Monday, March 7, 2016

THREE THEMES OF KOCH BROTHERS’ ACTIVITIES
“[Jane] Mayer patiently describes the patient, decades-long creation and deployment of think tanks, such as the Scaife effort to launch the Heritage Foundation or the Koch role in the start of the Cato Institute. She also describes the funding of university research centers that became the intellectual backdrop of this new radical right wing, including for instance the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She interweaves the political story with the ongoing saga of the various businesses that produced the fortunes on which it was built. Several striking themes emerge.
“One is that the various moguls were almost all angry at the government because it insisted on prosecuting their most egregious oversteps. John Olin, for instance, who would fund an unprecedented effort to push his libertarian philosophy on campuses across America, was constantly embroiled in defending egregious pollution at his chemical plants across America. The company was pouring mercury into the Niagara River, and turning a Virginia town so toxic that it became one of the first names on the EPA’s ‘Superfund’ list of especially dirty sites.
“The Kochs were no pikers either. Charles constantly disparaged government regulations as ‘socialistic,’ perhaps because they were costing him money—not nearly as much money as his polluting plants were making him, but enough to sting. In 2000, for instance, Koch Industries paid what was then the largest fine in history ($30 million) for violating the Clean Water Act; in 2012, they were listed as the largest producer of toxic waste in the nation. Even the minor players in this saga conformed to this rule. John Menard Jr., for instance, the richest man in Wisconsin and a member of the Koch donor network who helped back Scott Walker, ran a home improvement chain that paid $1.7 million in fines for illegally disposing of hazardous waste and “in one memorable instance, [Menard’s] company reportedly labeled arsenic-tainted mulch as ‘ideal for playgrounds.’”
“A second, and related, motif involves perhaps the greatest single issue of our time, climate change. “Coal, oil, and gas magnates formed the nucleus of the Koch donor network,” Mayer writes. ‘Guest lists for the [annual donor summits they organized at California desert resorts] read like a Who’s Who of America’s most successful and most conservative fossil fuel barons.’ As a result, they had a strong vested interest in making sure that nothing was done about global warming.
“Those of us fighting this battle have long known that the Kochs were our adversaries (I make a cameo appearance in an amped-up documentary about them, Koch Brothers Exposed, that was released in 2012).2 But [Jane] Mayer describes precisely how their network, among other things, poured tens of millions of dollars “into dozens of different organizations fighting climate reform.” Increasingly the various moguls hid their contributions through outfits like DonorsTrust, closely linked to the Kochs and focused not on conducting research to disprove climate change (a difficult task in a warming world) but on raising doubts about it wherever and however possible, a tactic borrowed from the tobacco industry (and in fact pursued by some of the very same operatives). She describes, in particular, the scurrilous attack on leading climate scientist Michael Mann, pursued by various groups with deep ties to the Kochs and Scaife. [see footnote]
“But Mann held his ground. The really sad story is about Republican Congressman Fred Upton, a moderate who took global warming seriously until, in 2010, he wanted to be chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Then, to appease the Kochs—who had donated to the campaigns of twenty-two of the panel’s thirty-one GOP members—he undertook what one political reporter called a ‘naked belly crawl’ into the cave of climate denial, coauthoring an Op-Ed with the head of the Koch’s Americans for Prosperity (AFP) and promising to subpoena EPA head Lisa Jackson so frequently that, in [Jane] Mayer’s paraphrase, ‘she would need her own congressional parking space.’
“Taken together, these two themes make clear a third, overwhelming point. The Kochs and many of their billionaire colleagues talk at length about their passion for liberty and freedom, acting as if their political activity were disinterested and they were merely following their sense of the common good. But in fact their ideology benefits their businesses at every turn, from the attacks on government regulations to their opposition to a price on carbon to their demand for lower tax rates on the wealthy. Almost all of them have made money off big government contracts; none of those described in [Jane] Mayer’s book turned down the massive subsidies offered to, say, fossil fuel companies, and the politicians they funded voted to keep those gifts flowing.3 [see footnote]
Mayer mostly avoids editorializing, concentrating on the revelations she’s uncovered with her prodigious reporting. But in the last pages she notes:
“ ‘It was impossible not to notice that the political policies they embraced benefited their own bottom lines first and foremost. Lowering taxes and rolling back regulations, slashing the welfare state, and obliterating the limits on campaign spending might or might not have helped others, but they most certainly strengthened the hand of extreme donors with extreme wealth.’”
[FOOTNOTES IN THESE PARAGRAPHS:]


[Jane] Mayer also wrote a short article, “Taking It to the Streets,” in the November 28, 2011, issue of The New Yorker about my role in the fight over the Keystone pipeline to Canada’s tar sands, where the biggest foreign leaseholder is the Koch brothers.