DEMOCRACY NOW
IMAGE/Amazon
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to go back to the beginning of your book. You start the book with the inauguration of President Obama in January of 2009 and all the attention and the enthusiasm that that generated across the world and in the United States. But then you also say that that very month there was a secret meeting that was convened by the Kochs of billionaires and multimillionaires with a completely different agenda. If you could talk about that?
JANE MAYER: Yeah, well, I’m glad you ask, because the book is not just about the Kochs. And the Kochs, on their own, probably would not be able to have the kind of influence they have. But what they’ve done is kind of a magic trick. They’ve attracted around them—they’ve purposefully built what they call an unprecedented network—it’s a pipeline, they talk about it, too—where they’ve gathered about 400 other extraordinarily wealthy conservatives with them to create a kind of a billionaire caucus almost. And that’s the group that met, just as Obama was being inaugurated. Soon after that, they met to figure out: How can we obstruct this? They regarded it as a catastrophe that Obama had been elected, and they wanted to see if they could stop change from taking place in the country and keep the order the way it had been for them during the Bush years, and maybe even push it further to the right.
So this is not—it’s an organization that I think people need to understand is not just about elections. They’ve been playing a long game that started 40 years ago, when Charles Koch really got involved in politics in the beginning. And they wanted to change not just who rules the country, but how the country thinks. They’re very antigovernment. They are—and they have pushed this kind of antigovernment line for 40 years through many different channels. And it’s kind of a war of ideas as much as anything else.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, you also talk about the secrecy with which they operate. You quote Fred Koch, the family patriarch, as saying, “The whale that spouts is the one that gets harpooned.”
JANE MAYER: Yes. And so—and I’ve talked to—many operatives who have worked for the Kochs are interviewed in this book. And one of them told me, they’re not just under the radar, they are underground. And they, for many years, just were almost invisible. They used to—the Kochs, themselves, used to call Koch Industries the biggest company that you’ve never heard of. It’s the second-largest private company in America. It has $115 billion of business a year. And most people didn’t know what it was. Many Americans use their products, they don’t realize—Dixie cups, Stainmaster carpet, Lycra, Georgia-Pacific lumber, there’s Quilted Northern toilet paper. There are so many products that they’ve flooded the American market with, yet most people don’t realize that that is coming from these two brothers who own most of the company and are pouring the money into far-right-wing politics.
…
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour is Jane Mayer, staff writer for The New Yorker, author of the new book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. If you think about what’s happening in this country, the rise of inequality, why climate change action doesn’t happen in a more systemic way—many different issues—Jane Mayer talks about some of the reasons, the power blocs behind the major obstacles—the bloc. Start with where you’re getting your information.
JANE MAYER: Well, I interviewed hundreds of people for this. And there—I have many new documents also. I mean, one of the things that was interesting to me, I mean, I went into this kind of wondering why does the government seem so dysfunctional. As you said, why can’t something be done about global warming in Congress? All of the scientific community is going one way, Congress is going the other. American public opinion supports doing something about global warming, the Congress won’t do anything. What’s holding it up? Money, the fossil fuel interests and others. And you can see it in here.
There’s a—and it begins long ago. In about 1976, there was a plan laid by Charles Koch to build what he called a radical movement to change the way that America voted and thought. And he said we need to, quote-unquote, “destroy” the statist paradigm and start a movement. And he modeled it on the John Birch Society. He loved the secrecy of the John Birch Society. And there’s a paper that is quoted in here that he wrote in 1976 about how he was going to found a movement and launch it. So, this has been a long, long-running project. And he’s built it up. He’s an engineer. He’s extraordinarily wealthy. And he has worked with a number of very smart people to build this network that tries to sort of push, push, push the country in his direction.
Democracy Now for more