Mayer quotes Richard Fink, “introduced as Charles Koch’s ‘grand strategist,’” telling the donors’ 2014 summer conference, “We want to decrease regulations. The group’s goals are fairly straightforward. When they talk, the littler billionaires and the wannabe billionaires tend to listen when the brothers concluded their 2015 annual winter donors conference they were able to announce commitments of $889 million for electing conservatives in the 2016 presidential and congressional races - more than the combined total spent by the Republican National Committee and the party’s two congressional campaign committees in 2012. (There are four brothers in all and Mayer tells the entire family history, but these are the two most commonly identified as “the Koch Brothers.”) Combined, their wealth, estimated between $80-$95 billion, constitutes the largest single fortune on earth. The Koch Brothers, David and Charles, heirs to Koch Industries, now the second largest privately held company in the United States, are each ranked 5th to 10th out of the wealthiest individuals in the world.

But Mayer’s book goes way past that, describing an exceedingly impressive effort by the United States’s right wing to remake our political system and control the terms of the debate through foundations, think tanks, university institutes, and even by paying political commentators to sing their song. The seemingly unlimited and often untraceable money now flooding our political system has everything to do with Citizens United - the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling, by a 5-4 majority, that the First Amendment to the Constitution precludes the government from restricting independent political expenditures. On the other, the story is so outrageous it should make any citizen want to go out and do something about it. So likewise, read on here, but if you should decide that you’ve just got to stop and get on with changing things - well, that’s the point. On the one hand, this tale of how the Koch Brothers persuaded “hundreds of the other richest conservatives in the country to give them control over their millions of dollars in contributions” compels us to read on.

JANE MAYER’S DARK MONEY: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right is almost too good for its own good.

Book dark money by jane mayer