By George Monbiot: 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.
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