the sense of shame, horror and fear that Americans have viewed life at the bottom of the economic ladder played right into the hands of people like the Kochs. If the poor and working poor see themselves as lesser Americans, lesser humans, it follows that those at the top are the best and brightest, and to deny them their wealth and power is simply going against nature. It's this warped logic that helps explain why the white, populist, working-class Tea Party (a quietly Koch-founded movement, as Mayer points out) metastasized into the Red Guard of the GOP. Against their better interests Tea Party supporters embrace the brutalist capitalist ideology of the Kochs as a way of distancing themselves from the poverty they fear and loathe.

Many commentators have made the point that during this election cycle the Kochs have ended up on the outside looking in as Donald Trump has swept aside their preferred candidates. The Kochs may have lost the battle but they've won the war. Politics is broken in the United States, and it's due in no small part to the Kochs. The American right is now an anarchic crew of ideologues who want to cripple federal and state governments. These are vandals, not politicians. Jane Mayer's book is an invaluable and astute guide to the structure, purpose and character of this counter-revolution, and it probably stands as one of the most important political books written in the last ten years. The Kochs certainly think so because they tried very hard to silence her. There's no higher recommendation for the book than that.

Peanuts, Popcorn & Anti-Capitalism

This post is actually a reprint, as it were, of an article I wrote for Z magazine ten years ago. I was noodling around on the web and came across it and thought it was worth adding to my blog. Z magazine features a lot of solid reporting on left-wing issues and interviews with people like Noam Chomsky. Some of the references in my article are a tad old, but the points the article makes still hold up (I hope) fairly well. Enjoy.

When President George W. Bush (among many politicians) advised Americans that an effective way to respond to September 11 was to “go to the mall,” it was made clear that the business of America, as Calvin Coolidge once put it, is business. That being said, is there any anti-capitalist rhetoric or discussion out there in the mainstream media? There is, but it's not to be found in the op-ed pages of the New York Times or on any of CNN's innumerable panel discussions featuring middle-aged suits vigorously agreeing that America is infallible. 

Have you seen the sports pages lately? Heard any sports talk radio? Watched an ESPN commentary show? That's where you'll find some of the most vituperative anti-capitalist rhetoric since Pravda folded.

Columnists, reporters, and fans use these media outlets to relentlessly vilify the major sports leagues. League officials, team owners, player agents, and the athletes are all exposed to ridicule, scorn, and contempt. Greedy, arrogant, selfish, oafish, cruel, racist, criminal, parasitic, and insane, these are just a sample of the terms fans throw at those who play and control pro sports. The basis for all this anger is almost invariably the big money in sports. 

Listen to sports radio for a few days and one quickly gets the clear impression that what helps fuel this anger is the sense of betrayal fans feel toward their favorite team or sport. Fans are, first of all, lovers of a sport. The emotional and intellectual investment a fan makes in a team represents an exploitable resource for the owners of pro sports teams. Admission prices have skyrocketed to the point where the best seats to a sports event can cost as much as a night's stay in a five-star hotel. The remaining seats are largely priced for upper middle class incomes and the cheaper seats are often monopolized by those who can afford season tickets or, if the team is popular, those who can afford scalper's prices. Television, once the great popularizer of pro sports, has progressively become more exclusive, with sports programming moving to specialty cable channels such as ESPN or pay-per-view. 

Is the anger of sports fans meaningful? Does it represent anything other than irritation with the vagaries of a favored leisure activity? For several reasons I think it does, the first being that pro sports exposes people to a portrait of capitalism without the usual scrim of corporate/governmental PR and propaganda. When NFL owners like Art Modell, Al Davis, Georgia Frontiere, and others move their teams from one city to another in return for tax breaks, subsidized or free playing facilities, and a whole package of other inducements, they aren't acting any differently than American corporations that move factories to states or other countries that offer low wages, low taxes, or other economic come-ons. The only difference is that football owners don't bother with spin control. A factory that closes in Michigan to be replaced by one in Mexico is described as “rationalization,” “strategic re-allocation of assets” or “a necessary step to stay globally competitive.” When Robert Irsay moved his tradition-rich Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis he didn't even bother with an explanation; he packed up the team's equipment and ran out of town. 

Similarly, the New York Yankees don't apologize when they snatch up the top talent from small market teams. The contracts these individual players receive can sometimes equal the entire payroll of the team the player came from. This is similar, say, to an agribusiness going into the Third World and buying up or contracting all the best land to produce “cash crops” for export while the indigenous peasantry starves for lack of arable land. The deleterious effect of these exports is papered over with talk of “aiding the balance of payments” or “bringing agricultural expertise to the underdeveloped nations of the world.” 

It seems clear that when sports fans react with rage at the actions of the Yankees and Irsays of the world, they're not just bemoaning the state of the game. Part of this fury stems from the realization that money, capital, is being used as a weapon, and a blunt one, at that. It's capitalism unmasked and a significant number of people, most of whom wouldn't describe themselves as socialists if their lives depended on it, are appalled by what they see.

Another interesting aspect of fan anger is that the public forums it finds voice in—the sports pages, phone-in shows, sports commentary TV programs—are probably the only major media-sanctioned outlets for anti-capitalist sentiment in the U.S. These outlets probably don't realize that what's being discussed would be branded as “dangerously socialist” if it appeared in a different context or forum. 

Although much of the public criticism directed at pro sports doesn't rise much above the level of name-calling, it's significant that it exists at all. It's hard to imagine a newspaper or cable channel regularly devoting a section or program to the sins of capitalism, but certainly on many days the sports media seems wholly concerned with trashing the finances and corporate structure of pro sports. 

The breadth and depth of critical comment in the sports world stands in stark relief to “regular” news. The mainstream press, for instance, has handled the Enron debacle as though it was a kind of corporate train wreck, the blame for which can be safely pinned on some rogue accountants and executives. There has been little serious discussion about Enron being the end result of willful government deregulation and a corporate culture that rewards and encourages fiscal avarice. Mainstream media chooses to portray the Enron meltdown as an aberration, albeit a spectacular one. For comparison look to the way the sports media has been handling major league baseball's plan to “contract” teams. Commentators (and fans) have been virtually unanimous in deriding baseball commissioner Bud Selig's explanation that the health of the sport depends on shedding teams, pointing out that this move is more about dividing up the TV-rights revenue pie amongst fewer teams, while at the same time dropping two teams, Montreal and Minnesota, that add virtually nothing to national TV ratings. Further, this attempted move has exposed baseball to a blizzard of critical comment on all its activities, from exorbitant free agent signings to the fan-unfriendly actions of stars. 

Capitalist indiscretions in the sports world are thoroughly and critically examined. This critical analysis pro sport receives on a near daily basis has helped create fan disenchantment and, in some cases, fan rebellion. Baseball, the major league sport most egregiously dominated by big money, has been the most seriously damaged by fan anger. In the years since the labor lockout in 1994, fan support at the turnstile and in front of the TV has declined severely, a spectacular example being the Montreal Expos, a team that now struggles to draw AAA-sized crowds 

One sure sign of growing fan disenchantment with the capitalist knife fight that pro sports has become is the number of franchises that jump from city to city looking for greenbacker pastures. Unlike the expansionist 1970s and 1980s, when new franchises and pro leagues popped up everywhere, the last ten years have seen pro sport franchises move around like a traveling carnival. Now, a handful of super-rich teams in each pro league dominate the elite player talent pool. This results in a long list of have-not teams that struggle futilely to achieve a winning record. Fans are painfully and angrily aware of this inequity 

 

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the anti-capitalist bent of so many fans and sports journalists is that it creates a fertile environment in which to educate people about the larger problems created by a capitalist economy. Thanks to the mendacious and piratical behavior of pro sports, millions of fans are savvy to the ways and means a huge bankroll can stack the deck against their rooting interests and the interests of their sport. It's not a huge jump from there to show people how the capitalism that ruins their favorite team or sport can, and is, ruining lives within and without the U.S. 

Any fan who has wept over his or her team skipping town to set up in a more financially accommodating city should be able to see and understand one of the main problems of globalization; that is, the damaging effect of capital chasing cheap labor and low taxes around the world. Similarly, fans of small market teams who gnash their teeth when their team's best talent is siphoned off to major market teams would undoubtedly have a keen appreciation for the destructive power of capital in the Third World, where the most lucrative natural resources (land, minerals, oil) are largely controlled by foreign multinationals, who leave behind poverty and pollution after they've exported products and profits to the Western World. 

In these red, white and blue post-September 11 days, with media-encouraged jingoism at an all-time high, and a president and Congress that can be charitably described as corporate America's courtesans, it's somewhat comforting to realize that a rich vein of anti-capitalist emotion and thought still exists in America, even if one has to go to a sports bar to hear it. Chicken wings, anyone?