The Betrayal of the American Dream by Donald L. Barlett, James B. Steele Read Free Book Online

“partisan agenda.”
    The environmental group Greenpeace, which in 2010 examined just one issue on the Kochs’ agenda—their efforts to discredit scientific data about global warming—identified forty organizations to which the Koch foundations had contributed $24.9 million from 2005 to 2008 to fund what Greenpeace called a “climate denial machine.”
    The Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University has calculated that various Koch foundations contributed at least $143 million to more than two hundred groups in the three-year period 2007 to 2009. Many were colleges and cultural institutions, but others were think tanks and foundations. Based on its own research and information culled from other foundations, the Workshop estimated that the Koch foundations have contributed no less than $275 million to various groups since 1986.
    One of the most significant, ongoing recipients of the Koch largesse is the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. Mercatus, which describes itself as “the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas,” has become one of the most powerful voices in the country for right-wing economic policy. It was founded in the 1970s by Richard Fink, a long-time Koch operative who heads the brother’s multimillion-dollar operation in Washington. Charles serves on the Mercatus board, but the brothers’ chief contribution has been money. The Investigative Reporting Workshop estimated that the Koch foundations gave Mercatus and its parent, George Mason University, $11.9 million in the years 2007 to 2009. Mercatus was one of the earliest and most strident opponents of President Obama’s economic stimulus plan adopted early in 2009.
    Interest groups supported by the Kochs spew out a steady stream of position papers, congressional testimony, and public pronouncements about public policies that are detrimental to the middle class. They back unrestricted free trade and oppose even the slightest government actions that might be interpreted as protectionist, a position that has helped destroy millions of domestic manufacturing jobs. They oppose any increase in the minimum wage. In 1970, before the Kochs and right-wing groups began railing about the evils of raising the minimum wage, it was $1.60. In 2012, it was $7.25, meaning the wages of those at the bottom have not even kept pace with inflation. Koch-funded groups have supported changes in bankruptcy law that make it much more difficult for average Americans to reorganize their finances when they are plunged into debt by medical bills or the loss of a job. That change has been especially harmful to women, usually single mothers, who for years have been the largest group of distressed Americans who file for bankruptcy.
    The push by Koch-supported groups for the deregulation of industries such as airlines and trucking drove down wages and salaries in those fields and produced—in the case of financial deregulation—one of the most catastrophic financial bubbles in American history. Some of those groups contend that the housing crisis was caused by the federal government’s wrongheaded moves to promote homeownership, while dismissing the much larger role played by Wall Street, banks, and the private equity market, all of which made billions bundling and peddling junk mortgage securities. Koch-funded groups agitate to cut Medicare and limit Social Security and would love to abolish both. In lieu of that, their goal is to privatize Social Security by turning average Americans’ retirement savings over to Wall Street to invest in the stock market. Making Social Security benefits the equivalent of a 401(k) would further enrich stockbrokers but put most working people at even greater risk of poverty in their old age.
    The Kochs are masters of misinformation. David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity (AFP) virulently opposed the national health care reform bill and