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How
Corporate Dark Money is Taking Power on Both Sides of
the Atlantic
By George Monbiot
February 05, 2017
"Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Guardian" -
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”.
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 for Conservative 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.
hen 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.
The views
expressed in this article are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of
Information Clearing House. |
