For some three decades, there's been a steadily increasing flow of think-tank studies, legislative proposals, articles, books, corporate lawsuits, citizen petitions, and other efforts to push for the deregulation of most industries and the privatization or elimination of government functions. These extremist ideas have never had strong public support, yet they've moved from the back burner of American policy in the 1970s to the red-hot front burner in the Bush years -- and today we're paying the price for the adoption of these concepts at all levels of government, from privatization of local water supplies to the deregulation of Wall Street.
The different pushes to implement this anti-government ideology have come from a wide assortment of seemingly independent groups and individuals, creating a sense of broad public demand for a libertarian corporate kingdom in America. However, when you examine those pushing this dog-eat-dog ethic, chances are you'll find that they have one thing in common: funding from the Koch fortune.
The three Koch family foundations discreetly refrain from publishing the recipients of their beneficence, but some progressive watchdogs (see Do Something) have dug into the dense IRS reports that foundations must file, giving us a glimpse of the extensive right-wing web spun by this one oil family. The Kochs are not the only funders, of course -- such other far-right family foundations as Bradley, Coors, Olin, and Scaife are also major players. But the size, scope, strategic purpose, and secrecy of the Koch investments make the brothers worthy of special attention. The following list by no means covers the entirety of their network (they've put money into hundreds of groups), but it'll give you a sense of their reach into every nook and cranny of public policy.
Charles and David are not idle check-writers -- they're actively involved in the creation and running of this interconnected web of political influence and hold top positions in many groups. For example, David is board chairman of Americans for Prosperity and is on the boards of the Cato Institute and Reason Foundation, while Charles (who founded Cato in 1977) is chairman of the Institute for Humane Studies and a director of the Mercatus Center.
The focus of most political groups is to influence candidates, lawmakers, agency heads, and reporters at the top of the system. But these two brothers have been executing a concerted plan for more than 30 years not only to influence those at the top, but also to go much deeper. They spend freely on dozens of ideologically grounded, right-wing groups to influence schoolteachers and high-school curricula, state and federal judges, lawyers and legal scholars, conservative policy thinkers and media producers, city-council candidates and local party activists -- and their aim is to shove the country's national debate to the hard right, discombobulate the public's progressive wishes, and alter government policies to advance corporate interests generally and the Kochs' own interests specifically.
Here is a profile of just one of the Koch tentacles: Americans For
Prosperity. AFP, the third-largest recipient of Koch foundation
largesse, is the brothers' overtly political unit. Essentially, it is a
front group for mass-producing front groups. Much like McDonald's churns
out Big Mac franchises, AFP can pop out a grassrootsy-looking,
cookie-cutter political operation on demand.
It has a $7 million annual budget that supports dozens of GOP operatives
and former corporate PR veterans, all standing ready to assemble, fund,
staff, and package a hot-to-go front group for any issue that comes up.
Its menu includes such garnishes as hoked-up studies, alarmist talking
points, deceptive attack ads, divisive hate messages, celebrity and
religious endorsers, and a menagerie of media stunts.
AFP was launched by David Koch in 1984 as Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), a moniker it used until switching to its present name in 2003. It refuses to disclose its list of donors, but when it was known as CSE, about 70% of the $18 million it spent came from the Koch foundations. There's no reason to think that AFP is any less of a Koch-funded operation today, and David, as one of its top officers, continues to be actively engaged in directing the organization's work.
And what a piece of work it is.
Start with Tim Phillips, brought in to be AFP's president and Koch's point man in 2006. As a longtime Republican campaign director and Washington lobbyist for corporate interests, Phillips earned a reputation as one of the GOP's "Mr. Nasties," in the Karl Rovian mold.
His credits include helping George W. Bush win the pivotal 2000 GOP primary in South Carolina by spearheading a smear campaign that used images of John McCain's adopted daughter from Bangladesh to claim that he had fathered a black child; helping Saxby Chambliss defeat incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland (a highly decorated Vietnam vet who lost both legs and an arm in that war) in the 2002 Georgia election by creating a TV ad linking the Democrat to Osama bin Laden and claiming that he lacked the courage to fight terrorists; and working with super-sleaze corporate lobbyist Jack Abramoff in 1998 to stir up evangelical churches in opposition to a labor-law reform that would've ended the brutal exploitation of Chinese girls and young women enslaved in sweatshops on the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth. (Phillips rallied evangelicals by asserting that many of the Chinese workers "are exposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ" while on the islands "and return to China with Bibles in hand, so Congress should not interfere.)
At AFP, Phillips has the Kochs' deep pockets and political network at his disposal to take on a broad range of right-wing corporate causes. While the organization has 23 state "chapters" and immodestly bills itself as the nation's "premier grassroots organization," it has only 8,000 actual members, is totally controlled by corporate money, is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and is run by the exact same kind of professional political insiders it pretends to detest.
Consider the boisterous "tea bag" rebellion. No one professes more hatred for the two-party, business-as-usual political system in Washington than those angry Americans who're caught up in the tea-bag rallies. Yet unbeknownst to most of the mad-as-hellers who have showed up, it was AFP's Republican-tied lobbyists and political functionaries who cynically financed, organized, and orchestrated the very first tea-bag protest. AFP has steadily co-opted the tea-bag faction to make it a front for the corporate agenda, and many of the tea-bag groups have devolved into subsidiaries of the Republican party. Indeed, AFP has become the Astroturf-To-Go Store, fabricating and spreading fake grassroots organizations all across the country. It was especially busy during the 2008 presidential campaign and in the first year of Obama's presidency. Here are a few recent AFP-manufactured campaigns on major public-policy issues:
- PATIENTS
UNITED NOW. The website for PUN (odd choice for an acronym, huh?)
proclaims, "We are people just like you." However, that statement is
true only if you're one of the people working as paid political hacks
for AFP. PUN is nothing but a shell created by AFP's laissez-faire
corporate extremists. The goal of this front group is to kill
legislation that would restructure the rip-off health-insurance industry
so real patients can get fairly priced, quality care. In addition to
running farcical, anti-reform TV ads under PUN's name, the AFP-directed
effort has included a "Hands Off My Health Care" bus tour. Its message
wasn't subtle--a giant bloody hand was painted on the side of the bus,
and a speaker traveling with the group repeatedly compared the
Democrats' health-reform plans to the Holocaust.
- HOT-AIR TOUR. During the past two years, people in 40 cities have been greeted by the sight of a 70-foot-tall hot-air balloon drifting over them. It heralded the arrival of a barnstorming tour to expose "the ballooning costs of global warming hysteria." This stunt had a just-folks veneer on it, but it was another AFP production -- after all, as owners of the largest privately held oil corporation, the Koch brothers have a special interest in spreading denial about the existence of climate change. AFP ran ads mocking proponents of fossil fuel regulations as elitist brats more concerned about their "three homes and five cars" than about the jobs of working-class families (an incredible rhetorical gusher from a privileged billionaire like David, who lives the high life in Manhattan, where he hobnobs with the richest elites at society galas, while also owning a mansion in Aspen where he can curl up in luxury and sip fine wine from his collection of 5,000 vintage bottles). Perhaps he was tipsy on some of those grapes last fall when he attended an AFP summit of tea-party leaders and personally embraced the histrionics of a climate-denial film that accuses such leaders as Al Gore of wanting to bring back "the Dark Ages and the Black Plague."
Among AFP's other fronts are: FREE OUR ENERGY, which clamored during the 2008 election season to open up our seashores and national parks to oil drillers; NO STIMULUS, which tried to rev up the tea-party network last year to kill Obama's economic-recovery plan; and SAVE MY BALLOT, yet another "grassroots tour," this one to rail against a proposal to stop corporate intimidation of workers trying to unionize (AFP paid Joe the Plumber to front this smear campaign).
Out of the shadows
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