We have heard much of supposed ‘libertarian’ think tanks or PR outfits in the Anglosphere influencing policy, especially of the right, via media and lobbying, euphemistically known as ‘Koch Network’ or the ‘Kochtopus’ with a fondness for fossil fuels and climate science denial.
New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer investigated several years ago for her book ‘Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right’ (2017) which included insight into oligarch donors Mellon-Scaife, Olin, Bradley, DeVos and Coors.
Further, historian Nancy MacLean in researching her book ‘Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America’ (2017) she stumbled across the economic muse of Kochs, ‘segregation economist’ James Buchanan.
Not only does this network exist in the US, it’s global via the ‘Atlas Network’ of think tanks especially influential in Canada, UK and Australia. On the latter ‘charity’ i.e. IPA Institute of Public Affairs Australia, both US Bradley & Olin Foundations had been funders in the ‘80s and ‘90s, while a key funder now is mining magnate & heiress Gina Rhinehart.
Further, in the UK journalists have researched similar links centred near and around Tufton St. think tanks influencing Conservative Party policies and behind Brexit, including Taxpayers’ Alliance, IEA Institute of Economics Affairs, Global Warming Policy Foundation or Net Zero Watch, Policy Exchange etc. and a ‘Tanton Network’ anti-immigrant NGO Migration Watch. The ByLine Times published an article several years ago describing ‘Brexit & Climate Science Denial: The Tufton Street Network’ (2019)
Following are key excerpts from an excellent DeSmog article outlining not just Kochs, but the invisible donors in the background:
‘Beyond Koch: Meet the Other Right-Wing Oligarchs Featured in Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money”’
By Steve Horn on Jan 21, 2016 @ 03:58 PST
The shenanigans of the “Kochtopus” have garnered most of the headlines — including here — pertaining to reviews of New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer’s new book, Dark Money.
But the Koch Brothers and Koch Industries’ right-wing family foundation network are far from the only big money influencers featured in the must-read book which has jumped to #4 on the Best Sellers list at Amazon.com.
Enter the Scaife, Olin and Bradley family fortunes, all three of which have served as key nodes through which the right-wing have tried to reshape the public policy landscape within (and beyond) the U.S. in the years following the Cold War until present day. If those family names sound familiar to DeSmog readers, they should: we have a profile in our database for Scaife and have written fairly extensively about Olin and Bradley…..
Scaife, “League to Save Carthage” and ALEC
In 1964, Richard Scaife — namesake of the Scaife Family Foundations, whose money came largely from the Gulf Oil fortune — helped create a group called the League to Save Carthage, harkening back to the city conquered and colonized by the Roman Empire now situated as a suburb of Tunis, Tunisia.
“This little-heralded group was just the first small step in what would become an improbably successful effort by one of the richest men in the country, along with a few other extraordinarily wealthy conservative benefactors, to cast themselves as field generals…in a strategic war of ideas aimed at sacking American politics,” Mayer wrote.
Eventually, the Scaifes would call one tentacle of their Scaife Family Foundations the Carthage Foundation. But its origins in the League to Save Carthage are crucial if, for no other reason, than how one of its members, Lewis Powell, became a future U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
Before joining the Supreme Court bench, Powell penned the so-called Powell Memo which, at the time, was marked confidential. Written on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and officially titled, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” Powell’s treatise called for Big Business to pour money into universities, the media, think-tanks, the conventional political apparatus and other key institutions as a means to fend off what Powell described as the ongoing onslaught against the free enterprise system.
Among other key pieces of political infrastructure funded by Scaife, he was one of the first major foundation funders of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
Mayer cites a historical letter by ALEC founder Paul Weyrich’s aide in her book, in which the aide thanks Scaife for his support of the corporate bill mill for the statehouses.
“ALEC is well on its way to fulfilling the dream of those who started the organization thanks wholly to your confidence and the tremendous generosity of the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts,” wrote the aide in 1976, a few years after ALEC got off the ground in 1973, according to the letter cited by Mayer.
Olin & Law and Economics
Another influential family fortune featured in “Dark Money” is that of the Olins and in particular John M. Olin.
Jaded by his experience as a student at Cornell University, Olin believed universities served as brainwashing centers for liberals and the Left. So, Olin made it his life mission to spread conservative ideology onto U.S. college campuses.
Like Scaife and Gulf Oil, Olin made his bucks in part from the fossil fuel industry via the Olin Corporation, which manufactured blasting powder for coal mining companies. Olin Corporation found itself embroiled in a DDT production pollution scandal in the 1970’s, culminating in the federal government forcing the company to shut down its DDT unit.
In documenting several other environmental catastrophes that Olin Corporation perpetrated, Mayer suggests that the regulatory crackdown that occurred due to these incidents may have influenced the self-interested anti-regulatory posture taken by Olin and the foundation he created, , from a business point of view. Former Olin officials denied to Mayer this was the case.
Olin would move to endow the still-influential “Law and Economics” curriculum in law schools nationwide, which calls for a system of jurisprudence in which judges and lawyers incorporate free market economic analysis into their legal decisions and arguments.
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
Though covered in less depth than other families, the Bradley Foundation also earned a section in “Dark Money.” Just as Olin Foundation shuttered its operations, its Executive Director, Michael Joyce, was hired by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which had enjoyed a huge financial boost resulting from a corporate merger that catapulted the Bradley Foundation into the top 20 largest foundations in the U.S.
The foundation also gives big donations to a fellow midwest-headquartered climate change denial organization: the Chicago-based Heartland Institute.
Harry Bradley, was one of the founding members of the John Birch Society alongside the Koch Brothers’ father, Fred Koch. According to a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel investigation, between 2001 and 2009 the Bradley Foundation “doled out nearly as much money as the seven Koch and Scaife foundations combined.”
A recently published paper titled “The Koch Effect”, by Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol and Harvard government and social policy PhD student Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, describes the impact these family foundations, and in the case of their paper, the Kochs in particular have had on public policy in the U.S.
“In a disciplined way, the Koch network operates as a force field to the right of the Republican Party, exerting a strong gravitational pull on many GOP candidates and officeholders,” they wrote. “The overall effect is to re-set the range of issues and policy alternatives to which candidates and officeholders are responsive.”
Another case in point: the Kochs formerly funded (and some of its executives served on the Board of Trustees of) the Democratic Leadership Council, a think-tank and advocacy group pinpointed as pushing the Democratic Party rightward under President Bill Clinton.
Clinton formerly served as chairman of the DLC, and those who agree with the DLC‘s free market ideology, such as President Barack Obama, now call themselves New Democrats.
If anything, this rightward “force field” created by the influence of big money, serves as the genius and long-lasting impact of the Koch-Scaife-Olin-Bradley oligarch network’s donations and advocacy.’
For more related blogs and articles on Economics, Environment, Koch Network, Libertarian Economics, Political Strategy and Tanton Network, click through
Radical Libertarian Disinformation Machine – Koch Network by Nancy MacLean
James Buchanan – Economist – Koch Influencer – Radical Right Libertarian – Anglo Conservatives
Anglosphere – Radical Right Libertarian Socioeconomics and Authoritarianism
Brexit, Conservatives, Nativism, Libertarian Strategy, Single Market and the European Union
Anglosphere Nativist Libertarian Social Economic Policies or Return of Eugenics?
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