The Triumph of the Diligent Dozen

"Can a society whose culture is so given over to excessive commercialization ever function as a deliberative democracy? Can the public find and develop its own sovereign voice, or has its character been so transformed by commercial media . . . that public life will forever be a stunted thing?" -- David Bollier, p. 148 in "Silent Theft."

What a Tangled Web We Weave Jeb Bush, the President's brother, served until recently on the Board of Trustees of the Heritage Foundation, whose two main goals are to privatize Medicare and public education. Charles Koch is a founder of the Cato Institute, his brother David is a director. Their foundations are major contributors to Cato, which champions the privatizing of Social Security and federal public lands. Charles and David are also co-owners of Koch Industries, a $35 billion privately-held oil company indicted in 1999 of cheating on its oil leases on those lands. The Kochs and their employees contributed generously to George Bush's several campaigns. David Koch and his wife Julie gave $487,500 exclusively to Republican candidates in the 2000 election cycle. Among the energy industry donors in that cycle only four companies -- Enron, Exxon/Mobil, Chevron, and BP/Amoco -- outdid Koch Industries, which contributed well over a million dollars, 90 percent to Republicans. Koch Industries was charged by the Clinton Administration's Justice Department with $352 million in pollution and hazardous waste violations. The Bush Administration dropped the charges when Koch Industries agreed to a settlement of $20 million. The Kochs have also given handsomely to the neoliberal Mercatus Center at George Mason University, as did Enron Corp. CEO Kenneth Lay. Wendy Gramm, Sen. Phil Gramm's wife, was an ardent deregulator at Mercatus, and sat on Enron's Board of Directors. Mr. Lay in turn sat on the Board of Trustees of the American Enterprise Institute. He no longer does, but corporate America remains well represented; more than half AEI's current trustees are CEOs of American corporations, including Dow Chemical, State Farm Insurance, Mead Westvaco Corporation, American Express, Merck & Co., Motorola, and Exxon Mobil. Vice President Richard Cheney once served as a Trustee of the American Enterprise Institute, too. His wife, Dr. Lynn Cheney, is currently a senior staffer there. So is Richard Perle, a chief architect of the Bush National Security Strategy and the preemption policy that drove the invasion of Iraq. Thirteen other American Enterprise Institute staffers serve in senior positions in the Bush Administration.

David Bollier's alarming and vital book, titled "Silent Theft: the Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth," describes a stealthy, violent attack on public life in America. The things we share freely and enjoy in common -- our culture and public knowledge, public assets, public services, public spaces, public lands -- define us as the American people. Slowly, deliberately, they are becoming private assets and services, private spaces, proprietary knowledge, and trademarked culture, to be marketed for corporate profit. The vibrant body politic is becoming a mundane body economic.

This sea change in our public life is primarily the result of the efforts of 12 archconservative philanthropic foundations that set out 40 years ago to advance an ideology known as "neoliberalism," or "free market theology." These foundations -- call them the Diligent Dozen -- chose to fund not humanitarian projects but ideological programs, and they were willing to do so decade after decade, spending hundreds of millions in the effort.

The Diligent Dozen: The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Carthage Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, the Charles G. Koch, David H. Koch and Claude R. Lambe charitable foundations, the Phillip M. McKenna Foundation, the JM Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Henry Salvatori Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.