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Liberal critics, like the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, worried that the country was in danger of being transformed from a democracy into a plutocracy, or worse, an oligarchy like Russia, where a handful of extraordinarily powerful businessmen bent the government into catering to them at the expense of everyone else. "We are on the road not just to a highly unequal society, but to a society of an ol..
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Jane Mayer |
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Olin Foundation made a key $25,000 investment of its own in an unknown writer named Charles Murray, funding a grant at the Manhattan Institute that would support a book he was writing that attacked liberal welfare policies. The backstory to Losing Ground, Murray's book, was a primer on the growing and interlocking influence of conservative nonprofits.
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Jane Mayer |
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David Brock, a conservative apostate who became a liberal activist, described the Heritage Foundation, where he was a young fellow, as almost completely under the thumb of its wealthy sponsors. In his tell-all book Blinded by the Right, he writes, "I saw how right-wing ideology was manufactured and controlled by a small group of powerful foundations" like Smith Richardson, Adolph Coors, Lynde and Harry Bradley, and John M. Olin."
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Jane Mayer |