Money always mattered in statewideand national elections. From the 1970s through the ‘90s, the realization that toomuch spending by large donors was warping democracy spurred a bi-partisan drivefor campaign finance reform.
Those days seem to be over. In the Citizens Uniteddecision (2010), a case of what the right wing otherwise denounces as “judicialactivism,” the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that unrestricted election spending bycorporations is a constitutional right. Koch Industries is just like you andme, the court decided. But we know better: Koch is worth billions and controlsa big piece of the American economy. Even before Citizens United, the Kochbrothers spent a fortune on media and political campaigns, seeking to remodelthe U.S. according to their own fantasies. The pace has only accelerated.
As the documentary CitizenKoch shows over and over, David and Charles Koch aren’t the onlybillionaires bent on controlling the country, but they are the prime movers.Wisconsin, once a progressive state, became a battleground and test case whenthe Kochs’ favorite son, Scott Walker, pulled a fast one on voters and turned“reform” into union busting. Walker thwarted a grassroots campaign to recallhim, outspending his opponents eight to one on the largesse of out-of-statedonors.
Directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal caught Walker on camera blandlydiscussing his scheme: destroy the state’s labor movement by “divide andconquer,” starting with public service unions, since many people hold vagueresentments over workers paid with taxpayers’ dollars. The mania to dismantleunions has a financial motive, since unions are a major source of funding forDemocratic Party candidates. But running at a deeper level is a dark current ofideology. The Kochs’ father was the racist anti-Communist paranoiac whoco-founded the John Birch Society. Although the Koch-funded elements of the TeaParty parade the occasional African American in a show of diversity, Citizen Koch visits a Tea Partygathering during the Walker recall whose John Birch speaker blamed America’sdecline on the malign influence of Jews who fled Nazi Germany for America.Little wonder, given the clarity of such thinking, that the Tea Baggers shownin Citizen Koch can’t decide whetherObama is a Fascist, a Socialist or a Communist. Of one thing they are certain:he’s not an American.
Citizen Koch may be preaching to the choir, but its directors hope towin a few converts. They interview several genuinely conservative Republicansdismayed by the radical shift in their party, and follow the 2012 Republicanpresidential campaign of Buddy Roemer, a banker and former Louisiana governorwho couldn’t raise enough money to buy a seat in the GOP primary debates.Disgusted by the overweening power of corporate contributors, he quit theparty.
Citizen Koch is out on DVD.
