Koch brothers vs. a bus: Why two billionaires hate a transit project in Nashville

Naturally, this usually makes drivers annoyed, because drivers hate losing one single lane of traffic to drive on anywhere at any time. Property owners often worry, too, that mass transit projects will make it easier for undesirable elements (poor people and black and Latino city residents) to travel to rich neighborhoods.* That is why the project has become “oddly ugly,” in the words of Atlantic Cities. The ugliness is actually understandable for anyone who follows urban transit politics. What doesn’t quite make sense is why Americans for Prosperity, one of the Koch brothers’ largest political organizations, is now lobbying against the project. [*There are also more sympathetic criticisms of the project from residents of working-class neighborhoods, who believe that the city is prioritizing transit for tourists over essential transit upgrades for low-income residents. But it’s always easier to find funding for projects connecting already thriving commercial districts than for projects connecting poor people to that commercial activity.] The Tennessean reports that the Tennessee office of Americans for Prosperity was involved in the drafting of a state Senate bill that would “make it illegal for buses to pick up or drop off passengers in the center lane of a state road,” effectively banning Nashville from creating Amp along the route that it has been planned to operate on since it was first proposed years ago.

StopAmp.org Inc., the leading opposition group, thanked AFP in a news release Thursday, and Andrew Ogles, AFP’s state director, said that the group didn’t back the effort financially but that the bill grew out of a conversation he had had with Sen. Jim Tracy, the sponsor.

In other words, AFP suggested the bill and a friendly legislator sponsored it. According to Ogles, Americans for Prosperity-Tennessee was founded nine months ago, with a “sizable” undisclosed budget and three employees (two of whom are registered lobbyists). Why Tennessee, a state that the Kochs have no personal interest in? Well, it’s just a good environment for their agenda:

“With supermajorities in both houses,” [Ogles] said, “Tennessee is a great state to pass model legislation that can be leveraged in other states.”

So, this is not “the Kochs” doing this, in the cartoonish sense of David or Charles calling up a henchman and saying “kill that new bus line in Nashville,” and then cackling and dipping an orphan in fracking runoff and using it to light a cigar. But this is the story of how billionaires dedicated to advancing an agenda at every level of government can do so with practically no one noticing until they’ve already won. Because a couple of energy moguls are constitutionally opposed to mass transit spending based on a very self-serving definition of “liberty,” Nashville, a city neither of them spends any significant amount of time in, may not get a new bus line. “All politics is local” means something a bit different in this age of unregulated free-for-all political spending.

 Thanks To Salon.com