Dark Money

By the end of Obama’s second month in office, Newsweek ran a tongue-in-cheek cover story asserting, “We are all socialists now,” and even the lofty New York Times picked up the right wing’s framing of Obama as outside the American mainstream. In a presidential interview, the paper asked whether he was a socialist. Obama was apparently so stunned he

Charles Koch has acknowledged that he miscalculated earlier, writing in his 2007 book, The Science of Success, “We were caught unprepared by the rapid increase in regulation.” As he explained it, “While business was becoming increasingly regulated, we kept thinking and acting as if we lived in a pure market economy.”

In the final days before the election, the Democratic Party aired a national ad accusing “Bush cronies,” Ed Gillespie and Karl Rove, and “shills for big business” of “stealing our democracy.” The spot depicted an old woman getting mugged. The image, though, was hackneyed, and the message simplistic. It was almost impossible to explain to the public

At this point, Neera Tanden believes, the president finally understood what he was up against. “I think he came in truly trying to be post-partisan,” she said. “I think it took the debt ceiling fight to make him see that they hated him more than they wanted to succeed. It was an irrational deal, driven by their funders.” Two and a half years into h

When asked in a Bloomberg television interview if, given the dire state of the economy, his own taxes should be raised, Schwarzman, who was one of the most vigorous defenders of the carried-interest loophole, suggested that, to the contrary, the poor needed to pay more. “You have to have skin in the game,” he said. “The concept that half of the pub

Citizens United and its progeny did not represent the black-and-white contrast of progressives’ nightmares so much as it clarified gray areas. But this alone was extremely important. By flashing a bright green light, the Supreme Court sent a message to the wealthy and their political operatives that when it came to raising and spending money, they

At the Freedom School, Charles became particularly enamored of the work of two laissez-faire economists, the Austrian theorist Ludwig von Mises and his star pupil, Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian exile, who visited the Freedom School. Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom had become an improbable best seller in 1944, after Reader’s Digest published a conde

Their front groups demonized the American government, casting it as the enemy rather than the democratic representative of its citizens. They defined liberty as its absence, and the unfettered accumulation of enormous private wealth as America’s purpose. Cumulatively, the many-tentacled ideological machine they built came to be known as the Kochtop

Ironically, the organization modeled itself on the Communist Party. Stealth and subterfuge were endemic. Membership was kept secret. Fighting “dirty” was justified internally, as necessary to combat the imputed treacherousness of the enemy. Welch “explicitly sought to use the same methods” he attributed to the Communists, “manipulation, deceit, and