Jane Mayer Quotes - Page 2

The book that I wrote is called Dark Money, and it's about secret spending that is very hard to follow. [George] Soros's whole thing is about government transparency, so he spends very much in the open, and the same with [Tom] Steyer.

There's a difference between those two [George Soroses and the Tom Steyers] and the Kochs that I think is important.

Barack Obama was elected President in 2008 and re-elected in 2012. The natural thing would be to suggest money on the right [wing] doesn't really matter that much. The first thing you have to know is that the presidential elections are the ones where it's most difficult for money to hold sway, in that they're the most public elections.

The Kochs have been activists since the 1970s. You can go back and look at the platform of the Libertarian Party in 1980 and see what they really believe in. They wanted to abolish huge swaths of the U.S. government, including the Internal Revenue Service. They want to get rid of Social Security. They'd like to get rid of Medicare. They'd like to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, which directly affects their business.

It's quite amazingly radical, what their [the Kochs] vision of America would be.

It's hard for them to run away from their record. The Kochs are businessmen.

People I've interviewed say they're terrified there may be boycotts of their [the Kochs] products, which include so many household items that everybody's familiar with, things like Stainmaster Carpet and Dixie Cups and Brawny paper towels and Lycra.

It's hard to look at [Donald] Trump as a hopeful sign because, in his own way, he is offering false solutions to many problems.

The possibility exists that the Kochs will walk away with even more power if [Donalds] Trump's defeated.

I think the scary thing is that there is in place already a sprawling infrastructure of advocacy groups, think tanks, academics and candidates and politicians funded by the Kochs and other deep-pocketed groups on the far right ready to attack Hillary Clinton.

[Tom] Steyer is specifically spending money on candidates who will take action against climate change.

There's not as much big money on the left, but you've got George Soros, who has the Open Society Institute. He's pushing liberal policies.

There's been a 40-year effort on the far right to build up think tanks, academic programs, advocacy groups, to push a particular ideology. That's really where the impact is that people don't see.

This year [2016] we're seeing a really strange upending [of the party]. The money was coming from these super-wealthy donors who were really on the far, hard right, people like the Kochs. So the party and the candidates moved so far to the right that a lot of people who don't share their point of view were unhappy.

So you've got these regular, middle-class voters who don't hate the government as much as the Kochs do. They're Republicans, but they still want government programs. They want Social Security, they want Medicare. They need it.

[Donald] Trump comes along and is singing a different song. He says, "I don't need your money; I'm rich enough on my own to run." And he says, "I think we need these programs." And, lo and behold, a lot of Republican voters liked what he said.

The great unknown in this country is where this leaves the Republican Party after this election. Will it be the party of the Kochs or will it be the party of [Donald] Trump?

The Kochs are very much involved in this election, not backing [Donald] Trump but backing everything down the ballot from him. They're pouring money into capturing the Senate and the House of Representatives, and state Houses across the country.

I would argue that there's been a backlash this year [2016]. They [the Kochs] pushed the [Republican] party too far right. The other thing that the backlash is against is the sense that politicians have been bought and sold.

So in a strange way, even though Trump is a billionaire, what he's been saying is, "Everything's rigged, it's all corrupt and I'm not corrupt because I'm my own billionaire." Both [Donald] Trump and Bernie Sanders made a lot of hay by making that argument.

[The Kochs] they hate big government.

Donald Trump actually is a pretty big-government conservative. He doesn't see eye-to-eye with them [the Kochs] on trade.

They [the Kochs] want free trade and cheap labour. They own the second-largest private company in America, which is a huge multinational corporation. So they are on a different wavelength.

One of the oddities of this election is the man that [Donald] Trump chose as his vice-president, Mike Pence, is one of the Kochs' favourite politicians.

In fact, Charles Koch tried to get [Mike] Pence to run for the White House in 2012.