Charles and David expanded their father’s primary businesses of oil pipelines and refineries by diversifying into lumber and paper, coal, chemicals, commodities and futures trading, turning the Wichita-based Koch Industries into the second largest private company in the USA. Following their father’s death in 1967, they inherited the family’s company alongside siblings Bill and Fred, eventually buying them out in 1980. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right meets the task emphatically, meticulously investigating the cast of characters that Mayer argues are debasing the political system.Ĭentral to Mayer’s examination are the lives and careers of Charles and David Koch, commonly known as the Koch brothers. The opaque nature of political finance in America means that unravelling the complex web of the super-wealthy’s influence – or, as former president Barack Obama described it, the ‘unlimited, untraceable spending hiding behind non-profit front groups and public relations agencies’ – is a vast challenge. Jane Mayer, a writer for New Yorker magazine who specialises in long-form investigative journalism, convincingly builds a case that US democracy has been systematically undermined by this small group of extremely wealthy men who are driven by greed and self-interest, effectively subjecting politics to corporate capture.
An estimated $1 billion of this amount came from a few shadowy billionaires backing the Republican Party, equalling the total raised by the millions of individual donations from private citizens. One of the most startling statistics from the 2016 US presidential election was that the estimated total campaign spend of $6.8 billion was double the expenditure of the 2012 contest. 2016.Īmerican Carnage: How Free-Market Capitalism is Destroying the USA ĭark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right. This is a thorough, meticulously researched and compelling account of the financial takeover of US democracy that unveils the otherwise hidden influence of the billionaire class, writes Peter Carrol. In Da rk Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, investigative journalist Jane Mayer reveals how a elite group of plutocrats have effectively subjected the US political system to a process akin to corporate capture.
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