Book Review, by Peter McKenzie-Brown
I could have reported on this book at our last meeting on politics. A key
subtheme, though, is climate change and the efforts of the super-rich in
America to downplay its importance. The book is about 500 pages in
length, including references and the index – long, but a terrific read. Jane
Mayer is a thoughtful journalist, and has researched her topic well.
She focuses on a group of fabulously wealthy
industrialists led by Charles and David Koch. Her general theme is that they
took over the Republican Party and corrupted US politics for the benefit of
the super-rich and to the detriment of the rest of the world. Put another
way, US democracy has been systematically undermined by a small group of
extremely wealthy people driven by greed and self-interest. In effect, they
have subjected US politics to corporate capture.
She published the first edition in 2016. My copy, which I
bought last winter, is the fourteenth paperback printing.
One of the most startling statistics from the 2016 US
presidential election was campaign spending of some $6.8
billion – double the spending in 2012. An estimated $1 billion of
this amount came from a few shadowy billionaires backing the Republican
Party, equalling the total raised by the millions of individual donations
from private citizens.
Central to her examination are the lives and careers of
Charles and David Koch, commonly known as the Koch brothers, who expanded
their father’s primary businesses of oil pipelines and refineries by
diversifying into lumber and paper, coal, chemicals, commodities and futures
trading, turning Koch Industries into the second-largest private company in
America.
While their individual wealth would give them huge power
on their own, the Koch brothers have intensified their political influence by
joining forces with a select group of like-minded political allies, many of
whom are also part of the multibillionaire club. While the Kochs may disagree
with their peers on a range of political issues, the glue that binds them all
together is antipathy towards government regulation and taxation, especially
when it directly affects their own personal wealth.
Their ultimate goal, Mayer argues, is to remake America
along the lines of their radical free-market beliefs. The Kochs and their
allies have bankrolled myriad political vehicles to achieve their objectives,
often giving them innocent-sounding names like ‘Citizens for a Sound Economy’
and ‘Americans for Prosperity.’ The organizations – which appear to be mere
public relations outfits masquerading as think-tanks or civil action groups –
have developed seemingly common-sense rationales to entrench their anti-tax,
anti-government and anti-regulation message into the public consciousness.
In US tax law, ‘philanthropic’ activity is a
tax-deductible expense. If a US citizen wants to donate $1 million to a
‘charity’ of their choosing, they can then deduct the entire amount from
their tax bill. The definition of philanthropic activity is so broad that in
effect it becomes a choice between paying taxes or donating to a cause,
creating what Mayer describes as ‘weaponized philanthropy’.
Over the past century these groups, run with little
transparency or accountability, have multiplied almost beyond belief. By
2013, there were over 100,000 private foundations in the USA with assets of
over $800 billion. The 2010 Supreme Court’s ‘Citizens United’ decision to
remove restrictions on political spending by private individuals sent the
amount of money being pumped into US politics into the stratosphere.
Mayer’s achievement: a thorough and compelling case study
of how US democratic life is being delegitimized and undermined by the
ideology of a tiny proportion of its society, and their wanton disregard for
the environment. While the book is primarily political, Mayer often returns
to the issue of climate change. Her main section on the topic, which is about
40 pages long, includes ten pages on corporate denunciation of climate change
science – notwithstanding the fact that 97 percent or more of actively
publishing climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past
century are extremely likely due to human activities.
The Koch brothers are fabulously wealthy (about $43bn
each, according to a Forbes list of the world’s billionaires). They have long
used part of their wealth to support think-tanks. They have close connections
with like-minded billionaires. Memorably, Mayer dubs this network the
“Kochtopus.”
