A veteran political staff reporter for the very liberal The New Yorker magazine provides an exceedingly detailed account of the manipulation of U.S. politics by the billionaire Koch brothers Charles and David. In the name of philanthropy, with the help of many other billionaires, they have established countless opaque front organizations to advance a political agenda that benefits their diverse business interests and libertarian political philosophy. These include efforts to cripple the Environmental Protection Agency, and allow their companies to continue to produce toxic wastes, decrease taxes on the 0.1 % richest citizens, dismantle social support programs, oppose health care reform, cast doubt on climate science, and avoid criminal charges by the Justice Department (in the name of criminal justice reform).
The non-profit tax-exempt organizations include such think tanks as the Cato Institute, The American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and Americans For Prosperity. After the Supreme Court ruled on Citizens United, allowing unlimited corporate donations for political campaigns, their influence increased dramatically, to the point of even establishing higher education programs to promote their extreme libertarian agenda. Semiannual powwows of the secretive donors arranged for an ever-increasing number of opaque so-called charities intertwined with the moguls of the Republican Party. The major donors include the DeVos family of Amway fame, the American Chamber of Commerce, financial institutions, the owner of Home Depot, the Las Vegas Sands casino conglomerate, various hedge fund managers and billionaires from the oil and gas industry. By 2015, the voter database of the secretive organizations supplanted that of the Republican National Committee and they had effectively determined who ran in various electoral districts, as well as controlling the efforts to gerrymander electoral maps for the GOP.
Unfortunately the book was published before the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and before the death of David Koch, but the dirty tricks, deceits and outright lies of the far right libertarians clearly preceded Trump, and many familiar names of his era are discussed in this book.
The writing is humourless and it will be impossible for any but the most dedicated political scientists to keep track of all the players. The account may be a bit unbalanced as the dirty tricks are not limited to the libertarians and the Republicans and there is almost no discussion of foreign policy issues. But readers will at least learn to distrust the spewing from deceptively named think tanks and some so-called charities. (The Economist is particularly fond of quoting the reports from think tanks without revealing their funding sources.) If nothing else the documentation here will go a long way to disabuse anyone who still thinks that the U.S. is a democracy.
The Passionate Reader 