Thom Hartmann: Greetings my friends, patriots, lovers of democracy, truth and justice, believers in peace, freedom and the American way. Thom Hartmann here with you. Well we’re discovering that the oligarchy, the plutocracy is real. It’s not some wacky conspiracy theory, it’s not some strange notion from outer space, it’s not related to robotic pigeons. It’s a bunch of actual people who actually get together and it’s not the Bilderbergers, and it’s not the Jewish conspiracy to take over the world that we’re constantly hearing about from right wing tea party folks. No. The conspiracy as it were is sort of right out in the open but not entirely.

Lee Fang has been checking into this from the Center for American Progress, ThinkProgress.org is the website where the story was broken this morning. And Lee Fang, welcome to the program, welcome back to our program.

Lee Fang: Thanks for having me again.

Thom Hartmann: And thanks for showing up for our TV show the other night too, it was great meeting you. In 2006, “Koch Industries owner Charles Koch,” you write, “famously told the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore that he’s coordinating a conservative infrastructure.” Tell us about this.

Lee Fang: Yeah you know I read this interview that Charles Koch who is very secretive unlike his brother and co-owner of Koch Industries, David Koch, who likes to go out and have fancy parties on yachts every other days. Charles Koch is actually very secretive. And so the only indication that the Koch brothers were secretly coordinating billions of dollars of right wing corporate money to the conservative infrastructure was a sneak peek in this Wall Street Journal article in 2006. Other than that, everyone in the media, public, the rest of the world has never known anything about this meeting that Koch has been convening until now.

Thom Hartmann: So if you were to go to the website, into the internet and Google “Bilderberger group” or “trilateral commission” or "Brzezinski's conspiracy” you would find you know hundreds of thousands of websites and posts devoted to these. We know who is really ruling the world or the United States, let’s say. But it turns out, you know a billion dollars is a hell of a lot of money. I mean it’s chump change for these guys, Charles Koch is worth over 12 billion dollars. But in the last election, in the 2008 election, the presidential election, the total amount of money that was spent by both John McCain and Barack Obama together was only about 1.4 or 1.6 billion as I recall. Correct me if I’m wrong on that. And so…

Lee Fang: Well here’s the interesting thing on that number. That’s the disclosed amount of money. You have to realize that David and Charles Koch and a lot of these other corporate titans funneled undisclosed money to things like the Heritage Foundation and Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works, which when you see those numbers of how much was spent in 2008 they don’t take into account the secret money that they put in foundations to hire hundreds of thousand of organizers and to run ads and to create videos and to put people …

Thom Hartmann: Man phone banks.

Lee Fang: Exactly.

Thom Hartmann: Yes. So there’s this, this, and you’ve got a list, so they have this meeting. Is it once a year, this meeting?

Lee Fang: Twice a year.

Thom Hartmann: Twice a year. So these guys are pretty, they’re active, they’re making things happen.

Lee Fang: Yeah. You know previously they had, they organized these meetings and continuing till today, and they figure out how to funnel money to different organizations. There are some organizations that are dedicated to spreading free market right wing ideas to high school children. There are other institutes focused on converting college students. There are other organizations that create their own media outlets or put right wing operatives in mainstream news outlets like ABC news. And you know this all sounds kind of conspiratorial but the money is all mainstream. I mean these folks are executives at things like Bank of America. That’s not foreign or far away that’s right here in America. Or JP Morgan or Exxon Mobil. And there’s really hundreds of different oil companies and Wall Street firms that are involved in this.

Thom Hartmann: Right. And it goes beyond just that. I’ve told this story before, Lee Fang, about how during the 2004 election we had on our website, at ThomHartmann.com we’ve got an open message board there and we’ve had it since back before we started doing the radio show, back when I was just a New York Times bestselling author kind of thing. And there was a guy who, leading up to the election, was constantly posting anti-Kerry stuff. But he was very friendly. He let everybody know who he was, where he lived, you know about his pets, I mean, you couldn’t, we couldn’t or we didn’t ban him because he seemed like he wasn’t a troll. That he was just you know a passionate Republican. And so people had debates with him.

The day after the election, he came out to us on the message board and said that he had been paying, he had been being paid 25 cents a post to post on our message board that he was posting on lots of message boards, that the amount of he got depended on the size of the message board. And that because, and about, I don’t know maybe a month after, well it was a couple of months, it was when the war in Iraq started. He continued to participate in our board but very rarely whereas he used to post 10, 15 times a day. And he joined the army and went off to Iraq. And we had pictures of him at the enlisting office and you know this was like this is a member of our community and he just came out and told us, you know. The RNC, well he never said who it was but he suggested strongly it was the RNC, was paying him to do this.

I walked through the offices of a conservative think tank that I’m not going to name, that would probably be inappropriate. But and I would like to walk through their offices again in the future. And I saw, there was a cubicle full of interns. And it was like 15, 20 interns and they were all working vigorously on their computers. I walked through and they’re all, well not all of them, half of them had Wiki pages up. And this morning we’re going to be doing a segment in the 2nd hour on birth control and abortion and all that kind of thing. And Louise tried to Google, and I said you know just Google abortion rates go down when women’s education go up. Which is well known. And she couldn’t find it. It was just like all this stuff, you know, the first 2, 300 pages were all, and it’s like pick a topic. For example, the cause of the great depression. All you’re going to find is revisionist history from the right wing and it’s being paid for by these guys.

Lee Fang: They are very sophisticated in their guerrilla tactics. I don’t think many journalists or really anyone understands the depth of what they’ve been investing in. What you just mentioned on the message board that’s very interesting but it’s unsurprising. One of the people at this Koch meeting is named Eric O’Keefe. He set up about five different front groups that focus on these guerrilla type tactics. For example, one of his groups, called American Majority, hires people and then pays people and then trains, holds training sessions to teach them to go onto Amazon.com, find liberal books and rate them down. There’s video of him saying I don’t even read the books, I just rate them down because I know they’re liberal and they talk about…

Thom Hartmann: Yeah it happens to me.

Lee Fang: the common section warfare, Wikipedia warfare. I mean they use militaristic terms because this is a battle.

Thom Hartmann: Yeah. And they’re very aggressive about it. So these meetings, this, this last meeting, Glenn Beck was there?

Lee Fang: That’s right. And the memo that we found actually indicated that it’s not his first time. He’s addressed them before.

Thom Hartmann: Wow. Now there is, on the left, there’s the Democracy Alliance, they get together and they fund progressive groups. Wouldn’t the response of the Koch’s be to say this is the same thing as the Democracy Alliance? It’s a group of you know wealthy guys who get together and put money where they believe is best for America.

Lee Fang: Sure but the story here is not about billionaires getting together, it’s about billionaires getting together and funding front groups that pad their profits. I know some of the groups that are funded by Democracy Alliance, and they do things like expanding the, expanding Medicaid and banning pre-existing conditions. I don’t know of any billionaires or large corporations that are benefiting from that. I do know that Koch Industries, for example, used their massive array of front groups to elect Bush and then asked the Bush justice department to drop the largest environmental suit in American history, charged against Koch Industries, saving them about 300 million dollars.

Thom Hartmann: And it got dropped?

Lee Fang: And it got dropped.

Thom Hartmann: Amazing. Lee Fang over at Think Progress, check it out. ThinkProgress.org, it’s right up at the top of the blog. Lee, thank you so much.

Lee Fang: Thanks for having me.

Thom Hartmann: Great talking with you.

Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.