Killing the Messenger Read online

  Richard Mellon Scaife may be gone. He redeemed himself in the end by making up with the man he unjustly tried to destroy. But, as in any good comic book, the dark forces have emerged even stronger. Don’t expect them to learn from Scaife’s apology.

  The day after I spoke at the Clinton School in Arkansas in March 2014, my phone rang. It was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who had read about my speech in the papers. He told me he appreciated everything I’d done for the Clintons—but what, he asked, are you doing for me?

  I didn’t know how to respond. “What should I be doing?” I asked. The conversation would be the beginning of our fight against the dominant figures of the vast right-wing conglomerate, two wealthy industrialist brothers from Wichita, Kansas, named Charles and David Koch.

  Reid, as he explained, had gone out on a limb, publicly and repeatedly blasting the Koch brothers, who by 2014 had emerged as the biggest threat to Reid’s Senate majority, pumping what would end up being hundreds of millions of dollars into defeating Democratic candidates around the country.

  Reid’s attacks were enormously controversial among Democrats. For all the time they had spent complaining about the pernicious influence of big-money Republican SuperPACs, few on the left thought it would do any good to make the Kochs themselves an issue. After all, Democrats had plenty of wealthy backers, and they worried that Reid’s strategy might come off as hypocritical and potentially offend important left-wing donors. Besides, most Democrats believed highlighting the Kochs’ spending threatened to distract from their main messages: underscoring Republicans’ extremist policies and promoting a middle-class economic agenda.

  I certainly didn’t think that campaign finance reform was going to be the issue that helped Democrats survive the ugly Senate map in 2014; indeed, as I described in the last chapter, I thought that Democrats had long overestimated the political value of being on the side of the angels when it came to SuperPACs.

  But Reid didn’t simply want to go after the Kochs because they were major contributors to the ongoing subversion of our democracy. He wanted to talk about what these guys believed, and why they were spending all this money, and what they planned to get in return, and, critically, what that would mean for everyday Americans. He wanted to focus less on the ugly process of turning campaigns into auctions, and more on the outcomes that would result if the Kochs ended up being the high bidders.

  The majority leader wasn’t just guessing. Private focus-group research that we had access to suggested that while voters did believe that there was too much money in politics, they weren’t terribly alarmed, much less outraged, at the sheer magnitude of the Koch spending.

  They had a much stronger, more negative reaction when told about the Koch agenda and how it would affect them.

  The data showed that we could persuade voters to reject Koch candidates, but only if we showed them that the brothers were funding politicians who would help them greedily line their own pockets while undermining education, taking away health-care benefits, privatizing Medicare, and otherwise turning a cold shoulder to the concerns of the public. Two billionaires spending a bunch of money was one thing; two billionaires buying up political offices so they can increase their own bottom line at the expense, say, of clean water or workplace safety was something else entirely.

  But with few other Democrats interested in making this argument, Reid was on his own. And drawing the link between the Kochs’ spending, the right-wing agenda they were pushing, and the tangible impact those policies would have on their profit margins as well as on the lives of most Americans would take research, lots of it; Reid just didn’t have the kind of operation that would allow him to prove the case.

  But war rooms? We knew how to do that. I thought Reid was on to something important. And so we quickly launched a project called RealKochFacts, designed to educate voters about the threat posed by the brothers’ self-serving political agenda.

  It was an ambitious undertaking, and, as always, we started with primary source documents, the holy grail of all research efforts. Our team craves raw material. We once went through twenty-seven thousand pages of documents related to Scott Walker’s corruption investigation in ten hours. We once sent a team to New Jersey to get 911 tapes from local police after Chris Christie shut down a bridge there, finding a computer café to send the audio back to headquarters, where forty people managed to listen to forty-five hours of tape in just an hour and a half. We once ventured to Massachusetts in search of old footage of Mitt Romney talking about health care; told that the relevant video archives were available only on VHS, we paid to digitize them all—a gift from us to the people of the Commonwealth; and it was a few thousand dollars well spent, as it yielded proof of his flip-flopping on the issue of the individual mandate for health-care coverage.

  And now, as we began our investigation of the Kochs, we sent a researcher to the University of Virginia, where the Libertarian Party (the home of the Kochs’ political activities during the 1970s and early 1980s) keeps its archives.

  The files are stored in old boxes; the university’s librarian told us that they hadn’t been opened since the day they were put away. In a dark basement on the gorgeous UVA campus, our researcher spent two days inhaling dust and carefully sifting through the yellowing papers. We paid to digitize old reel-to-reel films that hadn’t been touched in decades, worried that any attempt to play the reels in their current condition would cause them to disintegrate or burst into flames. And what we found would help to paint a gothic picture of the two most powerful unelected men in America.

  As part of this project, I spend a lot of time speaking about the Kochs publicly, where audiences already cringe at the mention of the Koch name. But when I tell Democrats and progressives about today’s vast right-wing conglomerate—when I show them how deeply the Kochs’ influence has penetrated into our political system at the expense of the prosperity of everyday Americans—they seem shocked all over again, as if there’s no precedent for the kind of coordinated, sinister effort the Kochs are mounting.

  Progressives who want to win need to understand what we’re up against. Richard Mellon Scaife was able to pump unlimited money into destroying Democrats without anybody in the mainstream media ever bothering to shine a light on the man behind the curtain. If the same mistake is made again, there’s no telling how much damage the Kochs could do operating in the shadows. If we want to elect Hillary Clinton in 2016—indeed, if we want to move the progressive project forward at all in the years to come—we don’t just have to beat the Republicans. We have to expose the Koch brothers.

  When you imagine the Koch brothers, it’s hard not to think of the 1983 film Trading Places, which featured as its villains a pair of brothers, commodity brokers named Randolph and Mortimer Duke. Bored with their millions, the Duke brothers decide to frame an employee for theft and drug dealing while offering riches to a street hustler—just to see what would happen.

  The Kochs, of course, aren’t in it for fun. They’re in it for profit. Their family company, Koch Industries, is the second-largest privately held corporation in the country. And while there’s little doubt that Charles and David are both sincere in their right-wing ideology, it helps to understand that the Kochs aren’t spending their fortune attempting to sway elections simply because they see doing so as a contribution to their country. They’re doing it because they see it as an investment in their company.

  Back in the late 1970s, a federal audit found their company guilty of violating energy price controls (which Charles considered to be “socialistic measures”). A Koch subsidiary was ultimately faced with a $10 million fine.

  When most people find themselves running afoul of the law, they might change their ways. When the Koch brothers found themselves running afoul of the law, David Koch decided to run for office so that he could change the law. And that was exactly what he did, joining the Libertarian ticket as its vice presidential candidate in the 1980 election. (One of the documents we found in the basement
at the University of Virginia was a letter from Koch to Libertarian delegates pointing out a loophole in campaign finance laws that would allow him to bankroll the entire campaign if he was placed on the ticket.)

  If you think back to 1980, you’ll remember that conservatives really didn’t have much reason to be upset with the Republican Party nominee, Ronald Reagan. For more than a decade, he had been a visible and vocal advocate for right-wing policies, a true believer who was now running on a platform of free-market economics, a militant foreign policy, and all the other things that make conservatives want to stand up and cheer. Even better, he was looking like a huge favorite to beat the pants off of Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter.

  But the Libertarian ticket, with a smooth-talking lawyer named Ed Clark at the top and forty-year-old David Koch riding shotgun, felt that Ronald Reagan simply wasn’t conservative enough. Indeed, we found a letter they wrote to Reagan demanding that he stop describing himself as a “libertarian.”

  Reagan famously said that “government isn’t the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” But in the eyes of Clark and Koch, that just meant Reagan was soft on government. To them, government wasn’t just the problem, it was the enemy, and these guys meant to crush it. As Charles Koch put it, “Our goal is not to reallocate the burden of government; our goal is to roll back government.”

  These weren’t empty threats. The Libertarian platform (which was nothing more than the Koch platform) proposed to take a sledgehammer to the basic functions of government. They wanted to abolish the Federal Reserve, the Department of Energy, the Department of Education—and that was just for starters. Also on the hit list would be the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates Wall Street, and the Federal Election Commission, which regulates campaign spending. Gone as well would be the Small Business Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, because in David Koch’s America, workers should be free to get sick and die from asbestos poisoning.

  Oh, and they wanted to get rid of the minimum wage, zero out federal spending on highways, and abolish Social Security, which the Koch ticket called “the most serious threat to the future of stability of our society next to the threat of nuclear war.”

  David Koch campaigned on this platform in states across the country. And, to their credit, the American people recognized it for what it was: a radical and dangerous ideology that would have increased the power of America’s wealthiest, blown up the safety net for America’s poorest, and left the government completely unable to do anything to sustain and protect the middle class. Even in the big Reagan election when America cut its hair, put on a suit, and signed up for an experiment in conservative governance, the Libertarian ticket was able to earn just over 1 percent of the national vote.

  “As a candidate,” David Koch ruminated, “meeting only libertarians, it seemed to me that everyone was voting for us. We all got a little too optimistic.” He was living in a bubble.

  While the Koch brothers may have overestimated the popular appeal of taking a wrecking ball to the federal government, they weren’t oblivious. They quickly came to understand that the American people weren’t buying what they were selling. And if they wanted their ideas to win the day, well, then it was time for Charles and David to start buying—not acquiring other companies now, but instead taking over the Republican infrastructure. Instead of running as Libertarians, they would be Republicans—their version of Trading Places.

  The brothers decided to make three tactical changes. First, instead of fronting their right-wing policies, the brothers would start funding them. Second, instead of attempting to run to the right of the Republican Party as Libertarians, they would simply try to pull the Republican Party to the right from the inside. Third, instead of plowing their money into any one campaign, they would follow the well-trod path of becoming conservative institution builders—one they had already begun to follow in 1977, when Charles founded the Cato Institute, which would quickly become one of the nation’s premier right-wing think tanks.

  It would be, in the words of Charles Koch, a “vertically and horizontally integrated” strategy, “from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organization to lobbying to litigation to political action.” This would require the creation of a whole network of groups, each devoted to tackling a different piece of the Kochs’ vision—and each fully committed to their right-wing ideology. As David put it, “If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent.”

  There’s no way of knowing how much money the Koch brothers have spent on this project over the last thirty years or so, since so much of it has been and continues to be spent in secret. But if you look at conservative infrastructure, you see their fingerprints everywhere. Let’s follow the money.

  Take the Mercatus Center, a policy incubator at George Mason University that the Wall Street Journal has called “the most important think tank you’ve never heard of” and a recipient of at least $14 million in Koch funding.

  When the Environmental Protection Agency announced new measures to reduce ozone pollution in 1997, it was a Mercatus economist who made the novel argument that smog-free skies might lead to more cases of skin cancer. A few years later, the DC Circuit Court actually ruled that the EPA had “explicitly disregarded” the “possible health benefits of ozone” and decided in favor of the polluters.

  Now, you may think that the judges who bought the Mercatus economist’s argument would have been concerned about the fact that the economist was funded by two brothers who, as owners of oil refineries that contributed heavily to ozone pollution, had a direct financial stake in overturning the proposed regulation.

  But you’d be underestimating the Kochs.

  You see, the judges who ruled in favor of the polluters had previously received trips to a ranch in Montana for what were essentially junkets. These vacations—excuse me, legal retreats—had been arranged by the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE). And you’ll never guess who funded FREE. Yup: Charles and David Koch. But in Koch world nothing is really FREE. They get what they pay for.

  The Kochs’ think tanks weren’t just there to harass Democratic policy makers. As they became more and more influential, they began to substitute for the policy-making apparatus of the Republican Party itself—and when Republicans took the White House in 2000, the Bush administration drew heavily on the brainpower of the Koch institutions to set the agenda.

  For example, when the Bush administration began soliciting suggestions for regulations to eliminate, the Mercatus Center was ready with a list—and, in the end, fourteen out of the twenty-three regulations on the administration’s “hit list” came straight from the Kochs’ think tank. Again, the Kocus got what they paid for.

  As vast right-wing conspiracies go, a wide-ranging, well-funded, and deeply influential network of think tanks and policy shops isn’t a bad start. But what makes the Koch brothers uniquely threatening to democracy is that they didn’t stop at building a mechanism to influence elites. They hired some foot soldiers, too. In 1984, they launched Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), their first attempt to foment a mass movement of antigovernment zealots. CSE would later branch off into a few different organizations.

  One would be called Americans for Prosperity (AFP), which would become the grassroots army the Kochs had long lusted after. Indeed, AFP would go on to become the single most influential independent expenditure group in America, feared by Democrats who knew that the group could spend practically unlimited funds on negative ads and by Republican candidates who knew that falling out of favor with AFP was akin to losing your next primary.

  Ask conservative true believers about the Tea Party, and they’ll tell you that, as in 1776, America was in danger of succumbing under the boot heel of tyranny. Government had grown too large, too powerful, too, well, tyrannical. And the American people had had enough.
Then, a prophet emerged: On February 19, 2009, a cable news talking head named Rick Santelli, outraged at President Obama’s attempt to help struggling homeowners stave off foreclosure, went on a televised rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange—his own version of the “mad as hell” speech from the movie Network.

  Channeling Santelli’s outrage—and his suggestion that perhaps a “Chicago Tea Party” was in order to protest the president’s actions—the Tea Party supposedly emerged as an authentic grassroots expression of the country’s rage at Comrade Obummer’s dastardly attempts to bail out the electric car companies, give free health care to illegal immigrants, and replace the Bible in every American hotel room with a copy of Chairman Mao’s little red book.

  This was the myth they told as the Tea Party became an ascendant force in American politics, and it was a complete fairy tale.

  To be sure, conservatives were legitimately unhappy about the economic stimulus package that passed in 2009, as well as the Affordable Care Act enacted in early 2010. And much of the anger that got vented at Democratic officeholders during a series of tumultuous town hall meetings—in which angry citizens attempted to recreate Santelli’s moment by screaming at their representatives about tyranny—was heartfelt. Conservatives really were mad that an (African-American) Democratic president was implementing a center-left agenda. Whipped up by the likes of Glenn Beck, some may have honestly believed that the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act really was a prelude to an Orwellian society in which dissenters were ushered into FEMA camps.

  But while the Tea Party may have been a reflection of authentic anger, that anger was funded, organized, channeled, and directed by Americans for Prosperity, along with FreedomWorks (another of the splinter groups that formed out of Citizens for a Sound Economy). Those organizations were responsible for many of the Tea Party’s activities—organizing conference calls and rallies, writing and disseminating talking points, buying Web domains, and planning protests. In that way, the Tea Party wasn’t a spontaneous outpouring of grassroots energy. It was the Koch brothers and their allies putting on a show—and finally building (or buying) their grassroots movement.