While my reading definitely has an underlying theme, it’s often dictated by randomness. What’s available at the library at the moment, what catches my eye on my bookshelf, etc. Personally, I’m an advocate of this style of learning. If you willingly follow what’s interesting to you in this moment, you’ll likely learn a lot more than if you try to force yourself to do something. Of course, there’s a value in dedication and specialization as well. Everything in moderation.
This week I’ve finished listening to a very timely book. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by journalist Jane Mayer goes a long way toward explaining the current state of politics in the U.S. Though the book was published in 2017, its journey from Fred Koch (father of Charles and David Koch) amassing a fortune building oil infrastructure in the 1930s in the USSR and then in Nazi Germany, through to the polarizing and anti-democratic influence of their money today underscores the truth of the quote from Louis Brandeis at the start of the book: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
Reading Roundup
Before I get into the rest of the review, here are some articles/other readings I’ve come across recently that I found interesting.
Very much in line with the Mayer’s book, Peter Greene, former educator and current education reporter, wrote about a new report from Senator Bernie Sanders about right-wing billionaires’ attempts to sabotage public education in the U.S.
“Over the past decade, there has been a coordinated effort on the part of right-wing billionaires to undermine, dismantle and sabotage our nation’s public schools and to privatize our education system,” said Chairman Sanders. “That is absolutely unacceptable. We can no longer tolerate billionaires and multi-national corporations receiving massive tax breaks and subsidies while children in America are forced to go to under-staffed, under-resourced, and under-funded public schools. On this 70th anniversary year of Brown v. Board of Education, let us recommit to creating an education system that works for all of our people, not just the wealthy few.”
Civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis has written about the pitfalls of criminal justice reform with a new article about how body cameras are a misleading policy goal that do not fix the problem of police violence, and instead increase funding and power of police departments.
“This is the seduction of “reforms” that increase the power of bureaucracy. But it is only by realizing that we are being deliberately asked to provide the wrong answers to the wrong questions that we can escape its cycle. Who could object to better medical care in prison? Perhaps someone who understands that this medical care could be provided outside prison at lower cost with better results—and that there would be less need for it given that prison is so unhealthy that it reduces the life expectancy of a person by two years for every year they are confined.[10] There are more people dying more deaths and more people per capita exposed to more horrific conditions in U.S. prisons than when Eugene Debs and many others urgently sounded the alarm about prison conditions 100 years ago.”
After reading the above article, I came back to this piece I had read years ago in Jacobin about “non-reformist reforms”, which changed the way I think about political power and organizing. Basically, it is important to look critically at reforms to institutions and determine whether those reforms actually change power dynamics, or whether they perpetuate the harms currently happening and empower the institution to continue existing.
“Gorz acknowledged that deep poverty and misery still existed, but only among a fraction of the population — perhaps a fifth. Those suffering most were not a homogenous industrial proletariat ready to come together as a unified force. Instead, they were a diverse and divided collection of people that included the unemployed, small farmers, and elders facing economic insecurity.
Changing times, Gorz believed, called for social movements to adopt a new strategy — specifically, a strategy focused on making concrete gains that could serve as transitional steps toward revolution. “It is no longer enough to reason as if socialism were a self-evident necessity,” he argued. “This necessity will no longer be recognized unless the socialist movement specifies what socialism can bring, what problems it alone is capable of solving, and how. Now more than ever it is necessary to present not only an overall alternative but also those ‘intermediate objectives’ (mediations) which lead to it and foreshadow it in the present.””
Finally, this excellent essay by Dr. Viktor L. Shammas summarizing a recent publication of his which very clearly lays out one of the arguments I tried to make in my first post about global inequality and extractive practices fueling the wealth of nations like the U.S through a look at Norway.
Briefly restated: No social democracy without global hierarchies—of wealth and poverty, of power and dispossession, of capital and labor, of financial rentier and client-tenants. In this sense, social democracy fails Kant’s categorical imperative: Social democracy can never become a solution for the entire universe of states in the world today, can never become generalizable to the world as such.
Why is this important? Because social democracy, and the countries most commonly associated with this reformist vision of market capitalism, the Nordic countries, are often held up as exemplars for the rest of the world to follow…..
But as I argue in my paper, “The global hinterland of social democracy,” this is strictly speaking an impossible promise to the world, especially those parts of the world riddled with poverty and positioned at the lower ends of global political-economic hierarchies. Social democracy needs what I call a global hinterland to meet its specific national needs and relies upon global hierarchies to feed its national populations. Social democracy is, we might say, great for those who can get it; but so few can—and largely for structural reasons. While social democracy is often redescribed as welfare capitalism, in practice this usually ends up meaning welfare for those on the inside of the social-democratic national polity (including social security and free public healthcare and education), and capitalism for everyone else.
Book Review
As I look back on the harm to working people in the Obama years through bailouts for the wealthy and a refusal to hold banks accountable for the subprime mortgage crisis and protect homeowners from eviction, this book offers one possible explanation for his failure to act. That is, the decades-long struggle of the Koch brothers (and other wealthy Libertarians) to infiltrate the GOP and dismantle public institutions for their personal gain at the expense of the American people. The book argues convincingly that their money and extremist views effectively polarized elected officials and pushed them increasingly rightward as they were constantly challenged by Koch-funded candidates if they didn’t take extreme anti-government positions. According to Mayer:
“Some argued that an elite minority was also driving extreme political partisanship as its interests and agenda lost touch with the economic realities faced by the rest of the population. Mike Lofgren, a Republican who spent 30 years observing how wealthy interests gamed the policymaking apparatus in Washington, where he was a staff member on the senate budget committee, described what he called ‘the secession of the rich’ in which they ‘disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its wellbeing except as a place to extract loot.’ America, as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pearson described it, had become a ‘winner take all country’ in which ‘economic inequality perpetuated itself by pressing its political advantage.’ If so, the Koch seminars provided a group portrait of the winner’s circle.”
I want to pause here to note that, like most wealthy Libertarians, the Koch brothers are not truly Libertarian. They have funneled hundreds of millions of their own dollars into candidates for government. They wish to control government and allow regulations that benefit them, while removing those that harm their profits while protecting the safety of others. It’s worth quoting extensively from a passage on the 2008 financial crisis:
“It was widely assumed that the Kochs, as hardcore free market enthusiasts had opposed the huge government bailouts of the private sector. Later many reporters assumed this too, ascribing the Kochs’ opposition to Obama as stemming from their principle disagreement over issues such as the TARP bailouts, but none of this was true. Had people checked the record carefully, they would have found it quite revealing. At first, the Kochs’ political organization Americans for Prosperity (AFP), had in fact taken what appeared to be a principled Libertarian position against bailouts, but the organization quickly and quietly reversed sides when the bottom began to fall out of the stock market, threatening the Kochs’ vast investment portfolio. The market began to collapse on Monday, September 29th when, in the face of heavy opposition from conservatives, the House unexpectedly failed to pass the federal rescue plan. By the end of the day, the DOW Jones Industrial Average had fallen 777 points, losing 6.98% of its value. It was the stock markets’ largest one-day drop point drop ever. Although some conservative groups and politicians such as DeMint still opposed the bailout, the market panic was enough to change many minds. Among those who flipped during the next 48 hours were the Kochs. Two days after the unexpected House vote, as the measure was about to be considered by the senate, a list of conservative groups now supporting the bailouts was circulated behind the scenes to republican legislators in hopes of persuading them to vote for the bailouts. Among the groups now listed as supporters was Americans for Prosperity.”
Since J.D. Vance was recently announced as Donald Trump’s running-mate, and he is a protégé of Peter Thiel, it’s worth highlighting that this is a common thread among the wealthy “Libertarians” whose political philosophy is more about removing barriers to their personal power than any well-defined ideology. In Rudy Havenstein’s recent blog post he includes this quote:
“It irks me a lot when people try to say that Peter Thiel is a Libertarian. Certainly he claims that publicly in his speeches and books, but if you look at his actions and what he has done creating a tool like Palantir for the federal government is literally the least libertarian thing you could do. Nothing empowers the worst aspects of the state more than a company like Palantir.”
Whitney Webb on Redacted
Dark Money goes on to detail the radical and frankly disturbing political philosophies of the wealthy. For example Fred Koch’s admiration of fascism and his frustration with the New Deal and policies that benefitted those most in need:
“Fred Koch often traveled to Germany during these years… In late 1938 as WWII approached and Hitler’s aims were unmistakable, he wrote admiringly about fascism in Germany and elsewhere, drawing an invidious comparison with America under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. ‘Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard…. When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925, you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc. with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.’”
Far-right think tanks expanded massively starting in the 70s, and were a way for major corporations and wealthy individuals to influence politics without revealing their funding. However, an early list of donors to the Heritage Foundation (publisher of the infamous Project 2025), included many Fortune 500 companies. As Mayer puts it, “in fact, after Watergate the conservative think tanks pitched themselves to businesses as the safest way to influence policy without scandal.”
Basically, it is impossible to overstate the negative influence that the 1% and the 0.01% have had on politics, education, culture, and basically every aspect of U.S. society. Mayer details how they fought to dismantle public funding of higher education, in part because they disagreed ideologically with the research being done, and in part so that universities would be more dependent on large donations from the incredibly wealthy. This allowed the Kochs and others to set up entire schools within universities focused on advancing their political agenda. However, as Mayer notes through direct quotes from individuals involved, they realized early on they had to be careful to hide their true intentions. Its worth one last extensive quote here to illustrate this point. Richard Fink, a political aide to Charles Koch, spoke to ultra-wealthy donors after Obama won the 2012 election about polling research they had done to figure out why they lost. He split the American people into thirds. A third that agreed with the far-right, a third that were unreachable to him (liberals), and a middle third who were convincible.
This segment of the American population tended to believe that liberals cared more about ordinary people like themselves. ‘In contrast,’ he said ‘big business they see as very suspicious, they’re greedy, they don’t care about the underprivileged.’ Assuming that he was among friends, Fink readily conceded that these critics weren’t wrong. ‘What do people like you say? I grew up with pretty much very little, okay? And I worked my butt off to get what I have. So,’ he went on, when he saw people on the street, he admitted his reaction was ‘get off your ass and work hard like we did. Unfortunately,’ he continued those in the middle third whose votes they needed had a different reaction when they saw the poor. They instead felt guilty. Instead of being concerned about opportunity for themselves, Fink said ‘this group was concerned about opportunity for other people.’ So, he explained, the government slashing agenda of the Koch network was a problem for these voters. Fink acknowledged ‘we want to decrease regulations. Why? It’s because we can make more profit, okay? Yeah, and cut government spending so we don’t have to pay so much taxes. There’s truth in that.’ But the middle third of American voters was uncomfortable with positions that seemed motivated by greed. What the Koch network needed to do, he said, was to persuade moderate, undecided voters that the ‘intent’ of economic Libertarians was virtuous. ‘We’ve got to convince these people we mean well and that we’re good people.’ said Fink. ‘Whoever does,’ he said ‘will drive this country.’
Basically the takeaway was, “our policies and goals are unpopular, we must lie to win.” However, the Koch brothers don’t just encourage lying for political and electoral gain. Mayer details their constant abuse of power in their business dealings as well. Not only do they regularly hire private investigators to follow, intimidate, and collect dirt on their enemies, they also pressure their own employees to commit illegal acts. In one instance, they illegally dumped large quantities of the chemical benzene. When a whistle-blowing employee reported it, they were uncooperative with courts until they eventually settled on a small fine and pleading guilty to covering up evidence. In the court proceedings, it was revealed that disposing of the chemicals properly would have cut into less than 1% of their over $100 million profit at the plant where this occurred.
In a different hearing, one employee testified about “the Koch Method”.
“As he later described it, ‘they were just mis-measuring oil from the Indian reservations, as they did all over the U.S. If you bought crude, you’d shorten the gauge, they’d show you how. They had meters in the field. They’d recalibrate them so if it showed a barrel, they’d say it was just 3/4 of a barrel when they were buying it. You did it in different ways, you cheated. If we sold a barge with 1,500 barrels, you’d say it was 2,000. It all involved weights and measurements and they had their thumb on the scale.’ That was the Koch Method.”
Another employee said, “The Kochs expected us to lie and try to cover it up.”
For anyone still unconvinced about the power of the Kochs’ network of wealthy individuals, the last chapter of the book talks about their massive spending plans for the 2016 election:
“This time, the Koch network aimed to spend $889 million in the 2016 election cycle. The sum was more than twice what the network had spent in 2012. It rivaled the record $1 billion that each of the two major political parties was expected to spend. Securing their unique status as a rival center of gravity. The Koch’s could afford it. Despite their predictions that Obama would prove catastrophic to the American ecnomy, Charles’ and David’s personal fortunes had nearly tripled during his presidency, from $14 billion a piece in March 2009 to $41.6 billion each in March 2016, according to Forbes.”
Fred Wertheimer, a public interest lawyer fighting to reduce money in politics since Watergate said “This is unheard of in the history of the country. There has never been anything that approaches this.” That a tiny portion of the U.S. population can put together enough money to rival the vast political machines of two major parties is not good. That those two parties are vast political machines is also not good. That there are basically only two parties to choose from is not good. Much of this is caused by the contradictions inherent in a capitalist political system, highlighted so well by the Brandeis quote “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
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