Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

by Jane Mayer

Bush’s poll ratings were below those of Nixon! There had been a complete failure of his economic and foreign policy ideas.

avoid paying capital gains taxes in a 2000–2001 transaction by using what are called prepaid variable forward contracts.

Koch family owed part of its fortune to two of history’s most infamous dictators, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. The family patriarch, Fred Chase Koch, founder of the family oil business, developed lucrative business relationships with both of their regimes in the 1930s.

While driving as a high school student in Wichita, he ran a red light and fatally injured a twelve-year-old boy. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of vehicular manslaughter and was sentenced to eighteen months of probation and a hundred hours of community service and was required to pay for the boy’s funeral.

This is murder, not an “injury”!

If you choose to let this money destroy your initiative and independence, then it will be a curse to you

In 1958, Fred Koch became one of eleven original members of the John Birch Society, the archconservative group best known for spreading far-fetched conspiracy theories about secret Communist plots to subvert America. He attended the founding meeting held by the candy manufacturer Robert Welch in Indianapolis.

“The Birchers”

He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy and disparagingly of the American civil rights movement.

Bigot mindset stirred up racial tensions

Such rants brought Koch to the attention of the FBI, which filed a report describing his rhetoric as “utterly absurd.”

Drew Pearson slammed Koch’s “gimmick” and exposed him as a hypocrite for having profited himself from Soviet Communism by building up the U.S.S.R.’s oil industry.

Goldwater, too, opposed the Civil Rights Act and the Supreme Court’s landmark desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education.

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.

LeFevre opened the Freedom School in Colorado Springs in 1957 and from the start there were close ties to the John Birch Society.

Pedophilic actions; turned state’s evidence

An FBI file on the Freedom School shows that by 1966 Charles Koch was not only a major financial supporter of the school but also an executive and trustee.

In support of building their own youth movement, another speaker, the libertarian historian Leonard Liggio, cited the success of the Nazi model.

Philanthropy, with its guarantees of anonymity, became their chosen instrument.

Carthage

ostensibly fell when its wealthy elites failed to adequately back their military leader, Hannibal, as he reached the gates of Rome.

Out of this discussion was born the League to Save Carthage, an informal network of influential, die-hard American conservatives

In order to shelter themselves from taxes, they were required to invent a public philanthropic role.

Private foundations have very few legal restrictions. They are required to donate at least 5 percent of their assets every year to public charities—referred to as “nonprofit” organizations.

Lewis Powell’s memo awoke the financial angels their project needed. The first of these was Joseph Coors, a scion of the archconservative Colorado-based Coors brewery family.

After Ritchie succeeded in absconding with the dog, Scaife posted a sign in his front yard reading, “Wife and dog missing—reward for dog.”

😂🤦🏿‍♂️

By the early 1980s, the reversal in public opinion was so significant that Americans’ distrust of government for the first time surpassed their distrust of business.

Weyrich, with Scaife’s financial backing, launched several other ingenious political organizations during this period. One was the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group aimed at waging conservative fights in every state legislature in the country.

Weyrich, meanwhile, dramatically enlarged the conservative groundswell by co-founding with Jerry Falwell the Moral Majority, which brought social and religious conservatives into the pro-corporate fold. Weyrich was particularly adept at capitalizing on white anger over desegregation.

Between 1981 and 1986, the top income tax rate was cut from 70 percent to 28 percent. Meanwhile, taxes on the bottom four-fifths of earners rose. Economic inequality, which had flatlined, began to climb.

Olin complained about the government’s interference and inefficiency, but his company reaped $40 million in profits during World War II alone.

If the Olin Foundation was less than transparent about its mission, it was not for the first time. Between 1958 and 1966, it secretly served as a bank for the Central Intelligence Agency. During these eight years, the CIA laundered $1.95 million through the foundation.

The lead underwriters were the Charles Koch Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, and State Farm, the insurance company.

the Olin Foundation provided crucial start-up funds for the Federalist Society, a powerful organization for conservative law students founded in 1982.

Joyce stuck with Murray in the face of growing controversy over his 1994 book, The Bell Curve, which correlated race and low IQ scores to argue that blacks were less likely than whites to join the “cognitive elite,” and was loudly and convincingly discredited.

in 2005, they bought out Georgia-Pacific, the huge wood-products company, for $21 billion, which made them among the world’s biggest manufacturers of plywood, laminates, and ubiquitous paper products like Dixie cups, Brawny paper towels, and Quilted Northern toilet paper.

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.

Variety Wholesalers owned several chains, including Roses, Maxway, Super 10, and Bargain Town. The company favored a specific demographic: neighborhoods with median incomes of less than $40,000 a year, and populations that were at least 25 percent African-American.

As with contributions to a 501(c)(4), the law protected the donors’ anonymity. But as a business league, it fell outside the charitable trust purview of state attorneys general, further safeguarding the secrecy.

Politico’s Kenneth Vogel crunched the numbers and discovered that in the presidential race the top 0.04 percent of donors contributed about the same amount as the bottom 68 percent.

The problem, though, was that no matter how keenly Obama wanted to address economic inequality, he was going to have to turn to his party’s own billionaires and multimillionaires for help. Soon, in fact, Obama would set a record for the number of fund-raisers attended by an incumbent president.

That November, Republicans added to their previous gains by winning the governorship and veto-proof majorities in both houses of the general assembly. It was the first time since Reconstruction that the Republican Party had complete control of the state’s government.

ALEC was in many ways indistinguishable from a corporate lobbying operation, but it defined itself as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) “educational” organization.

The Kochs hadn’t done it on their own. They were the fulfillment of farsighted political visionaries like Lewis Powell, Irving Kristol, William Simon, Michael Joyce, and Paul Weyrich. They were also the logical extension of the legacies of earlier big right-wing donors. John M. Olin, Lynde and Harry Bradley, and Richard Mellon Scaife had blazed the path by the time the Kochs rose to the pinnacle of their power.