Hacker News Books

Anybody who's discussing the quite unique tax situation around charity in the US, should give Dark Money by Jane Mayer a read. This uniqueness isn't by accident, and only is called charity as a minor, inconvenient side effect.

Foundation for Economic Education is a Partner to the Koch brothers, so likely a thinktank to espouse their point of view. Read Dark Money by Jane Mayer for more info.

Source: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Economi...

Completely agreed. I recently finished reading the book Dark Money by Jane Meyer. She lays out convincing evidence for how our political discourse and democracy is being undermined by monied interests. The Citizen's United court decision likely accelerated this as well.

Another good book in that vein, but more in the political arena (think tanks etc.) is Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer.

I've recently been reading Dark Money by Jane Mayer and the family is discussed quite a bit. I'm surprised they're supporters of MAPS.

Unfortunately, this is our reality. I’d highly recommend Dark Money by Jane Mayer if you haven’t read it already. Of course, this same machinery has already been built time and time again in the Valley.

> How did we end up with such a gross lack of accountability?

Have a read of Dark Money (Mayer) and/or Democracy in Chains (MacLean) to get a picture of the why and how.

The book Dark Money by Jane Mayer tells much of the backstory of how many of these think tanks got started. Most of them were funded by rich folks, mostly far right or libertarian (e.g. Kochs brothers), for one reason: to make the rich folks' far right, libertarian views seem moderate and mainstream. The idea was to sponsor a think tank that looked moderate and unbiased, but then to fill it up handpicked people who were basically paid to try to "prove" that the Koch brothers ideas are good. Of course both sides do this now, but the libertarian and far right folks have done it the best.

The Koch brothers hired private investigators to trail, intimidate, and attempt to get dirt on Jane Mayer when she was writing Dark Money -- a book about how they covertly funded ultra-right wingers and climate sceptics to protect their hundreds of billions of dollars of oil investments. Charles Koch literally shoulders a non-trivial amount of responsibility for a possible coming semi-apocalypse, and he makes plenty of movie villains look laughably tame in comparison.

But this is a good step.

I think these three books offer a solid framework for providing an answer to your question:

1) The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert Reich [0]

- Reich drops the buzzword neoliberalism in favor of the word power. I like that as neoliberalism is a terrible phrase for the concept it describes, but make no mistake, it's the insidious, invisible nature of neoliberalism that put our country in a position where neither party served the people well. That is what Reich describes here.

2) The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News-and Divided a Country by Gabriel Sherman [1]

- There is also a Showtime miniseries based on the book you could watch. Pair with the movie Bombshell

3) Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer [2]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52118381-the-system

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15981705-the-loudest-voi...

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27833494-dark-money

I think more pertinent are Economism by James Kwak (on the naive use of Econ 101), Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic (a better, or at least much more legible, analysis of inequality within and among countries than Piketty's tome), and maybe Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer (about campaign financing in the last two decades in the US).

I read 47 books so far:

* Oxygen (Lane)

* The Vital Question (Lane)

* Mitochondria and the meaning of life (Lane)

* Life Ascending (Lane)

* Shoe Dog (Knight)

* Heat (Buford)

* Thinking Fast And Slow (Daniel K, 3rd time reading it)

* Fluent Forever (Wyner)

* Dark Money (Mayer)

* Elon Musk (Vance)

* The Black Swan (Taleb, 5th time reading it)

* In Defense of Liberal Edication By Farred Zakaria

* Confidence Men By Ros Suskind

* Dark Money by Jane Meyer

* Better by Atul Gawande

* The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

* Essentialism by Greg Mckeown

* Contagious by Jonah Berger

* Sapiens by Yuval Harari

* The Pentagons Brain by Annie Jacobson

* Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

* The Only Game in town by Mohamed El-Erian

* The Industries of Future By Alec Ross

Charles Koch and other billionaires and oil interests are literally spending hundreds of millions of dollars per year funding the ultra-right wing US ecosystems of think tanks and academics, and a large part of the motivation is to prevent action to deal with climate change. They're fighting. But fighting back is wrong?

Dark Money by Jane Mayer is a good place to read more. Charles Koch hired private investigators to tail her back when she was working on the book. That's a strong endorsement!

Quit spreading right wing propaganda and talking points here. Hacker News isn’t for political discussion and you’re just making a false equivalency and repeating Fox News lines (college students all think the same!)

The right wing donors like Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson far outspend the left and have organizations like ALEC to which there is no left wing equivalent. Data is here so you don’t have to make shit up: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/03/richest-billionaire...

>According to Open Secrets, Republicans had a larger share of the billionaires -- and their contributions to outside spending groups -- in the 2012 election cycle. Among the top 100 donors in the Open Secrets list, 33 were billionaires, and of those, 14 gave primarily to liberal groups while 19 gave to conservative groups.

>In addition, the top 100 donors of 2012 gave 41 percent of all the money collected by outside spending groups, and of their donations, 71 percent went to conservative groups.

From: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2014/jun/23...

Another relevant source: https://billmoyers.com/2014/04/10/nothing-really-compares-to...

You can read Dark Money by Jane Meyer if you are actually interested in this.

> Lots of classic liberian nonsense in here.

Alex Tabarrok is a strident libertarian who is in the employ of the Mercatus Center, a place that was started with "ultraconservative" Koch brothers money and has long been funded by them. Read Dark Money to learn what the Koch's expect in return for the many millions they've poured into the Mercatus Center.

1. "ultraconservative" is Dark Money author Jane Mayer's term for the 'extreme' big-business liberatarian politics of Charles Koch and John Olin.

The book this article is about " Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer" is amazing and a little depressing. The funding that is behind the PAC/Super-PAC is very scary, it's a tidal wave of cash. I've always assumed since day one of American politics that cash has been a player. I never assumed that it's as big as portrayed. I'm really starting to rethink my choice of IT and not becoming a political operative.