'Dark Money': New Book About the Koch Brothers

From an NYT review:

When Jane Mayer published her 10,000-word article about Charles and David Koch in The New Yorker in August 2010, David Koch denounced her piece in print and, as she reports in her new book, “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” a “private investigative firm with powerful political and law enforcement connections was retained.” While there was no hard evidence on who had hired the firm, “clues leading back to the Kochs were everywhere.”

That effort may have backfired: Since that first article, Ms. Mayer has followed the trail of the tax-deductible “dark money” the brothers have secretly donated to political causes; absorbed the work of dozens of outstanding independent investigative journalists; ferreted out articles, speeches and interviews the brothers, or their advisers, have given, many of them quite revelatory; and secured access to previously unpublished sources.


Father of Koch Brothers Helped Build Nazi Oil Refinery, Book Says
“Dark Money,” the result of Ms. Mayer’s research, is a persuasive, timely and necessary story of the Koch brothers’ empire. It may read overly long and include some familiar material, but only the most thoroughly documented, compendious account could do justice to the Kochs’ bizarre and Byzantine family history and the scale and scope of their influence.

Ms. Mayer begins with Fred Koch, the family patriarch. “Oddly enough,” she writes, “the fiercely libertarian Koch family owed part of its fortune to two of history’s most infamous dictators, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler,” for whose regimes Mr. Koch’s company built oil refineries in the 1930s...

RW note: A lot needs to be researched and revealed about the Koch brothers role in attempting to derail principled libertarian advocacy. Unfortunately, it does not appear this is the book. Though it should fill in the blanks on some Koch activities.

We are talking a book with an extreme lefty/CIA stance. More from the review:

The 1980 platform of the Libertarian Party, to which the Koch brothers provided financial support and on which David Koch ran for vice president, offered a preview of their anti-government zealotry. The Libertarians opposed federal income and capital gains taxes. They called for the repeal of campaign finance laws; they favored the abolition of Medicaid and Medicare and advocated the abolition of Social Security and the elimination of the Federal Election Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. “The platform was, in short,” Ms. Mayer concludes, “an effort to repeal virtually every major political reform passed during the 20th century.”

Not surprisingly, given the extremism of their views, which William F. Buckley Jr. characterized as “Anarcho-Totalitarianism,” the Libertarians polled less than 1 percent of the votes.

Buckley was, of course, a tool of the CIA.




  -RW