On Koch Industries and Fingers In Pies.

Charles and David Koch: hardline libertarians, Tea Party sponsors, Climate Change deniers*, and all round nice guys, I'd imagine.

Koch Industries is the second largest privately held company in North America. Based in Wichita, Kansas, the company began life as an oil-refining venture in 1940. Today, Koch Industries employs 80,000 people worldwide and has subsidiaries in trading and investment, manufacturing, and other energy industries. They own Lycra.

Fred Koch – who, as a student at MIT, developed an improved method of converting crude oil into gasoline on which the original company was based – diversified the firm during the 1960s, investing in refineries in Minnesota and Oklahoma and ranching opportunities in the Midwest. On his death in 1967, the company passed into the hands of his two sons, Charles and David Koch, who run the company to this day.

The Kochs have always been politically active, throwing their considerable influence and wealth behind causes deemed worthy. Unsurprisingly, the Kochs’ political views “dovetail” (in the uncharacteristically neutral parlance of New Yorker columnist Jane Mayer, whose excellent article on this subject is here) neatly with their corporate interests. Since the foundation of the company in the New Deal Era, the Koch family have lobbied for a libertarian America: low (or preferably non-existent) corporate and personal taxes, minimal social security provision, and less federal oversight of industry. The Kochs have been, in Mayer’s words, “the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America.”

Fred was a founder member of the John Birch Society, a libertarian group which, amongst other things, claimed that Dwight Eisenhower was an agent of the Soviet Union and bundled Barry Goldwater towards the presidency in 1964. In 1980, David stood for president on the Libertarian Party ticket, running to the right of Ronald Reagan. His platform pledges included the abolition of the FBI and the CIA, the scrapping of Social Security, and an end to federal regulation of business. In 1963, Fred gave a speech in which he claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican parties.” In time, he went on to say, Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the US until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”

Sound familiar?

That’s right. Fred Koch’s rhetoric could easily have been lifted from any of the Tea Party rallies that have come to dominate the political narrative in the run up to November’s midterm elections. And that’s no coincidence: to say that the Kochs have their grubby fingers in the Tea Party pie would be a gross understatement.

Many of the organisations that make up the Tea Party were cast in the Koch furnace. Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) – which now operates under the moniker ‘FreedomWorks’ – was founded by David Koch in 1984 to act as a political lobbying organisation. Masquerading as a grassroots movement, CSE owes it history of activism and current prominence to nothing more than the Kochs’ generosity. Koch Industries provided over $8 million in the early 1990s, allowing CSE to effectively become the family’s Washington arm in the battle against Clinton-era reforms. The Kochs also fund conservative think tanks such as the Cato Institute and Reason Foundation. In total, Mayer estimates, the Koch brothers have given over $100 million to conservative causes.

As the 2010 midterms approach, David Koch has pledged $45 million to Americans for Prosperity, another libertarian non-government organisation that splintered from CSE during the Bush years. Reflecting upon the unexpected political salience of the Tea Party, David Axelrod – Obama’s Senior Political Adviser – quipped “What they don’t say, in part, is that this is a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”

Of course, oil billionaires pushing a libertarian agenda is nothing new – the Kochs themselves have been at it for years. What is new, however, is the receptiveness of American voters to that agenda. As the primary successes of candidates such as Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and Christine O’Donnell have shown, anti-government sentiment has gained a remarkable credibility in a political climate forged in the crucible of global recession, national decline, subconscious racism, and residual anti-intellectualism. For all the accusations of astro-turfing, the genuine sentiment behind certain aspects of the Tea Party is undeniable.

In her New Yorker article, Mayer quotes the conservative economist Bruce Bartlett at length. “The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians,” Bartlett says. However, with the ascendance of the Tea Party, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there – people who can provide real ideological power.” More so than at any other time in America’s recent political history, men such as David Koch have a receptive electorate onto which to push their self-serving, socially-damaging agenda. The Kochs, Bartlett writes, “are trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.”

Yet, no matter how hard the chiefs try to hide the fact, they are not from the same tribe as the Indians. The Kochs’ libertarianism, which shapes everything from signs at Tea Party rallies to Senate platforms, exists first and foremost to further the interests of business. The Kochs don’t give a damn about the fate of middle America, the job market, or stagnating urban centres. Yet, the con is on. Along with the Kochs, the Tea Party’s biggest donor is good old Rupert Murdoch who, with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin on the payroll, uses Fox News to push Indians towards the conclusions the chiefs want them to reach.

For her article, Mayer interviewed Gus diZerega, a former friend of Charles Koch. Reflecting on the Kochs’ libertarianism, diZerega speculates: “perhaps [they have] confused making money with freedom.” I’d wager they haven’t. Freedom is the name of the Kochs’ game because it facilitates the making of money. In a damning Rolling Stone article, Matt Taibbi predicts that the Tea Party agenda will be “whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP’s campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade, and financial deregulation.”  Soon, Taibbi writes, the “revolutionary causes” will be reduced to “voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives.”

The real worry as we approach November’s midterms is surely not that the Kochs have confused making money with freedom, but that American voters will confuse freedom with making money.



*Greenpeace have described Koch Industries as "the kingpin of climate change denial."

On Godwin's Law

On Godwin's Law

In one of the more chuckle-worthy of Family Guy’s occasionally tedious cut scenes, Cookie Monster, bed-ridden in cookie rehab, is discovered to be hoarding cookies. After attempting to pin blame on ‘Derek’, Cookie Monster makes a dart for the contraband. Restrained on his bed by doctors, he screams in distress: “You guys are Nazis, man. You’re fricking Nazis.”

Unwittingly, Cookie Monster has added further weight to an endlessly cited internet chat room phenomenon: Godwin’s Law. Godwin’s Law holds that

“as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

Devised by Jewish-American lawyer and author Mike Godwin in 1990, the Law has sprung into wide usage, transcending its original application to internet discussions. As Godwin himself has written, “this one off creation of mine, like the Energizer bunny, keeps on going and going.” The logical and widely quoted extrapolation of the Law is that, in any argument or discussion, the party that first brings up the Nazis, Hitler, the Holocaust, or any other Third Reich comparison has automatically lost.

Cookie Monster is thus not the only one losing arguments these days. Nazi references seem to be increasingly common in politics and the media. Predictably, the best example is Glenn Beck, whose Fox News show contains more references to the Fuhrer than a toothbrush-moustache convention at Eagle’s Nest. “So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research...eugenics”, Beck ranted in 2009. “In case you don't know what eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race!” The President isn’t the only one being daubed with Beck’s swastika-brush either. A figure as removed from politics as Brian Urlacher, the burly Chicago Bears linebacker, has been on the receiving end: branded a Nazi by Beck for seemingly nothing more than having broad shoulders, blue eyes, and a Germanic name. Daily Show funny man Lewis Black recently joked that Beck has “Nazi Tourettes.” And he isn’t the only one. Last month, the Democratic nominee for California governor, Jerry Brown, proved his political classiness by declaring his opponent, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, to be “like Goebbels.” Brits aren’t immune either. In 2008, the Conservative MEP for South East England, Daniel Hannan, angered by the extension of the EU President’s parliamentary powers, declared that he was “almost tempted to compare [the powers] to the Nazi Ermächtigungsgesetz - the Enabling Act of 1933.” According to Godwin’s Law, all of these guys – Beck, Brown, Hannan – have lost.

Godwin states that his opposition to Nazi comparisons is based upon “a sense of moral outrage” elicited by people flinging about Hitler and the Holocaust without properly understanding the horrors of Nazism. Such comparisons belittle the suffering of millions, he argues.

I have two problems with this.

First, our modern obsession with Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust is a symptom of a much larger problem in western society: the lack of genuine evil. The world, since Adolf’s demise in 1945, has become more relativist and uncertain. The West has, in the modern era, waged war on (amongst others) Koreans, the Viet Cong, Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia, Saddam Hussein (twice), and Islamic fundamentalists. It also engaged in a four decade-long Cold War with the Soviet Union and communism more generally.

However, none of these ‘bad guys’ offer the same moral absolute that the Nazis do. I am not in any way trying to defend the atrocities carried out in the name of Milosevic, Saddam, or any of the communist regimes, but culturally their ‘evil’ is tempered. The Viet Cong were ‘freedom fighters’, celebrated by counter-cultural elements in the West; communist revolutionaries have been deified by many; the Taliban are – it seems – terrible, but the very fact that they operate in the name of Islam leaves western commentators unwilling to hold them up as an example of genuine evil. In addition, the wars fought by the West since 1945 have been largely unpopular, thus shifting the ‘evil’ tag away from the ‘enemy’ and onto our own leaders.

In short, thanks to the rise of moral relativism, there has been no individual or regime over the last half-century that could universally be considered evil. Thus, when commentators reach for the N-bomb, it is usually not in order to make historically sound comparisons to Nazism, but rather to liken the target of their ire to the only manifestation of true, absolute, unquestionable evil that exists on our cultural horizon. Thus, Beck et al aren’t belittling Nazi atrocities but are reinforcing our condemnation of them.

This brings me to my second defence of Nazi comparers. Engraved on the wall inside the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. are the words spoken by President Clinton at the museum’s Dedication Ceremony:

“This museum will touch the life of everyone who enters and leave everyone forever changed – a place of deep sadness and a sanctuary of bright hope; an ally of education against ignorance, of humility against arrogance, an investment in a secure future against whatever insanity lurks ahead. If this museum can mobilize morality, then those who have perished will thereby gain a measure of immortality.”

The United States Holocaust Museum is brilliant and its message – to learn from the mistakes of the past in order to ensure that nothing resembling the Holocaust can ever occur again – is pitched perfectly. When the millions of tourists who visit Holocaust museums the world over read the memoirs of survivors, watch video footage of emaciated inmates, or gaze at the piles of shoes left by the murdered, their morality is indeed mobilized.

It is, however, a universal truism that when people need a museum to remember something, it is probably already in the process of being forgotten. Plus, only a limited percentage of the world’s population can visit such a museum every year.

Yet, every time Glenn Beck makes an ill-judged and foundationless comparison between his political opponents and Hitler; every time a commentator likens an event to the Holocaust; and every time the Nazis get an airing in popular culture, we are forced to observe the subliminal equation: Nazis/Holocaust/Hitler = EVIL. The more often Godwin’s Law is obeyed and discussions are ‘lost’ because of it, the more profoundly this equation – and the conviction that the world should never see another Bergen-Belsen – is embedded into our psyche. More than any museum, Nazi comparisons help us remember that the like of Hitler et al should not be tolerated in the 21^st century.

So I’m all for Nazi comparisons. Far from belittling the suffering of millions, they are a constant cultural reminder of it, ensuring that such suffering is avoided in the future.

On God, History, and Glenn Beck.

"[The Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom] was meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.” - Thomas Jefferson

“America today begins to turn to God.” This was conservative talk show host Glenn Beck’s opening gambit at his controversial ‘Restoring Honor’ rally on Saturday. The rally, Beck claimed, had “nothing to do with politics.” Rather, he announced to the hundreds of thousands assembled in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the rally had “everything to do with God [and] turning our faces back to the values and the principles that made our country great.”

I thought this odd. Beck has long been in the business of claiming that America was founded a Christian nation. “I have done years now of reading the Founders, the diaries, their letters,” Beck recently reflected, “…and I will tell you that God was instrumental [in the foundation of the republic.]” He’s wrong, of course. Countless liberal defenses of the proposed Islamic community centre in Lower Manhattan have shown that, so I won’t bother here.

What’s more surprising about Beck’s comments is his failure to realize that America has already “turned to God.” America might have been founded as a secular nation based upon the principle that religion and government should never mix, but God has been hitting back. Indeed, it would not be a stretch to argue that God has been the most influential protagonist in American history.

Standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Beck, gesturing to the white marble shrine, declared: “we look to a giant for answers.” Lincoln’s answers – engraved on the walls of his memorial – would probably have pleased Beck. It was Lincoln, at Gettysburg, who first described America as “one nation under God.” It was Lincoln who conceived of the nation united by Christianity: “[The North and South] both read the same bible and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other.” And it was Lincoln who, during the nation’s darkest hour, followed what he interpreted as God’s will. In September 1862, immediately before the Battle of Antietam, a Confederate courier used General Robert E. Lee’s battle plans to wrap three cigars and mislaid them. By chance, Union soldiers happened upon the cigars – and the plans. With such detailed information about Lee’s tactics, Union general George McClellan won a famous victory. The victory – and, more importantly, the chance discovery that facilitated it – convinced Lincoln to issue his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, paving the way for the destruction of slavery. Lincoln, according to Gideon Welles, “had submitted the disposal of the subject  to a Higher Power.” That higher power, willing that Lee’s plans be mislaid and discovered, directed Lincoln towards emancipation. Thus, the supposed will of God shaped the path of American history during the nation’s bleakest moments.

How about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in whose footsteps Beck was literally standing on Saturday?* Like Lincoln, Beck conceived of America as a Christian nation. In King’s last speech, given in 1968, he imagined a “mental flight” through history. He began in Egypt and the “Promised Land.” He stopped “to watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church in Wittenberg.” Then he arrived at the present: “I just want to do God’s will,” he cried. The future, he finally reassured his audience, was safe in God’s hands: “I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.” King’s conception of world history, of the Civil Rights Movement to which he had been so central, and of the future of America, was inseparable from Christianity.

More obviously, the New Right, which emerged to dominate politics in the late twentieth-century, was deeply rooted in an evangelical, millennial Christianity. Activists and preachers such as Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham drove religion right to the heart of American politics and national life. Issues such as abortion, gay rights, school teaching, and censorship have become supercharged with religious zeal. Politicians grasped at this awakening. “Our forbears came not for gold,” Ronald Reagan proclaimed in 1982, “but mainly in search of God…Our Pledge of Allegiance states that we are ‘one nation under God’, and our currency bears the motto ‘In God We Trust’…the morality and values such faith implies are deeply embedded in our national character.” And he was right. The rise of the religious right further entwined America with Christianity.

Today, the statistics speak for themselves.  According to a 2009 Pew Research Center survey, 71% of Americans believe in God. 56% say that religion is very important in their lives. 39% attend religious services at least once a week. Compare this with the UK, where – according to a 2005 Eurobarometer poll – only 38% believe in God. America is, in relative terms, a phenomenally religious, thoroughly Christian, country. Sociologists commonly hold up the United States as a notable exception to the ‘secularisation thesis’.

Glenn Beck thinks that America needs to turn back God. A cynic might say he’s confusing his causalities. If America really is in the mire and the great project laid out by Jefferson, Adams, Madison, et al is in legitimate danger, surely the problem is not a lack of religion, but an excess. If Beck is a true ‘Tea Partier’ and believes in returning America to the principles upon which it was founded, he needs to rethink his ideas on religion.

America was founded as a slave-holding republic, but it has changed. America was founded as a non-religious republic, but it has changed. Of course, the history books celebrate the former transformation, but are more reserved about the second.

Yes, memorialise Abraham Lincoln and Dr. Martin Luther King for their contributions to the construction of a fairer, more racially inclusive nation; but don’t neglect their role in driving religion into the heart of American political and social life. You can't pick and choose your history. I can’t help but think that a clearer understanding of the history of religion in America would benefit the debate over the Islamic Community Centre and the broader discussion of the proper place of religion in American life.

On C L R James, Art, and a Useful 56.

"What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?"

I’m reading C L R James’s Beyond A Boundary. It’s magic. If you have even the most fleeting of interests in cricket or, for that matter, world history, you should tuck into James. Without exception, every single one of the chapters I’ve read so far (and I’m nearly done!) has something illuminating to say about both the game of cricket and the history of mankind. James’ chapters on W.G. Grace – “he brought and made a secure place for pre-industrial England in the iron and steel of the Victorian Age” – are perhaps the pages in which he most cleverly intertwines the inseparable (he believes) narratives of cricket and English social history. Before I started reading I honestly could make neither head nor tail of James’ famous research question – “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” – but, by a process of submersion more than anything else, I’m beginning to understand. Understand it maybe, but I can’t explain it. You’ll just have to read it if you want to glean more.

In one of James’ chapters – “What is art?” – he makes perhaps his boldest claim. “Cricket,” he declares, “is an art. Not a bastard or a poor relation, but a full member of the community.” Now, of course, to compare sport to art is a tired cliché. James’ argument is enthralling, though. The “manifold motions” of great players, he writes, are of such beauty that “there are few picture galleries in the world which effectively reproduce a fraction of them.” Unlike a picture in a gallery however, batting strokes and bowling actions and leaping catches exist only fleetingly as an image and thereafter “become a permanent possession of the spectator which he can renew at will.”*

Whilst reading James’ prose there was but one player in my mind. It was not Lara, Ponting, or Tendular. Nor was it Wasim Akram, Shane Warne, or Andrew Flintoff. Working my way through James’ arguments, I realised that the only player I have ever watched who turns ‘cricket the sport’ into ‘cricket the art’ is the great Pakistani batsman, Mohammad Yousuf.

Having lost the national captaincy in acrimonious circumstances in Australia this winter, temporarily retired from international cricket, and thus missing at Edgbaston and Trent Bridge, Yousuf returned to play England at the Oval last week. His first innings 56 was a piece of art in James’ most trumped-up sense. Yousuf did not dominate the bowling – indeed it took him fifteen balls to get off the mark and both James Anderson and Steven Finn had him playing and missing early. He could have been run out twice. Azhar Ali, the young pretender at the other end, looked in far better knick. Yet, there is something different about Yousuf that no-one seems to be able to put their finger on. Simon Hughes, in a video-analysis segment on Channel 5, illustrated how the wily veteran stays still in his stance, moves his feet well, and plays the ball as late as possible. But that’s not it. In a recent article, Hughes credits Yousuf’s "unbreakable" concentration. That’s not it either. The problem is perhaps that Simon Hughes is a sport critic whilst C L R James was an art critic. The way Yousuf plays and the way he holds himself at the crease marks him out as something more than a sportsman. He is so easy, so natural and effortless. For unquantifiable intangible reasons, it doesn’t matter whether he’s easing his way to a double-century – as he did at Lord’s in 2006 – or grinding out a gutsy half-century having not played for six months, when Yousuf walks out to bat he looks like an artist. I’ve never watched another cricketer – nay, another sportsman – for whom that can be said.

On Thursday Yousuf will be returning to the scene of his magnificent double-century in 2006. I’ll be making every effort to watch him bat; to watch the crossing of the thin line between sport and visual art.

* James, who also made the observation that the strokes of great batsmen “are not caught and permanently fixed for us to make repeated visits to them”, failed to foresee youtube.