Dark Money

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind The Rise of the Radical Right By Jane Mayer Large Print Edition 765 pages ISBN 978-0-7352-1033-2 $30 US $39 Can Contents: Introduction, Parts 1, 2 and 3, 14 Chapters, an Author’s Note, Notes for each chapter and an Index. Jane Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, is the co-author of Landslide: the Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988 and Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas. She is the author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. She has won many prizes for her writing and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Recently the New York Public Library named Dark Money as one of the ten best non-fiction books of the year. She spent five years conducting exhaustive interviews, searching public records, private papers and court documents following the well-hidden trail of the billions of dollars spent by the ultra-rich to change the ways Americans thought and voted. Some of her sources refused to be named for fear of reprisals and she, herself, was followed and closely investigated while researching this book. No one would admit who was responsible. For those interested in understanding Donald Trump’s recent election to the post of President, this book is essential. People like Betsy DeVos, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and Dick Cheney are involved in the secretive networks which Mayer uncovers. The prominence of Rex Tillerson’s ExxonMobil is also referred to. Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll describes ExxonMobil’s business in Russia. There is no doubt, as one reads Dark Money, that this movement was behind Trump’s win. It is scary and hard to believe the measures which the Koch brothers and their friends take in order to gain political power in an attempt to avoid regulation and taxation. The story begins way back in the 50’s when Fred Koch, the father of four brothers, two of whom, Charles and David, became known as “the Koch brothers”, used the enormous wealth he gained from Koch Enterprises to begin to influence the political system in the US. Koch Enterprises gained much of its early good fortune because of Fred’s willingness to work with Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. When Fred died in 1967, Charles and David bought out their brothers and owned what became the second largest company in America. They owned four thousand miles of pipelines, oil refineries in Alaska, Texas and Minnesota, the Georgia-Pacific lumber and paper company, coal and chemicals, and they were huge traders in commodity futures, among other businesses. The company made the two brothers the sixth and seventh wealthiest men in the world. Each was estimated to be worth $14 billion in 2009. Charles Koch seemed, on the surface, to be simply an ideologue dedicated to the American – Libertarian dream. But when you consider that Koch Industries was the number one producer of toxic waste in the USA in 2012 and that one defense of a company it owned in Texas was that producing smog with their air pollution saved many from skin cancer, you are forced to look a little deeper. The anti-regulation and taxation philosophy behind Koch’s “freedom” rhetoric always ends up producing a financial gain for him at the expense, in most cases, of others. The most shocking revelations, which Mayer documents scrupulously, are the secretive, duplicitous, intentionally false lengths to which the Koch brothers and their supporters go. The Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case in 2010 was meant to allow citizens to see for themselves whether their political leaders were receiving funds from various corporations. Instead, it did just the opposite. By ruling that any amount of money could be contributed to outside groups who were supporting or opposing political candidates, it overturned a century of restrictions banning corporations and unions from spending all they wanted to elect candidates. The court held that corporations had the same rights as individuals and that as long as the money was given to groups who were technically independent of the campaigns, anyone could give any amount. This opened the doors for Koch’s billionaire friends (some of whom were original members of the John Birch Society) to finance candidates and contribute any amount to fighting their opponents. As Jeffrey Toobin, a lawyer and New Yorker writer put it, “it gave rich people more or less free rein to spend as much as they want in support of their favored candidates.” The movement of the mega rich led by Charles and David Koch, “exercised their power from the shadows, meeting in secret, hiding their money trails, and paying others to front for them”. They didn’t want only to win elections. They wanted to change the way Americans thought. They did it by anonymously funding think tanks, university departments, Pacs and Superpacs and other “philanthropic” foundations. Jane Mayer has written a fascinating book about a largely unknown movement in the USA which is responsible for Donald Trump’s victory and the state of America today.

Proof of Collusion

Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America Seth Abramson Simon and Schuster UK 2019 428 pp isbn 978-1-4711-8328-9 Can $ 37.99 Seth Abramson is a former criminal defense attorney and criminal investigator who teaches digital journalism and cultural theory at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of eight books and editor of five anthologies, a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School. Proof of Collusion has fourteen chapters, meticulous notes on each one, an introduction which includes a theory of the case, acknowledgements and an author’s note which directs anyone interested to the index of the book at www.sethabramson.net or http//proofofcollusionindex.com. “Collusion” can be defined as “a clandestine agreement between two or more parties, implicit or explicit, to act in a mutually beneficial way”. Within the umbrella term are contained dozens of federal criminal statutes which are routinely applied by federal law enforcement agents. “Collusion is not a crime” is an easy out, a convenient phrase, but hardly a truthful response to Mueller’s serious investigation. When Paul Manafort and Donald Trump changed the language in the GOP’s platform at the Republican National Convention in July 2016 so that the US would not encourage the Ukrainian army by giving them arms to fight the Russians, Trump justified it by saying he didn’t want to go to WW3 over the Ukraine. The book states that Russia aided and cultivated Trump for a long time (probably 2011 – 2016) before he ran for President. It was Russia and Trump who combined to steal the American election for the GOP and, sadly, many of Trump’s supporters continue to believe his lies. Many good people who love America have been fooled. Trump invited Aras (a billionaire developer who does projects for the Kremlin) and Emin (his son, an aspiring pop singer) Agalarov to the Miss USA pageant in 2013. There, Trump invited the Agalarovs to join him for the Miss Universe pageant on the future site of the Trump Tower Moscow They promised him twenty million dollars and a meeting with Putin. From here the book describes Trump’s movements according to and backed up by evidence contained in Christopher Steele’s report, also known as “the dossier”, which is proving to be more accurate than Trump and his supporters admit. The most salacious part is the description of Trump asking some prostitutes to urinate on the bed in the Presidential Suite at the Ritz-Carlton Moscow which Obama and his wife used. This was to show disrespect to the past presidential couple. Multiple active-duty CIA officers told the BBC that there are sex tapes of Trump in Moscow and St Petersburg. These recordings comprise “kompromat”, blackmail material. This explains Trump’s behavior in foreign policy which includes referring to Putin in glowing terms, overlooking Putin’s involvement in the murders of journalists, opposing Russian sanctions, questioning NATO’s authority and viability, advocating Russia’s immediate return to the G7 and remaining open to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Many of Trump’s associates have already pled guilty to charges Mueller has brought but there are many more, people like Erik Prince, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Sam Clovis, Roger Stone, Joseph Schmitz, J.D. Gordon, Carter Page and a number of Russian nationals who will be or already have been prosecuted for various campaign finance laws, election fraud, wire fraud, bribery, bank fraud, computer crimes, extortion, identity theft, obstruction of justice, witness tampering, perjury, making false statements to Congress, making false statements to law enforcement, failure to register as a foreign agent, money laundering, tax evasion and RICO charges. Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort and George Pappadopoulis played prominent roles in Donald Trump’s rise to power and their dozens of trips to Russia, Saudi Arabia and Greece are exposed in Proof of Collusion. In December 2016 Mike Flynn, Tom Barrack, Rick Gates and Bud McFarlane lobbied Trump to give nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia so that Russian companies and others could build reactors in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. This would require lifting sanctions on the Russian companies which would then be free to partner with American companies and win contracts for billions of dollars. That arrangement didn’t succeed at the time since Saudi Arabia wouldn’t agree to the condition that it wouldn’t use the reactors for weapons. The Trump administration has reopened those talks and might not insist on the same precautions in the future. In October 2017 Jared Kushner took a sudden trip to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia where he gave Mohammed bin Salman (the crown prince) the names of Saudis disloyal to the crown prince. These names could only be available to Kushner through his father-in-law’s daily security briefing. The name Jamal Khashoggi comes to mind. In November 2017 Kushner advised Trump to support the Saudi blockade of Qatar. He was the only one of Trump’s advisors to do so and succeeded in squeezing a huge loan for a real estate deal from a Qatar-connected company. The list of quid pro quos goes on as Proof of Collusion enumerates, in great detail, the Russian blackmail and gifts (in the form of real estate deals mostly) offered to Trump in exchange for the lifting of sanctions and establishment of Russian influenced foreign policy. There may not be a “smoking gun” email or recorded phone call to prove Trump’s treachery but with his growing tendency toward authoritarianism and the number of lies, investigations and unanswered questions surrounding this administration, Americans would do well to read Proof of Collusion and take heed.