Chapter review: The Spoils: Plundering Congress

The Spoils: Plundering Congress is chapter 11 of Jane Mayer’s 2017 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Mayer has been an investigative reporter at New York Magazine since 1995. Chapter 11 is in part three of her book which is entitled, Privatizing Politics: Total Combat, 2011-2014. Given titles like that, one can imagine where this little review is going to go.

This chapter details several important things. One is the rise of tax cuts for the top 0.1% and cuts in domestic spending that billionaire Republican donors demanded. Another traces the loss of power by the Republican Party and its purchase by billionaires who bought Republican candidates for congress. 

Chapter 11, like the rest of the book is reasonably readable for general audiences. But it is dense with details and facts, which are backed up by 51 pages of citations to information sources. The content is based on work that Mayer did as a journalist over about a 30 year period, starting in the 1980s. A post on part of the book is here.

Mayer’s other book

Mayer starts the chapter with this accurate quote by billionaire Warren Buffett: There’s class warfare all right. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.

Some key facts and points:

• Republican billionaire donors, like the Koch brothers (only Charles is still alive, David died in 2019), usually operate in as much secrecy as they can, but their power and reach are staggering. They have taken control of the Republican Party and ruthlessly use their power to enrich themselves and increase their power, while claiming that what they do is for our good. They hate government and government regulations. They hate domestic spending programs and want to eliminate all Medicare, Medicaid and other major safety net spending. The donors literally see this as a necessary and moral thing to do. 

• In an apparently unguarded moment in 2011, just before John Boehner was sworn in as House Speaker for the 112th Congress, David Koch answered a reporter’s questions. In response to a question about what he wanted from Boehner and the new Republican House, David said: “Well, cut the hell out of spending, balance the budget, reduce regulations, and uh, support business!” He and the rest of his donor class saw it the same way.

• Some of the billionaire donor class propaganda claimed that the GOP favored personal charity over government spending on safety nets, because individual people should be free to spend on charity. Charles Koch, saw it a bit differently, arguing in a speech that, like Maimonides (a influential medieval Sephardic Jewish Torah philosopher, 1138-1204) he saw the highest form of charity as paying no taxes to government and no charity to anyone. Charles commented: “I agree with the 12th century philosopher, Maimonides, who defined the highest form of charity as dispensing with charity altogether, by enabling your fellow humans to have the wherewithal to earn their own living.” One expert on Maimonides, a university professor who taught classes on him, commented “This is false and tendentious and idiotic.” He argued that Maimonides wrote that “he who averts his eyes from the obligation of charity is regarded as a villain.” For whatever reason, the billionaires seem to feel a need to try justify themselves and their policies, which invariably adds to their own power and wealth. Maybe this mental gymnastics gives them a fig leaf to hide the social, governmental and environmental wreckage their core policies leave behind. Regardless they are either just bad liars or blind motivated reasoners. At best, Republican billionaire moral philosophy and morality sucks.

•  The Kochs were radical libertarians and that is what their money bought and still buys. Hate of government and regulation were at the core of their scared laissez-faire capitalist ideology. In an essay, Charles wrote: “Morally, lowering taxes is simply defending property rights.” He argued that it was a moral imperative for the wealthy to cut their own taxes. Money is property and taxes take some if it. Another billionaire, Foster Friess (a Christian nationalist who claimed ownership of a business with $15 billion in 2020, he died in 2021), tried to be a bit more nuanced about the morality of not paying taxes. He argued that “wealthy people self-tax” by contributing to charities, commenting “It's that top 1% that probably contributes more to making the world a better place than the 99%.” (Some data helps put that in context. In 2017, total contributions to charities by all Americans were about $390 billion. Over their lifetimes, the top 25 billionaires gave $149 billion as of 2019, but getting accurate numbers is hard because of complexities in how billionaires do charity, some of which is self-serving and some of which is to political action committees and political campaigns, etc. Maybe billionaires aren’t better than the 99% at making the world a better place, especially since some of their charity spending is offset by the damage social and environmental their policies inflict -- they ignore that part.)

• Coordinated campaign contributions and a relentless public propaganda campaign got the Republican Party in congress to oppose efforts to deal with climate change. Republicans in congress who wanted to act on the climate issue, were threatened with being primaried by a well-funded opponent. One happy donor operative commented that the tactic of threatening to primary a reluctant congressman was so effective it caused them to “pee their pants.” Republican climate polluting efforts the billionaire-tamed House put forward included proposed legislation to (i) block all legislation to deal with climate change, and (ii) requiring the EPA to consider costs of regulations, while ignoring the science about pollutants and any health impacts on humans. The billionaires hate the government trying to protect the environment. One billionaire operative, Tim Phillips (president of Americans for Prosperity, an influential Koch-funded political advocacy organization) was tickled pink at how effective billionaire cash was in setting the GOP straight about climate change. He commented to the National Journal: “Most of these candidates have figured out that the science has become political. We’ve made great headway. The vast majority of people who are involved in the [Republican] nominating process -- the conventions and the primaries -- are suspect of the science. Groups like Americans for Prosperity have done it.” Koch industries was one of America's top polluters and Koch money was hell bent on keeping the the pollution freely flowing, regardless of who or what it killed.  

• The billionaires like to operate quietly in public, while they and their lobbyists exert pressure behind closed doors. A former associate claimed that Koch family patriarch, Fred had a saying he liked to use: “The whale that spouts is the one that gets harpooned.” That sums it up nicely. Billionaires really are whales, but they just need to breathe quietly in the dark. 

• The Republican billionaires play hardball politics. They rely on lies and slanders when they think they can get away with it, and sometimes even when they know they can’t. For example, in August 2010, Mayer wrote, and New York Magazine published, a long article about Koch brother influence on the GOP. The Kochs were enraged and caught flat footed. They thought they and their billionaire peers could buy a major American political party and no one would notice or comment on it. In response the Kochs hired a new team of public relations propagandists who specialized in aggressive, hard ball tactics. One of them, Michael Goldfarb, had worked on Sarah Palin's vice presidential campaign. He had founded the Washington Free Beacon, a radical right propaganda and lies source whose motto was “do unto them.” He described his job as “attack the press” using “combat journalism” against “liberal gasbags.” The Kochs’ tactics included hiring a private investigator to find dirt on Mayer to smear her with. That failed so the propagandists made up a potentially career-ending lie that Mayer had plagiarized four journalists in various stories she wrote and had published. She found out about the impending story that the radical right propaganda and lies source The Daily Caller (one of seven big conservative politics sites that banned me from commenting in 2016), edited by Tucker Carlson (at the radical right CATO institute at the time), was planning to publish. Mayer realized that if the Koch slanders published, her career would be seriously damaged, even if it was later disproven. People remember juicy lies against evil journalists much better than they remember the later truth, assuming they even hear the truth in their echo chambers, which they usually don’t. (Hence the dangers of lies and smears in hyper-partisan echo chambers.) Once she understood the danger her career was in, Mayer contacted the journalists she would be falsely accused of  plagiarizing and asked them to look at the allegations and comment. Three of the four asserted in writing she had not plagiarized their work. Later the fourth said they were not plagiarized. Mayer found out that The Daily Caller had not even bothered to contact any of the journalists it had planned to cite as Mayer’s victims. Mayer then sent the real facts to The Daily Caller, which then confirmed them and dropped the story before they published it. Another reporter who was aware of all of this sleaze asked the Kochs if they were behind it, but their spokesman refused to answer any questions. He then contacted Carlson (a self-confessed (under oath in court) professional liar, now lying to audiences at Fox News) and asked who the source of the Mayer smears was. Carlson responded with, “I have no clue where we got it.” Good old plausible deniability -- the best friend of liars, crooks, tax cheats, traitors and thugs the world over.

• Over time, the billionaires got their money’s worth from their corrupted, captured and radicalized Republican Party. Yes indeed, the billionaires really did radicalize the GOP. Politicians who hesitated to radicalize and tow the line were either RINO hunted out of the party into retirement or primaried out in the next election. The tax rate on billionaires dropped to levels below average taxpayers making less than $50,000 per year. In the past, they paid much higher tax rates to pay for things like wars and safety net programs. They fixed that problem by forcing government into creating endless new debt. That allowed themselves to keep their loot mostly intact. Some of the tax breaks they bought were potentially worth tens of billions to the 16 wealthiest families in America, e.g., estate tax reductions. Campaign contributions, a/k/a/ free speech, really does have great value. Of course, that assumes you have enough cash to make your free speech heard above all the other free speech out there. Given how pay-to-play politics works, all the other speech is just white noise that Republican politicians can and do safely ignore.