POLITICO Nightly: What Mexico’s new president means for the U.S.

BY RACHEL SHIN Presented by Citi Claudia Sheinbaum celebrates following the results of the general election in Mexico at Zocalo Square in Mexico City. | Carl de Souza/AFP via Getty Images MEET LA DOCTORA — America’s closest partner — on trade, migration, energy and more — has made history by electing its first woman as president. Now the U.S. is watching Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum with one question in mind: Will she be a facsimile of her predecessor or blaze her own path? Sheinbaum served nearly five years as mayor of Mexico City, resigning in 2023 to seek the presidential nomination. Before entering politics, she was an environmental engineer, worked on a UN panel of climate scientists, and received the nickname “la Doctora” for her stellar scientific credentials. Sheinbaum’s landslide victory was propelled by the endorsement of Mexico’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), her political mentor and the wildly popular founder of the country’s dominant, populist MORENA party (Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional). She’s promised to follow many of his precedents, including cooperating with Washington on reducing migrant border crossing, but it’s not yet clear whether she’ll diverge from him on key issues highly relevant to the U.S. including gang violence, energy and international investment. To understand the significance of Sheinbaum’s election for U.S.-Mexico relations, Nightly spoke with Lila Abed, the director of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute and a columnist for El Heraldo de México and Opinión51. We discussed how Sheinbaum’s election fits into the U.S.-Mexico bilateral relationship, and what may be on the horizon for the U.S.’s top trade partner. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What are the key differences between AMLO and Sheinbaum, the former president’s hand-picked successor? What changes can the U.S. expect?  Security cooperation between Mexico and the United States under the AMLO administration really deteriorated. There’s going to unfortunately need to be a rebuilding of mutual trust between U.S. and Mexico’s security agencies. From speaking to folks close to Claudia’s team, there really is an incentive to restart the relationship with the United States in terms of security cooperation. Sheinbaum, at least in her political platform, has signaled stark differences, one being that she wants to create a national intelligence agency that can better gather intelligence and information, that coordinates all levels of federal, state and municipal level in terms of security cooperation. I think this will allow the United States and Mexico to better exchange intelligence and information and continue doing operations on the ground that serve both the U.S. and Mexico’s priorities in terms of security. How do you expect Sheinbaum to cooperate with the Biden administration on immigration?  On the migration front, Sheinbaum is going to continue to cooperate with the United States because Mexico has a real objective to stem migrant flows into Mexico. Mexico is no longer just a transit country for migrants. It is now a destination, and the Mexican government has to absorb thousands of migrants that are going to potentially stay in Mexico if they can’t reach the U.S.-Mexico border. Sheinbaum has stated that she wants the United States to provide funds and resources so that Mexico can absorb these migrants on Mexican soil. She will press, like AMLO did, for the United States to fund some of the social programs that in her view could really address the root causes of migration. Sheinbaum is a renowned climate scientist. Do you see her following her predecessor’s investment in domestic fossil fuel infrastructure, or pivoting to renewables?  She has said that she wants to attract more investment for the renewable and clean energy sector. That’s very different from AMLO’s preference for fossil fuels and dirty energy. She is a scientist by trade. So that might drive her idea of bringing more foreign direct investment in the renewable energy sector, which is super important for the United States. I think Sheinbaum has a better understanding of how vital the energy sector is for the United States and how important it is to preserve a good standing as the top trading partner of the United States in order for the economy to keep growing. Despite being the U.S.’s top trade partner, Mexico has also been cozying up with Chinese investors. What is Sheinbaum’s stance on China, and how could that impact the Mexico-U.S. relationship?  It is true that investment from China has increased in Mexico in the past years. Sheinbaum understands that this is a hotspot for the United States, but she is going to have to balance this relationship with China because, for example, Chinese companies offer Mexican citizens a cheaper alternative to EVs than the United States. So she’s going to have to keep her consumers happy and at the same time make sure that she keeps the United States happy and keeps U.S. national security protected. Mexico’s high level of violence will be one of Sheinbaum’s most urgent challenges upon taking office in October. How will she tackle Mexico’s pervasive gang violence? If we look at what she did as mayor of Mexico City, we can get an idea of what to expect during her six-year term. Her security strategy in Mexico City did provide really positive results on a variety of issues. I think she’s going to have a much stronger security strategy than AMLO’s failed “Hugs Not Bullets” strategy, which focused on the prevention side of security instead of frontally combating transnational criminal organizations. And she will receive pressure from the United States. I think Mexico will continue to place the illicit flow of arms from the United States and Mexico as a priority for the Mexican government on the security agenda. There’s real optimism from different U.S. security agencies that this will be a restart, a 180 from what they saw with AMLO. What’s the significance of Sheinbaum’s landslide and the extreme dominance of the MORENA party? The governing party won not just the presidency, but won a super majority in Congress, seven out of nine governorships, the mayorship of Mexico City, and the majority of the major districts in the Capitol. So it really is a testament that Mexico’s democratic system is reversing into a single, dominant hegemonic party. Why is this important to the United States? Because if Mexico doesn’t have a democracy, forget about security cooperation, forget about nearshoring, because companies are not going to want to invest in a country where there’s no separation of powers, where there’s not an independent, autonomous judicial branch, where there’s no clear rules of the game. All of this could affect all aspects of the bilateral relationship and that is something to keep an eye on. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @rachel_shin_ . A message from Citi: How will digital currencies shape the future of finance? As blockchain technology advances, digital currencies are poised to disrupt traditional banking models and could redefine the global monetary landscape. Central banks are working across global stakeholders to help determine what future adoption might look like – presenting both challenges and opportunities for businesses. Explore in-depth analysis from Citi on the potential implications in the Citi GPS Report, Money, Tokens, and Games.   WHAT'D I MISS? — Appeals court halts Trump’s criminal proceedings in Georgia amid scrutiny of Fani Willis: A Georgia appeals court has halted all pretrial proceedings in Donald Trump’s Atlanta-based criminal case while a three-judge panel considers whether to disqualify the lead prosecutor, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. The order issued today effectively confirms that the sprawling racketeering case against Trump and more than a dozen codefendants — charging them with an attempt to corrupt Georgia’s 2020 election results — will not come before a jury in 2024. — Contraception bill fails in Senate: Senate Republicans blocked passage today of a bill to protect Americans’ access to birth control , one of several legislative actions Democrats have pledged on reproductive rights in the leadup to the November election. Only Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) broke with the GOP to vote in favor of the legislation, which failed 51 to 39 — short of the 60 votes needed to advance. The vote comes on the heels of former President Donald Trump telling a local television station that he’s “looking at” restrictions on contraception, and just ahead of the two-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision that ended the federal right to abortion. Trump quickly walked back his comment in a social media post, vowing never to “ban” birth control. — Two of Hunter Biden’s exes describe his years of drug abuse: Hunter Biden’s federal trial on gun-related charges took a personal turn today as two of his former romantic partners, including his ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, took the witness stand and described Biden’s years of abusing crack cocaine . Both women were called by prosecutors, who have charged the president’s son with three felonies stemming from his purchase of a handgun in October 2018. Prosecutors say he lied about his drug addiction on a federal gun-purchasing form and then illegally possessed the gun for about two weeks.   THE GOLD STANDARD OF POLICY REPORTING & INTELLIGENCE: POLITICO has more than 500 journalists delivering unrivaled reporting and illuminating the policy and regulatory landscape for those who need to know what’s next. Throughout the election and the legislative and regulatory pushes that will follow, POLITICO Pro is indispensable to those who need to make informed decisions fast. The Pro platform dives deeper into critical and quickly evolving sectors and industries—finance, defense, technology, healthcare, energy—equipping policymakers and those who shape legislation and regulation with essential news and intelligence from the world’s best politics and policy journalists. Our newsroom is deeper, more experienced, and better sourced than any other—with teams embedded in the world’s most active legislative and regulatory power centers. From Brussels to Washington, New York to London, Sacramento to Paris, we bring subscribers inside the conversations that determine policy outcomes and the future of industries, providing insight that cannot be found anywhere else. Get the premier news and policy intelligence service, SUBSCRIBE TO POLITICO PRO TODAY .     NIGHTLY ROAD TO 2024 CORPORATE OUTREACH — Former President Donald Trump will attend a private meeting with one of the most powerful business lobbying groups in Washington as he tries to craft an alliance with major corporate leaders, reports NBC News. Joshua Bolten, the CEO of the Business Roundtable, confirmed in an email to members today that Trump will be at the group’s plenary meeting in Washington on June 13. Though President Joe Biden was invited, he cannot attend due to overseas travel for a G7 meeting. The business group instead asked White House chief of staff Jeff Zients to come, according to Bolten’s email. Zients accepted the invitation last week and plans to address the group on June 13, according to a person familiar with his plans. The meeting is off the record and closed to the press, Bolten wrote in his message. THE DAILY VEEPSTAKES — Donald Trump’s search for a running mate is intensifying , as the former president awaits sentencing on felony charges and prepares for next month’s Republican National Convention, writes NBC News.. Vice presidential contenders recently received vetting materials. Trump’s search, according to one source, is heavily concentrated on four top prospects: North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Tim Scott of South Carolina and JD Vance of Ohio. Another source described a three-way competition involving Burgum, Rubio and Vance.   A message from Citi:     AROUND THE WORLD Posters of candidates displayed for the European elections on administrative notice boards in Paris. | Magali Cohen/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images TO THE POLLS — Across Europe, the radical right is on the rise. This week’s European Parliament election will reveal just how much . In France, the far-right National Rally party is on track to receive a third of the vote, more than double the support of its nearest rival, President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party. In Germany, despite a series of scandals, the AfD is headed for second place, ahead of every partner in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition. In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing Brothers of Italy party is floating far ahead of the chasing pack. Five years ago, a “Green wave” in the 2019 European Parliament election spurred the Continent’s leaders to launch an epochal restructuring of the economy aimed at making the EU climate-neutral by 2050. This year, the tide is flowing in the opposite direction. An even stronger performance by parties once shunned as too toxic to work with will likely have an even larger effect as Europe’s political leaders realize the radical right is no longer at the gates — it’s inside the palace and can no longer be ignored. The European Parliament election runs from June 6-9 — keep tabs on the results here . And if you’re an American who hasn’t heard much about what’s going on this week, here’s a primer . BUZZ THE TOWER — Ukrainian officials are pressing the U.S. and other countries to ramp up their F-16 pilot training , saying the current pipeline isn’t producing enough aviators to fly the jets that will be soon donated to Kyiv. Ukraine says it has 30 pilots who are eligible to start training in the U.S. immediately. Yet the Biden administration has told Kyiv it lacks the school seats in its Arizona-based program to accept more than 12 pilot trainees at a time, according to three people with direct knowledge of the request. Two other facilities in Denmark and Romania have a similar issue with available training spots. It’s the latest hurdle in the drawn-out effort to get modern F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. Kyiv began pushing for the aircraft in the months following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, but was repeatedly rebuffed by the Biden administration. In May 2023, President Joe Biden greenlit other countries’ requests to send their F-16s, but logistical challenges repeatedly delayed the training. Further complicating the effort, it took months for Western countries to agree to send their own aircraft to Ukraine.   JOIN US ON 6/12 FOR A TALK ON THE AIRLINE INDUSTRY : As air travel soars again, policymakers and airlines are grappling with a series of contemporary challenges to the industry's future. Join POLITICO on June 12 for a topical and timely conversation with government leaders and aviation stakeholders about the state of the airline industry. From what passengers want to what airlines need amid the high demand for air traffic, workers and technology solutions. What can Washington do to ensure passengers and providers are equipped to fly right? REGISTER HERE .     NIGHTLY NUMBER Up to $17 billion The amount that Disney plans to invest in its Florida resort , now that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the company are set to bury the hatchet and approve an agreement. Five DeSantis-appointed supervisors who oversee the Disney World district voted today to give initial approval to a new development agreement. RADAR SWEEP SUBSCRIPTION-BASED COFFEE — In our regular work-from-wherever era, a lot of people are choosing to post up for hours — or the full day — at coffee shops. For the businesses, it can be inviting to have a full place. But usually, people sitting there for hours and not ordering anything beyond one coffee when they arrive is bad for business, making it difficult to stay afloat. One potential solution? A subscription model . Pay a nominal fee and get to sit in the place all you want. Could your favorite coffee shop become a little more like a gym, or a newspaper? Andy Vasoyan reports for Slate. PARTING IMAGE On this date in 1989: A Chinese man stands alone to block a line of tanks heading east on Beijing's Cangan Blvd. in Tiananmen Square. The man, calling for an end to the recent violence and bloodshed against pro-democracy demonstrators, was pulled away by bystanders, and the tanks continued on their way. The Chinese government crushed a student-led demonstration for democratic reform and against government corruption, killing hundreds in the strongest anti-government protest since the 1949 revolution. | Jeff Widener/AP Did someone forward this email to you?  Sign up here . A message from Citi: How will digital currencies shape the future of finance? As blockchain technology advances, digital currencies are poised to disrupt traditional banking models and could redefine the global monetary landscape – presenting both challenges and opportunities for businesses. Blockchain-based products can make a significant impact in terms of wide consumer adoption in digital currency, especially central bank digital currency (CBDCs), gaming, and social. Momentum on adoption has positively shifted as governments, large institutions, and corporations have moved from investigating the benefits of tokenization to trials and proofs of concept. Explore in-depth analysis from Citi on the potential implications in the Citi GPS Report, Money, Tokens, and Games.     Follow us on Twitter Charlie Mahtesian @PoliticoCharlie Calder McHugh @calder_mchugh   FOLLOW US

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The Kochs & the Nazis: Book Reveals Billionaires' Father Built Key Oil Refinery for the Third Reich

 

 

In her new book, "Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right," New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer explores how the Koch brothers and fellow right-wing billionaires have funded a political machine aimed at shaping elections and public policy. The book contains a number of revelations and new details. Mayer begins with revealing that the Kochs’ father, industrialist Fred Koch, helped build an oil refinery in Nazi Germany—a project approved personally by Adolf Hitler. The refinery was critical to the Nazi war effort, fueling German warplanes. Mayer joins us to discuss.

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America

THERE'S MORE..

I'm sure you read the RSN article -- 

the Kochs oppose: 

public education, libraries, Cape Wind 

[they funded the Cape Alliance], they oppose 

SOLAR, have produced propaganda against 

electric cars.... 

they funded Republicans to take over Congress, 

but they forgot to check for brains when they 

support Louie Gohmert tied with Steve King 

as dumbest congressmen and there are a 

bunch of others.

they're members of Mar-A-Lago and surely 

have the dim wits ear. 

They funded the Tea Party. 

They funded the Bundy rabble because they 

want PUBLIC LAND CHEAP to drill or frack. 

Let's also remember that according to the PARADISE 

PAPERS, available on line, the KOCHS, THE MERCERS, SHELDON 

ADELSON and other wealthy ilk park their $$$ overseas to avoid 

supporting government on any level.  

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America

This is worth re-visiting!

What Is the Far Right’s Endgame? A Society That Suppresses the Majority.

By Rebecca Onion

NANCY MACLEAN, AUTHOR OF AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES MCGILL BUCHANAN, EXPLAINS HOW THIS LITTLE-KNOWN LIBERTARIAN’S WORK IS INFLUENCING MODERN-DAY POLITICS.

 

Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by MBisanz/Wikimedia, 

Dechateau/Wikimedia, Atlas Network/Wikimedia, and Thinkstock.

When the Supreme Court decided, in the 1954 case of Brown vs. Board of Education, that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, Tennessee-born economist James McGill Buchanan was horrified. Over the course of the next few decades, the libertarian thinker found comfortable homes at a series of research universities and spent his time articulating a new grand vision of American society, a country in which government would be close to nonexistent, and would have no obligation to provide education—or health care, or old-age support, or food, or housing—to anyone.

This radical vision has become the playbook for a network of people looking to override democracy in order to shift more money to the wealthiest few, historian and professor at Duke University Nancy MacLean argues in her new book, an intellectual biography of James Buchanan called Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.* Buchanan’s life story, she writes, is “the true origin story of today’s well-heeled radical right.”

I spoke with MacLean about Buchanan’s intellectual evolution and its legacy today. We discussed whether it’s helpful or counterproductive to call the network of organizations funded by Charles Koch a “conspiracy,” the line of influence between Buchanan and what’s going on in MacLean’s home state of North Carolina, and that time Buchanan helped Chile’s dictator craft a profoundly undemocratic constitution. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

So why is James Buchanan so unknown? He had a Nobel Prize; how did he manage to fly under the radar?

He had a very different personality from somebody like Milton Friedman. I think of them as kind of a yin and yang. Friedman was very sunny, and Buchanan was kind of a darker figure. Friedman was always very anxious to be in the limelight, and Buchanan was not like that at all. He was very interested in making an impact over the long term and training other people, and he seemed to be content to talk to powerful people more than to talk to public audiences. His books were really written for other scholars, not so much the general public.

Can you put him in relationship with other people, besides Friedman, who might be more familiar to us today?

People might be familiar with the Mont Pelerin Society, the international invitation-only group that began in 1947 launched by Friedrich Hayek. That society included Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, Buchanan, ultimately Charles Koch (which I think not many people know!), and many others.

Friedman and Hayek put much more emphasis on making the case for free markets, whereas Buchanan’s distinctive mission was to make a case against government. … His basic idea is that people had been wrong to think of political actors as concerned with the common good or the public interest, when in fact, according to Buchanan’s way of looking at things, everyone should be understood as a self-interested actor seeking their own advantage. He said we should think of politicians, elected officials, as seeking their own self-interest in re-election. And that’s why they’ll make multiple costly promises to multiple constituencies, because they won’t have to pay for it. And he would say agency officials—say, an official at the EPA—would just keep trying to expand the agency, because that would expand their power and resources.

Now there were other people who actually tested that empirically and found out that it didn’t hold, so it’s really a caricature of the political process, but it’s a caricature that’s become very, very widespread right now.

You mentioned a few times in the book that Buchanan didn’t really do empirical research. So what was he writing from?

He was also trained in game theory at the Rand Corporation, so he uses a lot of that. But basically he writes more like a social philosopher, someone studying the social contract.

Did his ideas change over time?

The core ideas kind of stayed the same. What did change over time was his own outlook. It became much darker over the years. His first big book in his field, which is called public choice economics, was titled The Calculus of Consent, and it came out in 1962 and was co-authored with Gordon Tullock. It was the work for which Buchanan was most recognized in his Nobel citation. In that work, he seemed to believe that somehow people of good will could come to something close to unanimity on the basic rules of how to govern our society, on things like taxation and government spending and so forth.

And by the mid-1970s he concluded that that was impossible, and that there was no way that poor people would ever agree … there was no way that people who were not wealthy, who were not large property owners, would agree to the kind of rules he was proposing. So that was a very dark work. It was called The Limits of Liberty. He actually said in that work that the only hope might be despotism.

And he went from writing that to advising the Pinochet junta in Chile on how to craft their constitution. This document was later called a “constitution of locks and bolts,” [and was designed] to make it so that the majority couldn’t make its will felt in the political system, unless it was a huge supermajority.

So yeah, it’s pretty dark.

Tell me more about the relationship between Koch and Buchanan.

I think too many people on the left have really underestimated Koch’s intelligence and his drive, and also misunderstood his motives. There’s been brilliant work by journalists, really good digging on the money trail and the Koch operations, but much of that writing seems to assume that he is doing this just because it’s going to lower his tax bill or because he wants to evade regulations, personally. I think that really misgauges the man. He is deeply ideological and has been reading almost fanatically for a very long time. I see him as someone who’s quite messianic. He’s compared himself to Martin Luther and his effort being like the Protestant Reformation. When he invested in Buchanan’s center at George Mason University, he said he wanted to “unleash the kind of force that propelled Columbus.”

This is not someone who’s just trying to lower his tax bill. He wants to bring in a totally new vision of society and government, that’s different from anything that exists anywhere in the world or has existed because he is so certain that he is right. I think it’s more chilling because it doesn’t correspond to the ideas we have about politics.

Right, like he’s not trying to get a particular person elected. You mention several times Buchanan was very against that idea, that the point was to get a particular person elected. The point, for him, was to change the whole system.

Right. You asked how the two men connected. I only have the documentary trail that I found. But from what I found, I believe that they first came in contact or first began to work together about 1969 or 1970, and that was in the context of the campus upheaval against the war in Vietnam, and for black studies, and so forth. Buchanan wrote a book about the campus unrest that applied his particular school of thought to it. Koch had an operation called the Center for Independent Education, and that center took Buchanan’s book and turned it into a kind of pamphlet that could be circulated more broadly.

In 1970, Koch joined the Mont Pelerin Society. Once he got in, he began to advertise his many different organizations and efforts and try to recruit and get people to events and so forth, through Mont Pelerin. Buchanan helped with the founding of the Cato Institute and with various other intellectual enterprises that were close to Charles Koch’s heart, like this thing called the Institute for Humane Studies.

And then Koch funded Buchanan’s center, as well as other projects, at George Mason University. One of Buchanan’s ideas that Koch liked was the concept of making a flurry of changes all at once so that people have a hard time opposing them.

Yes, and in the same year that Koch invested all this money in George Mason, [economist] Tyler Cowen got a commission by the Institute for Humane Studies to produce this review of places where economic liberty has made big advances. Cowen advocates what he calls a “Big Bang.”

Interestingly it’s that same phrase that gets used by Civitas, the Koch-affiliated organization in North Carolina, after they take over the state legislature here in 2011. I actually have to give the North Carolina Republican-led General Assembly some credit for this book because I was struggling through Buchanan’s ideas, trying to understand the implications, because he did write in a somewhat abstract manner. And then the General Assembly came in in North Carolina and just made it all so clear. I saw the practical measures being taken and was like, “Oh, this is what he’s talking about! That’s what this is!” I should have put them in the acknowledgements.

I’d like to talk more about the way racism works in Buchanan’s intellectual project. You write in the conclusion to the book that this school of thought advocates “enlisting white supremacy to ensure capital supremacy.” Is it possible to disentangle those two?

So this is a challenge for the left because some of our categories, I think, are not very supple, and are also driven by the political world in which we operate. So for example, as we try to think about what’s going on with these voter suppression measures, the only thing that’s actionable is racial discrimination. Right? And so people think of voter suppression efforts as being motivated by racism. These are these good old boys who hate black people and that’s why they’re doing this.

I think actually what’s going on is that these people are extremely shrewd and calculating, and they understand that African Americans, because of their historical experience and their political savvy, understand politics and government better, in a lot of ways, than a lot of white Americans. And they are a threat to this project because they will not vote for it. So they want to keep them from the polls.

Similarly, young people are leaning left now, and they don’t accept a lot of these core ideas that come from this project, so this project has been very determined to keep young people from the polls. Frankly, if they could keep women away, they would, too. Because they understand that women suffrage opened the way to greater government involvement in the economy, and greater social provision and regulation.

We make a mistake when we think these are just reactionary prejudices, and we need to see them as shrewd calculations to keep people who would oppose this vision away from the polls.

So it’s about power, money.

Not just money. I think it’s also much more about this psychology of threatened domination. People who believe it will harm their liberty for other people to have full citizenship and be able to work together to govern society. And that somehow that goes much deeper than money to me. It’s hard to find the right words for it, but it’s a whole way of being in the world and seeing others. Assuming one’s right to dominate.

Your book calls Buchanan’s ideas a “stealth plan.” How can we, on the left, avoid falling into the trap of conspiracy-theory thinking while trying to understand this movement?

One of the challenges is that our language is not up to the threat that we’re facing. As a scholar, I understand the problem of conspiracy theories. I don’t want to be seen as promoting a conspiracy theory. Not least because this is not a conspiracy, by definition. A conspiracy involves illegality, and the people who are funding, and supporting and promoting this operation have extremely good lawyers and I think they actually do believe in the rule of law, and they are being, with the possible exemption of nonprofit tax law, scrupulously legal in what they are doing.

So conspiracy is not a good word. But on the other hand, this is a vast and interconnected and not honest operation. They say these anodyne things about liberty—like the title of one book is Don’t Hurt People And Don’t Take Their Stuff! And that’s not what this is about. The reality is that they are gerrymandering with a vengeance, to a degree we’ve never seen before in our history; they’re practicing voter suppression in a way we’ve not seen since Reconstruction; they are smashing up labor unions under fake pretenses, not telling people that they actually do want to destroy workers’ ability to organize collectively ... I could go on and on.

They’re doing a lot of things for strategic reasons and not being honest with the public about it. That suggests to me that we need a new vocabulary for grasping what we’re dealing with here. I guardedly used the term “fifth column” in the book, and you know, there’s problems with that term too, but at least it gets at the fact that these wealthy donors that Charles Koch has convened are deeply hostile to the model of government that has prevailed in the United States and in many other countries for a century.

While I think we need all the great investigative work that’s being done to try to show us how these organizations that are being presented to the public as separate are actually coordinating together, I don’t think that just laying that out is enough. I think that what we need to convey to people is that this is a messianic cause, with a vision of the good society and government that I think most of us would find terrifying, for the practical implications and impact that it will have on our lives.

We are at a crucial moment in our history, and we will not get another chance, by this cause’s own telling. They say again and again that this is going to be permanent, and they’re very close to victory. So I think we need to be really clear-eyed about understanding this and reaching out to one another without panic.

The most important thing I want readers to take from this book is an understanding that the Koch network and all of these people are doing what they’re doing because they understand that their ideas make them a permanent minority. They cannot win if they are honest about what they’re doing. That’s why they’re doing things in the deceitful and frightening ways that they are.

And that, I think, is a sign of great power for the majority of people, who I think are fundamentally decent, and agree on much more than we’re led to believe.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2017/06/james_mcgill_buchanan_s_terrifying_vision_of_society_is_the_intellectual.html

 Occupy Democrats's photo.

One Man Has Set Up a $1.6 Billion Slush Fund to Fuel the Radical Right’s Takeover of Congress; Get Ready for a Dirty Tricks Campaign

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One Man Has Set Up a $1.6 Billion Slush Fund to Fuel the Radical Right’s Takeover of Congress; Get Ready for a Dirty Tricks Campaign

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 26, 2022 ~

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the Resident Expert in Congress on Dark Money Groups

The New York Times dropped a political bombshell on Monday. The public interest website, ProPublica, built further on the story that afternoon. And, as luck would have it, Wall Street On Parade finds itself in the unique position of filling in missing pieces of the story thanks to an investigative report we published in 2010.

The gist of the story is this: a sketchy billionaire named Barre Seid decided last year to donate his electronics manufacturing company, Tripp Lite, to a nonprofit tied to the radical right called Marble Freedom Trust. After the transfer of ownership to the nonprofit, Tripp Lite was then sold to the Dublin, Ireland based power management company, Eaton, thus avoiding capital gains taxes on the sale. This handed the nonprofit a cool $1.65 billion in tax free money from the sale of the business. In other words, the U.S. taxpayer is subsidizing the radical right’s ability to trash democracy in the U.S.

Nothing about this maneuver appears to be illegal, a screaming call for reforming current laws if ever there was one. And, apparently, in an effort to make sure all the legal t’s had been crossed, the nonprofit hired the Big Law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell to handle the transaction and paid the law firm the hefty fee of $940,000.

Sullivan & Cromwell’s former law partner, Jay Clayton, was appointed by Donald Trump during his time as President to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. Trump apparently liked what he saw in Clayton because Attorney General William Barr then tried to oust the sitting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and replace him with Clayton. That episode backfired badly. See our reporting: U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman’s Ouster: The Untold Story.

So who is this Barre Seid that the public has never heard of who has the ability to drop a cool $1.65 billion into the lap of the radical right? It just so happens that our knowledge of Barre Seid dates back to November 16, 2010 when Salon published an article by Justin Elliott naming Seid as the likely source of money for a widely-distributed race-baiting film released just weeks before the presidential election of 2008, where the radical right was hoping to defeat presidential candidate Barack Obama by pushing conspiracy theories that he wasn’t born in the U.S. and was a Muslim. (Obama’s faith is Christian and he has released his birth certificate showing he was born in Hawaii.)

The Salon article captivated our attention because it built on an earlier article we had published at CounterPunch on October 26, 2010 about a dark money slush fund called Donors Capital Fund that was sluicing money to the radical right. We had broken the story that Donors Capital Fund had given $17,778,600 to the dark money Clarion Fund to produce the race-baiting film, but we were not able to name the individual who had given the money to Donors Capital Fund.

Salon named Seid as the likely mystery man and produced a tax document that had inadvertently exposed Seid as the donor of $16.775 million of the money that went to the Clarion Fund in 2008. That sum represented more than 90 percent of the Clarion Fund’s total contributions in 2008, meaning the bulk of the funding for the film could not have come from another source. Nonetheless, Seid’s representative denied to Salon that Seid had funded the film but would not comment on whether Seid had told Donors Capital Fund to donate the money he had provided to it to fund the film.

Donors Capital Fund and its sister, Donors Trust, are classified as Donor-Advised Funds, meaning they are dark money groups that don’t publish the names of their donors but do take advice from the donors on where to secretly sluice the money.

One of the first donations made by the newly-established Marble Freedom Trust from the $1.65 billion it received from the sale of Seid’s business was a $41 million donation to Donors Trust, according to its tax filing for last year.

Below are excerpts from our 2010 reporting on the Clarion Fund and its financing of the race-baiting film. (Read our full report here.)

Seven weeks before the Presidential election of 2008, approximately 100 newspapers and magazines in the U.S., including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer, and St. Petersburg Times, distributed millions of DVDs of the documentary, “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.” Altogether, including a separate direct mail campaign, 28 million DVDs flooded households in the swing voter states.

The newspapers did not know who was funding this massive propaganda campaign and, apparently, did not care. They inserted the DVD in their Pulitzer properties with the casualness of throwing in a sample of suds free detergent. The nonprofit organization named on the packaging of the DVD as the entity behind the film, the Clarion Fund, Inc., had no known history of operations and had a virtual office address in New York City with no physical presence and no employees on site. Documents submitted to the IRS to obtain its tax-exempt status show the Clarion Fund demanded total secrecy from its vendors:

“At all times, whether during or after the provision of services to Clarion, Service Provider shall keep in confidence and shall not disclose or use, for his or another’s benefit, any nonpublic knowledge, data, material, document or other information of any type that is related to Clarion, or its subsidiaries, directors, members, managers, agents, employees or other affiliates or that Service Provider otherwise acquires in the course of providing services (collectively, the ‘Confidential Information.’).”

The DVD packaging was slick, leveraging the imprimatur of the big league media outlets by listing 73 of their names as part of its distribution network. The cover carried a red banner blaring: “As seen on CNN and FOX News by more than 20 million viewers worldwide.” The title of the film was graphically enhanced with the “O” in “Obsession” sporting the Islamic crescent moon and star and the “N” represented by an upended fearsome automatic weapon. The movie content was slick as well. The first half is endless scenes of suicide bombers and human carnage; the second half of the film intersperses clips of Hitler, Hitler Youth, or Hitler analogies intermittently with Muslim crowds and young children with fists in the air calling for death to westerners. Once at the beginning and again at the end, the film reminds us that not all Muslims ostensibly want to kill us; in the middle of the film it quantifies the number that do (without any support to back up this hunch): a cool 100 to 150 million, i.e., 10 to 15 per cent of 1 billion Muslims…

The reaction to corporate media peddling this propaganda in the final days of a Presidential race where one candidate was already being smeared for Muslim ties was immediate and harsh. A writer at Democratic Underground using the moniker MrMickeysMom grabbed the keyboard to vent a spontaneous reaction: “Okay – Who ELSE just picked through the Sunday advertisements and viewed this DVD today?…They’re here to warn us about the declaration of war on Western Culture and to bring down Christianity and Judaism – just in time for the election. So, this is the heat, folks. This blitz DVD is one more step – the biggest, boldest step I can see to orchestrate fear, hatred and to change your vote…It told me that the White House will be changed and become the Muslim House…that America has to wake up and that America is strangling itself with ‘our political correctness.’ ”

Margaret Lewis of Durham, North Carolina fired off a letter to The News & Observer of Durham, North Carolina: “I cannot believe that I was sent the hate-inflaming, fear-mongering video disk ‘Obsession’ in my newspaper! What will you enclose next? KKK robes?”

Hal Chase of Hudson wrote to the St. Petersburg Times: “My wife and I were shocked to see the CD entitled Obsession tucked innocently among the ads in our Sunday paper. This hate-filled propaganda is just part of the right-wing extremists’ fear and smear tactics. Their hope is to make Americans afraid of anyone who is not exactly like them, and thereby affect the outcome of November’s election.”

Approximately 60 newspapers refused to accept the DVD for distribution, including the Detroit Free Press, the Plain Dealer of Cleveland, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The News & Record of Greensboro, North Carolina.

At the time, John Robinson, Editor of The News & Record, said the paper declined to distribute the DVD because “…it was divisive and plays on people’s fears…As I’ve said on other occasions about news decisions, just because you can publish doesn’t mean you should.”

We can now report what this race-baiting, fear-mongering campaign cost and where the money, at least nominally, came from…

The full tab, and then some, was paid by the super secretive libertarian nonprofit, Donors Capital Fund. In 2008, Clarion Fund became Donors Capital Fund’s largest grantee by a large margin, receiving $17,778,600. That sum constituted 96 per cent of all funds received by Clarion in 2008 and 9 times its revenue in 2007…

There are shades of Charles Koch all over Donors Capital and Donors Trust. Two grantees receiving repeat and sizeable grants from Donors Capital are favorites of the Koch foundations: George Mason University Foundation and Institute for Humane Studies. Another tie is Claire Kittle. A project of Donor’s Trust is Talent Market.org, a headhunter for staffing nonprofits with the “right” people. Ms. Kittle serves as Talent Market’s Executive Director and was the former Program Officer for Leadership and Talent Development at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Then there is Whitney Ball, President of both Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust. Ms. Ball was one of the elite guests at the invitation-only secret Aspen bash thrown by Charles Koch in June of this year, as reported by ThinkProgress.org. Also on the guest list for the Koch bash was Stephen Moore, a member of the Editorial Board at the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Moore is a Director at Donors Capital Fund. Rounding out the ties that bind is Lauren Vander Heyden, who serves as Client Services Coordinator at Donors Trust. Ms. Vander Heyden previously worked as grants coordinator and policy analyst at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.

Legal counsel for the Kochs has declined to respond to two emails with a week’s lead time seeking clarification of the relationship the Kochs have to Donors Capital and Donors Trust.

What remains unclear is the underlying donor within Donors Capital who made the large sum possible. Was it a joint effort by wealthy donors to boost Senator McCain’s presidential aspirations? Was it a single Islamophobe? While the DVDs were hitting the front lawns bundled in newspapers, the Clarion Fund posted an endorsement for McCain as President on its web site, a legal breach for a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit. When it was outed by the media, it quickly removed the endorsement. What is certain is that the donor(s) had every reason to believe they would never be discovered. The organization advises contributors on its web site: “Unlike with private foundations, gifts from your account will remain as anonymous as you request.”

Seid’s relationship to the Charles Koch’s radical right network of nonprofits and climate change denial groups has been well documented. This latest creation of the Marble Freedom Trust follows the well-worn path of secrecy finetuned by the Koch network.

The tax filing for Marble Freedom Trust shows that at the time of the massive gift of $1.65 billion, the nonprofit had no employees, thus making it appear to be little more than a slush fund to spread money around to other dark money groups. That impression is further supported by the fact that Marble Freedom Trust quickly sluiced $210 million of its loot to three other nonprofits with a history of funding the radical right. Unfortunately, Marble Freedom Trust’s tax filing for the pivotal period of May 1, 2022 through April 30, 2023 – showing where the rest of the $1.65 billion went, may not be available for years.

The tax filing for Marble Freedom Trust has two other unusual qualities. It provides a residential home address in Utah as its business location. That address belongs to Tyler Green, a lawyer with the Washington D.C. litigation boutique firm of Consovoy McCarthy. Green works out of Utah. The law firm is widely known for its legal work in attempting to stop Congress and New York prosecutors from obtaining Donald Trump’s financial records. The other unusual quality is that the phone number listed for Marble Freedom Trust is not a Utah phone number but a Palm Beach County, Florida phone number belonging to Neil Corkery.

Corkery has been heavily tied in the past to dark money groups and a byzantine series of money machinations. On its tax filing, Marble Freedom Trust lists the Supreme Court packer, Leonard Leo, as its Chairman and Trustee. Green is listed as Administrative Trustee. It lists the following as related organizations: America Engaged, BH Fund, Rule of Law Trust. The Rule of Law Trust was sluiced a whopping $153 million from the newly-formed Marble Freedom Trust last year.

On March 10 of last year, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who has become an expert on the dangerous threat that dark money poses to U.S. democracy, called a hearing on the subject. Whitehouse chairs the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action and Federal Rights. Lisa Graves, President of the Center for Media and Democracy, provided extensive testimony on dark money groups, including those tied to Leo, Corkery and Charles Koch. Graves provided written testimony as follows about America Engaged, the BH Fund, and the Rule of Law Trust:

“America Engaged. Leo is this group’s president, and [Jonathan] Bunch is a director. Other board members are C. Boyden Gray and Todd Graves, a former state attorney general. It has given nearly $4 million to Charles Koch’s Freedom Partners. In 2017, it gave nearly $1 million to the NRA as it backed [Supreme Court Justice Neil] Gorsuch…

“BH Fund. Leo is the president; Bunch is a director. It was launched with a secret $24 million donor and gave $20 million to George Mason University’s law school, securing Scalia’s name and Leo’s special influence…

“Rule of Law Trust. As Wellspring was being closed down, Neil Corkery created this group in 2018. Leo is listed as its only trustee, and almost all its known expenses are related to BH Group reimbursements, another Leo group. Rule of Law Trust brought in three contributions (possibly from one, two, or three individuals) totaling $80 million in 2018. It distributed two grants in 2019: $500,000 to People United for Privacy and $895,000 to America Engaged.”

You can read the full written testimony of Lisa Graves here as she documents the vast right-wing dark money groups that are killing U.S. democracy, one billionaire donation at a time.

If there is a message of hope in all of this, it is the fact that a recent NBC poll found that the top issue on the minds of registered voters is “threats to democracy.” It would appear that dark money withers when exposed to disinfecting sunshine.

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