The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer has been one of the most interesting chroniclers of the Bush II and post-Bush II era. She has another great addition to her portfolio in “Covert Operations” in the current New Yorker on David and Charles Koch, two billionaire owners of one of the top ten polluting companies in the US. Their dad was in on the founding of the John Birch Society. David ran as the vice-presidential nominee of the Libertarians in the 1980 election. After garnering about one percent of the vote in the 1980 Libertarian Party campaign, David and his brother decided on other political investment strategies. They provided the seed money for the Cato Institute, and, after that, an alphabet soup of other well-funded organizations we’ve never heard of. All of them have the goal of keeping the government off Koch backs and out of Koch pockets, which are much better stocked than in times gone by. In addition to being patrons of arts and museums, they have poured about $100,000,000 into the “populist” TEA Party movement, regulatory skepticism, and the climate change denial industry. There is a wing of The Smithsonian named after one of them that has a permanent display on climate change in human history. She quotes David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser, on the the strange lack of journalistic curiosity about who pays the TEA Party bills: “What they don’t say is that, in part, this is a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”
The video below is an hour-long conversation from Harry Kreisler’s Conversations with History series and deals with her book, The Dark Side.
UPDATE: Frank Rich's NYT column on August 28, 2010 "The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party" cites "Covert Operations."
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