How Dark Money, Political Think Tanks, and Billionaire Kingmakers Influence Our Political System
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” -Louis Brandeis
I’m not the type of person who generally writes about politics. I normally don’t even post political content on social media because I want to stay above the fray.
But with all of the current unrest in U.S. politics, I’ve decided to learn more about the hidden forces that shape our political system.
I just finished reading Dark Money by Jane Mayer. Mayer is an award-winning staff writer for The New Yorker, and her book unearths a number of appalling things about how money has corrupted American politics.
Here are the five biggest revelations from Mayer’s research:
1. Secretive nonprofits and think tanks often funnel money into political activities while obfuscating the donor records.
“In 2013, there were over a hundred thousand private foundations in the United States with assets of over $800 billion. These peculiarly American organizations, run with little transparency or accountability to either voters or consumers yet publicly subsidized by tax breaks, have grown into 800-billion-pound Goliaths in the public policy realm.” -Jane Mayer
Can you guess what these organizations with snooze-worthy names have in common?
- The Heritage Foundation
- The Institute for Humane Studies
- The Cato Institute
- Americans for Prosperity
All of the organizations above are nonprofit organizations or think tanks whose goal is to weaponize donations for political purposes. This “dark money” cannot be tracked back to the hands of the original donors because nonprofits are not required to disclose their donors.
Donating to “Americans for Prosperity” sounds much less political than donating to something like the Republican National Committee. And donations to political operations like the RNC are not tax-deductible, whereas all of the entities bulleted above are tax-deductible 501(c)(3) organizations.
So what do those nonprofit organizations do with the donations they receive? Keep reading.
2. Billionaire donors get tax benefits for philanthropy, but they still control how the money is spent.
“People say, ‘Wow — they’re so generous!’ It’s just the best available option for them. If they didn’t give it to their causes, they would have to give it to the government. At least this way they control how it’s spent.” -Gus diZerega, former friend of Charles and David Koch, talking about their philanthropy
The overarching purpose of these foundations is to give rich and powerful people the ability to get tax breaks while still pushing a specific agenda.
Jane Mayer writes extensively about the political power exerted by billionaires like Charles and David Koch. When Mayer published Dark Money in 2016, the Koch brothers were each worth about $40 billion, putting each of them on the list of the top ten richest people in the world. (Note: David passed away in 2019.) They are the embodiment of the 1 percent.
The Kochs and other billionaires have poured tens of millions of tax-deductible dollars into the politically-minded nonprofits listed above.
Their donations to the Heritage Foundation have helped eliminate some of the regulations on the oil and gas industry, saving billions of dollars for the donors who own energy companies.
Their donations to the Institute for Humane Studies have injected political propaganda into college courses, influencing the minds of future Senators, Presidents, and Supreme Court Justices.
Their donations to the Cato Institute have helped oppose climate change regulations and campaign finance reform.
Their donations to Americans for Prosperity have fueled Tea Party protests and paid for television advertisements to fight taxes on the rich.
Donations to other similar organizations went toward fighting safety regulations and environmental standards, fostering voter distrust in American government, and manipulating voting district boundary lines to give a political edge to a specific party (a process known as gerrymandering).
Mayer writes: “From the start, the Kochs exerted unusually tight personal control over their philanthropic endeavors. ‘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,’ David Koch has acknowledged. ‘And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with,’ he told [magazine editor Brian Doherty], ‘we withdraw funding.’”
3. Donors have begun funding think tanks and scientists to create doubt about the science behind climate change.
“The early think tank was not a spy operation, but it was funded by wealthy men who had no objections to using pretexts and disinformation in the service of what they regarded as a noble cause.” -Jane Mayer
Rich and powerful people have known for centuries that one of the best ways to fight information is with disinformation.
After loads of research showed the dangerous effects of smoking, tobacco companies paid scientists to manufacture doubt about the science. The tobacco counter-narrative kept some smokers from snubbing out their cigarettes — thus killing many more smokers in the process.
Just as cancer research threatened tobacco companies, climate change science threatens oil and gas companies. And who owns the oil and gas companies? Billionaires like the Koch brothers and their posse.
To protect their profits, the Kochs and other rich donors have funneled millions of dollars of “charitable donations” into think tanks and other organizations that are generating climate change counter-science. For example, Mayer says the Kochs alone spent $25 million fighting climate reform from 2005–2008. To put that figure in context, that is three times the amount that ExxonMobil (the world’s largest public oil company) spent fighting climate reform during that same time.
Even the President of Americans for Prosperity has admitted that his nonprofit is trying to muddy the water on climate change:
“Most of these candidates have figured out that the science has become political. We’ve made great headway. What it means for candidates on the Republican side is, if you…buy into green energy or you play footsie on this issue, you do so at your political peril. The vast majority of people who are involved in the [Republican] nominating process — the conventions and the primaries — are suspect of the science. And that’s our influence. Groups like Americans for Prosperity have done it.” -Tim Phillips
It’s deeply unnerving that even science can be politicized. And the money and influence of the billionaire donors eventually pushed more politicians to deny climate change science. Mitt Romney was one high-profile example of a politician who changed his tune. Romney had written and spoken about the dangers of global warming until late in his 2012 Presidential campaign, when he reversed course in time to speak at a high-profile Americans for Prosperity event in front of David Koch and other potential donors.
4. Donors are injecting money into education to create a pipeline of new political talent educated by conservative ideology.
“Through these carefully curated programs, the foundation trained the next generation of conservatives, whom [Olin Foundation Executive Director Michael] Joyce likened to ‘a wine collection’ that would grow more valuable as its members aged, increasing in stature and power.” -Jane Mayer
Conservative donors recognized that they could not only wage a war for control of today’s political landscape, but also for tomorrow’s. So donors like Charles and David Koch began a subtle campaign to fund libertarian- and conservative-minded college courses, endowed chairs, and even new college majors.
As described by James Piereson, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, one goal of philanthropists was to create “beachheads” at “the most influential schools in order to gain the greatest leverage.” The donors pay for endowed chairs where they ensure to institute a professor who aligns with their political philosophy.
“Often a program can be given a philosophical or principled identity by giving it the name of an important historical figure, such as the James Madison Program [in] American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University,” said Piereson.
A politically-minded organization called the Olin Foundation (backed by money from conservative billionaires) bankrolled a new university major for lawyers called “Law and Economics.” As with all of these subtle political ploys, the name sounds innocuous enough. But the program’s intention was to influence tomorrow’s lawyers, Federal Court judges, Supreme Court justices, Senators, and Presidents to embrace conservative constitutional law ideals.
In the late 1980s, the Olin Foundation shuffled over $10 million to Harvard, $7 million to Yale and Chicago, and millions more to other prestigious law programs like Columbia, Cornell, and Georgetown to underwrite the brunt of the costs of the Law and Economics program at those schools.
The result? By 1990, almost 80 law schools had a Law and Economics program. The Olin Foundation also launched Law and Economics seminars that became an all-expenses-paid bacchanal for judges. According to Mayer, “By one count, 40 percent of the federal judiciary participated, including the future Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Clarence Thomas.”
Forty percent. Piereson later said the beauty of the Law and Economics push was that it was a stealthy political attack that no one saw coming.
5. Donors have become kingmakers, and politicians must pay obeisance to them.
“Let’s call the system that Citizens United and other rulings and laws have created what it is: an oligarchy. The system is controlled by a handful of ultra-wealthy people, most of whom got rich from the system and who will get richer from the system.” -Mark McKinnon, centrist political consultant
The Koch brothers hold semi-annual private donor summits with fellow billionaires and multi-millionaires to raise money for their politically philanthropic organizations. Their donor network aimed to spend $889 million during the 2016 election. Nearly one billion dollars — all on a single election cycle — and much of it was fully tax-deductible.
Many of the biggest names in politics have attended the Koch summits, including current and former political figures like Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was an honored speaker at the June 2014 Koch donor summit. At the summit, he thanked Charles and David and said, “I don’t know where we would be without you.”
As Mayer shares, “Soon after he was sworn in [as Senate Majority Leader], McConnell hired a new policy chief — a former lobbyist for Koch Industries. McConnell then went on to launch a stunning all-out war on the Environmental Protection Agency, urging governors across the country to refuse to comply with its new restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.”
Politicians who have suckled at the teat of billionaire donors find ways to pay back the debts they owe. Those debts are often paid with policy changes that shave millions off the individual or corporate taxes of the donors.
As Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says, “Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth.”
Jane Mayer’s research changed my perspective on politics and democracy. I was saddened, disappointed, and angered to learn about dark money’s influence on our political system. I knew our system was rigged for the rich, but I didn’t realize that the rigging was so robust, so corrupt, and so obscured from public oversight.
Our system turns billionaire donors into anonymous kingmakers who can influence our nation’s policy, education system, and highest political offices. Although money may buy power, it shouldn’t be able to buy anonymous, unchecked power. And unfortunately, it sounds like that’s exactly what’s been happening in modern political philanthropy.
We are ever-becoming a nation that favors the wealthy, which will have disastrous effects on our democracy. As President Barack Obama once said, “[T]he nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.”
This isn’t the type of article with a happy ending. There’s no quick fix to the problems described above. However, there are many incremental fixes we can make as a society, and many of those incremental fixes come back to mandating greater transparency. We, the American people, need more transparency into who is funding scientific research and for what purpose, who is creating new legal programs on college campuses and what they’re receiving for those donations, and which political candidates have received donations from billionaires and large corporations.
In the words of former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
