Politics Quotes by Jane Mayer

[The Kochs] they hate big government.

— Jane Mayer

“Charles’s aim, he said, was to tear the government out “at the root.”

— Jane Mayer

“He was driven by some deeper urge to smash the one thing left in the world that could discipline him: the government.”

— Jane Mayer

“merged all forms of political spending—campaign, lobbying, and philanthropic—”

— Jane Mayer

“[David] Maraniss sees [Barack] Obama as a man with "a moviegoer's or writer's sensibility, where he is both participating and observing himself…

— Jane Mayer

“The rich inevitably are going to organize their wealth to avoid government confiscation. They’ll do whatever the law allows to use their…

— Jane Mayer

“Cato was devoted to espousing Charles Koch’s vision: that government’s only legitimate role was to “serve as a night watchman, to protect…

— Jane Mayer

“While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate…

— Jane Mayer

“the university system of becoming a “niche for radicals,” describing the public funding as “a boondoggle,” and demanding that the legislature “starve…

— Jane Mayer

“In “Stealth,” his unpublished 2003 report on Charles’s political development, Coppin suggests that Charles harbored a hatred of the government so intense…

— Jane Mayer

“In order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organization is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised,” Charles wrote, arguing for…

— Jane Mayer

I would argue that there's been a backlash this year [2016]. They [the Kochs] pushed the [Republican] party too far right. The…

— Jane Mayer

“They made political contributions to party committees and candidates, such as Dole. Their business made contributions through its political action committee and…

— Jane Mayer

“the next year, the company released a terse statement announcing that it had pleaded guilty to defrauding the Canadian government and would…

— Jane Mayer

“the Bush energy act contained some $6 billion in oil and gas subsidies and $9 billion in coal subsidies. The Kochs routinely…

— Jane Mayer

“What Obama was up against was a new form of permanent campaign. It was waged not by politicians but by people whose…

— Jane Mayer

“While these tax cuts starved the government, George Mason also belittled its role philosophically. A star on its faculty was James Buchanan,…

— Jane Mayer

“Today, they are commonplace, and rarely controversial, but Americans across the political spectrum once regarded the whole idea of private foundations with…

— Jane Mayer

“The Kochs’ extensive research had shown that what the American “customer” wanted from politics, alas, was quite different from their business-dominated free-market…

— Jane Mayer

“The Kochs were not alone. As they sought ways to steer American politics hard to the right without having to win the…

— Jane Mayer

“Fred Koch’s political views were apparently shaped by his traumatic exposure to the Soviet Union. Over time, Stalin brutally purged several of…

— Jane Mayer

“One former insider in the Kochs’ realm, who declined to be named because he feared retribution, described the early donor summits as…

— Jane Mayer

“Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, warned in his zeitgeist-shifting book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that without…

— Jane Mayer

“The flood of money from Amway’s founders failed, though, to quash an investigation by the Canadian government into a tax-fraud scheme in…

— Jane Mayer

“radicals in Congress refused to back down, bringing virtually the entire federal government to a halt for sixteen days in October, leaving…

— Jane Mayer

“Liberal critics, like the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, worried that the country was in danger of…

— Jane Mayer

“During the previous eight years of Republican rule, this conservative corporate elite had consolidated its power, amassing enormous sway over the U.S.…

— Jane Mayer

“In 1992, David Koch likened the brothers’ multipronged political strategy to that of venture capitalists with diversified portfolios. “My overall concept is…

— Jane Mayer

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…

— Jane Mayer

I think the scary thing is that there is in place already a sprawling infrastructure of advocacy groups, think tanks, academics and…

— Jane Mayer

“Libertarianism is supposed to be all about principles, but what it's really about is political expedience. It's basically a corporate front, masked…

— Jane Mayer

“In the view of the Kochs and other members of the Libertarian Party, government should be reduced to a skeletal function: the…

— Jane Mayer

“Private and corporate foundations, he said, must cease “the mindless subsidizing of colleges and universities whose departments of politics, economics and history…

— Jane Mayer

“These guys, individually and collectively, created a new philanthropic form, which was movement philanthropy,” said Rob Stein, a progressive political strategist, speaking…

— Jane Mayer

“They challenged the widely accepted post–World War II consensus that an activist government was a force for public good. Instead, they argued…

— Jane Mayer

“after Citizens United was that the business of manipulating politics from the ground up was now heavily directed and funded by the…

— Jane Mayer

“On top of these programs, the foundation doled out $8 million to more than a hundred John M. Olin faculty fellows. These…

— Jane Mayer

“Rob Reich, a professor of political science at Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society, explains…

— Jane Mayer

“The real enemies, he suggested, were “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences,”…

— Jane Mayer

“the government alleged that the company was little more than a pyramid scheme built upon misleading promises of riches to prospective distributors,…

— Jane Mayer