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.
↩
