Two of America's most respected investigative journalists spent decades documenting the same crime from different angles. Jane Mayer tracked the billionaires buying our political system. David Cay Johnston tracked the corporations legally stealing billions through hidden fees and rigged contracts. The picture they paint together is the same picture.
Jane Mayer is one of the most respected investigative journalists in America. Her book Dark Money took five years of reporting — court documents, private archives, childhood friends, sealed depositions — to document how a small group of right-wing billionaires systematically purchased American political institutions.
This is not a liberal talking point. This is documented history. The network Mayer exposed was built methodically over five decades — starting with the Lewis Powell Memo of 1971, running through the founding of the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and ultimately the capture of the Supreme Court.
By 2016, the Koch network alone was prepared to spend $889 million on a single election cycle — more than either major political party.
In 80% of all dark money spending in 2014, the money came from the right. That is not both-sidesism. That is the documented record.
This was not spontaneous. It was engineered. Lewis Powell's 1971 memo laid out the blueprint explicitly — and the network built exactly what it described, piece by piece, over five decades.
Future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell — then a tobacco industry lawyer — wrote a private memo arguing that corporate America was under assault. His target: not protesters, but professors, preachers, judges, scientists, and opinion makers. His conclusion: "We can't change them, so we'll create our own." The memo was accidentally made public. By then, Powell had already begun building the movement with Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Gulf Oil fortune.
The network funded the Heritage Foundation, expanded AEI, created the Cato Institute, and began funding the Federalist Society to train a generation of ideologically reliable judges. William Simon, running one of the foundations, declared the strategy: "Books, books, books — and then some more books." They moved up the supply chain of ideas and started producing them wholesale.
Charles Koch's brother David ran for Vice President on the Libertarian ticket. They lost decisively. Their response: abandon electoral politics as a primary vehicle and instead focus on manufacturing the conditions that would make their ideas win. They studied American political change as an engineering problem and designed a systematic assembly line — intellectuals, think tanks, front groups, candidates — to move ideas into law.
The Koch network developed what their own operatives called "an unparalleled pipeline" — funding programs at between 230 and 307 universities. They identified promising students, trained them in free-market ideology, credentialed them through the system, and placed them in think tanks, state-level policy groups, and eventually government. One operative described the strategy: find one slightly conservative professor, fund the program around them, grow it from the inside. They targeted Ivy League schools specifically — Olin chairs appear across every major university.
In a four-year period, $500 million flowed into think tanks, experts, media dissemination, and front groups to manufacture doubt about climate change — whether it was happening, whether it was man-made, whether any solution was affordable. Americans for Prosperity — the Koch's major grassroots organization — systematically targeted and removed any Republican who supported cap-and-trade legislation. The result: the U.S. Congress moved in the opposite direction of science and the entire rest of the world. Follow the money.
The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision — delivered by justices shaped by the Federalist Society the network had funded for decades — opened the floodgates to unlimited anonymous political spending. Justice Kennedy argued transparency would be the safeguard. The money immediately went dark through 501(c)4 social welfare organizations. By 2014, 80% of all dark money in American politics was flowing from the right. The system the Powell Memo described was complete.
The Koch network announced plans to spend $889 million in the 2016 election cycle — more than either major political party. Each Koch brother was then worth $45 billion, up from $14 billion each when Barack Obama took office. They did extraordinarily well under the president their network spent years opposing. The investment in political influence had paid returns no stock market could match.
The Koch network didn't just spend money. They built a system. Mayer documented each component in five years of reporting. Here is the assembly line they engineered.
Before policy, before politics, they funded the thinkers. Subsidized professors, funded chairs at Ivy League universities, produced books and papers that became the intellectual foundation for policies that would come decades later.
Brookings wasn't originally liberal — it was bipartisan. The network didn't try to capture it. They built their own: Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, AEI expansions. Think tanks that produced "policy papers" — the raw ideas turned into marketable products for legislators.
Find one slightly conservative professor. Fund that person. Grow the program from the inside. Don't be too overt — universities reject obvious transplants like organs. Work from within. Then leverage that beachhead to build out the department. Repeat at 230–307 universities.
One operative described students as "bottles of wine — not worth much when they're new, but as they age, they get more valuable." Fund the Federalist Society. Train a generation of law students in originalist ideology. Credential them. Then push them into clerkships, appeals courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court.
Americans for Prosperity looked like a grassroots citizen movement. It was funded by billionaires. It targeted specific legislators — ran ads, organized rallies, funded primary challengers. Any Republican who voted for cap-and-trade was targeted and removed. It was Astroturf engineered to look like grass.
The Kochs called their donors "the network" and "the investors." Guest lists leaked occasionally — revealing hundreds of ultra-wealthy contributors. The network pooled resources, coordinated strategy, and ran the money through 501(c)4 "social welfare" organizations where donor names stay hidden permanently.
After 2012's failure, internal research showed Americans thought them greedy. Response: fund the United Negro College Fund, push criminal justice reform, rename everything around "well-being." Charles Koch started a Well-Being Institute. Research showed if you call it "a movement for well-being," people respond better. The ideology didn't change. The packaging did.
"The enemy is not the kids out in the streets. The enemy is the professors. The preachers in the pulpit. The judges on the benches. The scientists. The public opinion makers. We're not going to change them — so we'll create our own."— Lewis Powell, 1971 Memo · Future U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Five years of primary-source reporting: court records, sealed depositions, private family archives, childhood interviews, and a secret history of the Koch family commissioned by one brother against another. Mayer draws on sources the subjects would have preferred stayed buried.
The book traces how extreme libertarian ideology — born in the mind of a man who built oil refineries for Stalin and Hitler, refined through the John Birch Society, and then weaponized with hundreds of millions of dollars — became the dominant force shaping American economic and environmental policy.
Please share this book. It explains in documented detail how the working people of this country get played — not by accident, but by design, by people who have studied the system and know exactly how to rig it.
View on Google Books →David Cay Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and one of America's foremost experts on tax law and corporate power. Where Jane Mayer followed the political money, Johnston followed the legal mechanisms — the hidden fees, rigged contracts, and privatization schemes that corporations use to extract wealth from ordinary Americans completely legally.
His conclusion is staggering: if corporations paid their fair share of taxes, every working American would have approximately 40% more money in their pocket. Healthcare reform is a drop in the bucket compared to what is being systematically extracted through the fine print of contracts and laws most Americans never read.
This is not illegal. That is the point. They wrote the laws. They write the contracts. And most of us sign without reading.
Johnston's work completes the picture Mayer began. The dark money buys the politicians. The politicians write the laws. The corporations profit from the laws. Working Americans pay the bill — and never see the invoice.
Johnston draws on court records, regulatory filings, and decades of investigative reporting to expose how corporations legally steal billions through hidden fees, rigged contracts, and the systematic privatization of public assets — all buried in the fine print of agreements most Americans never read.
The book documents case by case how companies that pay little or nothing in taxes use government infrastructure, benefit from public subsidies, and then charge customers rates set by regulators they helped select. The system is not broken. It is working exactly as designed — by the people who designed it.
Please share this book. Billionaires are robbing us blind and almost no one talks about it. Healthcare is just a drop in the bucket compared to what is extracted through mechanisms most people never see.
View on Penguin Random House →There needs to be one thread of truth in every believable lie. Although the system sounds fair — free markets, equal opportunity, rule of law — it is far from the truth. These books will give you the facts. You will find that all of us would have 40% more money in our pockets if big businesses paid their fair share. There is no bottom to the depravity of the human soul if left unchecked by accountability. Both parties are responsible. Call your representatives and let them know you're watching.
The Capitol switchboard connects you to any representative or senator. You don't need to know their number. Just call and ask to be connected to your member of Congress by name or state.
Ask why your representatives only serve the wealthy. Ask why corporations pay effective tax rates below what you pay. Ask why the fine print in every contract, utility bill, and service agreement is designed to transfer money from you to them. Let them know you're watching. Let them know you've read the books.
Jane Mayer documented how billionaires buy political power through dark money networks. David Cay Johnston documented how corporations use that political power to write laws that legally extract wealth from working Americans. These are not two separate stories. They are the same story told from different ends of the pipeline.
The Powell Memo said the opinion elite needed to be replaced with their own. Five decades later, the think tanks they built produce the policy papers. The judges they trained interpret the laws. The politicians they funded write the legislation. And the corporations write the fine print that most of us never read.
"Growing economic inequality coinciding with political equality is a tension. When contributions in politics are so skewed, you're going to see the democracy get distorted. Experts from both parties are worried about this — including Republican experts."— Jane Mayer, Dark Money
A Princeton study cited by Mayer found that the interests of ordinary voters on issues like strengthening Social Security have virtually no measurable impact on Congressional outcomes compared to the interests of the wealthy. This is not democracy malfunctioning. This is democracy captured — systematically, methodically, over fifty years — by people who studied how it worked and bought it piece by piece.
The question is not whether this happened. The documented record is clear. The question is what you do now that you know.