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”.
The diplomatic mission Liam
Fox developed through Atlantic Bridge plugs him straight into the Trump
administration
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.
When 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.
• A fully linked version of
this column will be published at monbiot.com.
Twitter: @GeorgeMonbiot
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