How corporate dark money is taking power on both sides
of the Atlantic https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/02/corporate-dark-money-power-atlantic-lobbyists-brexit?CMP=share_btn_fb
Illustration
by Nate Kitch.
Thursday 2 February
2017 18.29 GMTLast modified on Friday 3 February
2017 16.03 GMT
It took corporate America a while to warm to Donald Trump. Some of his positions,
especially on trade, horrified business leaders. Many of them favoured Ted Cruz
or Scott Walker. But once Trump had secured the nomination, the big money began
to recognise an unprecedented opportunity.
Trump was
prepared not only to promote the cause of corporations in government, but to
turn government into a kind of corporation, staffed and run by executives and
lobbyists. His incoherence was not a liability, but an opening: his agenda
could be shaped. And the dark money network already developed by some
American corporations was perfectly positioned to shape it. Dark money is the
term used in the US for the funding of organisations
involved in political advocacy that are not obliged to disclose where the money
comes from. Few people would see a tobacco company as a credible source on
public health, or a coal company as a neutral commentator on climate change. In
order to advance their political interests, such companies must pay others to
speak on their behalf.
Soon after the
second world war, some of America’s richest people began setting up a network of thinktanks to promote
their interests. These purport to offer dispassionate opinions on public
affairs. But they are more like corporate lobbyists, working on behalf of those
who fund them.
We have no hope
of understanding what is coming until we understand how the dark money network
operates. The remarkable story of a British member of parliament provides a
unique insight into this network, on both sides of the Atlantic. His name is
Liam Fox. Six years ago, his political career seemed to be over when he
resigned as defence secretary after being caught mixing his private and
official interests. But today he is back on the front bench, and with a crucial
portfolio: secretary of state for international trade.
In 1997, the
year the Conservatives lost office to Tony Blair, Fox, who is on the hard right
of the Conservative party, founded an organisation called The Atlantic Bridge.
Its patron was Margaret Thatcher. On its advisory council sat future cabinet ministers Michael Gove, George Osborne, William Hague and Chris Grayling. Fox,
a leading campaigner for Brexit, described the mission of Atlantic Bridge as “to bring people together who have common interests”. It would defend
these interests from “European integrationists who would like to pull Britain
away from its relationship with the United States”.
The diplomatic mission Liam
Fox developed through Atlantic Bridge plugs him straight into the Trump
administration
Atlantic Bridge
was later registered as a charity. In fact it was part of the UK’s own dark
money network: only after it collapsed did we discover the full story of who
had funded it. Its main sponsor was the
immensely rich Michael Hintze, who worked at Goldman Sachs before setting up
the hedge fund CQS. Hintze is one of the Conservative party’s biggest donors. In 2012 he was revealed as a funder of the
Global Warming Policy Foundation, which casts doubt on the science of climate
change. As well as making cash grants and loans to Atlantic Bridge, he lent Fox
his private jet to fly to and from Washington.
Another funder
was the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. It paid for a researcher at Atlantic Bridge called Gabby Bertin. She went on to become David Cameron’s press
secretary, and now sits in the House of Lords: Cameron gave her a life peerage
in his resignation honours list.
In 2007, a group
called the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) set up a sister
organisation, the Atlantic Bridge Project. Alec is
perhaps the most controversial corporate-funded thinktank in the US. It
specialises in bringing together corporate lobbyists with state and federal
legislators to develop “model bills”. The legislators and their families enjoy
lavish hospitality from the group, then take the model bills home with
them, to promote as if they were their own initiatives.
Alec has claimed
that more than 1,000 of its bills are introduced by legislators every year, and
one in five of them becomes law. It has been heavily funded by tobacco companies, the oil company Exxon, drug companies and Charles and David Koch – the
billionaires who founded the first Tea Party organisations. Pfizer, which
funded Bertin’s post at Atlantic Bridge, sits on Alec’s corporate board. Some of the
most contentious legislation in recent years, such as state bills lowering the
minimum wage, bills granting corporations immunity from prosecution and the
“ag-gag” laws – forbidding people to investigate factory farming practices
– were developed by Alec.
To run the US
arm of Atlantic Bridge, Alec brought in its director of international relations, Catherine Bray. She is a British woman who had previously worked for the
Conservative MEP Richard Ashworth and the Ukip MEP Roger Helmer. Bray has subsequently worked forConservative MEP
and Brexit campaigner Daniel Hannan. Her husband is Wells Griffith, the
battleground states director for Trump’s presidential campaign.
Among the
members of Atlantic Bridge’s US advisory council were the
ultra-conservative senators James Inhofe, Jon Kyl and Jim DeMint. Inhofe is
reported to have received over $2m in campaign finance from coal and oil companies. Both Koch Industries and ExxonMobil have been major donors.
Kyl, now
retired, is currently acting as the “sherpa” guiding Jeff Sessions’s
nomination as Trump’s attorney general through the Senate. Jim DeMint resigned
his seat in the Senate to become president of the Heritage Foundation – the thinktank founded with a grant from Joseph Coors of the Coors
brewing empire, and built up with money from the banking and oil billionaire
Richard Mellon Scaife. Like Alec, it has been richly funded by the Koch brothers. Heritage, under DeMint’s presidency, drove the attempt to ensure
that Congress blocked the federal budget, temporarily shutting down the government
in 2013. Fox’s former special adviser at the Ministry of Defence, an American
called Luke Coffey, now works for the foundation.
The Heritage
Foundation is now at the heart of Trump’s administration. Its board members,
fellows and staff comprise a large part of his transition team. Among them
are Rebekah Mercer, who sits on
Trump’s executive committee; Steven Groves and Jim Carafano (State
Department); Curtis Dubay (Treasury); and Ed Meese, Paul Winfree, Russ Vought and John Gray (management
and budget). CNN reports that “no other
Washington institution has that kind of footprint in the transition”.
Trump’s
extraordinary plan to cut federal spending by $10.5tn was drafted by the Heritage
Foundation, which called it a “blueprint for a new administration”. Vought and Gray, who moved on to Trump’s team from Heritage, are
now turning this blueprint into his first budget. This will, if
passed, inflict devastating cuts on healthcare, social security, legal aid,
financial regulation and environmental protections; eliminate programmes to
prevent violence against women, defend civil rights and fund the arts; and will
privatise the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Trump, as you follow this
story, begins to look less like a president and more like an intermediary,
implementing an agenda that has been handed down to him.
In July last
year, soon after he became trade secretary, Liam Fox flew to Washington. One of
his first stops was a place he has visited often over the past 15 years: the office of the Heritage Foundation, where he spoke to, among others,
Jim DeMint. A freedom of information request reveals that one of the topics raised
at the meeting was the European ban on American chicken washed in chlorine: a
ban that producers hope the UK will lift under a new trade agreement. Afterwards, Fox wrote to DeMint, looking
forward to “working with you as the new UK government develops its trade policy
priorities, including in high value areas that we discussed such as
defence”. How did Fox get
to be in this position, after the scandal that brought him down in 2011? The
scandal itself provides a clue: it involved a crossing of the boundaries
between public and private interests. The man who ran the UK branch of Atlantic
Bridge was his friend Adam Werritty, who operated out of Michael Hintze’s
office building. Werritty’s work became entangled with Fox’s official business as defence secretary. Werritty, who carried a business card naming
him as Fox’s adviser but was never employed by the Ministry of Defence, joined
the secretary of state on numerous ministerial visits overseas, and made
frequent visits to Fox’s office.
By the time
details of this relationship began to leak, the charity commission had
investigated Atlantic Bridge and determined that its work didn’t look very charitable. It had to pay
back the tax from which it had been exempted (Hintze picked up the
bill). In response, the trustees
shut the organisation down. As the story about Werritty’s unauthorised
involvement in government business began to grow, Fox made a number of
misleading statements. He was left with no choice but to resign.
Frightened by Donald Trump? You don’t know the
half of it
George Monbiot
When Theresa May
brought Fox back into government, it was as strong a signal as we might receive
about the intentions of her government. The trade treaties that Fox is charged
with developing set the limits of sovereignty. US food and environmental
standards tend to be lower than Britain’s, and will become lower still if
Trump gets his way. Any trade treaty we strike will create a common set of
standards for products and services. Trump’s administration will demand that
ours are adjusted downwards, so that US corporations can penetrate our
markets without having to modify their practices. All the cards, post-Brexit
vote, are in US hands: if the UK doesn’t cooperate, there will be no trade
deal. May needed
someone who is unlikely to resist. She chose Fox, who has become an
indispensable member of her team. The shadow diplomatic mission he developed
through Atlantic Bridge plugs him straight into the Trump administration.
Long before
Trump won, campaign funding in the US had systematically corrupted the
political system. A new analysis by US political
scientists finds an almost perfect linear relationship, across 32 years,
between the money gathered by the two parties for congressional elections and
their share of the vote. But there has also been a shift over these years:
corporate donors have come to dominate this funding.
By tying our
fortunes to those of the United States, the UK government binds us into this
system. This is part of what Brexit was about: European laws protecting the
public interest were portrayed by Conservative Eurosceptics as intolerable
intrusions on corporate freedom. Taking back control from Europe means closer
integration with the US. The transatlantic special relationship is a special
relationship between political and corporate power. That power is cemented by
the networks Liam Fox helped to develop.
In April 1938,
President Franklin Roosevelt sent the US Congress the following warning: “The liberty
of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power
to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That,
in its essence, is fascism.” It is a warning we would do well to remember.
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