It's a few years old now, but in my opinion, Jane Mayer's Dark Money remains one of the most valuable books out there for understanding today's political scene and the ramifications of cash in elections as a result of terrible decisions like Citizens United. Let's begin with this doozy of information that'll hit you like an unexpected southpaw uppercut:
"On its own in 2012, the Kochs' network of a few hundred individuals spent at least $407 million, almost all of it anonymously. This was more than John McCain spent on his entire 2008 presidential bid. And it was more than the combined contributions to the two presidential campaigns made by 5,667,658 Americans, whose donations were legally capped at $5,000. Politico's Kenneth Vogel crunched the numbers and discovered that in the presidential race the top .04 percent of donors contributed about the same amount as the bottom 68%."
Obama has gotten flak for walking back his refusal to use Super PAC money—but when these are the odds you're looking at, who can blame him for seeing the writing on the wall and saying, "Alright, well, we might not have much choice"?
Now, the Kochs aren't as relevant, at least not anymore—David Koch catching a bad case of dead seems to have put a stop to his political endeavors, but I'm sure Charles is double-shitty for the both of them, probably clubs an extra baby seal every morning or something—but plenty of the people who have splintered off and remain prominent in fundraising circles have ties to this fundraising network, and there are plenty of pretty sinister characters running in the shadows of republican politics.
Take a look at Peter Thiel—he's a real nutcase, as Max Chafkin's book makes clear—with a penchant for any number of peculiar, extreme-right beliefs; he's the guy who had that whole creepy thing come out about using the blood of young people to help extend lifespans, like some kind of sci-fi Dracula reboot nobody wants. He's the smarter version of a dipshit publicity whore like Elon Musk—unsurprising, considering if not for Thiel saving his ass back in the day, Musk'd probably have frittered away most of his apartheid money on the original X (a PayPal competitor, not something plastered over 'Twitter' like he got a bunch of X-Men stickers and didn't know how to spell).
And, of course, there are people like Robert Mercer, toy train aficionado, stringent employer (he used to dock maids' pay if they didn't properly drain his shampoo bottles, I believe it was, cause he's a miserly prick), and big funder of a guy named Steve Bannon, the guy who was big with Trump and apparently used to have a bathtub destroyed by acid in a rental in Florida where he was doing some weird stuff. Of course there's the bigoted rants, too. Enough about Bannon, let's learn a bit more about Mercer and the kind of people propping up our republican ticket:
[David Magerman, a partner at Renaissance Technologies] said that Mercer wanted to shrink the government to the size of a pinhead and that he doesn't think that - he basically has a philosophy, according to Magerman, that values people on the basis of what they earn. He doesn't think human beings have intrinsic value. He thinks that if you are a schoolteacher and you earn 2 million times less than Mercer earns, then you're 2 million times less valuable than Mercer is. And he believes that if you are on welfare, you have negative value. And what Magerman said was, and he's not talking about economically. He means as a human being.
For people like Mercer, the Kochs, the Thiels: it's not a matter of finding what the population needs and wants; it's what they can be hoodwinked into buying by con men. This attitude has infected the entire republican party, which opted to rely on obstructing Obama rather than providing a suitable, different approach to leadership. So we ended up with Trump in 2016 and a platform of basically, "Fuck Obama and the Democrats... trigger the libs and give rich people tax cuts! And slash regulations!"* which, unsurprisingly, didn't do much for us average people.
(Wealthy people did alright—I remember at one point my mom and I discussed being financially strapped; my example was turning off the heat because it was pricey, hers was how she couldn't get the hardwood floors installed in the basement of their vacation house because they'd had to pay cash for their nice, new, comfy car. Why, yes, this was around the time my family pulled some strings that landed me in a gnarly, free, state-run rehab. Comparable to hardwood floors vs. heating, we can compare this to 'new car vs. a roommate who diarrhea'd on the toilet seat sometime before I got there.' And yes, that diarrhea was still there a week later. Great fuckin' work, Valley Cities—was it Renton? Either way, someone in WA should poke around into that, I don't know of any workplace with sanitary standards like that... I digress.)
Returning to awful republican policies: there's no suitable vision for leadership at all: as we see republicans fling accusations of partisan bias at Biden, we are seeing factual reports coming out that the response to Helene has been more than adequate—including earning praise from Georgia's republican governor.
Once more, the party flinging claims of bias and Democrats dropping the ball?
When Trump was in office, he resisted sending federal aid to California cause of a high Democratic population and while republicans like Nancy Mace love the attention from their bill to keep demonizing immigrants in the headlines by trying to terminate FEMA programs and send that aid to those impacted by the hurricane instead, they sure as shit don't want to talk about voting against FEMA aid to Hurricane victims almost simultaneously.
Again, for people like them, it's about political party or personal profit or ambition—not a damn given about the country or the people of it. To quote from LBJ, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
From republicans all over the ticket dehumanizing Mexicans, to dehumanizing Haitians (knowingly with lies), to dehumanizing just, frankly, anyone they can spot a trace of melanin in, to that jackass in Idaho telling a Native to "go back where you came from," to dehuamnizing the entire LGBTQ community, and I've barely even scratched the surface, but suffice it to say: thanks to this rhetoric, we're seeing a rise in hate crimes. And we're seeing that what LBJ warned about all those years ago is accurate.
Trump and republicans aren't going to help their constituents out—but they'll "hurt the people that... need to be"—this politics of grievance isn't about building a better bridge to the future. It's about a bunch of insecure people being given all sorts of groups to 'Other-ise' and look down on.
So, again, I return: it's not about finding out what people want. It's about push polling, finding the right terms, nonsense like that, stuff that's meant to subtly push you one direction or another. We can thank guys like Frank Luntz for that.
He's the guy who helped republicans figure out valuable bits of information from polling groups: people are neutral about "estate tax," so now it's called a "death tax" by opponents. "Conservationism" brings up positive connotations to people like Teddy Roosevelt and the beauty of the national parks—environmentalism, however, is easily paintable as unkempt, unwashed hippies chaining themselves to trees, laughable figures.
Maybe the guy spent a bit too much time studying Ed Bernays as a kid or something, who knows? Point being, he's had an insidious effect on political discourse.
Take the 'death tax,' sounds real scary, right? Just like Obamacare's 'death panels,' it conjures up frightening images that ads will be happy to play up your fears. When you die, your house, your car, your keepsakes—the government's going to come in and tax them? Boy, it really is true about death and taxes...
Oh, wait, it's for estates valued at over $13.61 million for a single person, or $27.22 for a married couple, and then you've got exceptions and exemptions. If you're slotted to inherit $14 million, I think you'll be alright with anywhere from $8.4 to $11.48 million (I'm reminded of a kid I knew who got a new truck for his sweet sixteen, then complained because it wasn't black with tinted windows—be grateful, man, I had to pay for a hand-me-down my grandparents wanted to gift me and my parents wanted a few more excuses for vanishing paychecks about).
This approach is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
It hurts everyone, from the candidates who risk an election by pursuing their electorate rather than kowtowing to moneyed interests, to the voters who are stuck with disappointment that might lead to apathy, and to the dwindling fourth estate, which seems to have decided ad revenues and clicks are worth carrying water for the candidate that routinely threatens them. Certainly doesn't seem better than pursuing the ideal of a Murrow,** willing to stand up and speak truth to power.
I believe that this still-festering wound of dark money remains at the root of many problems we see throughout the US. With restrictions on the amount of money a person can funnel into an election—no matter how many different masks they wear to do so—as well as a reinstatement and expansion of both the Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time Rule, could be greatly beneficial in battling disinformation going forward.
Seeing the resurgence of even more blatant lies in 2024, the rise of AI usage in these efforts, and the flat-out denial to even allow fact-checks in debates by republicans make it clear we need facts and a grounding in reality more than ever.
When "the rules were that you guys weren't gonna fact check!" is one party's political defense, we're treading in dangerous, Orwellian waters and nobody wants to find out the plug's been pulled and we're headed to the Memory Hole because, "Who you gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes?"
Unfortunately, I don't know what's to be done about it given the makeup of our current Supreme Court. I know what I hope for in terms of retirements that would enable that, but we're a month away from Election Day and no positive progress is going to be made on the Supreme Court without Harris and Walz in the White House.
—
*Regulations. Ever a topic of importance. This returns a bit to my discussion of Reagan being an awful president. There, I was a bit more vague about regulations, the Kochs give me much better examples because these are the kinds of people we need to keep an eye on and have tight regulations for. Their behavior needs to be stopped. Why? Let's discuss.
To the Kochs, the government is an intrusive evil (as my old man used to quote Reagan, 'The scariest words in the world are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'); as a result, they view the government and anything it does as an intrusion on their rights. Rather paternalistically, they indicate their employees will be better off without health regulations and minimum wage requirements—in fact, if not for those laws making them pay minimum, they'd probably pay more! (See The Jungle on the wall?)
In reality, not so much with the looking after employees. One Bull Carlson come to mind: after years working for the company with toxic chemicals, he develops cancer. Fired and left to die at 51.
Sally Barnes-Soliz noticed while filling out paperwork one day that Koch Industries is illegally reporting under 1% of its actual emissions. She got fired, but now is a Department of Labor investigator, which is a pretty badass way of turning that around and making lemonade out of lemons.
Carnell Green reported improper disposal of mercury, a toxic substance. He was fired and later harassed by a Koch employee play-acting at being an FBI agent.
And how do their irresponsible behaviors impact those around them, beyond just their employees?
Well, I'd say we could ask Danielle Smalley or Jason Stone, but unfortunately, they're not able to speak. Death does that. So instead, I'll hypothesize they wouldn't be big fans, either.
If memory serves, it was the summer after graduation, she eighteen, he seventeen; her last day before heading home for freshman year of college. Key gets turned in the ignition and an explosion—150-foot fireball that could be seen miles away and blasted their bodies 50-60 feet from the truck
Butane leak. If memory serves as well, the specific pipe had already been highlighted as a problem that needed to be fixed. But regulations are a waste of time. A government obstruction. So they ignored it. When the diagnosis of the pipe came back, after, the words from the book still haunt me: the pipeline "looked like Swiss cheese."
They built their fortune on the backs of abominations—the nest egg of the Koch fortune, after all, came from their family helping to build oil refineries for both Hitler and Stalin's governments—and these abominations continue. It's a sick and toxic cycle: people suffer and they profit; then some of those profits are carefully sliced off and used to ensure their ability to profit, and the ability for people to suffer, grows—allowing the cycle to perpetuate time and again.
Taxes get cut; anti-worker laws are passed. The trickle-down we were promised never happens because all that cash goes into executive bonuses, stock buybacks, dividends, new fancy toys or hardwood floors for the wealthy, but certainly not to the people who are bringing in the money and struggling to eke out an average living.
**Two Murrow quotes come to mind.
One from his RTNDA speech: "Stonewall Jackson, who is generally believed to have known something about weapons, is reported to have said, "When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival. "
Another, from A.M. Sperber's biography of Murrow: "If a deceived or confused public is betrayed into creating or allowing to be created an America in which it loses faith, democracy will not survive... if the people finally come to believe either that they cannot cope with America's problems, or that those who inform... and those who act are inert or malign or both, then distrust, dissatisfaction, fear, and laziness can combine to turn them in desperation to that 'strong man' who can take them only to destruction."
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