How the Koch brothers and the super-rich are buying their way out of criticism | Hacker News Reader

How the Koch brothers and the super-rich are buying their way out of criticism

csmonitor.com

97 pointswalterbell71 comments

> When the Charles Koch Foundation pledges $1.5 million to Florida State University’s economics department, it stipulates that a Koch-appointed advisory committee will select professors and undertake annual evaluations.

Huh, that's surprisingly overt. Donations for things like endowed chairs or new buildings usually assumed to have an influence, as institutions don't like to offend potential sources of money. But it's rarely as direct as the donor actually getting to vet faculty hires. If the linked article [1] is correct, sounds pretty openly like an attempt by a private individual to literally buy control of part of a public institution.

[1] http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/billionaires-role-in-h...

To be fair, the Gates Foundation basically singlehandedly bankrolled the political process to push through Common Core...so a private individual buying control of our public k-12 schools. There are differences here, but both are dangerous.

As much as a fan of Gates I am, not a sustainable/efficient system when power is fairly centralised and can be bought.

I really don't believe that anyone has "control" of our public schools-- unless their intent is to simply run them into the ground by failure.

Common Core passed so quickly because:

- States already had educational standards

- There was already tremendous interest in improving those standards

- English, science, and math work the same way in every state

- States already had a lot of experience with harmonizing standards, such as the Uniform Commercial Codes

Even today, with all the "controversy", the vast majority of states adhere to the Common Core, and even the states that don't, have essentially the same standards with a different name.

So, there's really no reason to call this the Gates Foundation "buying control" of public schools.

edit: clarity

F-in dystopian, it's what this is.

It's very easy to turn to freedom as an argument and people making the choice, when education is finely tuned to shape said people.

If I were a student, alumnus, or professor of FSU, this would be quite annoying. However, from the outside, does this matter? Koch can't buy all the universities. I'm not aware that the FSU econ department is especially influential. It seems unlikely that Koch will be able to influence the direction of economic research or opinion through an action like this. Mostly he'll just be able to avoid the seeming embarrassment of the holder of the Chuck Koch Endowed Chair in Economics writing some paper that says, "Koch Industries sucks!"

>Koch can't buy all the universities.

They are billionaires. And this was only a $1.5 million dollar donation, so how many can they afford to buy this way? I'm thinking it's enough to have a real impact on higher education in the U.S.

I agree. I remember seeing some chart laying out the ROI of lobbying and how campaign contributions can be more or less directly connected to future government contracts worth 1000x of what they "contributed". Seems pretty logical to make the same "investment" in swaying public opinion on the legality/ethics of such a campaign finance system in the first place.

Here is the list of the Universities Koch was donated too: http://www.kochfamilyfoundations.org/pdfs/CKFUniversityProgr...

Koch is definitely having a impact on higher education, look at all the major universities he is involved in.

You don't need to buy out every university. You just need to buy out enough to "create a debate."

> He said he didn’t want to antagonize certain wealthy congregants on whose generosity the congregation depended.

> “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t criticize Wall Street,” he said, explaining that several of the trustees were investment bankers.

This sort of shit is exactly why income and wealth inequality are such a big deal. It's so much more than any principle of "fairness" - it's about representation and balance of power. Even if the entire population is, in a material sense, perfectly looked after, if some fraction of a percent own or control the bulk of the wealth, then they will have most of the power even if society keeps the veneer of democracy in place.

I don't have any issue with the Koch brothers in particular, but no one should be able to purchase laws or see their considerable wealth translate into outsized political power. No democracy can survive that forever, even if with an engaged and conscientious electorate.

Yep. I get downvoted every time I say this on HN, but I will keep saying it: wealth disparity matters. Even though everyone's standard of living has risen over the past several decades, the fact that the ultra rich are able to buy representation and power is a huge problem. It actively and fundamentally subverts democracy. That's why we must do everything we can as a society to fix the issue of income inequality before it's too late.

It's funny when the influence of money comes up it's always the Koch brothers being criticized. Clearly they aren't getting very good value for their money, since you never hear about the leftist billionaires doing the same thing.

Tom Steyer bought the California legislature, and I don't think I've ever seen his name on HN.

See also George Soros.

Tu quoque fallacy. Maybe the Kochs are an easy target because they do it at a scale never before imagined - their annual spending on their political projects easily eclipses Steyer's entire net worth...

The initiatives and proposed solution would solve any "leftist" kleptocrats doing the same thing as the teabaggers too - as such shouting "others do it too" smacks of somebody wanting to distract from the problem rather than solve it.

>Tu quoque fallacy. Maybe the Kochs are an easy target because they do it at a scale never before imagined - their annual spending on their political projects easily eclipses Steyer's entire net worth...

Oh? They spend more than a billion dollars every year? Please, sign me up for your newsletter.

Their "Freedom Partners" group publicly announced a budget of $889 million for 2016.

I'm not sure what Steyer is worth, he's referred to as a billionaire so that would suggest slightly more than that figure, but it's not so far away as to require a sarcastic response.

Eh... no. The total spending of all the groups the Koch brothers support (including Freedom Partners) is $889m. But that's not what the Koch brothers are spending, that's the total spending of all the groups they support. The amount of money they spent is a tiny fraction of that number.

For more realistic numbers this is a good place to start:

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2010/09/opensecrets-battle-k...

No, they just happen to be Libertarians; tending to support Republicans; hence they are the focus. HN like many blogs leans left and tends to allow far too often political hit pieces during election periods (it ruined slashdot for many)

let alone your term teabaggers clearly shows your tendencies

stories with any political connection either need flagged or a new flag, "Political"

_HN like many blogs leans left and tends to allow far too often political hit pieces during election periods_

You've not been coming here very long, have you?

>No, they just happen to be Libertarians

I agree. The anger should be directed towards the University, who could refuse the pledge with its associated demands. Why blame the Koch brothers for expecting their money to peddle influence? It's sort of the point. And it's only ever a problem for people who don't agree with the politics. Was having Larry Summers participate in the annual reviews at Harvard after a post in the Clinton Whitehouse corrupt? These sorts of things are inherently political.

In fact, just one article over, is this:

"Hoffman and Pincus each gave a million dollars to Priorities USA, the Democratic Super PAC. Since then, they have had the opportunity to spend time with Obama. In a private forty-five-minute meeting in the Oval Office in 2012, Pincus gave the President a PowerPoint presentation on what he calls “the product-management approach to government.”

>let alone your term teabaggers clearly shows your tendencies

It's funny that in another HN thread people are discussing "trolling" and how HN gets it right by allowing people to express dissenting views, respectfully, without being punished. Meanwhile, the parent is downvoted and the comment with a derogatory political term lives on.

And, for the record, I'm Canadian, so none of these politics are really mine.

>Why blame the Koch brothers for expecting their money to peddle influence?

That's really not the right use of the term "influence peddling", which refers to something you do when you're in a position of authority in exchange for money, i.e. it's when you sell influence.

From my perspective it sure seems like any public organization (university, NGO, foundation) that isn't explicitly conservative will trend sharply to the left over time due to the kinds of people who tend to work in those organizations. If I were donating a lot of money to a university department I'd want to maintain some control over who they hired as well.

>it's when you sell influence.

Which is exactly what the University executives did...sold influence to the Koch's. Hence, their money peddled influence.

That's still not the right usage. You could say university executives peddled influence, but you can't say the Koch brothers or their money peddled influence because they're the buyers.

This isn't an instance of the tu quoque fallacy as far as I can see, the poster isn't claiming this isn't bad, they're just claiming that the issue these issues receive in the public eye seems to be extremely politically biased (which I find hard to disagree with).

This is not at all true. The Kochs are easily outspent by the left every year. Just look at the Sierra Club's, NRDC's, EDF's, LCV's, Center for American Progress, and other's spending every year. And these are just groups that do environment activities. Soros, Tides Foundation, Steyer, McCarthur, Packard Foundation, and other foundations spend far more than the Kochs. If anything the Kochs are playing catch up. But the CS Monitor is not interested in writing about that. They are getting pitched by Media Matters on the Kochs and those are the stories The Monitor writes.

In the interest of fairness:

The biggest spenders on lobbying are typically business-right groups. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2015&inde...

The top individual funders tend to be conservatives: https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/summ.php?disp=D

And on the left, the biggest organizational contributers in election cycles tend to be unions (which is a significant factor behind the right's desire to break them): https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?cycle=2014

How[1] did Tom Steyer "buy the California legislature"?

[1] Meaning both "in what sense" and "by what means".

I've never heard of Tom Steyer, but mainly because the boogeyman on the right is always George Soros.

The difference is whether the policy the person is supporting may also be furthering the person's own economic interests. The Koch brothers certainly have avowed ideological motivations as well as possible economic motivations, but it's the latter that most people are worrying about when they talk about the influence of money in politics.

If you have money, shaping the discourse on issues of your choice is surprisingly straightforward:

1. Come up with a bunch of candidate ideas/ lines of argument/ memes that promote your point-of-view

2. Ensure maximum virality by doing things like forming think tanks to publish credibility boosting papers, distribute these ideas widely across available media, and (most importantly), gain the support of as many influential figures as you can. These people are the ones who will do the grunt work of persuading people when the memes you're pushing come up for discussion.

After a certain point, the position you're advocating becomes (one of) the main frameworks that people think in when evaluating an issue.

But! We've all seen cases where some idea took hold without having some wealthy cabal backstopping it-- academics can be biased, celebrities can (occasionally accidentally) make something a household word, thought leaders of various stripes can seize on a pet cause without a reward ever being offered. Sometimes, a voice from the rabble gets heard, but most of the time the stuff you get an opportunity to think about is graciously provided by either rich people or the otherwise influential[0].

However, it's scarier when wealthy people do it, because they have so much more scope to play with. They can weigh in on any topic (through proxies) and affect the discussion, regardless of whether they understand the issue or if there's a blatant conflict of interest. They can tamp down on dissenting voices (as we see in the article), so their position becomes the only obvious mainstream one.

I can't really offer any solutions. You can't trust the news (or other media) because the sorts of people who shouldn't game it are the ones that will, but you also can't participate in current affairs if you're uninformed. Okay, I suppose I can offer some solutions: become exceedingly wealthy or, if you can't swing that, become a widely influential subject matter expert on everything you discuss.

---

0. There's an essay by The Last Psychiatrist which is somewhat germane to this, http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/10/you_are_the_98.html

Look who owns often cited media for example the Economist on Wikipedia. Journalists will most often not criticize the hand that feeds them. A way of buying influence is to own media oulets and have think tanks pushing agendas which is in their best interests.

> Look who owns often cited media for example the Economist on Wikipedia

Aha! I was wondering why some of their editorials recently were out of whack. Usually a fairly progressive publication it's posted some fairly biased stuff about protecting the rich lately.

The Economist has been free-market oriented for 100+ years and conceives of itself as classically liberal, so I don't think there's any recent turn to the right. The main difference with some other free-market-oriented media (like some on the American right) is that they more fully adopt the European liberal tradition, including quite a bit of social liberalism, and acceptance of things like social safety nets, the need for good public schooling, openness to immigration, etc. That can sometimes make them seem progressive in an American context, but only in specific senses.

Yes. It's like how Jeremy Clarkson is pretty extreme right wing by British standards, but still makes jokes mocking the American health care system or how racist middle England is.

Different cultures can be a little weird to fit into eachother's concepts of a partisan political system.

I don't agree that "Free Market Oriented" is the same as "Right Wing". One is economic ideology, the other is a social position. They interplay certainly, but how should I put it, some of Economists editorials recently do seem disharmonious with overall enlightened character of their commentary.

So if you like free markets or are on the right you are not "enlightened"? Is that what you are saying?

Well my own personal position is that if you are "on the right" you're not enlightened, but that's just based on my own experiences of people who claim to be (or often deny they are - but clearly are) on the right.

Free Markets is different but it's one of those concepts that means different things to different people and most "enlightened" people can agree that some of those things are great, and some of those things are not so great.

This may be downvoted, as in the US private funding is an important source. But, in order to have an independent opinion, science and public media must not depend on private funding. In Germany we pay extra money to fund public media. Science has to depend either on tax support too, or at least donations must be indirectly routed through an anonymous account and an independent committee that distributes them.

The fear is, then there will be fewer donations and this fear might be realistic. But what use do donations have for science if they come with restrictions?

It's telling, though, that in Germany, it had to be an independent website (not funded by the public/government) that had to publish an investigation into government spying (netzpolitik). Not only that, netzpolitik got threatened with an investigation into possible treason.

So it seems in order to be independent from private influence, media has must depend on government funding. But, in order to be independent from government influence (and thus be free to report on government transgressions), a media organization must be privately funded. Which one should we be more scared of?

"So it seems in order to be independent from private influence, media has must depend on government funding."

Public funding has nothing to do with government funding. Netzpolitik was indeed threatened, but not by public media. Public media strongly supported Netzpolitik when it became clear that investigations were going on against them.

"It also guaranteed that a documentary critical of the Kochs didn’t air." Perhaps more of us should be writing documentaries criticizing wealthy people. Maybe that would help redistribute more wealth?

I recommend checking out http://www.unkochmycampus.org/florida-state-university/

Full disclosure, my friend went to FSU and experienced the Koch influence firsthand and he became involved with the FSU Progress Coalition. He recently wrote "A Student Review of FSU Gift Acceptance Policy: Undue Influence and Charles Koch Foundation" [1] which is worth reading.

[1] http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5400da69e4b0cb1fd47c90...

They aren't buying their way out of all criticism -- about 6 months ago I saw, on Michigan television, what I can only describe as an attack ad against them. They aren't politicians, they donate their money to charity and other causes they like. I disagree with some of the policies they advocate, but that left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

I'm not sure it makes a difference either way when it comes to the influence of money on institutions (influence from non-politicians is not necessarily any less corrupting), but: I think it would be hard to consider the Kochs to not be politicians, anyway. They're heavily involved in party politics and electioneering, both in internal party politics and in general elections. And David Koch has even run as a candidate for national office himself (he was the vice-presidential nominee on the 1980 Libertarian Party ticket, before leaving them for the GOP).

Yeah, they're politicians for sure, they're just in it to actually affect policy in their favor rather than as an ego trip or whatever other petty reasons people usually get into politics. And, they've figured out that directly running for office is sort of a waste of time in that regard, in America.

I rather think they figured that they can't run for every office they can buy.

    They aren't politicians, they donate their
    money to charity and other causes they like.

This is the most generous description of the Kochs I have ever read. They are planning on spending upwards of a billion dollars in the next twelve months to elect public officials who support their policy objectives[1].

[1] http://www.salon.com/2015/01/27/this_is_the_legacy_of_citize...

Donating to Bernie Sanders because you believe universal healthcare is important is also spending money to elect public officials who support your policy objectives. Like I said, I disagree with some of the policies they advocate, but unless someone is donating to a politician because they like their rock-hard abs (I literally cannot think of one likable thing about any politician except their policies), they fit that description as well.

You (and I) may disagree with the causes they find important, but that's a somewhat different topic. The article points out many, many instances (or rather intimates they exist) where _policies_ are immune from criticism -- my concern is when _people_ are criticized. There's no public policy value in humiliating someone, and it's happening anyway.

> you believe universal healthcare

The difference is it's something that benefits the many, as opposed to the few

Why does that make it right?

Because in "a democracy" the majority provide what's called a "political mandate". This kind of clandestine lobbying outside the democratic process usurps the democratic process.

There's a big difference between publicly supporting Bernie Sanders because you believe he'll be a good president and skulking around in the corridors of power buying off officials so that you can line your own pockets.

No, the fact that the US is a democracy just makes it legal. That still doesn't make it right.

Right now in the US almost all the income taxes are paid by 20% or so of the population. People who advocate a bigger, more expensive government are almost always planning to do it with someone else's money.

Strawman

It's in no way a straw man. That doens't even make sense in this context.

It does yeah - you've taken what I was saying, made a replica stuffed with straw and then defeated that. Your response doesn't really tie into what I was saying it seems like something you had rehearsed. So you reinterpreted to suit your response rather than discuss the topic at hand.

Still... no logical connection there. Are you cutting and pasting this from somewhere else?

Ha was thinking the same thing about you!

From the outlook of the human species, the health the needs of millions hold a higher value than the desire of the absurdly wealthy to become even more wealthy.

Hmmm while I broadly agree with your sentiment I could argue your point on Darwinian principles (-:

Sounding the Utilitarian alarm! Someone here hasn't done Philosophy 101. Here's the gist of it: utilitarianism is self-contradictory and by consequence self-defeating.

Many people have not had "the luxury" of doing "psych 101" as you call it. I have not but yet I get the gist of what your saying and to me it sounds like you're making an appeal to authority. I'd imagine the authority you're appealing to is a fairly culturally biased one too (101 doesn't sound particularly rigorous). Try to make a reasoned argument for what you want to say rather than regurgitating what was pumped into you as a brat freshman.

>>Donating to Bernie Sanders because you believe universal healthcare is important is also spending money to elect public officials who support your policy objectives.

Did you read the article? It talks about how Koch donated to an economics department at a public university in return for having a say in who gets selected as a professor every year. That's a different form of donation than the common citizen's congributions to political campaigns.

So you're OK with very rich people having more say in your democracy? I find that somewhat disturbing.

Surely the world doesn't deal in black and white. Rather issues are generally presented to us in shades of gray. With that said it's always a good exercise to imagine what an issue would look like if taken to its logical extreme.

Suppose 1 person had all available money to "invest" toward their politician of choice. All other citizens on earth are busy scraping by on minimum wage, in debt up to their ears, working for this one man who essentially gets to choose who gets elected because no one can put a single penny toward another candidate or his/her legal team to get through all the loop holes necessary to get onto the ballot, etc.

How is this a "fair" representative democracy?

Sure it's not at the point today, but one could imagine that without limits a political system's integrity can be upended through manipulation of its own structure.

The difference is in the size of the donation. Sanders rightly prides himself on the fairly small donations he receives; his donations come from a large number of not-very-rich people. Many other candidates rely on a handful of billionaires and big corporations to fund them.

Better would be to get all money out of politics, but until we get there, surely Sanders' donations are a lot more democratic than those of the billionaires' favourites.

The question is the size and number of the donations. A private citizen can donate very little compared to someone with the resources of oil tycoons (I'm using the Koch brothers, since they're the topic of the parent article). If total political donations were limited, or if an individual was only allowed to donate a limited amount to each candidate, the situation would be very different. But when a candidate has a handful of people donating two-thirds of their campaign funds, those voices will be heard above the rest.

Is Y Combinator turing into "The Daily Kos?" Blaming all the world's problems on the "Koch Brothers" and "The Super Rich?"

C'mon now, folks.

What does this have to do with Hacker News?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com