In 2011, a blogger impersonating billionaire David Koch got through the switchboard at the Wisconsin State Capitol and was connected to Governor Scott Walker, who took time out from battling with the union protesters besieging Madison to truckle before what he thought was the great man.
Jane Mayer’s remarkable new book makes it abundantly clear that the Kochs, and the closely connected group of billionaires they’ve helped assemble, have spent thousands of times that much over the past few decades, and that in the process they’ve distorted American politics in devastating ways, impairing the chances that we’ll effectively respond to climate change, reducing voting rights in many states, paralyzing Congress, and radically ratcheting up inequality.
.. In this election cycle, for instance, the Kochs have publicly stated that they and their compatriots will spend $889 million, more than either the Republican or Democratic parties spent last time around. According to a recent analysis in Politico, their privatized political network is backed by a group of several hundred extremely rich fellow donors who often meet at off-the-record conclaves organized by the Kochs at desert resorts. It has at least 1,200 full-time staffers in 107 offices nationwide, or three and a half times as many as the Republican National Committee. They may be the most important unelected political figures in American history.
..Next, he turned to another autocrat with busy expansion plans, Adolf Hitler, traveling frequently to Germany where he “provided the engineering plans and began overseeing the construction of a massive oil refinery owned by a company on the Elbe River in Hamburg.” It turned into a crucial part of the Reich’s military might, “one of the few refineries in Germany” that could produce “the high-octane gasoline needed to fuel fighter planes.” And it turned the elder Koch into an admirer of the regime, who as late as 1938 was writing in a letter to a friend that “I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard.”
.. At first he worked through the Libertarian party, persuading David to be its vice-presidential candidate in 1980, apparently because he could self-fund his candidacy, avoiding campaign finance laws, but their poor showing—only one percent of the vote—convinced him they needed to work behind the scenes, supplying the “themes and words for the scripts,” as one colleague put it, for a revolution.
.. Several striking themes emerge.
One is that the various moguls were almost all angry at the government because it insisted on prosecuting their most egregious oversteps.
.. A second, and related, motif involves perhaps the greatest single issue of our time, climate change. “Coal, oil, and gas magnates formed the nucleus of the Koch donor network,” Mayer writes. “Guest lists for the [annual donor summits they organized at California desert resorts] read like a Who’s Who of America’s most successful and most conservative fossil fuel barons.” As a result, they had a strong vested interest in making sure that nothing was done about global warming.
.. After the ruling, Karl Rove, among others, quickly appreciated its meaning, telling a group of wealthy Dallas oilmen that “People call us a vast right-wing conspiracy, but we’re really a half-assed right-wing conspiracy. Now it’s time to get serious.”
Getting serious meant, among other things, funneling completely unprecedented amounts of money into the 2010 midterm elections—$200 million or more from “Republican-aligned independent groups.” All over the country absurd attack ads were going after incumbents—Congressman Bruce Braley of Iowa and Bob Etheridge of North Carolina were each accused of wanting to build a “mosque at Ground Zero.”
.. The most substantive part of this image-building has been a drive for criminal justice reform, in partnership with many progressive and minority leaders concerned about mass incarceration who advocate reform of sentencing. But late last fall the coalition began to falter, with many complaining that the Kochs were pushing changes to the criminal code that would make it even harder to prosecute corporate crimes—the very crimes that, as Mayer shows, most of the biggest players in their network have regularly engaged in.4
Is Miami Beach Doomed? (Video)
Miami Beach could be underwater this century. The sea level around the tourist paradise has risen steadily in recent decades and flooding in the streets has become more frequent and severe. Most of the city sits just four to five feet above sea level, and on a foundation of porous limestone—making it especially susceptible to tidal flooding and surging oceans.
As experts predict the sea level to rise significantly in the coming years, the city of Miami Beach must decide how to keep itself afloat. This documentary examines how the city has taken unprecedented steps to save itself from the sea.
One of Africa’s Biggest Dams Is Falling Apart
Mosul Dam, the largest such structure in Iraq, urgently requires maintenance to prevent its collapse, a disaster that could drown as many as five hundred thousand people downstream and leave a million homeless. Four days earlier, the energy minister of Zambia declared that Kariba Dam, which straddles the border between his country and Zimbabwe, holding back the world’s largest reservoir, was in “dire” condition.
.. In 2014, researchers at Oxford University reviewed the financial performance of two hundred and forty-five dams and concluded that the “construction costs of large dams are too high to yield a positive return.” Other forms of energy generation—wind, solar, and miniature hydropower units that can be installed inside irrigation canals—are becoming competitive, and they cause far less social and environmental damage. And dams are particularly ill-suited to climate change, which simultaneously requires that they be larger (to accommodate the anticipated floods) and smaller (to be cost-effective during the anticipated droughts).
.. But the main issue is that, like many such dams, the project shouldn’t exist in the first place. Opened in 1986, it was built on unstable gypsum bedrock, requiring grout to be constantly injected into the foundation to prevent the dam’s collapse. That work has ceased. In 2006, long before ISIS began making headlines, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers called Mosul Dam “the most dangerous dam in the world.”
.. At least three million people live in the flood’s path; most would die or lose their crops or possessions. About forty per cent of the electricity-generating capacity of twelve southern African nations would be eliminated.
.. But maintaining a dam is expensive—and much less popular than building one.
State of the Union: on Global Warming
For example, when he spoke about climate change, he said that anyone who “still wants to dispute the science” should “have at it. You will be pretty lonely, because you’ll be debating our military, most of America’s business leaders, the majority of the American people, almost the entire scientific community, and two hundred nations around the world who agree it’s a problem and intend to solve it.” The one place they wouldn’t be lonely, as it happens, is on a Republican debate stage.