You wrote all that nonsense about a dystopian future and control of education and you think the “bullshit” label should go back to me?
Calm down.
The term “dark money” was chosen to sound ominous, and plenty of people use it to mean money they judge to be illegitimate.
Unions are shrinking because the manufacturing sectors where unions thrive best have been outsourced and offshored. Robert Reich noticed that back in 1991 and the picture has not improved since.
That means nothing but that most Dem pols are bought. (Republicans do not need to be bought.)
. . . it is because they do not know they are listening to the Kochs.
Isn’t that obvious? Such regulation is done to good effect in many countries that fairly count as free ones.
See post #23.
Why, yes, as a matter of fact I think it should …
[The Koch brothers] build up the think tanks that we all know, the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute — which already existed but they pour more money into it — the Cato Institute becomes the special think tank of the Koch family, and several others. And these counter-intellectual centers start waging a war of ideas. **Then they very deliberately move on into the universities too …
… one of the things that’s most important that the Kochs have done is to subsidize programs in universities and colleges all over the country.** It’s hard to count because they’re not transparent particularly, but there’s somewhere between 220 and maybe 300 universities and colleges now that have Koch-funded programs.
What they would say, of course, is, well, the universities are left-leaning and liberal — but the thing is what they’re doing is subsidizing one point of view, whereas the others have grown organically because it’s academic freedom, and that happens to be what the scholars are teaching and believing. They instead are waging a war of ideas, but one in which they push their own point of view by paying for it, and paying universities to push it. And it’s growing at a very fast clip at this point.
One of the things in the final chapter of the book, there is a tape of them talking about all of this, at one of the secret meetings the Kochs hold, with the donor group that they’ve assembled. And their operatives are saying, “We’ve created something that the other side (meaning the liberals) can’t compete with, it’s unrivaled.” And they say, “What it is is a pipeline, a talent pipeline.” And they describe it: You take the most promising students that you can convert to your point of view and you move them on through the other institutions that they’ve got, which are political think tanks, advocacy groups, turning them into people who work in their campaigns, authors, media personalities.
They talk about this in such an amazing way and openly, because they’re talking in front of their own group, that they’ve created an integrated network. And it is an integrated network.
So, yes, the “bullshit” label applies very well to your claim that none of this is happening.
You may see it that way, but nobody cares. The term “dark money” has the same idiomatic origins as “dark matter” and “dark energy” – you can’t see it in the ordinary sense, but it’s there. When I use the term, when Jane Mayer uses the term, or when scientific studies of how massive amounts of anonymous corporate money is undermining science like climate change that threatens their profits, that is the sense in which we use it – money that has been funnelled through third parties for the purpose of rendering the sources untraceable.
Your tactic of making a vague comparison between people you dislike and Hitler is brilliant! It’s amazing no one ever did that before.
But back to the point. The OP said this: “Their actual programme for the U.S. is breathtaking; eliminate all min. wages, welfare, unions, most Fed. govt agencies (not even sure if any would survive) and replace the entire constitution with a single sentence to protect property.” I challenged him to provide evidence of such a program. You linked to an agenda outline that featured topics such as education and freedom of speech, as well as golf. Now you say that it was titled “American Courage”. But we’re still waiting for any evidence to back up what the OP claimed. As neither he nor you can provide any such evidence, I’m guessing there isn’t any.
There’s also the point I made in my first post. In any case, minimum wage, welfare, unions, and federal government agencies still exist. With the exception of unions, all have expanded in recent years. So one of two things must be true. Either the Koch brothers are not influencing policy, or they aren’t influencing it in the direction that the OP claims they are.
Yeah. Of course. And entirely rightly so.
And yet it remains true that Hitler and his gang were wonderfully prone to euphemisms and loaded language, and would have given Frank Luntz a job in a heartbeat, even if he were Jewish.
And yet it remains true that Hitler and his gang were prone to euphemisms and loaded language, and would have given Frank Luntz a job in a heartbeat even if he were Jewish.
Vox.com has a nice piece today: How conservative megadonors built a shadow GOP that weakened the official party. The Koch Bros provide presentations to a hundreds of wealthy conservatives: annual dues of at least $100,000 are required to attend one of their seminars. Looking at their own contributions vastly understates their influence.
Back in 2000, the Republican Party controlled about 50% of the resources available to the right. Now it’s about 30%. They aren’t quite bit players, but I think it’s fair to characterize them as weak. How conservative megadonors built a shadow GOP that weakened the official party - Vox Meanwhile Americans for Prosperity, Karl Rove’s group, is looking forward to turning their guns on Hillary: #NeverTrump is morphing into #EventuallyTrump.
The Koch network doesn’t merely run attack ads in high profile races. They also fund $2000 glossy fliers in local (really local) elections against politicians not toeing the line.[sup]1[/sup]
The result? Half of all Republican Party voters think the wealthy pay too little in taxes. So the party wants to make them pay even less. States with Americans for Prosperity branches are more likely to pass anti-union legislation after controlling for various factors.
[sup]1[/sup] Source: A Frontline piece I saw a couple of years back. I made up the $2000 figure. Could be $10,000. I don’t remember. Work with me.
Guess again. The leaked agenda I linked to was not intended to address that, it was just an added insight supplemental to the previous link about the extreme secrecy that surrounds these sessions. The claims in the OP are supported in the cited book, in Mayer’s interviews like the one I cited, and in the various articles that Mayer has written as an investigative reporter for the New Yorker, such as this one – if you don’t understand how hardcore and determined these people are, you’re not really well informed on the issue:
The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation … As their fortunes grew, Charles and David Koch became the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America. Charles’s goal, as Doherty described it, was to tear the government “out at the root.”
… The Libertarian Party platform called for the abolition of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., as well as of federal regulatory agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Energy. The Party wanted to end Social Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control, and all personal and corporate income taxes; it proposed the legalization of prostitution, recreational drugs, and suicide. Government should be reduced to only one function: the protection of individual rights. William F. Buckley, Jr., a more traditional conservative, called the movement “Anarcho-Totalitarianism.”
You’re welcome. I just want to add a bit to what I already said in #14, on the general subject of “ain’t euphemisms wonderful”. No rational person could possibly believe that your humorously snow-white innocent interpretations of what your cherry-picked items supposedly mean have the remotest relationship to actual Koch brothers strategies. If that bullshit was what they really meant, they’d be taking it on a road trip and presenting it to first-graders as a patriotic civics lesson, not demanding extreme secrecy from all their hand-picked participants. Let’s just get past the Koch euphemisms and net it out:
[ul]
[li]“Defending First Amendment Rights” means Citizens United didn’t go nearly far enough, so let’s keep hammering away at the remaining campaign finance laws.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]The reference to online technologies and higher ed is clearly in support of the Koch strategy to continue their escalating infiltration of colleges and universities. As Dave Levinthal at the Center for Public Integrity said, “the campus of Koch Brothers Academy spans a nation”. I quoted Jane Mayer on the subject before, here’s a piece from the CPI:[/li]Political success, Kevin Gentry told a crowd of elite supporters attending the annual Koch confab in Dana Point, Calif., begins with reaching young minds in college lecture halls, thereby preparing bright, libertarian-leaning students to one day occupy the halls of political power.
“The [Koch] network is fully integrated, so it’s not just work at the universities with the students, but it’s also building state-based capabilities and election capabilities and integrating this talent pipeline,” he said.
[/ul]
[ul]
[li]“Over-criminalization: Removing Legal Barriers to Opportunity” is slightly more complicated. The Kochs have long realized that they have a PR problem that is discouraging new donors to their many political initiatives, and they’ve also been repeatedly blasted by senior government officials like Harry Reid. So in part, they do have a criminal justice initiative that is a cynical PR effort like those of the elder Rockefeller and the other robber barons to superficially redeem themselves with an image makeover. But this nifty euphemism can also refer to their longstanding desire to stop the government from regulating businesses and criminalizing things like safety and environmental violations. Koch Industries is one of the most egregious violators of environmental regulations and has been subject to record fines for repeated violations. Either way, does anyone seriously believe that the Kochs are suddenly and genuinely concerned about the prison population?[/li][/ul]
I’ll throw in another one for you:
[ul]
[li]“Energy: Changing the narrative.” It means finding new ways to deflect those pesky climate change arguments.[/li][/ul]
Interesting piece. If you look at Figure 1 about organizational resources of the left and right, the left has a higher total, roughly 3.5 billion versus 2.5 billion. I was quite surprised by this but it does suggest that while the Koch’s and similar funders may have gained influence within the Republican party, their impact on the broader balance of power in US national politics is limited.
Excellent vox.com article, thank you MfM, and it’s a perfect followon to what a number of us have been saying. The six paragraphs immediately after the orange graph (“The Rapid Growth of Americans for Prosperity”) underscore just how much power the Koch brothers have in the GOP. Democrats may have more money in formal party organizations, but the GOP is increasingly under the control of far-right organizations like AFP which is entirely run by the Kochs. Hence the GOP is losing control over its own agenda and lurching farther and farther to the right and further from any semblance of rational mainstream policies in response to these uncompromising hardcore libertarian lunatics.
I’m not sure that’s what they want, and I certainly don’t think we’re halfway there.
Again, it’s not a tautology if your solution to the problem involves some kind of limits on speech.
If they don’t, fine.
LOL. A paragraph teeming with value judgements that declares that it’s not a value judgement.
Nope.
It is not illegitimate to spend money on speech, nor is it illegitimate to speak anonymously or to spend money on speech anonymously.
There is not a single value judgment in that entire paragraph of technical definitions and descriptions.
“disguised as an ostensible grassroots movement”
“lack of accountability”
“manipulate public perceptions”
Those terms come with value judgements built in.
Nonsense. Those terms are as value-neutral as they possibly could be and still do the job. They describe real things which could not be adequately and accurately described in any other words.