LIBERTARIAN 2
see main and tag
6/17
see ayn rand (serial killer orig)
sil vly tech bro? seastead
i shd dismbig from free mkteer? vs capitalism?
thom3 says --> pjt 2025 vought OMB
i thought on way out as thoroughly discredited by pandemic
PRIVACY? FISA
MACHO MALE?
aha 6 22
i had not fully connected financialization and extraction
funny how milton provides holy rationale for greedy theft
i had sorta hoped pandemic trump had forever banished libtard BS
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CONTEXT MACHO LIBTARD?
AN 5 26
Las Vegas has always had a reputation for doing things bigger, louder and glitzier than everyone else. On Sunday, May 24 2026 it continues that tradition when the inaugural Enhanced Games take place at a purpose-built entertainment centre at Resorts World, a giant hotel complex on the city’s famous strip.
A one-day sports competition showcasing just three disciplines, the Enhanced Games openly embrace the use of legal performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) and technological advances that maximise human potential.
Conceived by London-based entrepreneur Aron D’Souza and backed financially by billionaires Peter Thiel, Christian Angermayer and Donald Trump junior, the one-day extravaganza will see 42 athletes competing in swimming, track athletics and weightlifting.
With substantial appearance fees and an unprecedented US$25 million (£18.6 million) in prize money – including US$1 million bonuses for breaking world records – the lucrative payouts have attracted some big names. These include Olympic medallists Cody Miller and Ben Proud for swimming; Olympic medallist Fred Kerley for track; and record-breaking weightlifter Thor Björnsson.
The Enhanced Games has drawn widespread criticism from international and Olympic sport. The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) has labelled them a “dangerous and irresponsible concept”, threatening to test athletes involved to “protect the integrity of legitimate sport” – despite the majority being retired from traditional sport. Wada also urged US authorities to shut down the games – which evidently didn’t happen.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) also issued a formal statement calling the games “utterly irresponsible and immoral … a betrayal of everything we stand for”. Travis Tygart, CEO of the US Anti-Doping Agency dismissed the Enhanced Games as “a dangerous clown show”.
In response, D’Souza argues that Wada is hypocritical and points to Olympic corruption scandals, claiming the Olympics are no longer fit for purpose. Other supporters have also promoted the idea of self-determination, and the need to break free of the IOC’s rules and regulations.
As sport researchers, we might be tempted to dismiss the event as a publicity stunt. However, based on our ongoing research into Olympic swimmers and coaches’ perceptions of the Enhanced Games (we have spoken to more than 20 so far), we believe the event is symptomatic of bigger issues. It represents a critical inflection point, and a unique opportunity to reflect upon the current shortcomings of traditional sport.
Sport’s ideological war
Deeply entrenched battlelines have been drawn on both sides of this complex debate. Recent events, such as Enhanced Games swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev breaking the former 50m freestyle world record, the games’ filing of an US$800 million anti-trust lawsuit against Wada, World Aquatics and US Swimming, and the Enhanced Group’s recent floating on the New York Stock Exchange are telling. They all appear to be the first shots fired in a potentially long and protracted ideological war over the future of sport.
Proponents argue that permitting PEDs such as testosterone, anabolic steroids, growth hormones, peptide hormones and stimulants could potentially unlock unprecedented human potential, allowing athletes to transcend current biological limits. Here, the Enhanced Games and the Olympic Games share a common goal of maximising human potential; the difference lies in precisely how it should be achieved and the transparency surrounding those methods.Supporters of the Enhanced Games also argue that a regulated approach to using PEDs under strict medical supervision is safer for athletes, transforming what is currently an illicit, underground practice into a controlled medical environment, akin to legalising substances like cannabis.
Conversely, defenders of traditional sport argue that this approach contradicts the fundamental integrity of sport. They assert that Olympism is based on natural talent, dedication and rigorous training, free from artificial advantages. Concerns have also been raised about the long-term health consequences for athletes who use PEDs, and the negative role modelling for young athletes who may see drug use as a shortcut to success.
Threat or revolution for sport?
Another critical battleline relates to whether the Enhanced Games exacerbate or alleviate existing issues of integrity within traditional Olympic sport. Proponents of the Enhanced Games – including many of the Olympians that we interviewed – argue that the current system is fundamentally flawed.
These athletes cite what they see as the rampant and pervasive use of PEDs (meaning it’s an open-secret), the misuse of therapeutic use exemptions, the ineffectiveness and erosion of trust in anti-doping authorities, and the need to better compensate athletes for their contribution to sport.
Many people within traditional sport view the Enhanced Games as a profound existential threat to the moral legitimacy of Olympism. However, far from being a circus sideshow, its emergence is symptomatic of deep-rooted, longstanding issues and continued failings that need to be resolved within traditional sport.
Instead of perceiving the Enhanced Games as a rival or threat to the Olympic Games – which we do not believe it is – its emergence should be viewed as a wake-up call. Traditional sport needs to direct efforts to solve these fundamental problems and reflect upon the true value of sport and its role in society.
In this light, we see the emergence of the inaugural Enhanced Games as a window of opportunity for much-needed conversations within international and Olympic sport.
Mathew Dowling, Senior Lecturer in Sport Management, Loughborough University; Alex Thurston, Lecturer in Sport Management, Loughborough University, and Jinsu Byun, Assistant Professor of Sport Management, Yonsei University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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AN 4 26
Trump once opposed government surveillance — at least the kind he claimed was directed against him.
“KILL FISA," Trump wrote on Truth Social in 2024. "IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS."
But now that Trump can surveil rather than be surveilled, a conservative is calling him out over his surveillance state.
“It's been two years and five days since Trump wrote that, but it might as well have been another lifetime,” said Eric Boehm, a reporter at Reason who covers economic policy, trade policy and elections. “On Wednesday, Trump again took to Truth Social as Congress was debating a possible extension to Section 702 of FISA, which allows intelligence services to scoop up electronic communications between Americans and individuals overseas.”
Trump is now looking to extend FISA surveillance powers, even as other privacy-minded members of the Republican Party oppose that effort. The extension would permit the CIA, National Security Agency, FBI and other agencies to collect and analyze huge swathes of overseas communications without a warrant. It also sweeps up the conversations of any Americans who interact with international targets for surveillance.
"I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country!" Trump wrote. "We need to stick together when this Bill comes before the House Rules Committee today to keep it CLEAN!"
Boehm has written for conservative publications like The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Signal and The Washington Examiner and is the a featured speaker at seminars hosted by The Libertarian Institute and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). And he vehemently opposes what he calls Trump’s overreaches in government power.
“It sure would be nice if Trump, who was once a prominent target of these surveillance powers, were willing to advocate for changes,” said Boehm. “Alas, now that those powers are ones he gets to wield, there is no need for consistency or principles.”
Last year The Conversation raised alarms over Trump potentially abusing civil liberties when staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency gained access to the agency’s databases — and then shortly thereafter the Department of Homeland Security obtained access to the same Internal Revenue Service tax data.
"Once confined to separate bureaucracies, data now flows freely through a network of interagency agreements, outsourcing contracts and commercial partnerships built up in recent decades," said Nicole M. Bennett, a Ph.D. Candidate in Geography and Assistant Director at Indiana University's Center for Refugee Studies.
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AN 2 26
During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan led a fragile right-wing coalition that included everyone from neocons to libertarians to evangelical Christian fundamentalists and the Religious Right. There was plenty of infighting within the Reagan coalition back then; Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) and the Moral Majority's Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr. were bitter foes. Now, in 2026 — more than a year into Donald Trump's second presidency — divisions on the right persist.
Some of Trump's most enthusiastic supporters are Religious Right evangelicals, while Never Trumpers include a variety of neocons and libertarians. In an op-ed published by the New York Times on February 9, Reason editor-in-chief Katherine Mangu-Ward lays out a variety of ways in which Trump's second presidency embodies everything that libertarians oppose.
"On immigration, speech and trade," Mangu-Ward warns, "Americans are living in a libertarian's nightmare. Masked federal officials are swarming areas far from the border, shooting American citizens and whisking away children in the name of immigration enforcement. Armed National Guardsmen walk the streets of several cities under the banner of vague emergency mandates to maintain law and order. Legal visa holders are being deported for expressing their opinions on Gaza and Charlie Kirk. Tariffs on China have been set at 10, 20, 54, 145 and 30 percent in just the last few months. The ownership of TikTok, Intel and U.S. Steel have all become matters in which the president has taken a personal interest — and threatened dire consequences if his wishes are not taken into account."
The Reason editor-in-chief continues, "These stories represent a terrifying pattern and an undeniable vindication of the long-held libertarian view that the steady growth in the size of the federal government and executive power would lead to precisely this kind of runaway authoritarianism."
" Trump 2.0," according to Mangu-Ward argues, "has made the libertarian case more obvious, even as libertarians have been consigned to the fringes."
"Consider Mr. Trump's record on free speech," Mangu-Ward argues. "For years, he has been threatening to give libel laws more bite and pull licenses from unsympathetic broadcasters…. Mr. Trump has a record of threatening media and platforms under various statutory and emergency authorities…. The good news is that Americans are increasingly waking up to the dark reality of our overbearing federal government."
The Reason editor-in-chief adds, "A Gallup survey released in October 2025 found that a record-high 62 percent say the federal government has 'too much power,' up from 51 percent a year ago and the highest since the question was first asked in 2002…. Similarly, Americans of all stripes have turned dramatically against Mr. Trump’s ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) enforcement actions. There could be — a libertarian can still dream — a grass-roots movement to shrink government that doesn't end up co-opted by one of the major parties, as the Tea Party was."
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NERD REICH?
What Is Silicon Valley's 'Nerd Reich,' and Is It Taking Over the US Government? | KQED
Sixty percent of surveyed American adults said they had an unfavorable view of Elon Musk — the billionaire Tesla CEO, who has been intimately involved with the federal government for months through his leadership of the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency.
Since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, Musk’s DOGE has slashed large swaths of federal jobs and cut funding to programs as varied as the U.S. Agency for International Development to energy-saving initiatives for low-income families. And this March poll of 1,000 people by the Marquette Law School is just one indicator that some Americans are tired of wealthy tech figures being involved in the nation’s politics.
“We’re learning a big lesson here, which is that we can have democracy or we can have billionaires, but we can’t have both,” San Francisco journalist Gil Duran said.
KQED Forum’s Mina Kim spoke to Duran, who formerly worked for California politicians like Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris, about the “Silicon Valley tech billionaire politics” that are the focus of hisnewsletter, The Nerd Reich — and what he thinks tech elites might want next.
*This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Before DOGE, there was RAGE
Gil Duran: Curtis Yarvin is a San Francisco software programmer who, in the early 2000s, started blogging under the name “Mencius Moldbug.” And in his blog posts — very internet troll stuff — he laid out these ideas for replacing democracy with tech-controlled dictatorships.
He specifically focused on San Francisco, which he said in his corporate tech dictatorship would be renamed “Frisk Corp.” In Frisk Corp, you would have to swipe in with RFIDchips and be under total surveillance, and give up all of your freedom in exchange for security.
The Broligarchy Pt 1: Chronicles of the PayPal Mafia
The important thing to understand about Curtis Yarvin is that he became a favorite thinker of Peter Thiel, the PayPal Mafia billionairewho founded Palantir and got even richer off of government surveillance. Some people call him Peter Thiel’s house philosopher.
In 2012, [Yarvin] gave a speech in which he said that the government needed to be reformed with something he called RAGE — Retire All Government Employees. And that entailed taking over the federal government, purging the bureaucracy of anybody who’s a Democrat or who believes in democracy, and replacing all federal employees with people who would answer to a CEO-dictator-type of person. Very much mirroring what Elon Musk is doing with DOGE at this current time.
If it weren’t for these billionaires, [Yarvin would] be just an anonymous internet troll. The whole reason this has gone national is because of JD Vance. [And] to understand JD Vance, you have to understand that he is largely a creation of Peter Thiel. At every step of JD’s career, Peter Thiel has been there, funding him.
Mike Pence looks on as Donald Trump shakes the hand of Peter Thiel during a meeting with technology executives during the first Trump Administration. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Predicting the ‘cognitive elite’
Yarvin is largely deriving his ideas from other places.
To really understand this, you have to go back to a 1997 book called The Sovereign Individual, which basically was one of these dark, apocalyptic-style books, and it predicted that in the 21st century, the information age would undermine the existing economy and existing nation-states. Thatthe Information Agewould kill lots of jobs and result in a lot of violence and chaos, and also lead to the rise of a so-called “cognitive elite”: people who are able to become wealthy off of technology and don’t need traditional jobs to survive.
It would be their mission to escape from existing countries using something called cyber currency — basically crypto, which would allow them to evade taxation and evade government authority, and create their own nations that they would rule over in this post-democracy order brought about by the information age.
These ideas sound crazy when you first hear them. They sounded very unhinged to me, and I didn’t pay attention to them at first.
However, you have to understand that these are very wealthy men with very strange and scary ideas. And they seriously believe in them.
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The GOP vs. the ‘broligarchs’?
I think Trump has, for the most, part right now, been bought off. Trump’s in it for the money — and these guys have plenty of it.
He may not have the ideology, but as long as Elon and these guys are going to spend billions of dollars and create all of these business opportunities for his family, I think he’s all in.
There is a problem, though, because this is becoming very unpopular very quickly. The polls are diving. Elon Musk is becoming one of the most despised men in the country. He’s threatening Social Security. He’s firing veterans. You’ve got Republicans showing up to town halls to yell at their absentee representatives in early 2025.
This is a political disaster in many ways, so I think there will be some political tension between the Republican establishment and these “tech-broligarchs” — because they’re breaking all the rules of politics and don’t really seem to care about the future. And in politics, you’ve really got to care about the next election and the election after. That’s the name of the game.
Silicon Valley’s ‘right wing strain’
I compare it to: this tech authoritarianism is the parasite and MAGA is the host.
[Tech leaders] saw an opportunity, right? It’s a very opportunistic play — and an opportunity to go as far as they can with a candidate who has been able to openly violate the law, and not pay any political consequence for it.
How J.D. Vance Went from Never Trumper to MAGA Warrior
This is not an ideology where the world is a better place for the majority of people. It’s a place where the world is a place for tech billionaires. You don’t make the world a better place by getting rid of Social Security, which is crucial to the survival of millions of Americans.
Malcolm Harris’s [book]*Palo Alto* talks about the right-wing strain through Silicon Valley. There was this idea during the nineties and part of the eighties and 2000s that tech was kind of fun: was going to make our life cool, all these nice products, connecting us, allowing us to buy stuff online.
And for a long time, it seemed nonthreatening. Remember, Google had the “Don’t be evil” slogan and they were kind of paddling around in their Crocs, building playgrounds for their employees and bespoke lunches and free kombucha on tap. There was the harmless vibe that seemed to be from Silicon Valley.
But I think there has always been a certain anti-government lean to a lot of the Silicon Valley movement — this idea that “we’re going to create structures outside of government.” The idea of getting out of authoritarian society, evading bad governments in the future: there were times when these ideas seemed like something people on the left could be into.
However, what’s happened is: these guys became super rich. And as they’ve become super super superrich, they’ve gone far, far, far to the right — and they’re pulling others now with them.
‘Freedom cities’ and governance by tech
All the way back in 2013, [Balaji Srinivasan, chief technology officer of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase] gave a speech at Y Combinatorin which he basically called for Silicon Valley to secede from the United States and to go start their own country and take all of their wealth and all of the brain power.
He continue[d] to develop these ideas over the next decade, and in 2022, released a book called The Network State — how to start a new country. This book lays out all the reasons why American democracy is an outdated system and why it needs to be replaced by new tech forms of governance. And there are two ways to do that: one is to leave the country by a territory and create your own sovereign state or city. You can do that within a country or by leaving a country. And the other way is to take over existing governments and convert them into tech-controlled governments.
This Tech-Backed Company Tried to Disrupt California’s Housing Crisis. It Couldn’t
My interest in this ideology started with SF politics — this effort by tech bros to take over City Hall, but also by the California Forever Project.
It wasn’t until I read a book by a historian named Quinn Slobodian called, Crack Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, that I understood the idea there … for wealthy people to find a way to exit society and create their own sort of utopian countries that they control.
In 2024, Trump had a plan for something he calls the so-called “freedom cities,” which are these 10 new charter cities that would be built on federal land all around the United States. The newspapers have mentioned that Trump plans to “build freedom cities,” but no one has explained what that means: where the idea comes from or why we need them.
I think the “freedom cities” are really anti-freedom cities — a very Orwellian name for what would essentially be a corporate-controlled city.
A billboard for California Forever sits on top of an apartment building along I-80 in Vallejo on April 2, 2024. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
How does this all end?
A lot of people stayed home [and didn’t vote in the 2024 election.] And I think this is going to wake [Americans] up to the fact that you can’t stay home. We have to realize that there is a group of people who are avidly working against the public good and against the welfare and well-being of the majority.
I don’t think these [tech] guys have fully thought this out. I don’t think they realize — having been in politics myself — what it’s gonna feel like when you see that the majority of people are against you. I do think this ends with tens of millions of Americans taking to the streets on a regular basis to stand against what is an increasingly authoritarian regime in Washington. And I think that it also ends with a bunch of billionaires getting on planes to Moscow at midnight.
I think it’s important to understand it, to learn about it, and to tell others about it … Word of mouth is very important. People listen to their peers, to their friends, to their family members. That’s where a lot of people get their main political knowledge from.
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/billionaire-tax/
Inside the Tax Records of the .001%
One day in July 1985, three young men from Philadelphia, their lawyer and a burly Pinkerton guard arrived at a horse track outside Chicago carrying a briefcase with $250,000 in cash.
Running the numbers on a Compaq computer the size of a small refrigerator, Jeffrey Yass and his friends had found a way to outwit the track’s bookies, according to interviews, records and news accounts. A few months earlier, they’d wagered $160,000, gambling that, with tens of thousands of bets, they could nail the exact order of seven horses in three different races. It was a sophisticated theory of theracing odds, honed with help from a Ph.D. statistician who’d worked for NASA on the moon landing, and it proved right. They bagged $760,000, then the richest payoff in American racing history.
But that summer day, when they presented their strikingly long list of bets at the track window, they were turned away. Their appeal to the track owner got them ejected. Yass, just 27, then sued for the right to place the bets. The track’s lawyer fumed to a federal judge that the men were trying to corner the betting market “through the use of their statistics and numbers.”
Yass lost, but that year he and his friends repeated variations of the strategy at horse and greyhound tracks around the country. Then they decided to turn their focus from a world of hundreds of thousands of dollars to a world of billions: Wall Street.
Four decades later, the firm he and his friends founded, Susquehanna International Group, is a sprawling global company that makes billions of dollars. Yass and his team used their numerical expertise to make rapid-fire computer-driven trades in options and other securities, eventually becoming a giant middleman in the markets for stocks and other securities. If you have bought stock or options on an app like Robinhood or E-Trade, there’s a good chance you traded with Susquehanna without knowing it. Today, Yass, 63, is one of the richest and most powerful financiers in the country.
But one crucial aspect of his ascent to stratospheric wealth has transpired out of public view. Using the same prowess that he’s applied to race tracks and options markets, Yass has taken aim at another target: his tax bill.
There, too, the winnings have been immense: at least $1 billion in tax savings over six recent years, according to ProPublica’s analysis of a trove of IRS data. During that time, Yass paid an average federal income tax rate of just 19%, far below that of comparable Wall Street traders.
Yass has devised trading strategies that reduce his tax burden but push legal boundaries. He has repeatedly drawn IRS audits, yet has continued to test the limits. Susquehanna has often gone to court to fight the government, with one multiyear audit battle ending in a costly defeat. The firm has maintained in court filings that it complied with the law.
Yass’ low rate is particularly notable because Susquehanna, by its own description, specializes in short-term trading. Money made from such rapid trades is typically taxed at rates around 40%.
In recent years, however, Yass’ annual income has, with uncanny consistency, been made up almost entirely of income taxed at the roughly 20% rate reserved for longer-term investments.
Congress long ago tried to stamp out widely used techniques that seek to transform profits taxed at the high rate into profits taxed at the low rate. But Yass and his colleagues have managed to avoid higher taxes anyway.
The tax savings have contributed to an explosion in wealth for Yass, who has increasingly poured that fortune into candidates and causes on the political right. He has spent more than $100 million on election campaigns in recent years. The money has gone to everything from anti-tax advocacy and charter schools to campaigns against so-called critical race theory and for candidates who falsely say the 2020 election was stolen and seek to ban abortion.
ProPublica has pieced together the details of Yass’ tax avoidance using tax returns, securities filings and court records, as well as by talking to former traders and executives. (The former employees spoke on condition of anonymity, with many citing a desire to avoid angering Yass.)
Through a spokesperson, Yass declined to be interviewed for this article. The spokesperson declined to comment in response to a long list of questions for Susquehanna and the firm’s founding partners.
Gregg Polsky, a University of Georgia law professor and former corporate tax lawyer who was retained by ProPublica to review Susquehanna’s tax records, said the tax agency may have more to scrutinize. The strategies revealed in Yass’ records, he said, were “very suspicious and suggestive of potential abuse that should be examined by the IRS.”
More than 35 years after he was booted from the racetrack outside Chicago, Yass still lives to gamble. Not just on horses, but on poker and on the market. He sheepishly admitted, in a podcast discussion, that he has even placed wagers on his children’s sports games.
Asked to describe his approach to trading at Susquehanna, Yass once reached for a poker analogy. “If you’re the sixth-best poker player in the world and you play with the five best players, you’re going to lose,” he said. “If your skills are only average, but you play against weak opponents, you’re going to win.”
That philosophy along with, Yass freely admits, a lot of luck, has made him a billionaire many times over.
Compared to many of his fellow billionaires — he’s richer than Hollywood mogul David Geffen, retail brokerage king Charles Schwab and “Star Wars” creator George Lucas — Yass doesn't seem particularly interested in the trappings of extreme wealth.
Yass and his wife, Janine, raised four children in the leafy college town of Haverford, on the Main Line outside of Philadelphia. Their large but unremarkable house could easily be the home of a successful doctor rather than one of the richest men in the country. In his quarter-zip pullover sweater, Nikes and no-nonsense rimless glasses, he’d be impossible to pick out of a crowd at the suburban country club where he plays golf.
If Yass collects expensive art or maintains a megayacht, he has managed to do so in complete secrecy. What comes closest to an identifiable trophy asset is a house in the ultra-exclusive Georgica Association beach neighborhood of East Hampton on New York’s Long Island. Even that property, purchased for $12.5 million in 2005 and held through an LLC, is in an area known as “bucolic and understated.”
Those who have worked with Yass say he lives less for spending money than for the competition of the market and the thrill of taking calculated risk. Yass softens any impression of ruthlessness by deploying a practiced humility and comedic timing. “Some people like art history,” he once explained, “I like probabilistic analysis.”
Yet when it comes to his philosophical outlook, he eschews the jokes. He speaks of capitalism in religious terms. Making new markets, he likes to say, is a “mission from God.”
Like many religious stories, his begins with a conversion experience.Born in 1958 to two Queens CPAs, Yass said reading the economist Milton Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom” as a young man delivered him from an early flirtation with socialism.
By the time Yass graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1979, he was already captivated by trading. (His father had also helped nurture Yass’ love of horse racing by taking him to local tracks to see harness racing, according to Forbes.) Yass’ college thesis weighed whether the budding market in stock options could be justified as socially useful. “I concluded that it should exist,” Yass later cracked. “I got a B.”
After college, he moved to Las Vegas for a year and a half to play poker professionally. Then he returned to the East Coast and settled in Philadelphia, where he began trading options. The previous decade had seen aburst of academic interest in the financial instruments, including a pioneering model of how to more accurately price them.Yass later called the model, and its broader implications for how to make mathematically sound decisions, “the most revolutionary idea in a long, long time.”
A share of stock is a relatively simple concept: It’s a small ownership stake in a company. An option, by contrast, is a contract that confers the right to buy or sell a given stock at a particular price and time in the future.
Options attract mathematically minded traders since a complex set of variables, including the underlying stock price, volatility, time and interest rates, determine how much one of the contracts is worth.
Options are a versatile tool. They can appeal to the risk-averse:Traders can use them as insurance to guarantee they will be paid at least today’s price when they sell in the future. They are also useful to the risk-embracing — gamblers who want to place outsized bets on how a stock will perform. (Here’s how a speculator would use an option: In early June, shares of Netflix were trading at below $200. If the speculator thinks the company’s fortunes will improve dramatically this summer, they could pay just $4.50 each for options to buy the stock at $250 in mid-August. If the stock soars over that figure, they could make a mint.)
In options Yass found more than a finan...
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GUK
REF
The movement for corporate city states cannot believe its good luck. For years, it has been pushing the extreme notion that wealthy, tax-averse people should up and start their own high-tech fiefdoms, whether new countries on artificial islands in international waters (“seasteading”) or pro-business “freedom cities” such as Próspera, a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med spa on a Honduran island.
Yet despite backing from the heavy-hitter venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, their extreme libertarian dreams kept bogging down: it turns out most self-respecting rich people don’t actually want to live on floating oil rigs, even if it means lower taxes, and while Próspera might be nice for a holiday and some body “upgrades”, its extra-national status is currently beingchallenged in court.
Now, all of a sudden, this once-fringe network of corporate secessionists finds itself knocking on open doors at the dead center of global power.
The first sign that fortunes were shifting came in 2023, when a campaigning Donald Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, promised to hold a contest that would lead to the creation of 10 “freedom cities” on federal lands. The trial balloon barely registered at the time, lost in the daily deluge of outrageous claims. Since the new administration took office, however, would-be country starters have been on a lobbying blitz, determined to turn Trump’s pledge into reality.
“The energy in DC is absolutely electric,” Trey Goff, the chief of staff of Próspera, recently enthused after a trip to Capitol Hill. Legislation paving the way for a bevy of corporate city-states should be complete by the end of the year, he claims.
Inspired by the political philosopher Albert Hirschman, figures including Goff, Thiel and the investor and writer Balaji Srinivasan have been championing what they call “exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.
Peter Thiel in Tokyo in 2019. Photograph: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty Images
One might assume that it is contradictory for Trump, elected on a flag-waving “America first” platform, to lend credence to this vision of sovereign territories ruled over by billionaire god-kings. And much has been made of the colorful flame wars between the Maga mouth-piece Steve Bannon, a proud nationalist and populist, and the Trump-allied billionaires he has attacked as “technofeudalists” who “don’t give a flying fuck about the human being” – let alone the nation state. And conflicts inside Trump’s awkward, jerry-rigged coalition certainly exist, most recently reaching a boiling point over tariffs. Still, the underlying visions might not be as incompatible as they first appear.
The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked by shocks, scarcity and collapse. Their high-tech private domains are essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human optimization, giving them and their children an edge in an increasingly barbarous future. To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.
That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the hard right globally, from Italy to Israel, Australia to the United States: in a time of ceaseless peril, openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers. These bunkers are brutal in their determination to expel and imprison unwanted humans (even if that requires indefinite confinement in extra-national penal colonies from Manus Island to Guantánamo Bay) and equally ruthless in their willingness to violently claim the land and resources (water, energy, critical minerals) they deem necessary to weather the coming shocks.
Though it builds on enduring rightwing tendencies ... we simply have not faced such a powerful apocalyptic strain in government before
Interestingly, at a time when previously secular Silicon Valley elites are suddenly finding Jesus, it is noteworthy that both of these visions – the priority-pass corporate state and the mass-market bunker nation – share a great deal in common with the Christian fundamentalist interpretation of the biblical Rapture, when the faithful will supposedly be lifted up to a golden city in heaven, while the damned are left to endure an apocalyptic final battle down here on earth.
If we are to meet our critical moment in history, we need to reckon with the reality that we are not up against adversaries we have seen before. We are up against end times fascism.
Reflecting on his childhood under Mussolini, the novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco observed in a celebrated essay that fascism typically has an “Armageddon complex” – a fixation on vanquishing enemies in a grand final battle. But European fascism of the 1930s and 1940s also had a horizon: a vision for a future golden age after the bloodbath that, for its in-group, would be peaceful, pastoral and purified. Not today.
Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.
And so we have the Trump administration’s dedication to releasing its steady stream of real and AI-generated propaganda designed solely for these pornographic purposes. Footage of shackled immigrants being loaded on to deportation flights, set to the sounds of clanking chains and locking cuffs, which the official White House X account labeled “ASMR”, a reference to audio designed to calm the nervous system. Or the same account sharing news of the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident who was active in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian encampment, with the gloating words: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.” Or any number of homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s sadism-chic photo ops (atop a horse at the US-Mexican border, in front of a crowded prison cell in El Salvador, slinging a machine gun while arresting immigrants in Arizona …).
Kristi Noem speaks during a tour of an El Salvador prison in March. Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP
The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.
It is terrifying in its wickedness, yes. But it also opens up powerful possibilities for resistance. To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line.
Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.
Not so long ago, it was primarily religious fundamentalists who greeted signs of apocalypse with gleeful excitement about the long-awaited Rapture. Trump has handed critical posts to people who subscribe to that fiery orthodoxy, including several Christian Zionists who see Israel’s use of annihilatory violence to expand its territorial footprint not as illegal atrocities but as felicitous evidence that the Holy Land is getting closer to the conditions under which the Messiah will return, and the faithful will get their celestial kingdom.
Mike Huckabee, Trump’s newly confirmed ambassador to Israel, has strong ties to Christian Zionism, as does Pete Hegseth, his secretary of defense. Noem and Russell Vought, the Project 2025 architect who now leads the office of budget and management, are both staunch advocates for Christian nationalism. Even Thiel, who is gay and notorious for his party lifestyle, has been heard musing about the arrival of the antichrist of late (spoiler: he thinks it’s Greta Thunberg, more on that soon).
But you don’t need to be a biblical literalist, or even religious, to be an end times fascist. Today, plenty of powerful secular people have embraced a vision of the future that follows a nearly identical script, one in which the world as we know it collapses under its weight and a chosen few survive and thrive in various kinds of arks, bunkers and gated “freedom cities”. In a 2019 paper titled Left Behind: Future Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth, the communication scholars Sarah T Roberts and Mél Hogan described the longing for a secular Rapture: “In the accelerationist imaginary, the future is not about harm reduction, limits or restoration; rather it is a politics driving toward an endgame.”
Mike Huckabee touring Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem in 2008. Photograph: David Silverman/Getty Images
Elon Musk, who dramatically grew his fortune alongside Thiel at PayPal, embodies this implosive ethos. This is a person who looks up at the wonders of the night sky and apparently sees only opportunities to fill that inky unknown with his own space junk. Though he burnished his reputation warning about the dangers of the climate crisis and AI, he and his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) henchmen now spend their days escalating those same risks (and many others) by slashing not only environmental regulations but entire regulatory agencies, with the apparent end goal of replacing federal workers with chatbots.
Who needs a functioning nation state when outer space – now reportedly Musk’s singular obsession – beckons? For Musk, Mars has become a secular ark, which he claims is key to the survival of human civilization, perhaps via uploaded consciousnesses to an artificial general intelligence. Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of the sci-fi Mars Trilogy that appears to have partially inspired Musk, is blunt about the dangers of the billionaire’s fantasies about colonizing Mars. It is, he says, “just a moral hazard that creates the illusion we can wreck Earth and still be okay. It’s totally not true.”
Much like religious end-timers who long to escape the corporeal realm, Musk’s drive for humanity to become “multiplanetary” is made possible by his inability to appreciate the multispecies splendor of our only home. Evidently uninterested in the vast bounty that surrounds him, or in ensuring Earth can continue buzzing with diversity, he instead deploys his vast fortune to bring about a future that would see a handful of people and robots eke out survival on two barren orbs (a radically depleted Earth and a terraformed Mars). Indeed, in a strange twist on the Old Testament tale, Musk and his fellow tech billionaires, having arrogated god-like powers to themselves, aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood. Today’s rightwing leaders and their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them.
What of the Maga base, though? Not all are sufficiently faithful to earnestly believe in the Rapture, and most certainly don’t have the cash to buy a spot in a “freedom city” let alone on a rocket ship. Fear not. End times fascism offers the promise of many more affordable arks and bunkers, these ones well within reach for lower-level foot soldiers.
Listen to Steve Bannon’s daily podcast – which bills itself as Maga’s premier media outlet – and you will be barraged with a singular message: the world is going to hell, the infidels are breaching the barricades, and a final battle is coming. Be prepared. The prepper message becomes particularly pronounced when Bannon switches to hawking his advertisers’ products. Buy Birch Gold, Bannon tells his audience, because the over-leveraged US economy is going to crash and you can’t trust the banks. Stock up on ready-to-eat meals from My Patriot Supply. Sharpen your target practice using a laser-guided at-home system. The last thing you would want to do is depend on the government during a disaster, he reminds listeners (left unsaid: especially now that the Doge boys are selling off the government for parts).
End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy
Bannon doesn’t only urge his audience to make their own bunkers, of course. He also advances a vision of the United States as a bunker in its own right, one in which Ice agents stalk the streets, workplaces and campuses, disappearing those deemed enemies of US policy and interests. The bunkered nation lies at the heart of the Maga agenda, and of end times fascism. Inside its logic, the first job is to harden national borders and expunge all enemies, foreign and domestic. This ugly work is now well under way, with the Trump administration, enabled by the supreme court, having invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to Cecot, the now infamous mega-prison in El Salvador. The facility, which shaves prisoners heads and packs up to 100 people into a single cell, stacked with bare bunks, operates under the civil liberties-destroying “state of exception” first declared over three years ago by the country’s crypto-loving, Christian Zionist prime minister, Nayib Bukele.
Bukele has offered to provide the same fee-for-service system for US citizens the administration would like to drop into a judicial black hole. “I love that,” Trump said recently, when asked about the proposal. No wonder: Cecot is the sick if logical corollary of the “freedom city” fantasy – a zone where everything is for sale and due process does not apply. We should expect much more of this sadism. In a chillingly candid statement, the acting Ice director, Todd Lyons, told the 2025 Border Security Expo that he wanted to see a more “business”-oriented approach to these deportations, “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings”.
If policing the boundaries of the bunkered nation is end times fascism’s job one, equally important is job two: for the US government to lay claim to whatever resources its protected citizens might need to get through the tough times ahead. Maybe it’s Panama’s canal. Or Greenland’s fast-melting shipping routes. Or Ukraine’s critical minerals. Or Canada’s fresh water. We should think of this less as old-school imperialism than super-sized prepping, at the level of the national state. Gone are the old colonial fig leaves of spreading democracy or God’s word – when Trump covetously scans the globe, he is stockpiling for civilizational collapse.
This bunker mentality also helps explain JD Vance’s controversial forays into Catholic theology. The vice-president, who owes his political career in no small part to the largess of the premier prepper Thiel, explained to Fox News that, according to the medieval Christian concept of ordo amoris (translated both as “order of love” and “order of charity”), love is not owed to those outside the bunker: “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” (Or not, as the Trump administration’s foreign policy would indicate.) In other words, we owe nothing to anyone outside our bunker.
Though it builds on enduring rightwing tendencies – justifying hateful exclusions is hardly new under the ethno-nationalist sun – we simply have not faced such a powerful apocalyptic strain in government before. The “end of history” swagger of the post-cold war era is rapidly being supplanted by a conviction we are in the actual end of times. Doge may wrap itself in the banner of economic “efficiency”, and Musk’s underlings may evoke memories of the young, US-trained “Chicago Boys” who designed the economic shock therapy for Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime, but this is not simply the old marriage of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. It’s a new, money-worshiping millenarian mashup that says we need to smash the bureaucracy and replace humans with chatbots in order to cut “waste, fraud and abuse” – and, also, because the bureaucracy is where the Trump-resisting demons hide. This is where the tech bros merge with the TheoBros, a real group of hyper-patriarchal Christian supremacists with ties to Hegseth and others in the Trump administration.
Steve Bannon advances a vision of the United States as a bunker in its own right. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
As fascism always does, today’s Armageddon complex crosses class lines, bonding billionaires to the Maga base. Thanks to decades of deepening economic stresses, alongside ceaseless and skillful messaging pitting workers against one another, a great many people understandably feel unable to protect themselves from the disintegration that surrounds them (no matter how many months of ready-to-eat meals they buy). But there are emotional compensations on offer: you can cheer the end of affirmative action and DEI, glorify mass deportation, enjoy the denial of gender-affirming care to trans people, villainize educators and health workers who think they know better than you, and applaud the demise of economic and environmental regulations as a way to own the libs. End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.
It’s also a self-reinforcing downward spiral: Trump’s furious attacks on every structure designed to protect the public from diseases, dangerous foods and disasters – even to tell the public when disasters are headed their way – strengthen the case for prepperism at both the high and low ends, all while creating myriad new opportunities for privatization and profiteering by the oligarchs powering this rapid-fire unmaking of the social and regulatory state.
At the dawn of Trump’s first term, the New Yorker investigated a phenomenon that it described as “doomsday prep for the super-rich”. Back then, it was already clear that in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, the more serious high-end survivalists were hedging against climate disruption and social collapse by buying space in custom-built underground bunkers and building escape homes on high ground in places like Hawaii (where Mark Zuckerberg has downplayed his 5,000 sq ft underground pad as a “little shelter”) and New Zealand (where Thiel purchased nearly 500 acres but found his plan to build a luxury survivalist compound rejected by local authorities in 2022 for being an eyesore).
This millenarianism is bound up with a suite of other Silicon Valley intellectual fads, all premised on an end-times-inflected belief that our planet is headed towards a cataclysm and it’s time to make some hard choices about which parts of humanity can be saved. Transhumanism is one such ideology, encompassing everything from minor human-machine “enhancements” to the quest to upload human intelligence into a still illusory artificial general intelligence. There is also effective altruism and longtermism, both of which skip over redistributive approaches to helping those in need in the here and now in favor of a cost-benefit approach to doing the most good in the long term.
Though they can appear benign at first glance, these ideas are shot through with dangerous racial, ableist and gender biases about which parts of humanity are worth enhancing and saving – and which could be sacrificed for the supposed good of the whole. They also share a marked lack of interest in urgently addressing the underlying drivers of collapse – a responsible and rational goal that a growing cohort of figures now actively shun. Instead of effective altruism the Mar-a-Lago regular Andreessen and others have embraced “effective accelerationism”, or the “deliberate propulsion of technological development” without guardrails.
Meanwhile, even darker philosophies are finding a wider audience, like the neoreactionary pro-monarchy rants of the coder Curtis Yarvin (another one of Thiel’s intellectual touchstones), or the “pro-natalism” movement’s obsession with dramatically increasing the number of “western” babies (a Musk fixation), as well as the exit guru Srinivasan’s vision of a “tech zionist” San Francisco where corporate loyalists and police join forces to politically cleanse the city of liberals to make way for their networked apartheid state.
Marc Andreessen and Balaji Srinivasan speak during a panel discussion about bitcoin in San Francisco in 2014. Photograph: Paul Chinn/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
As the AI scholars Timnit Gebru and Émile P Torres have written, though the methods may be new, this “bundle” of ideological fads “are direct descendants of first-wave eugenics”, which also saw a small subset of humanity making decisions about which parts of the whole were worth continuing and which needed to be phased out, cleared out, or terminated. Until recently, few paid attention. Much like Próspera, where members can already experiment with human-machine mergers such as having their Tesla keys into their hands, these intellectual fads seemed to be the marginal hobby horses of a few Bay Area dilettantes with money and caution to burn. No longer.
Three recent material developments have accelerated end times fascism’s apocalyptic appeal. The first is the climate crisis. While some high-profile figures might still publicly deny or minimize the threat, global elites, whose ocean-front properties and datacenters are intensely vulnerable to rising temperatures and sea levels, are well-versed in the ramifying perils of an ever-heating world. The second is Covid-19: epidemiological models had long predicted the possibility of a pandemic devastating our globally networked world; the actual arrival of one was taken by many powerful people as a sign that we have officially arrived at what US military analysts forecasted as “the Age of Consequences”. No more predictions, it’s going down. The third factor is the rapid advancement and adoption of AI, a set of technologies that have long been associated with sci-fi terrors about machines turning on their makers with ruthless efficiency – fears expressed most forcefully by the same people who are developing these technologies. All of these existential crises are layered on top of escalating tensions between nuclear-armed powers.
None of this should be written off as paranoia. Many of us feel the imminence of breakdown so acutely that we cope by entertaining ourselves with various versions of life in a post-apocalyptic bunker, streaming Apple’s Silo or Hulu’s Paradise. As the UK analyst and editor Richard Seymour reminds us in his recent book, Disaster Nationalism: “The apocalypse is no mere fantasy. We are living in it, after all, from deadly viruses to soil erosion, from economic crisis to geopolitical chaos.”
The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants
Trump 2.0’s economic project is a Frankenstein’s monster of the industries driving all of these threats – fossil fuels, weapons and resource-ravenous cryptocurrency and AI. Everyone involved in these sectors knows that there is no way to build the artificial mirror world that AI promises to construct without sacrificing this world – these technologies consume too much energy, too many critical minerals, and too much water for the two to coexist in any kind of equilibrium. This month, the former Google executive Eric Schmidt admitted as much, Congress that AI’s “profound” energy needs are projected to triple in the next few years, with much of it coming from fossil fuels, because nuclear can’t come online fast enough. This planet-incinerating level of consumption is necessary, he explained, to enable an intelligence “higher” than humanity, a digital god rising from the ashes of our relinquished world.
And they are worried – just not about the actual threats they are unleashing. What keeps the leaders of these entangled industries up at night is the prospect of a civilizational wake-up call – of serious, internationally coordinated government efforts to rein in their rogue sectors before it’s too late. From the perspective of their ever-expanding bottom lines, the apocalypse is not collapse; it’s regulation.
The fact that their profits are predicated on planetary devastation helps explain why do-gooder discourse among the powerful is giving way to open expressions of disdain for the idea that we owe each other anything by right of our shared humanity. Silicon Valley is done with altruism, effective or otherwise. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg pines for a culture that celebrates “aggression”. Alex Karp, Thiel’s business partner at the surveillance firm Palantir Technologies, the “losing” “self-flagellation” of those who question American superiority and the benefits of autonomous weapons systems (and, by association, the lucrative military contracts that have made Karp’s vast fortune). Musk informs Joe Rogan that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of western civilization” and he vents, after failing to purchase a supreme court election in Wisconsin: “It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.” Meaning we humans are nothing but grist for Grok, the AI service he owns. (He did tell us he was “dark Maga” – and he’s not the only one.)
In arid and climate-stressed Spain, one of the groups calling for a moratorium on new datacenters calls itself Tu Nube Seca Mi Río – Spanish for “your cloud is drying my river”. The name is fitting, and not just for Spain.
An unspeakably dismal choice is being made before our eyes and without our consent: machines over humans, inanimate over animate, profits over all else. With stunning speed, the big tech megalomaniacs have quietly rolled back their net-zero pledges and lined up by Trump’s side, hellbent on sacrificing this world’s real and precious resources and creativity at the altar of a vampiric, virtual realm. This is the last great heist, and they are getting ready to ride out the storms they themselves are summoning – and they will try to defame and destroy anyone who gets in their way.
Consider Vance’s recent European sojourn, where the vice-president harangued world leaders for “handwringing about safety” in relation to job-destroying AI while demanding Nazi and fascist speech go uncurtailed online. At one point he made a telling aside, expecting a laugh that never came: “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”
JD Vance speaks at the Munich Security Conference in February. Photograph: dts News Agency Germany/REX/Shutterstock
His comment echoed those made by his equally humorless patron Thiel. In recent interviews focused on the theological underpinnings of his far-right politics, the Christian billionaire has repeatedly compared the indefatigable young climate activist to the antichrist – a figure he warns was prophesied to come bearing a misleading message of “peace and safety”. “If Greta gets everyone on the planet to ride a bicycle, maybe that’s a way to solve climate change, but it has sort of this quality of going from the frying pan into the fire,” Thiel intoned.
Why Thunberg, why now? In part, it’s clearly the apocalyptic fear of regulation eating into their super-profits: accordingto Thiel, the science-based climate action Thunberg and others demand could only be enforced by a “totalitarian state”, which he claims is more dire a threat than climate breakdown (most distressingly, the taxes under such conditions would be “quite high”). There may also be something else about Thunberg that frightens them: her steadfast commitment to this planet and the many life forms who call it home – not to simulations of this world generated by AI, or to a hierarchy of those deserving of life and those who are not, nor to any of the various extra-planetary escape fantasies the end times fascists are selling.
She is committed to staying, while the end times fascists have, at least in their imaginings, already left this realm, ensconced in their opulent shelters or transcended to the digital ether, or to Mars.
Shortly after Trump’s re-election, one of us had the opportunity to Anohni, one of the few musicians who have attempted to make art that wraps its arms around the death drive that has gripped our world. Asked about what connects the willingness of powerful people to let the planet burn and the drive to deny bodily autonomy to women and to trans people like her, she responded by drawing on her Irish Catholic upbringing: it’s “a very long-held myth that we are enacting and embodying. This is the culmination of their Rapture. This is their escape from the voluptuous cycle of creation. This is their escape from Mother.”
How do we break this apocalyptic fever? First, we help each other face the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of our countries. To move forward with focus, we must first understand this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.
Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.
This basic sentiment, of course, is not new. It is central to Indigenous cosmologies, and it lies at the heart of animism. Go back far enough and every culture and faith has its own tradition of respecting the sanctity of here, and not searching for Zion in an elusive ever-distant promised land. In eastern Europe, before the fascist and Stalinist annihilations, the Jewish socialist Labor Bund organized around the yiddish concept of Doikayt, or “hereness”. Molly Crabapple, who has written a forthcoming book about this neglected history, defines Doikayt as the right to “fight for freedom and safety in the places where they lived, in defiance of everyone who wanted them dead” – and rather than be forced to flee to safety in Palestine or the United States. Perhaps what is needed is a modern-day universalization of that concept: a commitment to the right to the “hereness” of this particular ailing planet, to these frail bodies, to the right to live in dignity wherever on the planet we are, even when the inevitable shocks forces us to move. “Hereness” can be portable, free of nationalism, rooted in solidarity, respectful of indigenous rights and unbounded by borders.
Anti-Trump protesters march against the administration in New York in January. Photograph: Julius Constantine Motal/The Guardian
That future would require its own apocalypse, its own world-ending and revelation, though of a very different sort. Because as the scholar of policing Robyn Maynard has observed: “In order to make earthly planetary survival possible, some versions of this world need to end.”
We have reached a choice point, not about whether we are facing apocalypse but what form it will take. The activist sisters Adrienne Maree and Autumn Brown touched on this recently on their aptly named podcast, How to Survive the End of the World. In this moment, when end times fascism is waging war on every front, new alliances are essential. But instead of asking: “Do we all share the same worldview?” Adrienne urges us to ask: “Is your heart beating and do you plan to live? Then come this way and we will figure out the rest on the other side.”
To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of “ordered love”, we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all. Faithful to here. Or, to quote Anohni again, this time referring to the goddess in which she now places her faith: “Have you stopped to consider that this might have been her best idea?”
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AN NO LNX
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/trump-medicaid/
Trump supporters finally finding out why you shouldn't vote for a criminal corporate raider
Thom Hartmann
January 29, 2025
Yesterday, the Medicaid payment portal was shut down in all 50 states; they came back up when a federal judge put Trump’s illegal impoundment of federal funds on hold until February 3rd.
And it wasn’t just Medicaid. The Trump administration shut down Pell grants, federally supported student loans, veterans homeless shelters, veterans suicide prevention programs, school meals, home heating assistance, housing assistance, food stamps, food for women and infants, childcare, Headstart, child abuse investigations, rape crisis centers, and hundreds of other programs.
Why?
Because Trump is trying to gut the federal government the same way Mitt Romney gutted Clear Channel when I did my show from one of their studios a decade ago.
Romney’s company did it to shut down Air America and then extract the millions in wealth Clear Channel had, before throwing the husk of the company into bankruptcy; Trump is tearing our systems of governance apart because he and his billionaire buddies are offended by the idea of paying taxes to help the American middle class and the poor.
In the process, Trump is also breaking multiple laws and daring Congress and the courts to do anything about it. This is the beginning of the path to both economic chaos and dictatorship.
But first, let’s take a look at what Trump and his billionaire funders are up to and why.
Back in 1980, David Koch ran for vice president on a platform of shutting down virtually every federal function except the military and the court system. Some billionaires, you see, hate paying taxes and many of them think that all those “gummint” programs are both unnecessary and wasteful.
— “We urge the repeal of federal campaign finance laws, and the immediate abolition of the despotic Federal Election Commission.
— “We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.
— “We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services, including those which finance abortion services.
— “We also favor the deregulation of the medical insurance industry.
— “We favor the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system. Pending that repeal, participation in Social Security should be made voluntary.
— “We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service.
— “We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.
— “We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.
— “As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.
— “We support repeal of all law which impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws.
— “We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.
— “We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.
— “We support the repeal of all taxes on the income or property of private schools, whether profit or non-profit.
— “We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.”
— “We support abolition of the Department of Energy.
— “We call for the dissolution of all government agencies concerned with transportation, including the Department of Transportation.
— “We demand the return of America’s railroad system to private ownership. We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system.
— “We specifically oppose laws requiring an individual to buy or use so-called ‘self-protection’ equipment such as safety belts, air bags, or crash helmets.
— “We advocate the abolition of the Federal Aviation Administration.
— “We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.
— “We support an end to all subsidies for child-bearing built into our present laws, including all welfare plans and the provision of tax-supported services for children.
— “We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and ‘aid to the poor’ programs. All these government programs are privacy-invading, paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient. The proper source of help for such persons is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals.
— “We call for the privatization of the inland waterways, and of the distribution system that brings water to industry, agriculture and households.
— “We call for the repeal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
— “We call for the abolition of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
— “We support the repeal of all state usury laws.”
In other words, gut the federal government the same way Mitt Romney’s company gutted Clear Channel. But in politics and governance, it’s called libertarianism, which is the hot new philosophy for Silicon Valley tech bro billionaires.
The “Project 2025” plan put together by the Heritage Foundation (funded in part for years by the Koch brothers’ network) was a 21st century cleaned-up version of Koch’s 1980 Libertarian Party platform. And now we’re seeing it put into place, one step at a time.
Like Romney stripping the liberal talk radio network out of Clear Channel, they are now stripping the 20th century out of our laws and policies.
It’s why Republicans are working so hard to disempower women in the workplace, starting with eliminating their control over their own reproductive capacity.
It’s also why they’re doing everything they can to shut down corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs nationwide; the majority of the hiring and increased pay benefits coming from corporate, government, and academic DEI programs go to women, a situation Republican men find intolerable.
Republicans want to either “return” to a pre-Civil War understanding of the Constitution (as advocated by Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito) or embrace Russell Vought’s “post-constitutional” order, in which the last century’s “innovations” (including the income tax, women’s suffrage, “welfare” programs, entitlements, and even free public school and college) are dialed back.
We also see this in the ways the Republicans on the Supreme Court have gutted both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, how they’ve stripped most of the teeth out of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, and how they’re working to castrate most regulatory agencies including the EPA, FTC, and even the IRS.
Republicans are trying to do to our government, in other words, what corporate raiders do to companies.
Some of it is simple greed: as the middle class shrinks and poverty grows, the cash stash at the very top of the American economic pyramid grows exponentially.
Other American oligarchs follow the teachings of Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, and Ronald Reagan who all argued that a larger-than-50% middle class is a threat to the stability of the nation.
The simple reality is that nations without a large and active federal government providing protections and services to its people never develop large middle classes.
Unregulated capitalism always produces the kind of nation Charles Dickens wrote about in Christmas Carol and his many other novels: A tiny 1% who own most wealth; a small 3-5% middle class of doctors, lawyers, and small business owners (Ebeneezer Scrooge); and a massive 90%+ class of the working poor (Bob Cratchit).
Ever since the 1950s when Russell Kirk wrote his manifesto The Conservative Mind, a small cabal of Republicans and billionaires have argued that FDR’s “big government” programs — that moved America from being 10% middle class in the 1930s to over 60% when Reagan came into office in 1981 (it’s under 50% now) — were dangerous.
As I detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, their argument was largely based on the turmoil of the 1960s, when women, Blacks, and young people were demanding rights; they worried that these protests could lead to the destruction of our republic and a “communist takeover.”
Nowadays most rightwing billionaires have largely abandoned that argument, simply asserting their disgust at having to pay taxes to support programs that primarily benefit “the little people.”
And then, of course, there are those in the GOP who simply hate America because of its pluralism and diversity.
Most recently, Trump proved his commitment to fulfill their and Putin’s desire to see America’s government destroyed by sending an email to 2 million federal employees offering them 8 months pay if they’ll resign.
Just like when I was at Clear Channel and Romney’s company fired or laid off more than half of the employees here in Portland.
In the process of disemboweling our federal government, however, Trump is taking it a step farther and breaking multiple laws:
— The Impoundment Control Act, which was passed in the 1970s after Nixon withheld funding for programs he didn’t like, including the Clean Water Act, Public Housing projects, the elementary and Secondary Education Act that funded public schools in poor districts, school desegregation efforts, mass transit programs for cities, and health research and healthcare programs for low-income people.
The law says that presidents cannot refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress without the explicit permission of both the House and Senate, and requires him to give them 45 days to consider the impoundment or rescission of funds.
Our lawless, convicted-criminal president is nakedly breaking this law and daring Congress and the courts to do something about it.
— The Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883 and the Civil Service Reform Act guarantee that federal government employees can’t be fired for “retaliation” or political reasons; there must be actual evidence that they are not doing their jobs, doing them poorly, or behaving in ways that justify the firing.
When Trump fired all the career prosecutors and lawyers in the Justice Department who’d participated in his prosecution, it was a clear case of political retaliation and a clear violation of the law.
Our lawless, convicted-criminal president is nakedly breaking this law and daring Congress and the courts to do something about it.
— The Inspector General Act of 1978 (also responding to Nixon’s corruption) mandates that the president must notify Congress at least 30 days before removing an IG and provide detailed, case-specific reasons for the dismissal. Inspectors General are the watchdogs for federal agencies, keeping an eye out for people within those agencies committing fraud, stealing funds, or engaging in illegal favoritism or bribery, among other crimes.
Firing them is like a police department firing its Internal Affairs department that looks into corrupt cops. It sets up every federal agency affected by the firings to be corrupted by the Trump cronies put in charge of them. Even Republican Senator Chuck Grassley is furious about this.
Our lawless, convicted-criminal president is nakedly breaking this law, too, as he raids our government, and is daring Congress and the courts to do something about it.
As Alexandrian Ocasio-Cortez noted on social media yesterday:
“Trump is holding all the nation’s hospitals and vital services hostage to seize power from Congress and hand it over to billionaires. We must state the truth: this is a constitutional crisis. It’s a massive, illegal power grab that the House and Senate have a sworn duty to stop.”
Trump’s defiance of these three major laws (along with a few others) in the first two weeks of his presidency — and the GOP’s acquiescence to his criminality — are terrible signs for the future of American democracy.
They are frankly even more dangerous than his corporate raider-like efforts to bring the American government to its knees.
While most Americans who voted for Trump probably knew he was a convicted criminal, it’s unlikely they also thought he’d commit crimes in office that would gut the protections and programs that so many of them need. They f----- around and now they’re finding out.
Sadly, they’re taking the rest of us with them…
===
politico 1 25
Trump on Tuesday granted a pardon to Ross William Ulbricht, the imprisoned creator of a dark web marketplace for drugs and other illicit products whose case had become a cause célèbre for libertarians and crypto enthusiasts.
Trump explicitly tied his decision to free Ulbricht, who is serving a life sentence, to the support his campaign drew from people who viewed the Silk Road founder as a pioneer and victim of government persecution.
“I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son,” the president wrote on Truth Social.
He also compared Ulbricht’s treatment by authorities to the investigations that have dogged him in recent years.
“The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me,” he said.
In 2015, Ulbricht, who called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts, was sentenced in Manhattan federal court to life in prison for owning and operating Silk Road, the dark web marketplace for buying and selling drugs and other illegal goods. It gained a following among crypto enthusiasts and libertarians in part for being an early user of Bitcoin and challenging governmental authority.
Silk Road had thousands of listings for over 200 million dollars worth of narcotics, which were sold and distributed across more than 10 different countries.
Trump previously said he would commute Ulbricht’s sentence “on Day One” at the Libertarian National Convention in 2024. It came a day after he granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people charged or convicted for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
===
an 12 24
coinbase's plan to go public last April highlights a troubling trend among tech companies: Its founding team will maintain voting control, making it mostly immune to the wishes of outside investors.
The best-known U.S. cryptocurrency exchange is doing this by creating two classes of shares. One class will be available to the public. The other is reserved for the founders, insiders and early investors, and will wield 20 times the voting power of regular shares. That will ensure that after all is said and done, the insiders will control 53.5% of the votes.
Coinbase will join dozens of other publicly traded tech companies – many with household names such as Google, Facebook, Doordash, Airbnb and Slack – that have issued two types of shares in an effort to retain control for founders and insiders. The reason this is becoming increasingly popular has a lot to do with Ayn Rand, one of Silicon Valley's favorite authors, and the “myth of the founder" her writings have helped inspire.
Engaged investors and governance experts like me generally loathe dual-class shares because they undermine executive accountability by making it harder to rein in a wayward CEO. I first stumbled upon this method executives use to limit the influence of pesky outsiders while working on my doctoral dissertation on hostile takeovers in the late 1980s.
But the risks of this trend are greater than simply entrenching bad management. Today, given the role tech companies play in virtually every corner of American life, it poses a threat to democracy as well.
All in the family
Dual-class voting structures have been around for decades.
When Ford Motor Co. went public in 1956, its founding family used the arrangement to maintain 40% of the voting rights. Newspaper companies like The New York Times and The Washington Post often use the arrangement to protect their journalistic independence from Wall Street's insatiable demands for profitability.
In a typical dual-class structure, the company will sell one class of shares to the public, usually called class A shares, while founders, executives and others retain class B shares with enough voting power to maintain majority voting control. This allows the class B shareholders to determine the outcome of matters that come up for a shareholder vote, such as who is on the company's board.
Advocates see a dual-class structure as a way to fend off short-term thinking. In principle, this insulation from investor pressure can allow the company to take a long-term perspective and make tough strategic changes even at the expense of short-term share price declines. Family-controlled businesses often view it as a way to preserve their legacy, which is why Ford remains a family company after more than a century.
It also makes a company effectively immune from hostile takeovers and the whims of activist investors.
Checks and balances
But this insulation comes at a cost for investors, who lose a crucial check on management.
Indeed, dual-class shares essentially short-circuit almost all the other means that limit executive power. The board of directors, elected by shareholder vote, is the ultimate authority within the corporation that oversees management. Voting for directors and proposals on the annual ballot are the main methods shareholders have to ensure management accountability, other than simply selling their shares.
Recent research shows that the value and stock returns of dual-class companies are lower than other businesses, and they're more likely to overpay their CEO and waste money on expensive acquisitions.
Companies with dual-class shares rarely made up more than 10% of public listings in a given year until the 2000s, when tech startups began using them more frequently, according to data collected by University of Florida business professor Jay Ritter. The dam began to break after Facebook went public in 2012 with a dual-class stock structure that kept founder Mark Zuckerberg firmly in control – he alone controls almost 60% of the company.
In 2020, over 40% of tech companies that went public did so with two or more classes of shares with unequal voting rights.
This has alarmed governance experts, some investors and legal scholars.
Ayn Rand and the myth of the superhuman founder
If the dual-class structure is bad for investors, then why are so many tech companies able to convince them to buy their shares when they go public?
I attribute it to Silicon Valley's mythology of the founder –- what I would dub an “Ayn Rand theory of corporate governance" that credits founders with superhuman vision and competence that merit deference from lesser mortals. Rand's novels, most notably “Atlas Shrugged," portray an America in which titans of business hold up the world by creating innovation and value but are beset by moochers and looters who want to take or regulate what they have created.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rand has a strong following among tech founders, whose creative genius may be “threatened" by any form of outside regulation. Elon Musk, Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong and even the late Steve Jobs all have recommended “Atlas Shrugged."
Her work is also celebrated by the venture capitalists who typically finance tech startups – many of whom were founders themselves.
The basic idea is simple: Only the founder has the vision, charisma and smarts to steer the company forward.
It begins with a powerful founding story. Michael Dell and Zuckerberg created their multibillion-dollar companies in their dorm rooms. Founding partner pairs Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and Bill Hewlett and David Packard built their first computer companies in the garage – Apple and Hewlett-Packard, respectively. Often the stories are true, but sometimes, as in Apple's case, less so.
And from there, founders face a gantlet of rigorous testing: recruiting collaborators, gathering customers and, perhaps most importantly, attracting multiple rounds of funding from venture capitalists. Each round serves to further validate the founder's leadership competence.
The Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that has backed dozens of tech companies, including Airbnb, Palantir and Lyft, is one of the biggest proselytizers for this myth, as it makes clear in its “manifesto."
“The entrepreneurs who make it have a near-messianic attitude and believe their company is essential to making the world a better place," it asserts. True to its stated belief, the fund says it has “never removed a single founder," which is why it has been a big supporter of dual-class share structures.
Another venture capitalist who seems to favor giving founders extra power is Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. His venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is Coinbase's biggest investor. And most of the companies in its portfolio that have gone public also used a dual-class share structure, according to my own review of their securities filings.
Bad for companies, bad for democracy
Giving founders voting control disrupts the checks and balances needed to keep business accountable and can lead to big problems.
WeWork founder Adam Neumann, for example, demanded “unambiguous authority to fire or overrule any director or employee." As his behavior became increasingly erratic, the company hemorrhaged cash in the lead-up to its ultimately canceled initial public offering.
Investors forced out Uber's Travis Kalanick in 2017, but not before he's said to have created a workplace culture that allegedly allowed sexual harassment and discrimination to fester. When Uber finally went public in 2019, it shed its dual-class structure.
There is some evidence that founder-CEOs are less gifted at management than other kinds of leaders, and their companies' performance can suffer as a consequence.
But investors who buy shares in these companies know the risks going in. There's much more at stake than their money.
What happens when powerful, unconstrained founders control the most powerful companies in the world?
The tech sector is increasingly laying claim to central command posts of the U.S. economy. Americans' access to news and information, financial services, social networks and even groceries is mediated by a handful of companies controlled by a handful of people.
Recall that in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter were able to eject former President Donald Trump from his favorite means of communication – virtually silencing him overnight. And Apple, Google and Amazon cut off Parler, the right-wing social media platform used by some of the insurrectionists to plan their actions. Not all of these companies have dual-class shares, but this illustrates just how much power tech companies have over America's political discourse.
One does not have to disagree with their decision to see that a form of political power is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of companies with limited outside oversight.
Jerry Davis, Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and Professor of Management and Sociology, University of Michigan
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
AN 9 24
alternet-no lnx
Inside the billionaire's trick to keep people from voting
Thom Hartmann
September 23, 2024
Outside of Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan (and a hedge fund guy), just about all American billionaires are white. And while their white privilege helped most of them to become billionaires in the first place, for the politically active billionaires on the right, it’s their money that they care about the most.
Fred Koch, the founding patriarch of the Koch family, was an early supporter of the John Birch Society (JBS), which vigorously opposed any efforts to reduce the powers of the very wealthy white people or elevate the wealth or political power of poor or working-class people. Their most public positions in the 1950s and 1960s were against racial integration and communism— the ultimate method for leveling the fortunes of the rich. The JBS opposed virtually all “welfare” legislation, from Social Security to Medicare to unemployment insurance, calling it socialism and equating it with a softer version of communism. Around that same time, a Russian immigrant who’d fled the Soviet Union (her father had lost his pharmacy shop to the Bolshevik Revolution) came to America with dreams of becoming a great author or actress. Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum chose the stage and pen name of Ayn Rand, and in the 1950s she wrote a rather simplistic novel celebrating inherited wealth.
In Atlas Shrugged, a young woman and her hapless brother inherit a railroad from their father and try to grow it strong over opposition from the unions, which want a safe workplace and reasonable pay. As George Monbiot wrote:
In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife “who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing.”35
It means nothing, in other words, if average people are ground into the dirt. But when people who inherited wealth face challenges, particularly those from average working families, they should be able to utterly destroy them.
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In a subsequent novel, The Fountainhead, one of the “producers” of her mythology rapes a woman, but it’s all good because the woman decides that she enjoys it mid-rape. Monbiot boils it down simply: “Rand’s is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge, and greed.”
While Fred Koch was helping the JBS in its fight against taxes and regulation, his sons were apparently reading Ayn Rand and taking her philosophy of radical selfishness to heart. They were also, by the 1970s, running the Koch oil operation and having constant struggles with regulators, particularly during the Carter administration.
Looking for political juice, David Koch joined and then largely took over the Libertarian Party in the late 1970s.
That political party had been created by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), a lobbying group formed in 1946 that represented the Big Three carmakers, the top three US oil companies, Monsanto, DuPont, GE, Merrill Lynch, Eli Lilly, and both US Steel and Republic Steel. Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, was on its board of directors, as were United Fruit president Herb Cornuelle; National Association of Manufacturers director and DuPont and GM board member Donaldson Brown; and Leonard Read, a longtime US Chamber of Commerce executive.
The mission of the new libertarian movement was straightforward: to lobby for the interests of big business and the uber-wealthy people that such business had created.
The same year that the FEE was created and they began the rollout of libertarianism, Congress busted an obscure University of Chicago economist named Milton Friedman for illegally shilling for the real estate industry.
As Mark Ames wrote:
The purpose of the FEE—and libertarianism, as it was originally created—was to supplement big business lobbying with a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-economics rationale to back up its policy and legislative attacks on labor and government regulations.
This background is important in the Milton Friedman story because Friedman is a founder of libertarianism and neoliberalism, and because the corrupt lobbying deal he was busted playing a part in was arranged through the Foundation for Economic Education.36
Friedman was later implicated in the aftermath of the brutal and violent takedown of democracy in Chile, and his acolytes helped privatize the state-owned properties of the Soviet Union, creating the kleptocratic and oligarchic government that now runs Russia and many of the former Soviet states. Libertarianism, it turns out, has had real-world impacts, which include the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
No country has ever successfully established a libertarian form of economy or governance; it was, after all, a scam set up to front for the very rich, and the corporations that made them that way. But that hasn’t stopped libertarian and corporatist ideologues from trying.
While Chile and Russia are well-known examples, few Americans seem to remember how George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld simply stood on the sidelines watching as the treasures of Iraq were looted after the United States took down their government.
It was to be a Grand Experiment: they’d finally prove that without government interference in a nation’s economy or social systems, an utopia would emerge. L. Paul Bremer was their front man, arriving in Iraq on May 2, 2003, to begin the process of “freeing” the country’s economy so that the world’s corporations would flood in and create a paradise.
As Naomi Klein wrote for Harper’s Magazine in an article titled “Baghdad Year Zero”:
The tone of Bremer’s tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country’s borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was “open for business.”
One month later, Bremer unveiled the centerpiece of his reforms. Before the invasion, Iraq’s non-oil-related economy had been dominated by 200 state-owned companies, which produced everything from cement to paper to washing machines. In June, Bremer flew to an economic summit in Jordan and announced that these firms would be privatized immediately. “Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands,” he said, “is essential for Iraq’s economic recovery.” It would be the largest state liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union.37
Once again, Milton Friedman, the FEE’s heirs, and libertarianism made a few more billionaires and destroyed the lives of literally millions of people.
The source of the funds being channeled to Friedman back in 1949 was a man named Herbert Nelson, who was the chief lobbyist and executive vice president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, which not only was opposed to rent control laws but also had one of the largest lobbying budgets in Washington, DC.
Congressional investigators found a letter he wrote in 1949 saying:
“I do not believe in democracy. I think it stinks. I don’t think anybody except direct taxpayers should be allowed to vote.
“I don’t believe women should be allowed to vote at all. Ever since they started, our public affairs have been in a worse mess than ever.”38
Although the details are still a bit fuzzy, it appears that libertarianism (and the creation of a political party using that name) was Nelson’s idea, or at least one he promoted vigorously. With a budget of over $60 million (in today’s dollars), Nelson hired the FEE to come up with a third party that would argue for the interests of the wealthy developers and landlords he represented. The FEE, in turn, hired Milton Friedman.
Reason Magazine, heavily funded by the Kochs, was the main voice of the libertarian movement in the 1970s, and in 1977 it published a fascinating article by Moshe Kroy that described how libertarians should market their free-market fundamentalism to skeptical Americans.
Noting that it was important not to lie to people outright, Kroy wrote:
“The point is that you can use tricks—and you’d better, if you really want libertarianism to have a fighting chance.”39
The tricks involved repackaging and reframing libertarian dogma and using “salesmanship.”
For example, Kroy asserted that the average person wouldn’t understand an abstraction like individual rights. So don’t even bother explaining how libertarianism would shrink government and empower corporations and the rich. “Instead,” Kroy wrote”
“[W]hat you can do is to explain to him that libertarianism is just against one thing: CRIME. By crime you mean just what he means: theft, robbery, kidnapping, enslavement. He will of course agree, because he thinks this is obvious. Then you just explain (at great length, and with many examples) that taxation is armed robbery, that inflation through deficit spending and money printing is theft—as well as forgery of money—that draft is basically kidnapping, etc.”40
This was something the average person could understand. The government that people thought would protect them from polluting corporations, would provide an efficient court and fiscal system to protect their jobs and bank accounts from corporate grifters, and would defend their lives in war if necessary—that government was, in fact, an evil thing.
If the billionaires could get the average American to look at government the way that oil, chemical, real estate, and banking industry billionaires did, and just elect politicians who were bought and paid for by those industries, then things would get very, very easy.
===
===
an 9 24
In the Libertarian Party, there has been a great deal of infighting between traditional libertarians and MAGA-influenced alt-right nationalists who have dubbed themselves the party's "blood and soil" faction. That tension was evident during the 2024 Libertarian Party Convention in May, when libertarian traditionalists (who have a lot of common ground with Never Trump conservatives) voiced their displeasure with "blood and soil" members who featured Donald Trump as a speaker.
Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, another Libertarian Party controversy pertaining to the 2024 presidential election has exploded — this time involving a death threat against Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
The New Hampshire Libertarian Party shared a post on X, formerly Twitter, that read, "Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero."
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An X user flagged the tweet, calling for the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service to conduct an investigation.
This controversy comes at a time when Trump, on his Palm Beach, Florida golf course, survived what appeared to be a second assassination attempt.
The tweet was deleted, but the New Hampshire Libertarian Party did so begrudgingly.
In a September 15 tweet, the New Hampshire Libertarian Party said, "We deleted a tweet because we don’t want to break the terms of this website we agreed to. It's a shame that even on a 'free speech' website that libertarians cannot speak freely. Libertarians are truly the most oppressed minority."
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But 2024 Libertarian presidential nominee Chase Oliver, a scathing critic of the MAGA influence that the "blood and soil" faction has brought to his party, is vehemently condemning the death threat against Harris.
On X, Oliver posted, "I 100% condemn the statement from LPNH regarding Kamala Harris. It is abhorrent and should never have been posted. As Libertarians, we condemn the use of force, whether committed by governments, individuals, or other political entities. We are dedicated to the principle of non-aggression and to peaceful solutions to conflict. This is also something we pledge as part of attaining party membership. LPNH's statement should rightfully be condemned by all people."
The New Hampshire Democratic Party is speaking out as well.
New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Raymond Buckley said, "The Libertarian Party of NH encouraging the assassination of Vice President Harris must be condemned in the strongest possible terms. Political violence is never acceptable, and their statement was disgusting, dangerous and wrong."
U.S. Secret Service spokesman Nate Herring wouldn't get into specifics but told the Boston Globe's Steve Porter, "The Secret Service is aware of the social media post made by the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire, and as a matter of practice, we do not comment on matters involving protective intelligence. We can say, however, that the Secret Service investigates all threats related to our protectees."
READ MORE:[Trump's hate is no joke
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5 24 booed
Trump continued to needle the Libertarian Party as he sought their votes on Saturday, resulting in him ending his speech to very loud boos.
Trump took the stage to "thunderous" boos, and ended his speech in a similar fashion this weekend.
Trump was booed especially loudly when he called for the Libertarian Party to nominate him, instead of its own candidate, in the election.
Once that happened, it appeared that Trump decided to ridicule the members by telling them to only nominate him if they want to win for once.
"Or you can just keep getting your three percent," the ex-president said.
Trump repeated the nomination request as he left the stage, as well, resulting in some very loud boos as he stepped away from the podium.
Sonny Bunch, culture editor at The Bulwark, said, "Trump versus the Libertarian Party is the purest 'let them fight' situation I've seen in some time."
Former GOP staffer Tim Miller said, "Trump commits to put a Libertarian in his cabinet and then goes off prompter and starts making fun of the Libertarian party after they boo him."
Ex-Republican strategist Liam Donovan added, "This is a delegation that mercilessly heckled their own nominee in 2016."
"Anybody who sent him into that hall expecting a good result has never seen the cspan clips let alone been to a LNP national convention," the commentator added Saturday.
Independent journalist Aaron Rupar said that Trump was "going full heel on this Libertarian National Convention crowd."
Conservative Tom Nichols wrote, "This Trump speech to the libertarians does not seem to be going well at all."
"Man, I never thought I'd find myself agreeing with libertarians," he added on X. "He can't help himself going off script."
Rupar added that the "Trump speech end[ed] to mostly boos."
am 5 24
many libertarians and Never Trump conservatives have been highly critical of the Libertarian Party for featuring former President Donald Trump as a speaker at its annual convention, which will be held this Saturday, May 25 in Washington, D.C.
These critics have been arguing that Trump's MAGA agenda is diametrically opposed to libertarianism in a variety of ways. Libertarians, for example, often describe themselves as fiscally conservative but socially liberal — whereas Trump is a close ally of the religious right and far-right evangelical Christian nationalists who favor outlawing abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage.
One of the critics who is speaking out is Peter Goettler, president of the Cato Institute — a libertarian think tank founded in 1977.
READ MORE: Group that created Tea Party dissolves over split between 'MAGA and Never Trump factions'
In a biting op-ed published by the Washington Post on May 23, Goettler argues that featuring Trump as a speaker shows that the Libertarian Party has abandoned libertarian principles.
"It will be the first time in U.S. history that a presidential candidate of a rival party will address the convention of a party that is presumably gathering to nominate its own candidate," Goettler observes. "And this strange turn of events has many libertarians scratching their heads. "
The Cato Institute president continues, "With a razor-thin Electoral College contest in the offing this November, it's clear that any play for incremental support is worth Trump's effort and could make the difference. But what's in it for the National Libertarian Party? The answer, unfortunately, reveals the truth about today's party: It's hardly libertarian anymore."
Goettler goes on emphasize that a "long list" of Trump policies are opposed by libertarians.
READ MORE: The love affair with Ayn Rand ties conservatism to one of the most disturbing killers
"He allowed government spending and debt to continue to spiral upward, increasing the national debt by $8.4 trillion," the Cato president notes. "Federal outlays soared from $4 trillion his first year (2017) to $6.8 trillion in his last year. He persists in railing against immigration and free trade, supports further expansion of presidential power and seeks to crack down on political enemies."
The Libertarian Party's leadership, according to Goettler, has "been taken over by a faction that places it well outside the bounds of libertarianism altogether and appears comfortable with right-wing authoritarianism."
"Some tweets issued from state Libertarian parties and other Libertarian operators can only be described as shockingly racist or antisemitic — the Libertarian Party of Michigan, for instance, posted a cartoon portraying Jews as puppet masters of the Democratic and Republican parties — and would be more welcome on the alt-right than among true libertarians," Goettler warns. "This is not what traditional libertarians represent, and it isn't aligned with the position of most Americans."
READ MORE:'This isn't a joke to us': Far-right evangelicals aim to enlist Trump in 'censorship regime'
*Cato Institute PresidentPeter Goettler's full Washington Post op-ed is available at this link (subscription required).
11 23 ihope I’m wrong, but I think I just saw the future of America if Republicans manage to sweep the 2024 elections, Trump or no Trump.
Argentina just embarked on a Grand Experiment, untried before in any developed country in the world; it’s one that multiple American billionaires have been pushing in the US ever since David Koch ran for VP on the Libertarian ticket in 1980.
When I arrived at the airport in Buenos Aires on Sunday morning this week, Election Day, I asked my cab driver who he’d be voting for and why.
“Javier Milei,” he said without hesitation. “The current government hasn’t done what they need to do about inflation.”
I asked him about the Libertarian Congressman’s (and now newly elected president’s) plans to replace the national “Medicare for All” type of healthcare system Argentina has with American-style private, for-profit health insurance plans that people must finance out of their paychecks (if they have a job, otherwise they’re SOL); to end the nation’s free colleges; and his plan to turn all the nation’s public schools and prisons over to “entrepreneurs” to run for profit.
And what about his promise to end all government support for average people, including disability payments, unemployment insurance, and all forms of welfare? His saying that abortion is murder and he’ll re-criminalize it, along with ending women’s and queer rights?
He shrugged.
“Things can’t get any worse,” was his terse reply, adding that he’s driving an airport car as a second job because inflation has wiped out the income from his regular job. This working two and three jobs, he said, has become common across the country.
Argentina has been suffering from an ongoing economic crisis for decades, but it got really bad when the “currency crisis” hit the nation in 2018 after they complied with IMF demands, wiping out half the purchasing power of the peso virtually overnight.
Much like the United States, up until the 1960s Argentina had a top income tax bracket of 90%, which stabilized the economy and prevented massive wealth inequality. Subsequent administrations, including the military dictatorship, cut that down to 35%, like today’s US, with enough loopholes that, like America, most billionaires pay virtually nothing.
Like the US, they also cut taxation on capital gains (although they’ve taken them all the way down to zero), giving a huge boost to Argentina’s morbidly rich and stripping massive amounts of revenue from the federal government.
Their draconian tax cuts, like Reagan’s, drove huge federal deficits. Right wingers, citing the deficits, demanded cuts in social programs, but, until now, weren’t successful in gutting Social Security and other social programs in either country.
In part, because the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency, we can sell debt (treasuries) to finance our deficits; Argentina has a much harder time, because nobody else uses the peso and international investors are wary, so they’ve been pursuing a policy of printing money and borrowing from the IMF, which has debased their currency leading, in part, to today’s massive inflation.
Inflation this year has been over 100%, exacerbated by previous presidents experimenting with neoliberalism as demanded by the IMF, irresponsible borrowing, along with several years of climate change-induced droughtwhich have badly damaged Argentina’s agricultural production, driving up food prices.
Milei’s opponent in Sunday’s runoff election was the nation’s finance minister, so he took much of the blame for the state of things while Milei — often referred to as “Argentina’s Trump” because he’s a wealthy former TV star, tantric sex instructor, and crackpot economist with no governmental experience other than his first year in parliament — promised to dump the rapidly devaluing peso and replace it with the US dollar. (He campaigned carrying around a chainsaw, saying he was going to take it to “welfare,” the “deep state,” and the nation’s social programs.)
When Milei won the top slot in the runoff election a few months ago, his victory caused the peso to fall further, as markets anticipated mass chaos resulting from the possible implementation of his plan to abandon the Argentinian currency if he won the general election. (It’s going to require huge cooperation from the IMF, and they don’t seem inclined to want to help.)
His primary win set off a run on the peso and produced a further currency devaluation (inflation is at 143% today) which, in turn, caused greater voter discontent. Ironically, that funneled more votes to Milei, who overwhelmingly (55%) won Sunday’s election.
The Libertarianism that Milei and American politicians like Rand Paul and Mike Lee embrace, as I’ve noted previously, is a political/economic system that was invented and named in the 1950s by a front group for the real estate lobby to rationalize their opposition to rent control, which was then spreading out of New York City and across America.
It basically argues, as Koch did in his 1980 campaign, that the only “commons” (things publicly owned and administered) a country can legitimately claim are the police and the courts.
They, in turn, have the primary job of making sure that property rights of wealthy people supersede all other rights, including the rights to healthcare, education, clean air and water, protection from abuse by employers, housing, and anti-poverty programs (including Social Security). All of these, Libertarians will tell you, are simply vestigial forms of socialism (or communism) and should be turned over to billionaires or giant corporations.
Libertarians’ key rationalization for this is that “private industry is always more efficient than government,” an argument that, while false, anybody who’s ever stood in line for an hour at the DMV can understand.
Ever since the 1980s, when Reagan embraced the libertarian worldview claiming that, “The nine most frightening words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help,’” the GOP has increasingly embraced Libertarian policies. Republican presidential candidates now compete for who can gut or shut down the most federal government agencies, from the EPA to the DOE to, well, ask Rick Perry.
Milei haș taken it so far as to say that poor people should feel free to sell their body parts, children, and organs to wealthy people on private, unregulated exchanges to pay their rent and medical expenses.
Billionaires and big corporations love Libertarianism because they end up with all the formerly-government-run sectors that they can then turn into profit centers to rip off the public. And shutting down regulatory agencies like the EPA, Interior, and USDA means they no longer have to pay for pollution controls, food safety systems, and other pesky protections for the “little people.”
Probably the example most Americans would recognize is Medicare Advantage, a privatized health insurance scam for seniors that makes billions in profits every week for our largest insurance companies while routinely refusing to pay for doctor’s visits, procedures, and even hospitalizations. It’s literally killing people by denying them care.
Milei ran on the promise of shutting down 10 of Argentina’s 18 federal agencies, throwing most of his countrymen, women, and children into the arms of the nation’s largest and richest corporations and the billionaires who own them.
He’s also a climate change denier, winning him — like Trump — the support of the nation’s fossil fuel industry, claiming the country’s drought and wildfire problems are part of natural climate variations.
Mileitold the nation about global warming:
“It’s another one of the lies of socialism.” He’added, “There is a cycle of temperatures … a cyclical behavior … and therefore all the policies that blame humans for climate change are false.”
Economist Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, noted:
“No one so extremist on economic issues has been elected president of a South American country.
“His extremist views and values go far beyond macroeconomic policy — he hardly acknowledges any legitimate role for government in some of the most important policies that most people have come to see as necessary for a democratic, humane, and stable society.”
Proving Weisbrot’s point, Milei recently told Tucker Carlson:
“Every time the state intervenes, it’s a violent action that harms the right to private property and in the end, limits our freedom.”
As Weisbrot notes, Milei claims that any attempts to “fix the problem of hunger” or “fix the problem of poverty,” or even deal with unemployment is “communism or socialism”; all of these problems should be left to billionaires and giant corporations to solve through private charity or minimum wage work.
Programs like public schools, the free college system that Argentina has that allows any capable student to become a doctor or lawyer at no cost, their national healthcare system, housing supports, Social Security, and even a minimum wage and unemployment insurance are from rich people”:... Milei says. He claims that “social justice” is simply another word for “[theft
“It’s stealing the fruits of one person’s labor and giving it to someone else. So it means two things. First, it’s stealing. The problem with that is that one of the Ten Commandments is ‘thou shalt not steal.’ To support social justice is to support stealing. So one problem is that it violates the Ten Commandments.”
Milei has referred to Pope Francis as “a fucking communist,” saying that because the Pope champions social justice and the plight of the poor he is “the representative of the evil one on Earth.” (Apparently Milei has never read Matthew 25.)
When asked about Milei, (who is not associated with any political party, but, like Trump, has essentially taken over and destroyed Argentina‘s right wing movements) the Pontiff, the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires, told a television interviewer:
“The extreme right always reconstructs itself; it is the triumph of selfishness over communitarianism. … I am terrified of saviors of the nation without a political party history.”
Milei’s victory has America’s rightwingers positively giddy. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, tweeted a celebratory video of him promising to “destroy” the Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development, along with the Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity.
Republicans are loving him,particularly his hate of racial and religious minorities. US Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar (R-Florida) endorsed him on Twitter, saying “We want [Argentina] to be one of the best countries in the world, because it’s what they deserve. A country that has everything. It has soy, it has meat, it has minerals, it has land, it has water, and it has only one culture, only one religion and only one race, completely homogenous.”
Yeah, “one race.” White people control virtually 100% of the levers of political and economic power and Argentina. He’s been embraced across the GOP.
And his campaign appears to be the world’s first to make extensive use of artificial intelligence generated images and memes. It was very effective, portraying him as a superhero and his opponent as a Cuban army style socialist; expect to see Republicans use this in next year‘s election.
Trump posted to his vanity Nazi-infested social media site, “MAKE ARGENTINA GREAT AGAIN!” while Vivek Ramaswamy tweeted, “May the spirits of {neoliberalism’s founders] Mises & Hayek be with you.”
Rightwing influencer and failed Arizona senate candidate Blake Masters posted a video of Milei screaming in Spanish:
“Leftist sons of bitches, be afraid!” He added, “Now, Argentina electing Javier Milei foreshadows Trump’s return in 2024.”
I spent several hours Monday with a politically knowledgeable Argentinian friend-of-a-friend walking around Buenos Aires, and he was blunt:
“Milei is a very smart man, but he is also insane. Really. We call him ‘Loco Milei.’ Nobody knows exactly what he’s going to do or how far he will go, but the current situation is so intolerable that Argentinians will vote for a lunatic if he will simply change the economic course of the country. Poverty has gone from 25% to over 40% in the past two decades, which is a disaster: people are in a lot of pain.”
I asked about Milie‘s plans to criminalize abortion and gay marriage (Argentina was the first South American country to legalize gay marriage back in the 2010; abortion in 2010) and he shrugged:
“Maybe it’s just talk and maybe it’s not. We shall see.”
Because Milei doesn’t have a parliamentary majority, it’s unlikely any effort to replace the peso with the dollar will to go anywhere, but all bets are off on his reconfiguring the federal government to trash the poor, gut social services, and privatize the nation’s schools, colleges, and medical system. Converting the country to dollars, however, would require a massive stock of the US currency that is simply unavailable within the country; the World Bank is suggesting they are unlikely to finance necessary reserves.
Thus, he’s already moving the goalposts, saying his economic reforms won’t kick in until 2025 at the earliest, even though he takes office next month. Meanwhile, he’s ramping up the victim-blaming rhetoric, attacking “lazy” poor people, progressives, and pursuing what he calls a “culture war” similar to the one that led to the murder of over 30,000 people during the military dictatorship of 1978-1983.
Millie refers to the “LGBT lobby” and Argentina’s women’s rights movement as arms of the hated “socialist agenda” that he says must be “stamped out”: the first step he has promised will be ending legal protections for women and queer people by dismantling the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity and the legal rights they protect.
Like America’s far right groups attacking public schools and libraries that carry books about civil rights movements, MLK, and Rosa Parks, Milei is all in:
“Gender ideology, native peoples, ecology and inclusive language [taught in Argentina‘s public schools] destroy the values of society”.
His victory is an international marker, of sorts, for America’s billionaires and largest corporations who share Milei’s desire to end liberal democracy and the so-called “welfare state” both in Argentina and around the world.
In its wake, expect to see the GOP double down on Milei-like language and policies as they try to drive America back toward their own libertarian ideal, which hundreds of years ago in Europe was simply known as “feudalism.”
Here are 11 questions you should ask Libertarians to see if they're hypocrites - Alternet.org
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https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-april-6-2023/
04.06.23 - 10:00AM
The Century Long PR Campaign to Connect Capitalism to Democracy
Guest: Naomi Oreskes is professor of the history of science at Harvard University. Her books include, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, and her latest with historian of science and technology Erik Conway, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.
child labor pew sunoco NAM dupont paid for von mises and hayek to come to US u chic; the free mkt pjt blueprint (rewrite road to serfdom, milton does it; lect series wm volker fdn)
little hse on prarie
xian econ, norm v peale; billy g; $ sign of god favor (recycled the --- of wealth); commies are godless, thus god likes capitalism
hollywood no more grapes of wrath motion pix assoc w ayn rand; wrote censorship codes not crit bank rich ppl; [sinclair EPIC? ]; CoC
RR: ike ltr to bro sec secure ~ sm# and stupid; GE NY (convicted rig elec mkt) , horatio alger, very pop pgm; RR sends the speech to nixon; libtard bk list ; RR unites social and fiscal conservatives? xian?
1929 ~ libtard
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amanda an 2 23
...The PerryUndem research comports with another study published in Political Psychology in November, which examines the attitudes about abortion among self-described libertarians, who mostly tend to vote Republican. Researchers found that this group opposed reproductive rights, but only for women.They supported laws giving men veto power over women's abortions, as well as "financial abortion" laws that allow a man to opt out of financially supporting a child if a woman refuses to abort a pregnancy.Libertarians, researchers found, have "support for men's and not women's reproductive autonomy."
These findings help explain why Republican candidate for Georgia's Senate seat, Herschel Walker, lost very little Republican support during the 2022 election, despite widespread reports that he had demanded that two ex-girlfriends get abortions. The issue isn't abortion, but women's autonomy. If the perception is that a man made the abortion choice for a woman, most Republican voters will not hold it against him at the polls.
Sexist stereotypes about things other than abortion often get attached to bills restricting reproductive rights. In Tennessee, for instance, a bill allowing rape victims to get abortions comes with a poison pill provision that will likely prevent most, if not all, requests for the exception: If a patient makes a "false report or statement," they can go to prison for a minimum of three years. But, as journalist Jessica Valenti points out, "women across the country have been accused—and arrested!—for making false reports for reasons as simple as a police officer didn't believe them." So-called "false" allegations are often quite true, but victims get snared by the myth that women make up rape accusations to get revenge or conceal their own sexual activity. In reality, false rape reports are estimated to be about .5% of overall rape numbers. Lying about rape to the authorities is vanishingly rare. Fear of being accused of lying, however, will likely prevent women from seeking help....
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an ah? 1 23
Cryptocurrencies are popular on the right, from MAGA Republicans to anti-MAGA libertarians. But in 2022, the cryptocurrency market suffered a major blow when crypto exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy and criminal fraud charges were filed against its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried. In December, Bankman-Fried agreed to be extradited back to the United States to face charges.
In an op-ed published by The Guardian GUK on January 17, journalist Zoe Williams argues that there are some important lessons to be learned from the FTX debacle. One is that FTX’s downfall underscores the need for strong market regulation. Another is that libertarians are foolish to have so much faith in a market that is insufficiently regulated.
Zoe Williams, today in The Guardian, argues that the FTX debacle underscores the need for market regulation.
READ MORE: Here's a:{ quick explainer of what happened with crypto giant FTX — and how the GOP is lying about it}:
“Naturally, if you unshackle a currency from the state and don’t regulate it, that’s a pretty libertarian proposition,” Williams writes. “You might even call it the ultimate free market. So, how’s that panning out for you, lads? Or should I say bros?.... Sam Bankman-Fried has resigned from the cryptocurrency exchange he founded, and FTX has filed for bankruptcy.”
Williams goes on to lay out some reasons why cryptocurrencies aren’t the panacea that some on the right believe they are.
“As Bankman-Fried continues to proclaim his innocence, investigators point in court to a $65bn (£53bn) backdoor between his two companies,” Williams observes. “They’ve also identified tens of millions of dollars of spending on hotels, travel, food and luxury items in under a year. No question, there will be technical details in here that are hard to understand, but there is a principle that is very easily grasped, that is as universal and intuitive as time itself.”
Williams continues, “Markets have never been free: they are social spaces and, as such, have always been governed by rules, which — since the first time a snake-eyed trader tried to cut flour with chalk — work because they are formally determined. Take away those rules, and soon, a greedy, clever person might take advantage. He won’t be able to help himself. He needs the rules as much as anyone else, if not more.”
The Guardian writer notes that billionaire political donor Peter Thiel has been a major cheerleader for cryptocurrencies.
“I think Thiel is right: crypto is the ultimate technology of libertarianism, the final frontier of discovery,” Williams writes. “He just missed the second footfall, which is that, through crypto, we will discover that libertarianism is b******t.”
READ MORE: The white male privilege scam
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good analysis: atomization of ppl 2022
sil vly libtards:
the Global Lab: Inequality, Technology, and the Experimental Movement
By Adam Fejerskov
https://books.google.com/books?id=v591EAAAQBAJ&pg=PA78
Global Lab maps out the political, institutional, and ethical coordinates of a new experimental movement operating across the Global South. It tells the story of how a group of organizations, foundations, and corporations are increasingly using developing countries, local communities, and refugee camps as live laboratories to experiment with untested technologies, biometric humanitarian solutions, new drugs, and radical methodologies for social change. The book asks where and how this movement works, laying bare the human, ethical, philosophical, and political consequences of its practices.
The Global Lab takes the reader through Silicon Valley, Africa, and Asia to understand the tangible and transformative implications of experimentation, following a set of main protagonists, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to experimental economists known as the randomistas, to humanitarian organizations and pharmaceutical companies. Deeply entrenched in contemporary experimental practice, these actors form a movement inspired bycore logics emanating out of Silicon Valley about the need for fast-paced radical change and societal disruption, technological innovation as progress, and the privatization and commercialization of the human mind and body. Ultimately, the book examines the inequality of experimentation that is found in the erection of imaginary walls between us and them, and the imagined universal and often unquestioned value of scientific and technological progress in the name of development.
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/libertarianism-failed-us/
Libertarians have a dream. It is to create a floating colony, either using ships or artificial islands, located in international waters. Residents of these communities would be out of reach of sovereign countries, so they would not be bound by government rules and best of all, they would pay no taxes. It is called seasteading, which is being promoted by theSeasteading Institute.
You have to go back to the 1970s for the first serious attempt at seasteading, which was based on the idea that unclaimed island in the Pacific Ocean could be colonized by libertarians.
A Nevada-based real estate developer and coin dealer, Michael Oliver, had a dream. A libertarian, he wanted to escape the overbearing clutches of governments. The only way to do so, he decided, was to create his own country, where there would be few or no rules. In 1968, he published A New Constitution for a New Country, a practical guide on how to construct a new nation in which “people will be free to do as they damn well please. Nothing will be illegal so long it does not infringe on the rights of others. If a citizen wishes to open a tavern, set up gambling or make pornographic films, the government will not interfere.”Income would be generated from fees from grateful banks wishing to establish offshore services—no questions asked—and offer transnational corporations a place to establish their headquarters without bothersome rules or taxation. It would even issue its own currency.
Pulling together around 2,000 investors, Oliver established theOcean Life Research Foundation. With funds raised, Oliver’s first idea was to find a country that would be willing to sell his foundation one of its islands, over which the Foundation would declare sovereignty. When he couldn’t find any takers, Oliver looked around for an unclaimed island that could become his libertarian paradise.
The best Oliver could do was Minerva Reef, in the middle of the Pacific, 500 km (260 miles) southeast of Tonga. It had never been claimed, despite being discovered as far back as 1854. There were, however, serious problems establishing a settlement on the reef, not the least being that the reef lies some three feet above water at low tide and about four feet under water at high tide.
Undaunted, in January 1971, Oliver and a small party went to Fiji, where they chartered a 54-foot motor sailer and purchased the materials to create artificial islands on the reef. On their arrival at Minerva, the party unloaded large hunks of coral wrapped in chicken wire, concrete blocks, sand and other rubble, which allowed them to build two micro-islands on the reef. On one of these islands, they built a small stone tower and hoisted its flag: a yellow torch of freedom on a solid blue background. The founding fathers of Minerva hoped to expand the reclaimed land until it would eventually support a city of 30,000 citizens.
In February 1972, Oliver appointed Bud Davis the Provisional President of Minerva. A former project engineer with North American Rockwell, he ran the new republic from the living room of his one-story house in Gustine, California. From there, he mailed out aDeclaration of Sovereigntyto around one hundred nations, requesting recognition for the world’s newest principality. The only head of state willing to strike up diplomatic relations was the Sultan of Occussi-Ambeno. This coup lost its sheen when it was discovered that the Sultanate was a figment of the fertile imagination of Bruce Grenville, a New Zealand anarchist.
While the founding fathers of Minerva were romantics, they were pleased to find that they had counterparts in the business community who were thinking along similar lines. For example,Carl Gerstacker, the chairman of Dow Chemical Company, startled his audience in 1972 when he mused:
“I have long dreamed of buying an island owned by no nation and of establishing the World Headquarters of the Dow Company on the truly neutral ground of such an island, beholden to no nation or society. If we were located on such truly neutral ground we could then really operate in the United States as US citizens, in Japan as Japanese citizens and in Brazil as Brazilians rather than being governed in prime by the laws of the United States … We could even pay any natives handsomely to move elsewhere.”
Dow later brushed this quote off as a joke, but when questioned at the time, Gerstacker said he was “deadly serious.”
After reading a report about this speech, Oliver approached Dow to ask whether it would like to establish its world headquarters on Minerva. Gerstacker did not respond, and the principality remained no more than a flag fluttering in the wind over a few square yards of debris that threatened to wash away in the next storm.
Unfortunately for Oliver, Australia did not take kindly to a privately owned principality being created in its neighborhood and pressured Tonga, being the closest country to Minerva, to act.
Taking up the challenge was King Tupou IV, the heaviest monarch in the world, weighing in at over 440 pounds. On June 21, 1972, he led an expeditionary force to invade the Principality of Minerva. Without an army or navy to call on, the king recruited a five-man convict work detail to undertake the invasion and, to add gravitas to the expedition, a four-piece brass band played the Tongan national anthem from on-board the royal yacht Olovaba to inspire the troops. Taking courage, when he saw that Minerva was unoccupied, the king decided to personally lead his force. Once the tide was out, the king went ashore. After tearing down Minervan flag, he read aloud a proclamation of sovereignty. The reef now belonged to Kingdom of Tonga.
When the king was safely back on board the royal yacht, his ragtag troops were left to dismantle the stone tower, which had been erected by Oliver. What up until now had been a bloodless war turned nasty, as a fight broke out between two of the convicts, and one was killed. So, while the Principality of Minerva never had a live population, it was left with a single gravesite, which was all that remained of the shortest and smallest war in the history of the world, and even that grave soon disappeared, as did the Principality of Minerva when successive storms washed away its artificial islands.
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an 6 22
no lnx twt
Liberals and progressives have long expressed mixed feelings about libertarians, applauding their views on marijuana, abortion and gay rights while disagreeing vehemently with their hardcore fiscal conservatism. Libertarians have a long history of describing themselves as fiscal conservatives who are social liberals and arguing that the War on Drugs and the evangelical Christian Right have been terrible for the Republican Party and terrible for the conservative movement.
The far-right MAGA movement championed by former President Donald Trump and his army of authoritarians and Christian nationalists is antithetical to many of the positions libertarians have taken over the years, such as abortion on demand and full legalization of marijuana and prostitution. But journalist Jeet Heer describes an unlikely trend in an article published by The Nation on June 6: a growing MAGA influence within the Libertarian Party.
“Third parties have a political impact far greater than their electoral successes,” Heer explains. “They are the research and development wing of the political system…. The Libertarian Party can rightly claim to be heir to this tradition of being a seedbed for policy innovations taken over by both Democrats and Republicans…. If the dominant ideology of American politics since the 1970s is neoliberalism, then the Libertarian Party has truly punched above its weight…. The Libertarian Party championed gay rights and drug decriminalization long before the Democrats.”
But Heer goes on to lament that Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute, has become influential in parts of the Libertarian Party — pushing MAGA-like “blood and soil” rhetoric. And Heer describes a struggle between the Libertarian Party’s Mises Caucus and its “Gary Johnson wing.” Johnson, a former New Mexico governor and ex-Republican, was the Libertarian presidential nominee in 2012 and 2016.
In 2017, Arvin Vohra, vice chair of the Libertarian Party, warned that theMises Caucus had “been turned into a sales funnel for the White nationalist branch of the alt-right.” And others in the “Johnson wing” of the Libertarian Party, Heer notes, have been equally critical of the Mises Caucus and its MAGA-influenced views.
“Taking the Libertarian Party out as a competitive force will help consolidate the right-wing vote around the Republican Party,” Heer warns. “Once the Libertarian Party becomes a husk of its former self, the alt-right faction will continue to assist a Trumpized GOP in a way that parallels groups like the Proud Boys. MAGA Libertarians will be a potent vector for spreading bigotry on social media. The Mises Caucus are the nominal winners in the internecine libertarian wars, but the ultimate beneficiary could be Donald Trump.”
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why scare quotes?
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/aoc-elon-musk/
no lnx many twts
Elon Musk's attack on AOC draws far right Twitter trolls – and charges of 'staggering' misogyny
AOC catches a Republican launching a 'cynical' smear against her — and has the receipts to prove it
David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement April 30, 2022
Whether you believe him or not (don't), Elon Musk claims he is buying Twitter to protect "free speech" but he's already turning the top social media platform into a home for the far-right – exactly as liberals warned.
On Thursday the billionaire was accused of sounding "just like Trump" when he posted a demonstrably false meme alleging conservatives haven't changed since 2008, while the "center" and liberals have moved to the left – with liberals running to the extreme far left. Again, demonstrably false.
Apparently not thrilled by the massive negative response from the left, on Friday Musk tweeted, "The far left hates everyone, themselves included!"
About 20 minutes later, again apparently gauging reaction, he added: "But I’m no fan of the far right either. Let’s have less hate and more love," acting as if he already owned the place – which he does not.
Friday night, Musk responded to a tweet from a powerful sitting member of Congress, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). While she did not tag him, it was clearly about him.
"Tired of having to collectively stress about what explosion of hate crimes is happening bc some billionaire with an ego problem unilaterally controls a massive communication platform and skews it because Tucker Carlson or Peter Thiel took him to dinner and made him feel special," she wrote.
News reported Friday suggested Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey asked Musk to buy the social media site – and "libertarians" like Thiel urged him on.
The Wall Street Journal reported hours earlier thatDorsey "was whispering in Mr. Musk’s ear that Twitter should be a private company, people familiar with the matter say." The Journal also reported billionaire Peter Thiel, a strong Trump backer, had been urging Musk to get involved. Thiel is also a strong backer of Trump-aligned MAGA candidates.
So it's no wonder that Musk responded to AOC in a most vile manner, sexualizing her remarks, which was a dog whistle – if not a clarion call – to the misogynistic far right, who came barking with glee.
This was Musk's ugly response:...
Emma Vigeland, the co-host and producer of The Majority Report with Sam Seder weighed in: "Congratulations on reaching yet another right-wing milestone, Elon: projecting your own creepy sexual fixations onto Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It’s a rite of passage!"
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wolff debate w/ ayn inst
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Nasty, brutish and short” is the phrase that British philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in his 1658 book “Leviathan,” famously used to describe the lives of England’s working class. Hobbes, born in 1588, lived a long life and was 91 when he died in 1679, but many working-class Brits of Hobbes’ time didn’t make it to 50.
Centuries later, liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman uses Hobbes’ “nasty, brutish and short” concept in his January 31 column — arguing that in 2022, Republican policies are designed to make American lives exactly that: nasty, brutish and short.
“As Thomas Hobbes could have told you, human beings can only flourish, can only avoid a state of nature in which lives are ‘nasty, brutish and short,’ if they participate in a ‘commonwealth’ — a society in which government takes on much of the responsibility for making life secure,” the 68-year-old Krugman explains. “Thus, we have law enforcement precisely so individuals don’t have to go around armed to protect themselves against other people’s violence.”
Krugman continues, “Public health policy, if you think about it, reflects the same principle. Individuals can and should take responsibility for their own health when they can, but the nature of infectious disease means that there is an essential role for collective action, whether it is public investment in clean water supplies or, yes, mask and vaccine mandates during a pandemic. And you don’t have to be a socialist to recognize the need for regulation to maintain the reliability of essential aspects of the economy like electricity supply and the monetary system." [twt]
the liberal economist/columnist lays out a variety of Republican policies that can make the lives of Americans “nasty, brutish and short” — from COVID-19 policies and anti-vaxxer insanity to a failure to support and maintain infrastructure.Krugman specifically mentions Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas Republicans’ failure to properly “winterize” the Lone Star State’s “gas and electricity facilities” and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to “block just about every measure intended to limit the spread of the coronavirus.”
DeSantis “and his officials,” according to Krugman, “have stopped just short of being explicitly anti-vaccine, but they have catered to the anti-vax fringe.”
“I’m calling the modern American right antisocial — because its members reject any policy that relies on social cooperation, and they want us to return instead to Hobbes’ dystopian state of nature,” Krugman says of the Trumpified GOP of 2022. “We won’t try to keep guns out of the hands of potential mass murderers; instead, we’ll rely on teacher-vigilantes to gun them down once the shooting has already started. We won’t try to limit the spread of infectious diseases; instead, we’ll tell people to take drugs that are expensive, ineffective or both after they’ve already gotten sick.”
Krugman wraps up his column by stressing that the Republicans of 2022 fail to realize that government has its place.
“Government exists for a reason,” the economist/Times columnist writes. “But the right’s constant attacks on essential government functions will take a toll, making all of our lives nastier, more brutish and shorter.”
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an 1 22
no lnx
Economist Paul Krugman analyzes the 'bizarre alliance between Bitcoin and MAGA'
[Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas speaking at the 2021 Young Latino Leadership Summit, hosted by Turning Point USA at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, ]
Alex Henderson January 12, 2022
In MAGA World, it isn’t uncommon to find far-right Republicans trumpeting their love of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Sen. Ted Cruz, in October 2021, declared that he wanted to “see Texas become the center of the universe for Bitcoin and crypto” — and former Ohio State Treasurer Josh Mandel tweeted that Ohio “must be a pro-God, pro-family, pro-Bitcoin state.” Liberal economist and New York Times opinion writer Paul Krugman analyzes the MAGA far right’s “bizarre” obsession with Bitcoin in his January 10 column, offering some reasons for the obsession.
Krugman writes, “There has long been a strong connection between support for Bitcoin and right-wing extremism — like the traditional association between conservatism and an obsession with gold, only more so…. It does seem important to understand the cultish aspects of the cryptocurrency movement.”
Krugman’s column isn’t critical of Bitcoin itself, but he finds MAGA Republicans’ obsession with it strange — including Mandel’s goofy willingness to equate Bitcoin with “God and country.”
“I still sometimes encounter people who say that we live in a digital age, so we should be using digital money,” Krugman explains. “But we already do! Like many people, I pay for most things by clicking a mouse, tapping my debit card or pressing a button on my phone. I used to keep singles in my wallet to buy fruit and vegetables from New York’s ubiquitous sidewalk stands, but these days, even they often accept Venmo.”
Krugman continues, “All of these payments, however, depend on trusting a third party: People accept debit cards, Apple Pay, Venmo and so on because they’re linked to a bank account. Bitcoin’s whole purpose, as laid out in its original 2008 white paper, was to remove the need for that kind of trust: It would validate payments using methods related to cryptography — coded communication. The goal was to create a peer-to-peer system of payments independent of financial institutions.”
States that submit to the authority of Almighty God // states that don\u2019t\n\nStates that are pro-family // states that aren\u2019t\n\nStates that invest in #bitcoin infrastructure // states that won\u2019t\n\nOhio must be a pro-God, pro-family, pro-bitcoin state. \n\nI promise we will be.
— Josh Mandel (@Josh Mandel) 1640649612
The economist adds that although Bitcoin has been available since January 2009, it hasn’t caught on with the general public the way its strongest proponents would like.
“The truth is that although Bitcoin has been around a long time by internet standards — 13 years! — it and othercryptocurrencies have made hardly any inroads into the traditional role of money, as a medium of exchange used to purchase goods and services,” Krugman notes. “Hard numbers are scarce, but it looks as if a vast majority of cryptocurrency transactions involve market speculation rather than the ordinary business of life. Yet Bitcoin and its rivals now have a combined market valuation of more than $1 trillion.”
Krugman adds, “What do investors think they’re buying? One answer is protection against theperennial fear that governments will inflate away all your wealth.”
The Times columnist argues that the MAGA movement’s obsession withBitcoin fits in with its conspiracy mindset.
Krugman writes, “What’s with the deepening alliance between Bitcoin and MAGA? The answer, I’d argue, is that Bitcoin was supposed to create a monetary system that functions without trust — and the modern right is all about fostering distrust. COVID is a hoax; the election was stolen; California’s forest fires had nothing to do with climate change, and they were started by Rothschild-controlled space lasers. In this context, it’s perfectly natural for MAGAesque politicians to demand an end to a monetary system that runs through banks — we know who controls them, right? — and rests on a currency that’s managed by government-appointed officials.”
Krugman adds, “There’s no evidence of widespread monetary abuse, but that doesn’t matter on the extreme right. The point, then, is that while there are real economic issues associated with cryptocurrencies, their rise has a lot to do with the broader political madness that has American democracy on the brink.”
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see boy billionaire space race ; libtard PR stunt propaganda
subsidy military contractor? musk and thiel also mil/intel contractors?!
https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/bezos-space/
no lnx twt
'Inappropriate giveaway of galactic proportions': Outrage over $10 billion taxpayer gift to Bezos space obsession
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos/Twitter
Brett Wilkins and Common Dreams November 18, 2021
Progressives on Wednesday slammed what they called a proposed $10 billion handout to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—the world's first multi-centibillionaire—in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act as a "giveaway of galactic proportions" in the face of growing wealth inequality and the inability of U.S. lawmakers to pass a sweeping social and climate spending package.
According to Defense News, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) plans to merge the $250 billion U.S. Innovation and Competition Act of 2021 (USICA)—aimed largely at countering the rise of China—with next year's NDAA, which would authorize up to $778 billion in military spending. That's $37 billion more than former President Donald Trump's final defense budget and $25 billion more than requested by President Joe Biden.The NDAA includes a $10 billion subsidy to Bezos' Blue Origin space exploration company.
"Providing Jeff Bezos with $10 billion of taxpayer money would be an inappropriate giveaway of galactic proportions," Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), said in a statement Wednesday.
"Jeff Bezos shouldn't receive taxpayer subsidies for his personal projects—period,"he continued. "In at least two recent years, one of the richest people on the planet paid no income tax; yet he then demands billions in taxpayer funds for a project that's already been awarded to another company. This is the height of hubris."
"Rather than waste $10 billion on a redundant space contract for Bezos, that money could be used to adequately fund Social Security Disability, Medicare and Medicaid, and the food stamps that many of his own employees at Amazon and elsewhere have to rely on to make ends meet," Appelbaum said.
"Jeff Bezos's business model includes feasting on public subsidies—and the U.S. Senate must not acquiesce to his demands," he added. "Furthermore, until Jeff Bezos changes the way his employees are mistreated and dehumanized at Amazon and elsewhere, no elected official should support the passage of subsidies for him or any of his projects."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has condemned the NDAA for containing $52 billion in "corporate welfare" for Big Tech. Explaining why he would vote against the NDAA, Sanders said Tuesday that "combining these two pieces of legislation would push the price tag of the defense bill to over $1 trillion—with very little scrutiny."
"Meanwhile," he added, "the Senate has spent month after month discussing the Build Back Better Act and whether we can afford to protect the children, the elderly, the sick, the poor, and the future of our planet. As a nation, we need to get our priorities right."
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ayn rand plus theocracy?!
omg npi
https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/extremist-christians/
paul r salon
progressive policies and positions are supposed to be rooted in reality and hard evidence. But that's not always the case when it comes to the culture wars that have such an enormous impact on our politics — especially not since the unexpected evangelical embrace of Donald Trump in 2016, culminating in the "pro-life" death cult of anti-vaccine, COVID-denying religious leaders. If this development perplexed many on the left, it was less surprising to a small group of researchers who have been studying the hardcore anti-democratic theology known as dominionism that lies behind the contemporary Christian right, and its far-reaching influence over the last several decades.
One leading figure within that small group, Rachel Tabachnick, was featured in a recent webinar hosted by the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (archived on YouTube
Her presentation sheds important light on at least three things: First of all, the vigilante element of the Texas anti-abortion law SB 8. Second, the largerpattern of disrupting or undermining governance, including the "constitutional sheriffs" movement, the installation of overtly partisan election officials and the red-state revolt against national COVID public health policies. While Donald Trump has exploited that pattern ruthlessly, he did not create it. And third, the seemingly baffling fact that an anti-democratic minority feels entitled to accuse its opponents — including democratically elected officials — of "tyranny."
Some dominionist ideas — such as the biblical penalty of death by stoning — are so extreme they can easily be dismissed as fringe, others have been foundational to the modern religious right, and still more have become increasingly influential in recent years. Those latter two categories are what we need to understand most, say both Tabachnick and Jackson.
"One of the things that struck me, as a relative newcomer," said Jackson, a former Congregationalist minister, "was that there was not sufficient understanding about the theological frames used by many individuals who are opposed to abortion." She continued, "I'm a strategist in a lot of ways, and one important strategy, I believe, must be to understand what the teachings and the theological frames are" on the other side. Which links directly to the question of what progressive activists need to do differently in this changed environment.
This failure to understand the nature of dominionism has hampered activists, not just in the realm of reproductive justice, but across an entire spectrum of political issues, both cultural and economic.Jackson discussed her own background, raised within a conservative Christian worldview.
"I was taught a very individualistic approach," she said, "taught that we shouldn't pay taxes, because doing so enabled people who were not working, and enables people whose lifestyle we don't agree with." There's nothing new about such views, but dominionism provides believers with an even stronger foundation for them.
Jackson describes her current understanding of religious faith as highly intersectional: "We believe that to understand the attacks on abortion also invites us — or even requires us — to look at attacks on voting, to look at attacks on immigrants, attacks on prison reform, attacks on equal pay and on and on," she said. "It's all of the same cloth: They are all attacks on humans flourishing. That's my language. The God of my understanding wants all of us to flourish in who we are."
the language of dominionism is strikingly different, to put it mildly. In her webinar, Tabachnick played a clip of one of the movement's leading figures, C. Peter Wagner, providing a definition:
Dominion has to do with control. Dominion has to do with rulership. Dominion has to do with authority and subduing. And it relates to society — in other words what is talked about, what the values are in heaven [that] need to be made manifest here on earth. Dominion means being the head and not the tail. Dominion means ruling as kings. It says in Revelation chapter 1:6 that "he has made us kings and priests," and check the rest of that verse, it says "for dominion." So we are kings for dominion.
Later she provided a definition from Frederick Clarkson, author of the 1997 book, "Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy":
Dominionism is the theocratic idea that regardless of theological view, means, or timetable, Christians are called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society by taking control of political and cultural institutions.
Wagner, who died in 2016, is known as the founding father of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), one of the two main branches of dominionism, which grew out of the Pentecostal and charismatic traditions within evangelical Christianity. Dominionists in the other branch, known as "Christian reconstructionism," come out of conservative Calvinism, with a focus on bringing government and society under biblical law. They tend to be more circumspect, often obfuscating their true intentions and avoiding the word "theocracy" in favor of "theonomy," for example. But not Wagner, as can be seen in the title of his 2011 book, "Dominion!: Your Role in Bringing Heaven to Earth." The NAR talks constantly about taking dominion over the "seven mountains" of society: education, religion, family, business, government, arts and the media.
But it's the other branch, the Christian reconstructionists, who have excelled at strategic organizing and providing blueprints across different right-wing constituencies for almost 50 years. They are the ones Tabachnick focused most of her presentation on, specifically two key figures: Rousas John Rushdoony, the movement's master theologian, and his son-in-law Gary North, a prolific strategist, propagandist and networker who was once a staffer for Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian hero.[ayn radical indiv ~ jesus charity]
Christian reconstructionism, Tabachnick explained, is "about bringing government in all areas of life under biblical law, a continuation of the Mosaic law in the Old Testament, with some exceptions." This dispensation would include, "according to Gary North, public execution of women who have abortions and those who advise them to have an abortion."
In a recent private presentation, Frederick Clarkson asked a rhetorical question: "People have long said that there should be Christian government, but if you had one, what would it look like? What would it do? Rushdoony was the first to create a systematic theology of what Christian governance should be like, based on the Ten Commandments, and all of the judicial applications he could find in the Old Testament — including about 35 capital offenses."
But the "Handmaid's Tale"-style extremism of dominionists' ultimate vision shouldn't really be our focus, Tabachnick told Salon. "Nobody cares about the theocratic, draconian future envisioned by reconstructionists because they don't believe it will happen," she said.
What's happening right now, however, is that this ideology has had tremendous impact on more immediate politics. "Christian reconstructionism is the merger of a distinct brand of Calvinism with Austrian School economics," Tabachnick said. "In other words, it's an interpretation of the Bible grounded in property rights." The results have been far-reaching:
For more than 40 years, its prolific writers have provided the foundations and strategic blueprints for the attacks on liberation theology and the social gospel, as well as many other streams of Christianity which do not share the Reconstructionists' belief in unfettered capitalism as ordained by God and its fierce anti-statism.
The larger religious right's attack on public education, the social safety net and most government functions are largely grounded in the writings, strategies and tactics formulated by reconstructionist writers. Reconstructionism is not the only (and certainly not the first) source of interposition and nullification in this country. However, much of what is currently being taught today about using interposition to undermine the legitimacy of government is sourced in reconstructionism.
This idea of "interposition" comes through what's known as the doctrine of the "lesser magistrate," which we'll return to below. But its significance — especially in the post-2020 Republican Party — has only recently become apparent. Reconstructionism's initial appeal was more immediately, as Tabachnick explained in the seminar:
What Rushdoony provided is a package that included attacking what these fundamentalists hated and feared most in society, often expressed in terms of "This is communist. This is socialist." But Rushdoony provided a way to sacralize these ideas, and at the same time not just tear down the old order, but provide a blueprint for the new order.
Everyone didn't have to agree on the blueprint, she said: "Rushdoony's ideas went out in bits and pieces. The Christian right leaders took what they wanted and discarded what they didn't."
"Christian reconstructionism, as articulated by Rushdoony, provided a standard by which everyone else had to measure themselves," Clarkson told Salon. "Not everyone on the Christian right agreed with Rushdoony and his fellow Reconstructionist thinkers on, for example, the contemporary application of capital crimes listed in the Old Testament. And followers were often at pains to distinguish themselves."
Clarkson cites the case of conservative Presbyterian theologian Francis Schaeffer, who disagreed with Rushdoony on the applicability of biblical law, but became a driving force behind the anti-abortion activist movement Operation Rescue. That "militant Schaefferism," Clarkson said, "led activists to think: What's next, beyond political protest and stopping abortion? This is where the conversation has been in the Christian right for decades."
The doctrine of the "lesser magistrate," mentioned above, first emerged into public discourse out of Operation Rescue. But it did so as part of a larger, more complicated story.
There's a long history of right-wing opposition to federal authority, particularly grounded in the 19th-century defense of slavery and continuing in the defense of Jim Crow segregation. In his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke specifically of the governor of Alabama "having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification."
As detailed by Randall Balmer in "Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right," the religious right wasn't initially fueled by opposition to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, but by opposition to a lesser-known decision in 1971, Green v. Connally, which threatened the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory institutions,most famously the evangelical stronghold Bob Jones University.
Anti-abortion activists have long sought not just to bury that past but to stand it on its head, somehow equating Roe v. Wade with the notorious Dred Scott decision of 1857 and claiming the moral heritage of abolitionism.
"Throughout these movements there is also an attempt to turn the tables on the claims of racism," Tabachnick said in her webinar. "This is one of the roles that anti-abortion activism as abolition plays. Also, there's a promotion of narratives that provide a different history and legal justifications for interposition, nullification and even secession. One of the things that Christian reconstructionism has added to this dialogue is the concept of the lower magistrate."
As Tabachnick explains it, the "lesser magistrate" is a heroic figure who "resists the tyranny of a higher authority" — defining "tyranny" in biblical terms, potentially including any number of popular or common-sense laws or policies. This notion first gained salience in the anti-abortion context in the 1980s and '90s, as Tabachnick went on to explain.
"Many violent anti-abortionists have justified their actions in reconstructionist teachings," she said. "One of these was Paul Hill, who studied under one of the major reconstructionist leaders and corresponded with others." Hill went on to murder Dr. John Britton, a physician who performed abortions, as well as Britton's personal bodyguard, in 1994. Hill was executed in 2003, but the reconstructionist movement sought to cast him out well before that.
"Gary North responded, after the murders had taken place, in a book called 'Lone Gunners for Jesus,'" Tabachnick said. His message to Hill was, "You're going to burn in hell, you've been excommunicated. This was because Paul Hill stepped outside the bounds of the guidelines set by the movement."
To explain this, she quoted a passage from another book by North that offered qualified support for Operation Rescue: "We need a statement that under no circumstances will Operation Rescue or any of its official representatives call for armed resistance to civil authority without public support from a lesser magistrate."
"On the basis of their belief of what the law or the word of God is, they are allowed — on the advice, on the interposition, of a lesser magistrate — to commit acts of violence," Tabachnick continued. North was seeking to control or curb anti-abortion terrorism, but without rejecting it in principle. Murdering abortion providers — or even murdering women seeking abortions — could be morally justified, with the blessing of a lesser magistrate.
This is relevant to SB 8 in Texas in at least two ways. That bill bans abortions after six weeks and is enforced not by state officials, but by deputizing private individuals to sue anyone who performs the procedure or "aids and abets" it. First of all, giving private individuals these vigilante-style rights seems a lot like making them into "lesser magistrates," however narrowly constrained.
Second, the Supreme Court's refusal to stay the law — which clearly violates the Constitution and existing precedent, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued in her dissent — can be seen as an example of the doctrine in action. In more normal circumstances, the court would have stayed the law pending consideration on the merits, even if a majority of justices intended to overturn precedent. That's how common law has worked for centuries.
But biblical law isn't common law, especially as reconstructionists understand it. Under the doctrine of the "lesser magistrate," Roe is not precedent but an instance of tyranny — and the justices have aduty to Godto resist it. Of course, not even Amy Coney Barrett or Clarence Thomas has said anything like that, but it's entirely consistent with their behavior — as well as with their silence, since openly making such an argument would clarify just how radicalized they have become.But adherents of the doctrine of the lesser magistrate must surely appreciate the drift in direction.
Nor is the doctrine limited to abortion cases, as already noted. Matthew Trewhella is a pastor who was a prominent leader of violence-prone wing of the anti-abortion movement in 1990s, and author of the 2013 book, "The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates," which greatly heightened its visibility.
"Trewhella is now all over radio and the internet," Tabachnick said in her webinar, "claiming to meet with state legislators and attorney generals at the moment, with the cause of fighting the 'tyranny of mask mandates' and vaccination for COVID. So you can see how this is a concept that is not just limited to abortion. It is a concept that can be used in resistance of government authority all over the country in all different kinds of ways — FEMA, EPA, Bureau of Land Management and so forth."
Trewhella isn't breaking new ground here. Clarkson's 1997 book "Eternal Hostility" describes him making similar arguments in a speech to an anti-tax group in Wisconsin. He was just one figure among many spreading the seeds of reconstructionist resistance to federal authority among militia members, "freemen" and anti-abortion activists at the time.
"This movement believes that rights come from God and not from any government," Tabachnick told Salon. "Therefore, any 'rights' that conflict with their interpretation of God's law are not actually rights. They are 'humanist' or a product of man's laws and not God's laws. This theme of 'human rights' versus inalienable rights from God has been at the center of the Christian Reconstructionist movement since its beginnings."
She pointed to "What's Wrong With Human Rights," an excerpt from a book of the same name by the Rev. T. Robert Ingram published in "The Theology of Christian Resistance," a collection edited by North. Ingram sweeps aside the Bill of Rights as "a statement of sovereign powers of states withheld from the federal authority of the Union," and turns instead to the Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored by George Mason in 1776.
The first section of the Virginia Declaration, beginning "That all Men are by Nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent Rights," is dismissed by Ingram for omitting any mention of God, as an "error of unbelief which falsifies all the rest that is said about human life." The second, beginning "That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from the People; that Magistrates are their Trustees and Servants, and at all Times amenable to them," he dismisses as well: "The meaning could not be more clear, nor more opposite Biblical thought. The ruling proposition of Scripture and Christian doctrine is that 'power belongeth unto God.'" In short, there are no human rights.
The connection to the doctrine of the lesser magistrate is clear: Power comes from God, not the people. Whatever the people want is irrelevant. Whatever laws they may pass are irrelevant, too, if they go against God. "Tyranny" is whatever the Christian reconstructionist decides he doesn't like.
Elsewhere, Ingram denigrates freedom of speech and the press:
Freedom of speech and freedom of press are, in fact, applied seriously only to giving government protection to instigators of riot and rebellion, as well as those who would undermine human order by more subtle attacks on morals and customs.
As for the right to dissent, he calls it "not a lawful claim to own or to do something, which is the true right," but "a turning upside down of right and wrong, calling good evil and evil good." Similarly, there is no scriptural right to "resist authority," only that granted by the false doctrine of "human rights."
Ingram's interpretation of the Civil War is that "Yankee radicals inflamed the Northern peoples to mount the Civil War in the name of a 'human right'to be free ... if they did not destroy the whole Southern Order, they did at least dismantle its vast and efficient plantation economy." The civil rights movement, unsurprisingly, is understood as a defiance of "Tradition, law, and custom, which preserved public peace and order in the bi-racial state of the union, both North and South," and became "the target of the right to resist in the 60's, the supposed human rights justifying the violent means."
Tabachnick didn't dig into this text in her webinar, but it serves to illustrate her central principle: "This attack on the very concept of 'human rights' can be found throughout today's religious right."
Jackson told Salon that the most important part of Tabachnick's presentation came "when she talked about humanism and the humanistic frame, from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Those who are within the dominionist camp see that as contrary to God. I read those same documents and I say, this is pointing us toward the direction that God wants for us. They look at it and see that as counter to God, because humanism from their perspective is something very contrary to God."
If we take such arguments seriously, then we understand why for dominionists there is nothing wrong with breaking any law at all, so long as "God wills it" and you have the blessing of a so-called lesser magistrate. This is the reconstructionist argument supporting a whole range of chaotic right-wing activity today, including baseless claims that the 2020 election was a fraud. After all, the fundamental reconstructionist argument is that all such democratic government is illegitimate.
"The goal of reconstructionism is to tear down the existing order and reconstruct a new society based on biblical law," Tabachnick said. "Even if we assume that this vision of a theocratic America will never come to fruition, it's important to recognize the movement's impact on the ideas, strategies and tactics of the larger religious right and its role in sacralizing the actions of other anti-statist fellow travelers.
"As I wrote almost a decade ago, the theocratic libertarianism of Christian reconstructionism has been surprisingly seductive to Tea Partiers and young libertarians— many of whom may not realize what is supposed to happen after the government is stripped of its regulatory powers."
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dogma seemed to be on the ropes w/ pandemic fail but kochs and mercer are libtards? murdoch? vaxxer revives? [crt?]
GOP mercers kochs AT&T FUND THIS?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/fox-news-fascism/
Since well before Donald Trump's election, Fox News has served as one of his movement's most powerful and effective propaganda outlets. In numerous ways both large and small, Fox News has mainstreamed fascist and authoritarian talking points, circulated Trump's thousands of lies and massaged, minimized or falsified the events of Jan. 6 and the ongoing coup against American democracy.
On a near-daily basis, Tucker Carlson and other Fox News hosts amplify white supremacist lies about the "Great Replacement"— even if they don't use that precise term — claiming that white people are the victims of a genocidal plot to "replace" them with nonwhites. New public opinion research shows that this type of white supremacist stochastic terrorism has been internalized by tens of millions of white Americans — specifically white Republican and Trump voters — to such an extreme that many of them are willing to condone or participate in acts of political violence in to overthrow Joe Biden's presidency and American democracy.[when do we get to use the guns, corp medical tyrrany? "]
More than 700,000 people have died in the United States from the coronavirus pandemic -- and this is a low estimate. More than a million Americans are expected to die before the virus is brought fully under control.
Public health experts have documented the direct role that Fox News and other right-wing media have played in encouraging their audience to not be vaccinated against the coronavirus. This is part of a much larger pattern of behavior, in which Fox News hasconsistently fueled and amplified coronavirus denialism. In total, Fox "News" has been a public health threat, and bears both direct and indirect responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Because Fox News has such pernicious influence control over its public that it has caused discord, chaos and other forms of dysfunction — almost certainly including interpersonal violence — within families, among friends and across entire communities. When and if American democracy finally succumbs to authoritarianism, its obituary should include Fox News for helping to kill it.
For almost a decade, Jen Senko has been documenting the personal impact of Fox News on the American people. In her 2015 documentary "The Brainwashing of My Dad," she showed in painstaking detail, how Fox News and the right-wing propaganda machine transformed her father into an angry, paranoid, bigoted, political extremist. Her father is only one of the millions of Americans who have fallen under the spell of Fox News and the right-wing hate machine — and by doing so became the base of support for Republican fascist movement.
In her new book, also called "The Brainwashing of My Dad," Senko continues to explore the damaging influence of Fox News and the larger right-wing echo chamber in America's worsening democracy crisis.
In this conversation, Senko details how Fox News functions like a type of cult that uses anger and fear to seduce and control its audience. She also explains how right-wing media creates an alternate universe that offers meaning, community and friendship for the confused, alienated and lonely people — predominantly older white men — who are its primary audience. Senko shares more personal anecdotes about how Fox News and its allied media have destroyed loving relationships,. She also warns that Fox News is priming its audience for political violence to support Donald Trump and the Republican-fascist ongoing coup attempt.
With your documentary, you tried to warn the American people that Fox News and the right-wing media are an extreme danger to the country. But here we are several years later, with America's democracy crisis continuing to escalate as the right has increasingly embraced fascism. How do you feel watching this disaster?
Right now, I'm very, very frustrated. When I made the documentary, I was naïve. I thought to myself, "I'm going to save the world. I'm going to save America." It was cathartic for me to make "The Brainwashing of My Dad."
Now the American people are like the frog in the boiling water. It was lukewarm at first, nice and comfy, and they were all just splashing around a little bit. Then the water gets hotter, and they don't notice. By the time they notice, it's too late and they're boiling.
Given all that has happened and is happening with Trump and the Republicans, my feelings are now panic and despair. I always still have a seed of hope. There are many more people now who did get the message that I was trying to explain about Fox News and where the country was headed. I also have hope because it seems that more Americans are organized to resist.
What do people outside Trump World and the MAGAverse — or who are just generally in denial about the existential threat the country is facing — not understand about what's happening?
Too many people still do not seem to get that what the Republicans and Trump are doing to undermine democracy was long in the planning. It is all like an octopus and it has many tentacles. The head of the octopus is the media.
As fast as perhaps the FBI can catch those who are working to betray the country and commit treason, Fox News is everywhere. There truly is a vast right-wing conspiracy, as Hillary Clinton described it back in the 1990s. This is true whether you like it or not.
Basically, a bunch of oligarchs, evangelicals, racists, mega-corporations and right-wing libertarians got together and planned how they could get rid of government and any policies that serve the public good. What they want is no public schools, no libraries, no post office, no Social Security, no public health option.These right-wing forces want privatization across the board so that they can make as much money as they want, unrestrained, and won't have to pay taxes. Then these same forces got control of the media, and could inject their message right into the public's collective mind.
This right-wing movement also did other things too, such as running for school boards and in other local elections. They used gerrymandering and created a panic about nonexistent voter fraud. But it is the right-wing media that drives the campaign. What shocks me the most is that most Americans still do not understand the big picture.
In your documentary, you showed in painful detail how Fox News and the right-wing machine literally changed your father's personality into a person you no longer recognized. Other Americans have experienced this — perhaps millions of them. What is your dad an example of? How do we understand what Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber did to him as representative of a much larger phenomenon?
My father was seduced by the anger and the excitement. People know that something's wrong, that the system is rigged somehow, but they don't give much thought to how. My father was also retiring from his job, and he found the right-wing media. This gave him something to occupy his mind and thoughts.
Now, suddenly, there's all this excitement in his life. There is some right-wing media person telling him that the government is in his personal business too much. There are very persuasive big personalities pushing my father's buttons and those of the audience in general. And you know what? That feels good. There is an addictive quality to anger like that. It was exciting for my father. It also provided him a group to belong to.
I believe that a lot of white men feel like, "Well, what am I supposed to do? And who am I?" They needed help in figuring themselves out, and the right-wing media and that world provided it. Too many such men developed a victim mentality, telling themselves, "I'm a victim, I'm mad, I've always wanted to fight back."
How was Fox News and the right-wing media machine able to take people such as your father and get them to a point where they would support a coup or political terrorism or conspiracy theories like QAnon? Were they always prone to such behavior or did Fox News and the right-wing machine make them that way?
On Twitter, a lot people will say to me, usually Democrats or liberals, "Oh, these people, they were always like that. They're just finding a port to park their boat in now." I do not believe that is necessarily true.
My dad hadn't been racist. He hadn't been anti-"illegal immigrant." After listening to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, he got brainwashed. When I made the documentary, I did not know if I believed in brainwashing. Now I know that brainwashing does exist, it is real.
There's the brainwashing that happens through force, what we were all familiar with from movies. But what Fox News and the larger right-wing are doing is brainwashing by stealth. I believe this to be more insidious. There's only one type of information going into the brain. There's isolation. There is repetition. That is how they brainwash their public.
I feel like there has been a massive brainwashing campaign, something unlike anything we've ever seen before in this country. That's what's happened in America through Fox News and the right-wing media and movement.
Through your website and other outreach, many people have contacted you about how Fox News and the right-wing media machine have impacted their relationships. What are some of the common themes you are seeing?
One of them is anger. The relative, the loved one, the friend, whoever it may be, suddenly is angry more and more, it's their predominant mood. These people also become very argumentative. Many of these people who are watching Fox and are part of the right-wing echo chamber are incapable of having conversations that somehow do not turn to politics. They become obsessed with this new right-wing way of thinking. It becomes the person's mission. It is all of who they are.
What are some personal stories that jump out at you?
A woman recently shared with me how her husband was a good, sweet guy and a really quiet person. Right before Trump ran for office and became president, he started watching Fox News and his personality completely changed. He would yell at her and their child more. He would criticize her, his wife, because she was a Democrat, yell at her, yell at her kid, start criticizing her. The husband was becoming emotionally abusive.
The woman who reached out to me was afraid that it was going to traumatize her child and that she might have to leave her husband. She was really sad about it because she had once been very much in love with him.
Another person who contacted me lost several members of her family to COVID. Her father still wouldn't get the vaccine. He got COVID, and still wouldn't get the vaccine — or said he wouldn't — and he died because Tucker Carlson and other people on Fox News were telling people like him not to get vaccinated.
What is going on, emotionally and cognitively, where someone would listen to a person on TV who is telling them to do things that will cause them personal harm, that will hurt their family members, friends and other people they care about?
They're not thinking rationally. The part of their brain called the amygdala has been hijacked. That is the fight-or-flight part of the brain. When it is activated, the cerebral cortex is not functioning 100 percent. These people are responding from panic. In that moment, they go to the source that they have learned to trust. That source, in this case Fox News, is telling them, "You can only trust us." That source is angry all the time. It tells its public that the government has screwed them over and the politicians that have screwed them over. The response to Fox News and the right-wing machine actually becomes something physiological.
How does Fox News make friends with its viewers? Because what Fox News and other right-wing propaganda outlets are doing on a fundamental level is establishing an intimate relationship with their public.
There is a feeling that there is an in-group and an out-group. Fox and other parts of the right-wing media make their audience feel special, like they are in on something special. It is a very seductive feeling. Being part of a tribe makes people feel safer. That dynamic is also an example of groupthink.
Many Fox viewers and people who consume that right-wing media just want to belong to the group, to think the same way as everyone else in the group. You trust your people. You don't want to doubt them. They are your friends.
Are the people who watch Fox News awake, or are they asleep?
I think they're in a trance. They are definitely not awake. They're almost on autopilot. They are going to accept anything they are told by Fox.
Why would anyone listen to Fox News, or the right-wing echo chamber more generally, telling them to hurt people, to engage in violence? Why would a formerly reasonable person listen to these commands? What has gone wrong with them?
Because they are in such a rage. They are primed to take that next step. They're in such a rage because they believe, in their heart of hearts, that the 2020 election was stolen away from Trump. They really believe that their country is being taken over illegitimately.
Mix that in with the rage that they already have, where for example they truly believe, "Democrats are horrible, they're the devil's spawn. Anything that's wrong in my life is because of them. Now they're stealing the election, they stole my guy who speaks to me, who's like me." They're just ready to fight.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/neoliberal/
Most Chileans recently voted out the remnants of military dictator Augusto Pinochet, along with Milton Friedman's policies and many U.S. interventions. They are at work on a radically new Constitution. In the United States, former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden gave diminishing lip service to (or just ignored) neoliberal orthodoxy to push for and get massive government interventions into U.S. capitalism. Most of what remains of private capitalism is surviving on unprecedented, massive government life support, monetary and fiscal. A tired rerun of Cold War-style demonizing provides the ideological cover for the fading neoliberalism. Both major parties endorse huge and growing government economic interventions as urgently needed, homeland security-driven, anti-China policies.
Pity the poor libertarians. Their audience fades because the same intrusive government they blame for all economic ills demands loyalty in its fight with China. Former President Richard Nixon was less dishonest 50 years ago when he reportedly said, "We are all Keynesians now." In contrast, today's GOP mouths "conservative economics," yet merely quibbles over details of the government's gigantic money creation and deficit financing.
Today's declining U.S. capitalism can no longer repeat its previous bland celebrations of private enterprises and free markets. Too much is going wrong, provoking criticism, and deepening divisions across U.S. society. The last time U.S. capitalism stumbled this badly—the Great Depression of the 1930s—public health did not suffer massive failure at the same time. Yet, then too, criticism of capitalism reached far, wide, and deep. It was expressed in the unionization by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) of millions alongside zooming enrollments in two socialist parties and one communist party.
Yet, the New Deal negotiated by former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the employer class, on the one hand, with the coalition of unionists, socialists, and communists, on the other hand, achieved then much more than what President Biden seeks now. The pendulum then swung much farther from private enterprise and free markets to broad and deep economic interventions by the government—exemplified by Social Security, unemployment compensation, the minimum wage, and the federal hiring program. The pendulum now swings likewise, if less far, from the neoliberal tradition of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to the government-led and government-regulated capitalism focused on "winning" the competition with China (or, as Trump promised, punishing the "cheating" performed by U.S. trading partners).
Then, the poles of economic debate mirrored the policy oppositions. It was private self-regulating and self-healing capitalism versus government regulatory interventions to save capitalism from self-destruction. Now, something basic has changed. The three capitalist crashes in 2000, 2008, and 2020, each much worse than the previous one, plus the failures to prepare for or cope with COVID-19, ushered in massive, ongoing government economic intervention. The Federal Reserve has smashed all prior records of money creation. The Treasury has smashed all prior records of financing government budget deficits with an expanding national debt. The private versus government parameters of economic debate are gone, replaced by de facto debates over the size, duration, and appropriate beneficiaries or targets of government interventions, monetary and fiscal.
Of course, government interventions in the economy were needed, solicited, and obtained across U.S. history by its private capitalists. But the latter feared that widening and eventually universal suffrage could turn government toward serving the interests of labor (the majority) rather than capital (the minority). So it was important to demonize the government's economic interventions, to compare their effects unfavorably to what private capitalism had accomplished and could yet achieve. But now what remains of private capitalism increasingly depends upon and expects government interventions as the equivalent of life support in medically extreme situations. The old demonization of government economic intervention sounds increasingly hollow and out of touch with reality. To modernize Nixon, we might say, "We are all interventionists now." And this has its inevitable effects on economic debates in academia, politics, and the media.
The die-hard libertarians and other supporters of free-market, private capitalism increasingly lump together liberals, social democrats, insufficient "conservatives," Keynesians, socialists, and communists. They comprise an evil, awful bloc of "the other," advocates for government economic intervention. While there are gradations among them, ranging from Xi Jinping to Donald Trump to Joe Biden, they are all viewed as advocates of massive government economic intervention. By articulating such a perspective, the die-hards inadvertently isolate and marginalize themselves as well as the economic debates defining them.
Contradictory discourse proliferates. U.S. officials denounce Chinese private megacorporations for their close ties to the Chinese government and military, as if their U.S. counterparts do not have comparable ties to the U.S. government and military. Chinese officials have celebrated their "socialist" achievements over the last 25 years, as if China had not invited and enabled private capitalist enterprises to enter and fuel those achievements.Increasingly, spokespersons in economies with greater degrees of private capitalism refer to economies with greater government intervention as "models" to be learned from. Thus, "we" must "learn" from "them" in order to better compete with them.
Slowly, the realization dawns that maybe it never was appropriate to center analytical attention and doctrinal disputation on the private versus public sectors of capitalist economies. Maybe all capitalisms mixed private enterprises and free markets with public enterprises and publicly regulated enterprises, markets, and economic planning activities. We do know that slave economic systems mixed private slave enterprises with public slave enterprises and state regulations of slave enterprises. We know that the same applies to feudal economic systems. It was a distraction to focus on the private versus public dispute as if it were central to understanding capitalism's place in history and in modern society.
Perhaps economics as a discipline is shifting gears to focus on a different basic discourse and debate. At the micro level, this debate would contrast and compare the functioning and effects (economic, political, and cultural) of two alternative organizations of workplaces. One of them, contemporary capitalism—embodied in both private and public enterprises—entails a version of the dichotomies inherited from slavery and feudalism. In these dichotomies, a small minority—enslavers in slavery, lords in feudalism, and employers in capitalism—makes all the key workplace decisions, holds the major power positions, and accumulates disproportionate wealth relative to what the majority—slaves, serfs, and employees—gets. The alternative workplace organization now struggles to emerge from the shadows and margins of those dichotomous discourses and realities. It exhibits a communal, collective, or cooperative organization of the workplace. Instead of hierarchy, this alternative is a horizontal organization that makes all workplace participants equally powerful. Each has one vote to decide democratically what to produce, how and where, and what to do with the surplus or profits to which all workplace participants contributed. These are called worker self-directed enterprises, or WSDEs (see Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism).
At the macro level, the emerging debate would focus on how key institutions—markets, planning apparatuses, relations between workplaces and residential communities, schools, government, political parties, and so on—would link differently to the alternative enterprise organizations. The whole capitalism versus socialism debate would then be reorganized around this question: which enterprise organization—capitalist versus WSDE—best serves the interests of the communities engaged in such a debate.
Capitalism versus socialism debates would then stop being about private versus public ownership and free versus government-regulated (or planned) markets. They would refocus instead on hierarchical-capitalist versus democratic-collectivist organizations of workplaces (factories, offices, and stores). The original notion of socialism as a basic critique of and an alternative to capitalism would thereby return to displace its detour into debates over private versus public.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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pjo bktv present self/libtard/cato as sensible rational center vs extreme of rt and left, but anti-gubmint mantra even today on show teed up covid fail:
an 1020 one might think low density pop rural red states do best, but ND worst?
eight of the 10 states with the highest rates have Republican governors. Kansas and Nevada, which come in eighth and ninth, both have Democratic governors.[[1]](https://www.cepr.net/red-state-governors-still-flunk-testing/#_ftn1) While Democrats also control the legislature in Nevada, the legislature in Kansas is overwhelmingly Republican.
The story is more mixed among the states with the lowest positive rates, with five having Democratic governors and five having Republican governors. However, it is worth noting that all five of the states with Republican governors have legislatures that are controlled by Democrats.
In short, by this measure of efforts at getting the pandemic under control, Democrats seem far more serious than Republicans.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/economist-paul-krugman-libertarianism-gone-bad-wont-protect-americans-from-the-terrifying-path-of-19/
Paul Krugman explains why Ayn Rand's libertarianism is absolutely deadly
Alex Henderson October 23, 2020
During the coronavirus crisis, President Donald Trump and many of his Republican allies have not only downplayed the severity of the pandemic — they have also vehemently opposed social distancing restrictions, mask wearing and other measures meant to slow down the spread of COVID-19. Liberal economist Paul Krugman discusses that mindset this week in his New York Times column, slamming it as "libertarianism gone bad" and the toxic influence of the late right-wing author Ayn Rand.
"If you look at what Republican politicians are saying as the pandemic rips through their states," Krugman explains, "you see a lot of science denial. Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota has gone full Trump — questioning the usefulness of masks and encouraging potential superspreader events…. But you also see a lot of libertarian rhetoric — a lot of talk about 'freedom' and 'personal responsibility.'"
Noting the autumn surge in COVID-19 infections that is occurring across the U.S., Krugman writes, "Donald Trump's disastrous leadership is, of course, an important factor. But I also blame Ayn Rand — or, more generally, libertarianism gone bad, a misunderstanding of what freedom is all about."
Krugman agrees with libertarians that there are many times when the government needs to butt out and mind its own business. But when a pandemic poses so great a threat to public health, Krugman argues, it isn't government overreach to encourage social distancing or ask someone to wear a mask in public.
"Many things should be matters of individual choice," Krugman argues. "The government has no business dictating your cultural tastes, your faith or what you decide to do with other consenting adults. But refusing to wear a face covering during a pandemic, or insisting on mingling indoors with large groups, isn't like following the church of your choice. It's more like dumping raw sewage into a reservoir that supplies other people's drinking water."
According to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the COVID-19 pandemic has killed more than 1.1 million people worldwide and over 223,600 in the United States — and some health officials fear that the worst is yet to come if the pandemic follows a path similar to that of the 1918/1919 Spanish flu pandemic, which went from bad to worse during its second wave. Whatever happens this winter, COVID-19 has already killed a staggering number of people. And in light of all the misery the novel coronavirus has inflicted, Krugman stresses, it is hardly unreasonable to ask Americans to take precautions.
"Many prominent figures still don't seem to understand, or aren't willing to understand, why we should be practicing social distancing," Krugman explains. "It's not primarily about protecting ourselves — if it were, it would indeed be a personal choice. Instead, it's about not endangering others. Wearing a mask may provide some protection to the wearer, but mostly, it limits the chance that you'll infect other people…. Trump may complain that 'all you hear is COVID, COVID, COVID.' The fact, however, is that the current path of the pandemic is terrifying — and we desperately need leadership from politicians who will take it seriously."
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an 920
how a **mask mandate** might hurt the re-election chances of Indiana's Republican governor
September 27, 2020
The Associated Press recently reported that Indiana conservatives who are furious with Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb over his statewide mask mandate are cottoning to Libertarian Donald Rainwater as an alternative, which could make this fall's otherwise...
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libtard reductionism:
north Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis — viewed as one of the most vulnerable GOP senators in 2020 — has found himself in an uncomfortable situation after a staffer’s excessively honest comments to a constituent were caught on tape.
As first reported by WRAL, Bev Veals of Carolina Beach, a three-time cancer survivor, called her senator out of fear that her health insurance was at risk. She has previously faced medical bankruptcy and difficulty accessing care, WRAL said, andher husband was furloughed because of the pandemic. She wanted assurance that she’d have coverage if she lost her health insurance.
But Tillis’s office wasn’t helpful. While speaking to a dismissive staffer, Veals began to record their conversation, which was provided to WRAL and can be viewed above.
“You’re saying that, if you can’t afford it, you don’t get to have it?” she asked. “That includes health care?'
"Yeah, just like if I want to go to the store and buy a new dress shirt. If I can’t afford that dress shirt, I don’t get to get it,” the staffer explained.
“But health care is something that people need!” Veals said, clearly alarmed. “Especially if they have cancer.”
“Well, you got to find a way to get it,” the staffer said.
“So what do I do in the meantime, sir?” she asked, not hiding the irritation in her voice.
The response was snide: “Sounds like something you’re going to have to figure it out.”
Tillis’s office has apologized after Veals came forward about the exchange: “The way Mrs. Veals was talked to by a staff assistant in our Washington office was completely inappropriate and violates the code of conduct Senator Tillis has for his staff, which is why immediate disciplinary action has been taken.”
But the truth is that, insensitive and rude as the staffer’s comments to Veals were, they were simply a much more honest reflection of the Republican Party’s policies on health care than officials typically admit. But the truth isn’t hard to see. The Trump administration is currently arguing that the Supreme Court should overturn all of Obamacare, throwing millions of people off their insurance and invalidating protections for pre-existing conditions, along with other provisions that protect patients.
The unofficial Republican Party policy, though, is to lie about this fact. Trump is constantly telling voters that he protected pre-existing conditions — even though he has done nothing to ensure they’re covered — and that he’ll continue to keep these protections in place, even though he’s trying to destroy them.
The Tillis staffer, apparently, didn’t get the message. He has imbibed the attitude at the heart of the GOP’s policy preferences. His mistake was being honest with a member of the public about the policy.
Veals, for one, doesn’t seem deceived by the office’s apology. And that’s because she still hasn’t gotten the original answer to the question she called about.
“We need our legislators to listen to us and help us solve this problem because it’s not just my problem – not being able to afford health care,” she told WRAL. “It’s the problem of hundreds and thousands of North Carolinians.”
North Carolina is one of 12 states in the U.S. that has not adopted Medicaid expansion, a policy that would help cover people like Veals if they lost their insurance. Tillis opposes Medicaid expansion.
In a statement to WRAL, Tillis dishonestly defended his position:
“When he was Speaker of the House [in North Carolina],” the statement continues, “Senator Tillis inherited a Medicaid program that was mismanaged and plagued with overspending and inefficiency. Expanding Medicaid at the time would have been a promise that the state wouldn’t have been able to keep, requiring cuts to the program that would have harmed patients that states like New York and California have already been forced to make. Instead, Senator Tillis worked to strengthen the state’s Medicaid program to deliver quality health care to patients, and the reason the North Carolina is in a position to discuss expansion is because of Senator Tillis’ leadership.”
These claims are in spectacularly bad faith. Medicaid expansion has been wildly successful across the United States — it can even save states money. And claiming to be concerned about “cuts to the program” that harm patients is absurd when patients like Veals can be left with no coverage at all. It’s even more pernicious, though, because the recent stressed on state budgets in the wake of the pandemic come from the Senate Republicans’ refusal to provide recovery funds to state and local governments, as Democrats have sought to do.
It’s these comments — far more than a staffer’s rudeness — that should be the real scandal.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-a-con-artist-scammed-the-u-s-government-from-the-shadows/
no lnx
Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly September 17, 2020
On October 23rd, Garrison Courtney will be sentenced in court after pleading guilty to an elaborate fraud scheme that raked in at least $4.4 million from federal contractors. The tale reads like a Hollywood script. Courtney had a relatively undistinguished career as a spokesperson for the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. But apparently he studied up on spycraft and, as his high school drama teacher suggested, “Sometimes I think I trained him too well as an actor.”
Courtney presented himself to unwitting private companies as a CIA agent who could steer contracts their way if they gave him a salary and an office. To back up his story, Courtney produced memos on the letterhead of various federal agencies spelling out authorization for what he was doing and containing the forged signatures of high-level government officials. He also recruited current and former military leaders to a task force he named “Alpha214” and used them as unwitting props to validate his claims.
Incredibly, the now 44-year-old built enough of a reputation to actually place himself inside the National Institutes of Health as a watchdog over the allocation of no-bid contracts. What you have at that point is the proverbial fox inside the henhouse. But by that time, the scheme had started to unravel.
Some of the heroes of this story were lawyers at the companies Courtney swindled who began asking why they weren’t being paid under the contracts they had signed.
Navid Keshavarz-Nia was another hero. He had done cybersecurity and technical counterintelligence work for the C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. After several months of working with Courtney, he fired off a resignation letter from Alpha214, distributed to its members, and addressed Courtney directly: “It is clear that I have been deliberately deceived, lied to and criminally victimized by you based on your numerous false statements.” At about the same time, the Justice Department began an investigation.
It’s not hard to figure out how this fraud could work. You take a skilled con artist and add it to the feeding frenzy for government contracts. Combine that toxic mix with something my colleague Gilad Edelman wrote for the Washington Monthly three years ago.
While the number of federal employees has basically flatlined for a half-century, the government has ballooned if you include another group in your tally: private contractors. As the size and scope of federal programs grew, but the number of civil servants stayed fixed, that labor had to get done by someone. Congress’s answer has increasingly been to contract with the private sector…
Very few Americans realize that this exact trend—using contractors to hide the true size and cost of a government mission—is not even close to being limited to the military. It’s ubiquitous. There has been a de facto political cap on federal workers since the 1970s, and every administration since at least Jimmy Carter’s has used contractors to get around it. Bill Clinton, who announced that “the era of big government is over,” harvested the end of the Cold War to cut 400,000 federal jobs, mostly in defense. But big government was only over if you ignored the contracting workforce, which kept rising by the hundreds of thousands. The Bush administration took things to another level, as contracting morphed from a way to sneakily expand government to an ideological goal in itself.
There are lessons from this tale that go beyond the importance of holding an individual like Courtney accountable for his crimes. Here’s how Edleman summarized the situation:
The key is to transcend the false choice of big government versus small government. The real choice is between a transparent and relatively competent big government of civil servants and a dysfunctional shadow big government of private contractors.
Whenever our government operates in the shadows, exploitation by con artists like Courtney is possible.
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blogger and economist tyler cowan runs mercatus:
https://bluevirginia.us/2013/03/kochfunded-mercatus-center-embarrasses-gmu-yet-again-with-laughable-report-on-freedom
in many ways, George Mason University (GMU) is a fine school, an institution of higher learning that Virginians should be proud of. But in at least one way, it is a cringe-inducing embarrassment. That, of course, is the tremendous amount of money from the Koch brothers that goes to fund climate science denialism, to rail against environmental regulation more broadly, at GMU’s far-right-wingnut Mercatus Center, described in The New Yorker as essentially a scam to “take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank.” Mercatus is very useful to the Koch brothers, of course, because they can count on the corporate/clueless media to cite it as some sort of unbiased, neutral “think tank,” when in reality it is wildly biased, and certainly not a “think tank” the way most people would ever “think” of that concept.
Given all this, it’s not surprising that Koch-funded fellows at Mercatus have now produced a laughable, far-right-wingnut report that purports to measure “Freedom in the 50 States.” Of course, it does no such thing, unless by “freedom” you mean “freedom for corporations, polluters, and the super rich to completely run amok, while the state tells you what you can and can’t do with your body, who you can or can’t marry, whether or not you can organize with other workers to demand better pay and benefits, etc.” In short, this report is a Koch-brothers-meet-John-Galt wet dream of what America should look like. And that, my friends, is not a pleasant thought, in any way, shape or form.
Let’s look at a few of the metrics they use. Most importantly is having a low “tax burden” (note the loaded words they use?) — that metric makes up 29% of the entire score in and of itself, and of course the lower the better, even if your state’s schools, roads, bridges, health care systems, etc. are falling apart. The super-rich Koch brothers certainly don’t care – let the little people suffer, they’re doing fine, bwahahahahaha!
The next highest weighting in this “study” (using the word as loosely as is humanly possible) goes to that pressing issue, one that I know all of us sit up nights worrying about, namely “Freedom from Tort Abuse.” What on earth is THAT, you ask? According to Mercatus, “This is what the US Chamber of Commerce calls a state’s ‘lawsuit climate.’ It captures risks and costs that businesses must pass on to consumers as higher prices.”Yep, the virulently anti-government, pro-corporate-welfare US Chamber of Commerce came up with with the metric that makes up another 12% of the Mercatus Center’s scoring. ‘Nuff said.
So, combine those two items – low taxes and “freedom from tort abuse” – and you’re up to over 40% of the score right there. Throw in a few more on the “libertarian” wish list – “gun control freedom” (6.6%), “health insurance freedom” (5.4%), tobacco and alcohol “freedom” (6.9% combined), “labor market freedom” (3.8%) – and you’ve got the bulk of it. Note, by the way, that “marriage freedom” is weighted at just 2.1%, lower than “alcohol freedom” (2.8%), “tobacco freedom” (4.1%), and many others.
So yes, the whole thing would be completely laughable if it weren’t so insidious. Alex Pareene of Salon skewers it here, noting that the Koch-funded Mercatus Institute’s “definition of ‘freedom’ largely adheres to the standard American libertarian conception of ‘liberty,’ which is to say it is oriented almost entirely around private property ownership and low taxation.” Thus, North Dakota comes out in the rankings as the most “free” state, even though it just “passed the most restrictive antiabortion laws in the country…[i]ncluding a law specifically aimed at shutting down the state’s lone abortion provider.” In other words, you’re free in North Dakota to have very low taxes and very low services, but if you’re a woman you are NOT free to make important medical decisions, with your doctor, about your body. Is this the combo “Atlas Shrugged”/“The Handmaid’s Tale” version of “freedom” or what?
By the way, just in case you’re at all interested, Virginia is considered by the Koch brothers, aka Mercatus, as “one of the freest states in the country, ranking eighth overall,” in part due to ” Virginia’s status as a right-to-work state.” Lovely, huh? Meanwhile, just to our north, our unfortunate brethren in Communist Maryland suffer at #44, despite the fact that you can marry who you want there, while Virginia enshrines discrimination into its state constitution. Got that? I’d also note that, as a general rule, the “blue” states – the ones that are huge net donors to the “red” states – are considered less “free,” while the “red” states – huge net recipients of federal largesse, with the lowest education and health rankings in the country – are considered the most “free.” To put it another way, if you were dreaming up a dystopian vision of America, and ranking the most dystopian states the highest and the least dystopian the lowest, you’d basically have…the Mercatus Center study. What an embarrassment.
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no lnx
Suspect in Santa Cruz ambush linked to federal officer killing in Oakland; charged with 19 felonies
Suspect was a sergeant in the U.S. Air Force
By NATE GARTRELL | ngartrell@bayareanewsgroup.com and JULIA PRODIS SULEK | jsulek@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: June 11, 2020 at 10:12 a.m. | UPDATED: June 12, 2020
A U.S. Air Force sergeant accused of ambushing Santa Cruz County deputies is also believed to be the gunman who shot a federal officer in Oakland, a law enforcement source confirmed Thursday, linking the extraordinary tragedies that may have been spurred in part by extremist, anti-law enforcement views found in the dark corners of social media.
The explosive claim connecting the cases comes the same day that Steven Carrillo, 32, was charged with 19 felonies, including murder, attempted murder, explosives charges and carjacking after the deadly rampage Saturday afternoon that terrorized the mountain community of Ben Lomond, where Carrillo grew up and lived with his father.
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‘I became unreasonable’: Bloody message scrawled on car at Ben Lomond ambush]
In a 14-page criminal complaint filed in Santa Cruz County Superior Court, Carrillo — who was on active duty at Travis Air Force Base — was charged with murder in the death of Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller and with the attempted murder of Deputy Alex Spencer, who was critically injured and remains hospitalized. They had been responding to a call from a concerned citizen in nearby Boulder Creek who reported seeing firearms and explosives in Carrillo’s white van.
In all, Carrillo was charged on Thursday with assaulting a firefighter and trying to kill three other law enforcement officers, as well as the resident who ultimately pinned him to the ground as he tried to steal the man’s car during a desperate run from police. The charges include special circumstances of lying in wait, which makes Carrillo eligible for the death penalty, though prosecutors have not said if they will pursue death.
His first court appearance in that case will be a Friday afternoon arraignment in front of Judge Paul Burdick.
The complaint does not mention the Oakland case nor Carrillo’s increasingly hostile anti-government social media posts that alarmed Facebook friends. And it remains unclear why an active duty Air Force sergeant would target members of federal and local law enforcement.
“The link to the Oakland murder doesn’t necessarily surprise me,” said Troy Hunter, a Silicon Valley software engineer who was one of Carrillo’s alleged carjacking victims in Ben Lomond on Saturday.Hunter thwarted Carrillo’s getaway when he removed the keys from the ignition and ran. “It’s more surprising that this guy being an active Air Force member would go down that route. It’s absolutely a little alarming.”
A memorial to fallen Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Deputy Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller in front of Sheriff Headquarters is filled with flowers on Sunday as more than 1,000 mourners attend a vigil for Gutzwiller, who was killed in Ben Lomond in the line of duty on Saturday. (Shmuel Thaler — Santa Cruz Sentinel)
As the country grapples with the Black Lives Matter protests and police use of rubber bullets and tear gas, the rampage in Ben Lomond and the killing in Oakland of a federal officer, who was black, further entangle any notion of clear left and right political battle lines.
A former friend of Carrillo’s — Justin Ehrhardt, who served in the Air Force with him before retiring — said Carrillo’s Facebook posts point to a right-wing extremist group that includes former and active military members. In particular, Carrillo was sharing memes about the so-called “Boogaloo” movement that considers itself a libertarian anti-government citizen militia that is preparing for the next American civil war. Last week, the FBI arrested three adherents to the Boogaloo movement in Nevada, charging them with inciting violence with Molotov cocktails and other explosives at protests over the death of George Floyd.
Carrillo considered himself a libertarian, Ehrhardt said, speculating that police use of force during the protests may have pushed him over the edge.
“Excessive use of force on unarmed civilians — that was a huge thing for him,” Ehrhardt said. “It was a mental tipping point for him.” Ehrhardt imagined it was Carrillo’s way of saying, “If I’m going to fight for something, it’s going to be against the establishment.”
According to the complaint, Carrillo killed Gutzwiller while “lying in wait” for officers on Saturday afternoon at his Ben Lomond home and opened fire and lobbed pipe bombs before stealing one vehicle and attempting to carjack several others. Carrillo ultimately was wrestled to the ground by a nearby, unnamed resident whom Santa Cruz Sheriff Jim Hart praised for a “remarkable, heroic” act.
Carrillo also is charged with the attempted murder of that resident, who Hart said knocked away a pipe bomb and firearm as he grappled with Carrillo before officers arrived.
On Thursday, a source close to the investigation confirmed Carrillo is also believed to be behind the May 29 Oakland shooting that claimed the life of Federal Protective Services officer Dave Patrick Underwood. Underwood had been patrolling the federal building in Oakland blocks from a protest as tens of thousands of people took to the streets in cities across the country after the Minneapolis police killing of Floyd.
Federal prosecutors are reviewing the Oakland case and are expected to make a filing decision in coming days.
Angela Underwood Jacobs gives her opening statement 10 June, 2020 during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC of the House Judiciary Committee about policing practices and law enforcement accountability prompted by the death of George Floyd while in police custody. (Photo by MICHAEL REYNOLDS / POOL / AFP) (Photo by MICHAEL REYNOLDS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) ]
In testimony before a congressional panel on Wednesday, Underwood’s sister, Angela Underwood-Jacobs, said her heartbreak and grief are unexplainable.
“My brother wore a uniform, and he wore that uniform proudly. I’m wondering, where is the outrage for a fallen officer that also happens to be African American?” Jacobs told the House Judiciary Committee. “I truly hope that you take your positions, your offices so seriously that you want to go back and really work together and collaborate, because if you can’t get it right, there’s no hope for the rest of us.”
Carrillo had been living with his father in Ben Lomond over the two years since his wife, who was also in the Air Force, died by suicide while in South Carolina on a training program. He has been a member of a security squadron at Travis Air Force Base since 2018.
Carrillo has two school-age children who are living with his late wife’s parents.
Gutzwiller, the officer Carrillo is charged with killing, left behind a pregnant wife and young child.More than a thousand people turned out the day after his death for a vigil, and while it was clear that the case had national political overtones, the tragedy was deeply personal for this local community.
“There’s a hole in all of our hearts now,” Hart said.
Staff Writer John Woolfolk contributed to this report.
Nate Gartrell | Contra Costa County courts reporter
Nate Gartrell covers crime and corruption in Contra Costa County. He joined the Bay Area News Group in 2014.
Julia Prodis Sulek | Enterprise reporter
Julia Prodis Sulek has been a general assignment reporter for the Bay Area News Group, based in San Jose, her hometown, since the late 1990s. She has covered everything from plane crashes to presidential campaigns, murder trials to immigration debates. Her specialty is narrative storytelling.
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ref
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/12/i-became-unreasonable-bloody-message-scrawled-on-car-at-ben-lomond-ambush/
... Carrillo, 32, has been charged with 19 felonies including murder in Saturday’s ambush, according to a 14-page indictment filed in the Superior Court of Santa Cruz. He is also a suspect in the fatal shooting May 29 of a federal officer in Oakland, a law enforcement official confirmed to the Mercury News.
Before he was arrested in Ben Lomond, Carrillo scrawled the word “boog” and the phrases “I became unreasonable” and “stop the duopoly” in blood on the hood of a car, NBC News and other media have reported.
“Boog” is shorthand for the Boogaloo, a libertarian anti-government movement that claims to be preparing for a civil war in the United States.
“I became unreasonable” has become a meme in Boogaloo social media. It refers to a statement by Marvin Heemeyer, an icon in extremist anti-government groups because of the 2004 rampage in which he bulldozed 13 buildings in a Colorado mountain town over a zoning dispute. Heemeyer — aka “Killdozer” — fatally shot himself when the heavily armored bulldozer became stuck in the basement of a store he was destroying. A note he left behind included the line,“I was always willing to be reasonable until I had to be unreasonable.”
“Stop the duopoly,” referring to the dominance of the Republican and Democratic parties, is a slogan frequently pushed by third-party and libertarian candidates.
A former friend of Carrillo’s, Justin Ehrhardt,told the Mercury News that the suspect considered himself a libertarian and had been sharing Boogaloo memes on his Facebook account.
In the attack Saturday, Santa Cruz County sheriff’s Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller was killed and Deputy Alex Spencer was critically wounded, hit by shrapnel as the suspect fled, the indictment and media accounts said.
Other charges against Carrillo included detonating pipe bombs, laying in wait to attack officers and assaulting a firefighter and three other law enforcement officers, the indictment said.
Carrillo was an active-duty sergeant at Travis Air Force Base and a member of the 60th Security Force Squadron.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/noam-chomsky-decades-of-the-neoliberal-plague-left-us-unprepared-for-19/
NOAM CHOMSKY We should understand the roots of this pandemic. If we do not understand the roots and extirpate them, there is going to be another and worse one coming. So far we have been kind of lucky. The coronavirus, pandemics, epidemics are very serious, and there are many possibilities. So far, all the ones that have happened in the last ten or 15 years, either the virus has been very deadly but not very contagious, like Ebola, or very contagious but not very deadly, like COVID-19. What happens when the next one comes along that is both very contagious and very deadly? We are in deep trouble. Deep. Much worse than this. Much worse than the so-called “Spanish flu,” which ought to be called the Kansas flu by Trump’s logic. It originated in Kansas the century ago. We may be facing something much worse than that.
There are ways of dealing with it. After the SARS epidemic in 2003, scientists knew that another one is very likely. They warned against it. They presented policies that could be carried out. They weren’t implemented, in part because of deep institutional pathologies. The drug companies who are the obvious candidates for dealing with it can’t, by straight capitalist logic. You don’t spend money to try to prevent a catastrophe ten years from now. What you do is try to make money tomorrow. That is the logic of the system. So the pharmaceutical companies were ruled out by capitalist logic.
The government could step in. The government, in any event, does most of the basic research for vaccines and drugs, almost all of them. So they could have stepped in, create laboratories, and plenty of unlimited resources. But they are blocked by the neoliberal plague. Remember Ronald Reagan—that government is the problem, not the solution, which means we have to take decision-making and action out of the hands of government, which has a flaw; it’s somewhat responsive to the population. We have to shift it to unaccountable, private tyrannies, which are totally unaccountable to the population. That is the meaning of Reagan’s slogan. That is the fundamental principle of neoliberalism. We’ve been suffering—the world has been suffering from it for 40 years, except for the tiny percentage who have become super rich and extremely powerful. Well, that blocks the government.
Nevertheless, there were things that the government could do. When the Obama administration took office, in the first few days, Obama called the presidential scientific advisory board, which had been established by George H.W. Bush, the first Bush, who had some respect for science. Obama called it. He requested that they put together a pandemic reaction program, a way to deal with a pandemic if it comes. They came up with a report a couple weeks later. It was implemented. It was in place until January 2017.
Trump came into office, the first few days, dismantled the whole system. Nothing. That’s part of the general wrecking ball. “We have to destroy everything that Obama did. We have to wreck everything.” Because it is the only way to look like you are doing something. Happening all over. So that went.
There were programs of U.S. scientists working in China with Chinese colleagues to try to detect and identify coronaviruses. Most of them are deep in caves. It’s very dangerous work. Some have been killed, Chinese scientists. But they were finding them and identifying them and testing them. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is the main center for investigating this. Trump canceled the program.
There were simulations run of a pandemic as late as October 2019 warning of what would happen. No attention. The Trump administration isn’t interested. So when the epidemic finally hit, the United States was singularly unprepared. After that comes a series of grotesque inactions and actions. For a couple of months, Trump refused to admit that it was happening.
Other countries were doing things. In Asia, Oceania, Australia, New Zealand, they were reacting. Some of it, South Korea, which was one of the first places hit, never had to go to a lockdown because they dealt with it rationally. They identified the places that were hot spots, controlled them, tested, traced people for contacts. Countries pretty much functioned. Vietnam has reported zero deaths, and apparently that is taken quite seriously by leading U.S. specialists. The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, which monitors the international situation, records zero deaths from Vietnam, which has a 1,400-mile border with China. South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia are doing quite well. And Europe, they delayed in quite a way, but they did finally act. As you mentioned, the curve has sharply reduced since March for most of Europe. Some of them, like Norway, Germany, doing quite well in this respect. People are traveling through southern Italy almost like normal.
It has gotten so extreme that, as you know, Europe has banned American visitors. The United States is such a pariah state that Americans are not permitted to go to other countries. Other countries won’t allow them in. This is kind of mimicked in a horrible way in Brazil. Bolsonaro just denies that it’s happening. “It’s just a mild flu. Don’t worry about it. Brazilians are strong. We don’t care.” So big meetings of right-wing Bolsonaro supporters dancing in the streets and spreading the virus, and Bolsonaro says fine.
And one of the really world-shaking crimes that is being carried out is the destruction of the Amazon. That affects the whole world, not just Brazil. It’s basically genocide to the indigenous populations. Scientific predictions are that on our current course, the Amazon will shift in about 15 years from being a net sink of carbon dioxide to a net emitter of carbon dioxide, sometimes called the lungs of the Earth. The forest absorbs huge amounts of carbon dioxide. It will start emitting them instead. A little further down the road, the Amazon, under the current course, will just turn into savanna, no forest anymore. Devastating for Brazil and the other Amazonian countries. Devastating for the world. It’s one of the main oxygen producers of the world.
At every level, we are racing madly towards total catastrophe under the leadership of sociopathic fanatics. It is as if some evil demon decided to take over the human species and drive them to self-destruction. Much of the world is trying to counter it, almost all of the world, but the United States and Brazil are the extreme cases of racing with dedication towards disaster.
Going back to this election, that is the reason why it is the most dangerous, the most significant election in history. Why Trump is, in fact—this may sound outrageous, but it’s true—Trump is the most dangerous figure in human history. The Republican Party today is the most dangerous organization in human history. You can compare Trump to, say, Hitler, the Wannsee declaration in 1942, called for killing all the Jews, tens of millions of Slavs, not destroying humanized society. There has been nothing like this. Nothing.
The Republican Party, we know how they shifted. You go back just a decade or so, John McCain, 2008, was running for president. His program had some pretty weak, but some policies directed to global warming. The Republican Congress was beginning to contemplate global warming, policies to restrict global warming. The Koch brothers, a superrich energy corporation, got wind of this. They had been working for years to prevent it. David Koch, one of the Koch brothers who died recently, launched an incredible campaign to make sure that the Republican Party would turn to denialism. They bribed senators, intimidated others with the threat of running counter-campaigns against them. Huge lobbying campaign. Astroturf campaigns. A massive juggernaut. The party shifted, dropped all of its efforts to deal with climate change. It’s now a party led by denialists.
AMY GOODMAN: As you talk about this denialism and the science denialism, first dealing with the climate crisis and then extending to the pandemic, both threatening life on Earth, with President Trump now holding a daily coronavirus press briefing without the scientists, you have Anthony Fauci throwing out the first ball at the Washington Nationals game, the chief infectious disease scientist, who won’t play ball exactly with the White House, so he is not in the coronavirus briefing. You have Dr. Birx. President Trump says she’s right outside, but she is not a part of this news conference. Do you think reporters who are sitting in the White House briefing room should refuse to be there unless scientists are there and unless President Trump wears a mask?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Yes, I think so, and I think they should do much more. They should be pointing out constantly what I just said: we’re dealing with the most dangerous figure in human history, backed by the most dangerous organization in human history, and give the facts. Not only the pandemic, but the much more serious threat of environmental disaster and the growing, very severe threat of nuclear war.
In my opinion, every newspaper should have on the front page an image of the Doomsday Clock. You know all about this, but every January, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists gathers—the main scientific journal dealing with these issues—gathers scientists, political analysts to try to give an estimate of the security, the state of the world security. Started shortly after the atom bomb, it has been going on for 75 years. The minute hand is moved closer or farther—it oscillates—closer or farther to midnight, depending how dangerous the world situation is. Midnight means we are finished.
Every year that Trump has been in office, the minute hand has moved closer to midnight. Two years ago, it reached the closest it had ever been. This last January, the analysts gave up minutes; they moved to seconds. A hundred seconds to midnight. Since January, Trump has made every one of the issues that they have brought up worse. There were three major issues. One is of course the threat of nuclear war, second the threat of environmental catastrophe, the third the deterioration of democracy. Which does belong, because it is only with a vibrant democracy of informed, engaged public that we can have any hope of escaping from the two existential crises.
Since January, Trump has succeeded in making all three crises worse. I mention the nuclear weapons issue, considerably worse thanks to Trump’s actions. The environmental crisis of course getting worse, as he continues to press for maximization of the use of the most dangerous fossil fuels, cuts back through his EPA representatives and others, cuts back on the efforts to mitigate the crisis through regulatory means. And democracy, it’s pretty obvious; the executive branch has been essentially cleansed of independent voices. Nothing but sycophants of Pompeo variety. “We were sent by God to save Israel.”
The Inspectors General who were imposed by Congress, by the Republican Congress to monitor malfeasance of the executive branches, purged. Trump in fact went out of his way to humiliate the senior Republican senator, Charles Grassley, who had spent much of his career imposing these monitors. The attorney for the Southern District of New York looked into the Trump swamp; fired. Congress, turned by McConnell, used to be called the greatest deliberative body in the world. Now it is a joke. Doesn’t do any deliberation. It does essentially nothing except try to race through as many appointments of young, ultra-right judges as possible so they can pack the judiciary for a generation. The only other thing it does is figure out ways to pour money into the—dollars into the pockets of the rich, like the tax scam. That’s the Senate, the greatest deliberative body. Proposals come from the House for legislation; McConnell just cans them. Don’t look at them. That is not the role of the Senate.
Going back, that’s why they should be putting the Doomsday Clock on the front of every newspaper. Show us what the United States is doing to the world. To itself and the world. That should be in front of everyone’s attention. And there are many other things that should be done. There should be major protests now, everywhere, against the use of military force to occupy American cities and to crush peaceful dissidents. This is intolerable in a functioning democracy. We can’t sit by and let it happen, just let it proceed step by step until we reach real catastrophe.
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not official card-carrying, but ...?
karlis
The times are a-changing in Silicon Valley. Once a reliable bastion of libertarianism from the CEOs at the top to the workers at the bottom, new schisms are forming between the workers and the owners — from white-collar software engineers unionizing at Kickstarter to Googlers and Amazon workers publicly denouncing their executives.
This article firstappeared in Salon.
Yet as employees have begun to wake up to the many ways in which their employers exploited them in exchange for nap pods and free snacks, the titans of industry themselves appear to be showing their true colors. The pandemic prompted mass layoffs and swift changes in policy for many tech titans; yet coupled with the anti-police racism protests, we are starting to see the far-right soul of Silicon Valley’s leaders — belying the stereotype of technology as synonymous with progressivism.
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, profited tremendously off the pandemic, seeing his wealth rise $30 billion. Yet his empire still saw fit to stop paying a $2 an hour hazard pay bonus to its warehouse workers — a high-risk job. Putting them at risk has resulted in a lawsuit from warehouse workers, claiming the company put their families at risk.
amazon continues to try and position itself as a progressive company, unlike other big corporations. Recently, Amazon tried to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement by tweeting “the inequitable and brutal treatment of Black people in our country must stop. Together we stand in solidarity with the Black community — our employees, customers, and partners — in the fight against systemic racism and injustice.”
There was a tinge of irony to the statement, given the company’s history of enabled authoritarian surveillance. To that end, the American Civil Liberties Union quickly replied: “Cool tweet. Will you commit to stop selling face recognition surveillance technology that supercharges police abuse?”
Bezos isn’t the only CEO who treats his workers with utter disregard for safety or health. Tesla Inc. In mid-May,CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter that he was defying Alameda County shelter-in-place order and restarting production at the Alameda County Tesla factory, which employs more than 10,000 people. On his Twitter account, Musk said he will be “on the [assembly] line with everyone else,” and stated that he was willing to be arrested for the noble “cause” of restarting production. Musk filed a lawsuit against Alameda County for injunctive relief and threatened to take his factory to another state, then took a jab at the Alameda County’s interim health officer, Dr. Erica Pan, whom Musk called “ignorant.”
Previously, Musk expressed repeated disdain for the virus or the potential for a pandemic (i.e. “the coronavirus panic is dumb“) mirroring much of the American right, who value economic activity over lives and pivoted their politics to that effect, in defiance of scientific evidence and models.
The Trumpian head-in-sand attitude coming from Musk is unsurprising. As I’ve written before, Musk and Trump have much in common: they’re both entitled, wealthy businessmen who profit off the backs of a vast underclass — which is why Musk played the victim card when his factory couldn’t operate during shelter-in-place.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has shown bitter resistance in the face of evidence that his platform has become a fount of disinformation around both the coronavirus and the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests. In an interview with Fox News last week, Zuckerberg said that he doesn’t believe social media platforms should become the “arbiter of truth”.
“We have a different policy than Twitter on this,” Zuckerberg said in comments that first aired Wednesday. “I believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. I think in general private companies, or especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.”
The comments mirror his attitude in 2017, when he commented on Facebook’s role in fomenting political disinformation amid the 2016 election. “Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of content, influenced the election in any way — I think that is a pretty crazy idea,” Zuckerberg said then. “Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.”
Zuckerberg’s attitude towards the role of social media in serving as an arbiter of truth differs from his peers at Snapchat and, recently, Twitter, which made an about-face in its policies around Trump’s sophistic tweets. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey fired back at Zuckerberg: “We’ll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally. And we will admit to and own any mistakes we make. This does not make us an ‘arbiter of truth.’ Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves. More transparency from us is critical so folks can clearly see the why behind our actions.”
Zuckerberg’s inaction with regard to censoring or labeling Trump’s misinformation has led up to unprecedented internal actions this week, l_{ike employees staging a virtual walkout.}_ Facebook employees are notorious for their fealty to their CEO; internal leaks or dissent were rare, until recently.
They say the bad times bring out the best in people. In that case, it’s certainly worth examining why Silicon Valley’s overlords appear to be a notable exception.
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primer?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/meet-the-hidden-architect-behind-americas-racist-economics/
Nobel laureate James Buchanan is the intellectual linchpin of the Koch-funded attack on democratic institutions, argues Duke historian Nancy MacLean
Ask people to name the key minds that have shaped America’s burst of radical right-wing attacks on working conditions, consumer rights and public services, and they will typically mention figures like free market-champion Milton Friedman, libertarian guru Ayn Rand, and laissez-faire economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.
James McGill Buchanan is a name you will rarely hear unless you’ve taken several classes in economics. And if the Tennessee-born Nobel laureate were alive today, it would suit him just fine that most well-informed journalists, liberal politicians, and even many economics students have little understanding of his work.
The reason? Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that even young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly). If Americans really knew what Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is manifesting under their noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a transformation most would not even want to imagine, much less accept.
that is a dangerous blind spot, MacLean argues in a meticulously researched book, Democracy in Chains, a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. While Americans grapple with Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency, we may be missing the key to changes that are taking place far beyond the level of mere politics. Once these changes are locked into place, there may be no going back.
An Unlocked Door in Virginia
MacLean’s book reads like an intellectual detective story. In 2010, she moved to North Carolina, where a Tea Party-dominated Republican Party got control of both houses of the state legislature and began pushing through a radical program to suppress voter rights, decimate public services, and slash taxes on the wealthy that shocked a state long a beacon of southern moderation. Up to this point, the figure of James Buchanan flickered in her peripheral vision, but as she began to study his work closely, the events in North Carolina and also Wisconsin, where Governor Scott Walker was leading assaults on collective bargaining rights, shifted her focus.
Could it be that this relatively obscure economist’s distinctive thought was being put forcefully into action in real time?
MacLean could not gain access to Buchanan’s papers to test her hypothesis until after his death in January 2013. That year, just as the government was being shut down by Ted Cruz & Co., she traveled to George Mason University in Virginia, where the economist’s papers lay willy-nilly across the offices of a building now abandoned by the Koch-funded faculty to a new, fancier center in Arlington.
MacLean was stunned. The archive of the man who had sought to stay under the radar had been left totally unsorted and unguarded. The historian plunged in, and she read through boxes and drawers full of papers that included personal correspondence between Buchanan and billionaire industrialist Charles Koch. That’s when she had an amazing realization: here was the intellectual linchpin of a stealth revolution currently in progress.
A Theory of Property Supremacy
Buchanan, a 1940 graduate of Middle Tennessee State University who later attended the University of Chicago for graduate study, started out as a conventional public finance economist. But he grew frustrated by the way in which economic theorists ignored the political process.
Buchanan began working on a description of power that started out as a critique of how institutions functioned in the relatively liberal 1950s and ‘60s, a time when economist John Maynard Keynes’s ideas about the need for government intervention in markets to protect people from flaws so clearly demonstrated in the Great Depression held sway. Buchanan, MacLean notes, was incensed at what he saw as a move toward socialism and deeply suspicious of any form of state action that channels resources to the public. Why should the increasingly powerful federal government be able to force the wealthy to pay for goods and programs that served ordinary citizens and the poor?
In thinking about how people make political decisions and choices, Buchanan concluded that you could only understand them as individuals seeking personal advantage. In an interview cited by MacLean, the economist observed that in the 1950s Americans commonly assumed that elected officials wanted to act in the public interest. Buchanan vehemently disagreed — that was a belief he wanted, as he put it, to “tear down.” His ideas developed into a theory that came to be known as “public choice.”
Buchanan’s view of human nature was distinctly dismal. Adam Smith saw human beings as self-interested and hungry for personal power and material comfort, but he also acknowledged social instincts like compassion and fairness. Buchanan, in contrast, insisted that people were primarily driven by venal self-interest. Crediting people with altruism or a desire to serve others was “romantic” fantasy: politicians and government workers were out for themselves, and so, for that matter, were teachers, doctors, and civil rights activists. They wanted to control others and wrest away their resources: “Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves,” he wrote in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty.
Does that sound like your kindergarten teacher? It did to Buchanan.
The people who needed protection were property owners, and their rights could only be secured though constitutional limits to prevent the majority of voters from encroaching on them, an idea Buchanan lays out in works like Property as a Guarantor of Liberty(1993). MacLean observes that Buchanan saw society as a cutthroat realm of makers (entrepreneurs) constantly under siege by takers (everybody else) His own language was often more stark, warning the alleged “prey” of “parasites” and “predators” out to fleece them.
In 1965 the economist launched a center dedicated to his theories at the University of Virginia, which later relocated to George Mason University. MacLean describes how he trained thinkers to push back against the Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate America’s public schools and to challenge the constitutional perspectives and federal policy that enabled it. She notes that he took care to use economic and political precepts, rather than overtly racial arguments, to make his case, which nonetheless gave cover to racists who knew that spelling out their prejudices would alienate the country.
All the while, a ghost hovered in the background — that of John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, senator and seventh vice president of the United States.
Calhoun was an intellectual and political powerhouse in the South from the 1820s until his death in 1850, expending his formidable energy to defend slavery. Calhoun, called the “Marx of the Master Class” by historian Richard Hofstadter, saw himself and his fellow southern oligarchs as victims of the majority. Therefore, as MacLean explains, he sought to create “constitutional gadgets” to constrict the operations of government.
Economists Tyler Cowen and Alexander Tabarrok, both of George Mason University, have noted the two men’s affinities, heralding Calhoun “a precursor of modern public choice theory” who “anticipates” Buchanan’s thinking. MacLean observes that both focused on how democracy constrains property owners and aimed for ways to restrict the latitude of voters. She argues that unlike even the most property-friendly founders Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, Buchanan wanted a private governing elite of corporate power that was wholly released from public accountability.
Suppressing voting, changing legislative processes so that a normal majority could no longer prevail, sowing public distrust of government institutions— all these were tactics toward the goal. But the Holy Grail was the Constitution: alter it and you could increase and secure the power of the wealthy in a way that no politician could ever challenge.
Gravy Train to Oligarchy
MacLean explains that Virginia’s white elite and the pro-corporate president of the University of Virginia, Colgate Darden, who had married into the DuPont family, found Buchanan’s ideas to be spot on. In nurturing a new intelligentsia to commit to his values, Buchanan stated that he needed a “gravy train,” and with backers like Charles Koch and conservative foundations like the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts, others hopped aboard. Money, Buchanan knew, can be a persuasive tool in academia. His circle of influence began to widen.
MacLean observes that the Virginia school, as Buchanan’s brand of economic and political thinking is known, is a kind of cousin to the better-known, market-oriented Chicago and Austrian schools — proponents of all three were members of the Mont Pelerin Society, an international neoliberal organization which included Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. But the Virginia school’s focus and career missions were distinct. In an interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), MacLean described Friedman and Buchanan as yin and yang:
“Friedman was this genial, personable character who loved to be in the limelight and made a sunny case for the free market and the freedom to chooseand so forth. Buchanan was the dark side of this: he thought, ok, fine, they can make a case for the free market, but everybody knows that free markets have externalities and other problems. So he wanted to keep people from believing that government could be the alternative to those problems.”
The Virginia school also differs from other economic schools in a marked reliance on abstract theory rather than mathematics or empirical evidence. That a Nobel Prize was awarded in 1986 to an economist who so determinedly bucked the academic trends of his day was nothing short of stunning, MacLean observes. But, then, it was the peak of the Reagan era, an administration several Buchanan students joined.
Buchanan’s school focused on public choice theory, later adding constitutional economics and the new field of law and economics to its core research and advocacy. The economist saw that his vision would never come to fruition by focusing on whorules. It was much better to focus onthe rules themselves, and that required a “constitutional revolution.”
MacLean describes how the economist developed a grand project to train operatives to staff institutions funded by like-minded tycoons, most significantly Charles Koch, who became interested in his work in the ‘70s and sought the economist’s input in promoting “Austrian economics” in the U.S. and in advising the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
Koch, whose mission was to save capitalists like himself from democracy, found the ultimate theoretical tool in the work of the southern economist. The historian writes that Koch preferred Buchanan to Milton Friedman and his “Chicago boys” because, she says, quoting a libertarian insider, they wanted “to make government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root.”
With Koch’s money and enthusiasm, Buchanan’s academic school evolved into something much bigger. By the 1990s, Koch realized that Buchanan’s ideas — transmitted through stealth and deliberate deception, as MacLean amply documents — could help take government down through incremental assaults that the media would hardly notice. The tycoon knew that the project was extremely radical, even a “revolution” in governance, but he talked like a conservative to make his plans sound more palatable.
MacLean details how partnered with Koch, Buchanan’s outpost at George Mason University was able to connect libertarian economists with right-wing political actors and supporters of corporations like Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank, and General Motors. Together they could push economic ideas to the public through media, promote new curricula for economics education, and court politicians in nearby Washington, D.C.
At the 1997 fiftieth anniversary of the Mont Pelerin Society, MacLean recounts that Buchanan and his associate Henry Manne, a founding theorist of libertarian economic approaches to law, focused on such affronts to capitalists as environmentalism and public health and welfare, expressing eagerness to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare as well as kill public education because it tended to foster community values. Feminism had to go, too: the scholars considered it a socialist project.
The Oligarchic Revolution Unfolds
Buchanan’s ideas began to have huge impact, especially in America and in Britain. In his home country, the economist was deeply involved in efforts to cut taxes on the wealthy in 1970s and 1980s and he advised proponents of Reagan Revolution in their quest to unleash markets and posit government as the “problem” rather than the “solution.”The Koch-funded Virginia school coached scholars, lawyers, politicians, and business people to apply stark right-wing perspectives on everything from deficits to taxes to school privatization. In Britain, Buchanan’s work helped to inspire the public sector reforms of Margaret Thatcher and her political progeny.
To put the success into perspective, MacLean points to the fact that Henry Manne, whom Buchanan was instrumental in hiring, created legal programs for law professors and federal judges which could boast that by 1990 two of every five sitting federal judges had participated. “40 percent of the U.S. federal judiciary,” writes MacLean, “had been treated to a Koch-backed curriculum.”
MacLean illustrates that in South America, Buchanan was able to first truly set his ideas in motion by helping a bare-knuckles dictatorship ensure the permanence of much of the radical transformation it inflicted on a country that had been a beacon of social progress. The historian emphasizes that Buchanan’s role in the disastrous Pinochetgovernment of Chile has been underestimated partly because unlike Milton Friedman, who advertised his activities, Buchanan had the shrewdness to keep his involvement quiet. With his guidance, the military junta deployed public choice economics in the creation of a new constitution, which required balanced budgets and thereby prevented the government from spending to meet public needs. Supermajorities would be required for any changes of substance, leaving the public little recourse to challenge programs like the privatization of social security.
The dictator’s human rights abuses and pillage of the country’s resources did not seem to bother Buchanan, MacLean argues, so long as the wealthy got their way. “Despotism may be the only organizational alternative to the political structure that we observe,” the economist had written in The Limits of Liberty. If you have been wondering about the end result of the Virginia school philosophy, well, the economist helpfully spelled it out.
A World of Slaves
Most Americans haven’t seen what’s coming.
MacLean notes that when the Kochs’ control of the GOP kicked into high gear after the financial crisis of 2007-08, many were so stunned by the “shock-and-awe” tactics of shutting down government, destroying labor unions, and rolling back services that meet citizens’ basic necessities that few realized that many leading the charge had been trained in economics at Virginia institutions, especially George Mason University. Wasn’t it just a new, particularly vicious wave of partisan politics?
It wasn’t. MacLean convincingly illustrates that it was something far more disturbing.
MacLean is not the only scholar to sound the alarm that the country is experiencing a hostile takeover that is well on its way to radically, and perhaps permanently, altering the society. Peter Temin, former head of the MIT economics department, INET grantee, and author of The Vanishing Middle Class, as well as economist Gordon Lafer of the University of Oregon and author of The One Percent Solution, have provided eye-opening analyses of where America is headed and why. MacLean adds another dimension to this dystopian big picture, acquainting us with what has been overlooked in the capitalist right wing’s playbook.
She observes, for example, that many liberals have missed the point of strategies like privatization. Efforts to “reform” public education and Social Security are not just about a preference for the private sector over the public sector, she argues. You can wrap your head around those, even if you don’t agree. Instead, MacLean contends, the goal of these strategies is to radically alter power relations, weakening pro-public forces and enhancing the lobbying power and commitment of the corporations that take over public services and resources, thus advancing the plans to dismantle democracy and make way for a return to oligarchy. The majority will be held captive so that the wealthy can finally be free to do as they please, no matter how destructive.
MacLean argues that despite the rhetoric of Virginia school acolytes, shrinking big government is not really the point. The oligarchs require a government with tremendous new powers so that they can bypass the will of the people. This, as MacLean points out, requires greatly expanding police powers “to control the resultant popular anger.” The spreading use of pre-emption by GOP-controlled state legislatures to suppress local progressive victories such as living wage ordinances is another example of the right’s aggressive use of state power.
Could these right-wing capitalists allow private companies to fill prisons with helpless citizens—or, more profitable still, right-less undocumented immigrants? They could, and have. Might they engineer a retirement crisis by moving Americans to inadequate 401(k)s? Done. Take away the rights of consumers and workers to bring grievances to court by making them sign forced arbitration agreements? Check. Gut public education to the point where ordinary people have such bleak prospects that they have no energy to fight back? Getting it done.
Would they even refuse children clean water? Actually, yes.
MacLean notes that in Flint, Michigan, Americans got a taste of what the emerging oligarchy will look like — it tastes like poisoned water. There, the Koch-funded Mackinac Center pushed for legislation that would allow the governor to take control of communities facing emergency and put unelected managers in charge. In Flint, one such manager switched the city’s water supply to a polluted river, but the Mackinac Center’s lobbyists ensured that the law was fortified by protections against lawsuits that poisoned inhabitants might bring. Tens of thousands of children were exposed to lead, a substance known to cause serious health problems including brain damage.
Tyler Cowen has provided an economic justification for this kind of brutality, stating that where it is difficult to get clean water, private companies should take over and make people pay for it. “This includes giving them the right to cut off people who don’t—or can’t—pay their bills,” the economist explains.
To many this sounds grotesquely inhumane, but it is a way of thinking that has deep roots in America. In Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative(2005), Buchanan considers the charge of heartlessness made against the kind of classic liberal that he took himself to be. MacLean interprets his discussion to mean that people who “failed to foresee and save money for their future needs” are to be treated, as Buchanan put it, “as subordinate members of the species, akin to…animals who are dependent.’”
Do you have your education, health care, and retirement personally funded against all possible exigencies? Then that means you.
Buchanan was not a dystopian novelist. He was a Nobel Laureate whose sinister logic exerts vast influence over America’s trajectory. It is no wonder that Cowen, on his popular blog Marginal Revolution, does not mention Buchanan on a list of underrated influential libertarian thinkers, though elsewhere on the blog, he expresses admiration for several of Buchanan’s contributions and acknowledges that the southern economist “thought more consistently in terms of ‘rules of the games’ than perhaps any other economist.”
The rules of the game are now clear.
Research like MacLean’s provides hope that toxic ideas like Buchanan’s may finally begin to face public scrutiny. Yet at this very moment, the Kochs’ State Policy Network and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that connects corporate agents to conservative lawmakers to produce legislation, are involved in projects that the Trump-obsessed media hardly notices, likepumping money into state judicial races. Their aim is to stack the legal deck against Americans in ways that MacLean argues may have even bigger effects than Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court ruling which unleashed unlimited corporate spending on American politics. The goal is to create a judiciary that will interpret the Constitution in favor of corporations and the wealthy in ways that Buchanan would have heartily approved.
“The United States is now at one of those historic forks in the road whose outcome will prove as fateful as those of the 1860s, the 1930s, and the 1960s,” writes MacLean. “To value liberty for the wealthy minority above all else and enshrine it in the nation’s governing rules, as Calhoun and Buchanan both called for and the Koch network is achieving, play by play, is to consent to an oligarchy in all but the outer husk of representative form.”
Nobody can say we weren’t warned.
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a bunch like this: including game-over libtard cf nial f
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/the-failures-and-inadequacies-of-neoliberalism-are-now-on-stark-display/
no lnx
The failures and inadequacies of neoliberalism are now on stark display
Written by Subin Dennis / Independent Media Institute April 10, 2020
It is a sign of how bad things are when the editorial board of the Financial Times, the world’s leading business newspaper, carries an editorial calling for “radical reforms… reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades.” The FT editorial of April 3 has advocated, among other things, a more active role for governments in the economy, ways to make labor markets less insecure, and wealth taxes. The FT’s editorial board, increasingly concerned about saving capitalism from itself, had written about the need for “state planning” and a “worker-led economy” last year in August. But the April 3 editorial has garnered much more attention since it comes amidst a massive crisis.
By now it has become obvious that substantial state intervention in the economy—frowned upon by the apostles of neoliberal economics—is back to the center stage across the world.
The situation is such that the public sector, long maligned by neoliberal economists and weakened by governments beholden to neoliberalism, is playing a major role in the fight against coronavirus. Its role would have been much more effective and wide-ranging if it hadn’t been hit hard by decades of fund cuts and waves of privatization. Nevertheless, with the ineffectiveness of private production with profit motive as its driving force to handle a crisis becoming more evident, the public sector, production with state direction, and some amount of planning are making a major comeback.
Public Health Care
The case of the sectors that are directly concerned with health care provision is the most conspicuous, with the inadequacies of private health care during a crisis becoming evident to even right-wing leaders.
We see Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the UK, repeatedly talking about the need to protect the National Health Service (Britain’s publicly funded health care system). He even said, “there really is such a thing as society,” contradicting Margaret Thatcher, his conservative predecessor who batted for pure individualism in 1987 by saying “There is no such thing as society.”
Britain and many other countries in Western Europe have had relatively robust public health care systems. In many of these countries, such as Italy, Spain and the UK, public health care systems have suffered in recent years because of fund cuts and privatization of public facilities. Apart from the policy vision of the leaders of these countries themselves, they also came under pressure from the technocrats of the European Commission, who repeatedly demanded spending cuts on health care. Along with the easy-going attitude displayed by many of the Western governments in the early weeks of the coronavirus outbreak, such weakening of the public health care systems have made their response to the coronavirus outbreak a more arduous task. For now, the governments of Spain and Ireland have temporarily taken over their private hospitals to deal with the crisis.
The case of the United States, with its private, insurance-based health care system, is far worse.Not only was a sufficient number of testing kits unavailable in the United States for months, but the costs of testing and treatment remain prohibitive for a large section of the population, particularly to the 30 million uninsured and 44 million underinsured. This means that many people simply wouldn’t be able to afford to get tested and treated, endangering the health and lives of themselves and others.
The difference between the United States on the one hand, and China and South Korea on the other, comes readily into the picture here. Testing and treatment for coronavirus is free in China, which was crucial in the country’s success in bringing the epidemic under control. South Korea has done extensive testing, which was made available for free. Treatment costs were covered by the government and the insurance companies.
The Importance of the Public Sector, However, Goes Much Further
In times of crises such as the present one, which is comparable to war, the ability of economies to produce (or at least source) and distribute things becomes critical. Two kinds of things assume particular importance:
Essential things that are necessary for the immediate sustenance of the people.These include food and medicines, and in turn, the things necessary to produce them. If there are large gaps in the supply and distribution of these things, there would be a famine. If the gap is smaller, there would still be many unnecessary deaths. Even leaders who are otherwise callous about starvation deaths would be concerned about such an eventuality during a crisis, because social tensions that could rise as a result of this would make it even more difficult to tide over the crisis, whether it is a war or a pandemic. During the Second World War, Britain resorted to rationing to solve this problem. The people of India were squeezed to finance the Allies’ war in South Asia with Japan, and the result was the Bengal Famine, which took the lives of 3 million people.
The kind of things that are necessary to tide over the crisis. During times of war, armaments would be the most crucial among these. In the case of the coronavirus crisis, the main things would be items like ventilators, masks, hand sanitizer, gloves and medicines to treat the symptoms. Large gaps in the supply of these things would be disastrous. In the case of a war, such gaps could lead to defeat in war. In the case of a lethal pandemic, people would die in huge numbers, as we see right now. We could say this is an industrial famine of sorts contributing to the casualties, with countries unable to make ICUs, ventilators and masks fast enough in adequate quantities, and in many cases, to set up hospitals and quarantine facilities quickly enough.
It is in this context that leaders of government who ideologically disagree with state intervention in the economy are seen taking direct action in commandeering private companies to produce necessary things.
Thus we see Donald Trump, who had initially resisted the pressure to use the Defense Production Act—a wartime law—to mobilize private industry, finally using the law to direct General Motors to produce ventilators.
The government of Italy directed its only producer of ventilators, Siare Engineering, to ramp up the production of ventilators for the country, and sent engineers and other staff members from the Ministry of Defense to help with production. The company canceled all its orders from abroad to produce for the country.
Countries with a large public sector, robust industrial capacity, and the ability to effectively intervene in the market would be at a considerable advantage here. That is the case with China, which put the state-owned China State Construction Engineering to work to construct two emergency quarantine hospitals at breath-taking speed. The state ensured the flow of products such as grain, meat and eggs into the Hubei province while it was under lockdown, and coordinated the production and distribution of masks and other medical products. Once the outbreak within the country was under control, it began supplying masks and ICU equipment to other countries in need.
India, a large country with a poor health care system, does not have enough masks and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for its health workers. The number of ICU beds and ventilators available in the country is very low. For a population of 1.34 billion, it only has 31,900 ICU beds available for COVID-19 patients, according to the country’s Health Ministry officials. To compare, Germany, with 82.8 million people, had 28,000 ICU beds as of mid-March.
If the number of COVID-19 patients in India surges, hospitals and their critical care facilities will be overwhelmed. The public sector Bharat Electronics Limited has been asked to produce 30,000 ventilators to meet the urgent need. Hindustan Lifecare (another public sector company) and the Rail Coach Factory under the Indian Railways are going to manufacture ventilators. The public sector Ordnance Factory Board (OFB), which the government has tried continuously to weaken in the recent years, is now producing masks, sanitizer and coveralls for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). It has also developed a ventilator prototype and is preparing for production.
Within India, it is the state of Kerala that has dealt with the pandemic in the most effective manner. In the Left-ruled state, which has resisted the policy of privatization pushed by successive central governments, public sector companies are manufacturing hand sanitizer and gloves, and have raised the production of essential medicines.Kudumbashree, a massive government-backed organization of women’s collectives with 4.5 million members, is making masks, which the public sector is helping distribute. Mass organizations of youth and popular science activists are pitching in by making hand sanitizer. Volunteers supported by a state-led initiative have developed a respiratory apparatus that could free up ventilators.
It is not as if making masks, sanitizers and gloves requires advanced technology. But industrial capacity is needed to churn them out in large numbers, or at least large mass organizations, class organizations or collectives that can mobilize people to manufacture them. The inability of the United States to even ensure the supply of such items stands out in this regard. Four decades of neoliberalism seem to have led not only to the undermining of industrial capacity useful for public purposes, but also to the hollowing out of collective energies.
Need for Production Capabilities and Societal Control Over Them
In short, the lesson is that in times such as these, a society needs two things.
It needs production capabilities. During a time of crisis, if a country doesn’t have the necessary industrial capacity, it will be in trouble even if it has money to buy if the other countries that do have the production capabilities block the export of the required goods. This is what is happening right now to so many countries, such as Italy and Serbia. (In the mad scramble for resources, there have even been reports of countries offering higher amounts to buy masks ordered by other countries, and of some countries even seizing shipments for themselves.) Not only is industrial capacity needed, but some excess capacity is also required in some crucial areas. As the public health expert T. Sundararaman pointed out recently, the public health care system needs to have unused capacity, which will allow it to expand and take on the extra load when there is an emergency.
Excess industrial capacity in China, which is often seen as a problem (including by sympathetic observers), turned out to be useful, with the country being able to manufacture essential goods to not just meet its own demands, but also that of other countries.But relying on market forces doesn’t give any guarantee of industrial capacity being built up. The kind of production capabilities built without planning would be haphazard, and may not cover the needs of an emergency when it presents itself. India, which adopted a strategy of substantial economic planning during the first few decades after independence, only to abandon it in the recent decades, is witnessing this to its peril right now.
The society, or the state as the representative of society, needs to be able to control the production facilities.When a crisis hits a country with production capabilities in the private sector, the state can invoke emergency powers to bring them under control. But it would be a painful process, especially in countries where the private corporate sector is not used to submit to discipline. Given the enormous influence that the corporates have over the state itself, the state might try to prolong having to invoke such emergency powers, as was seen in the United States, and that could have disastrous consequences. India has the worst of all possible worlds—cronyism is rampant, industrialization has not taken off (whether it is because of cronyism or in spite of it need not detain us here), and the public sector has been undermined.Even when the state is trying to play a more active role, its efforts could be undermined by private firms acting in their own self-interest of maximizing profits. This was seen in the United States, where private companies were engaging in price gouging, by selling masks that are normally sold for 85 cents for $7, leading to the New York state governor to call upon the federal government to nationalize the acquisition of medical supplies. He said that the U.S. government should order factories to produce masks, gowns and ventilators; otherwise the situation would be impossible to manage. The state using private facilities can be costly as well, as was seen in Britain, where the National Health Service is paying 2.4 million pounds per day as rent to private hospitals for 8,000 beds.
Does calling for more domestic production capabilities that the state can control mean that every country should be left to fend for itself? Certainly not—every country cannot produce everything; smaller countries would find it particularly difficult. International trade would be needed for countries to procure things that they cannot produce for themselves. But as the developments of the recent months show, today’s trade regime has nothing to do with solidarity, and it provides no guarantee of countries being able to access goods during an emergency. This is no accident. Lack of solidarity is embedded in the way capitalism has developed, with the bulk of the world’s wealth concentrated in the hands of a few countries, and within countries, in the hands of the super-rich. This system has to be overhauled for a regime of solidarity to emerge. Production and its fruits becoming less concentrated in some regions of the world and in the hands of a minority would pave the way for power relations to be less unequal, which is a precondition for real solidarity among people and societies.
Along with socialized health care, an immediate stop to privatization, and a stronger, expanded public sector should become part of the transitional demands of the left as we search for an exit from the pandemic crisis.
Subin Dennis is an economist and a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He was the Delhi State vice president of the Students’ Federation of India.
This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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180?! 3/20
https://boingboing.net/2020/01/27/galt-underwater.html
Leading libertarian intellectuals are now disavowing the label (Tyler Cowan says he's now a "State Capacity Libertarian") thanks to the total failure of libertarianism to cope with climate change.
John Quiggin (previously) explores how, at the start of the climate debate, libertarians advocated for "market based" solutions, like tradeable emissions credits, something dubbed "free-market environmentalism." The model had been used successfully to fight acid rain, and it was appealing to libertarians as it "would supply incentives to find the most cost-effective path toward reducing emissions."
Climate activists weren't fond of the idea, favoring instead a limit on pollution itself (this traces a similar arc to the debate on smoking, which started with "sin taxes" on tobacco but really only made progress when these were augmented with absolute prohibitions on smoking in most places and strict curbs on the sale and marketing of tobacco products).
But once emissions credits became a reality, libertarians almost unanimously rejected them, and switched from "free market environmentalism" to straight-up climate denial. As Quiggin says, the problem with tradeable emissions is that it rebuts the core tenet of libertarianism: John Locke's idea that property rights arise spontaneously from nature, rather than being created by governments hoping to achieve specific policy goals.
But more deeply, "Affluent white men who don’t like being told what to do are by far the most important constituency for libertarianism. Such men would consider it a dreadful imposition to have to pay, whether directly or indirectly, for the right to drive a car or use air conditioning."
This created a steady-state in which the climate steadily worsened and libertarians steadily denied that their cities were underwater, on fire, or gripped by pandemics, repeating expensive talking points about solar cycles or crooked scientists who were hoping to dismantle capitalism (IOW: "Reality has a well-known leftist bias").
But Trump disrupted the steady state. When he took office, the libertarian frontrunners abandoned any pretense of commitment to anything except more power and money for people who were monied and powerful, leaving the few standards-bearers for the movement with no way forward. Even as the Cato Institute abandoned its climate denial stance, it still argued that the climate crisis couldn't be averted by state intervention, despite the fact that markets had totally failed to come to grips with it.
Quiggin reckons with the incoherence of markets-only thinking in his masterful 2019 book Economics in Two Lessons, which explores the power, limitations and dangers of using markets to solve our problems in a thoughtful and clear way.
Having abandoned intellectual credibility in the fight to stop climate action, libertarianism has no future as a movement. Trumpism will soon swallow up what’s left of its organizational structure. Individuals have a number of choices available, from Niskanen-style “liberaltarianism” to the fantasy of “going Galt.” But the libertarian moment is well and truly over.
Global warming is the ultimate refutation of Lockean propertarianism. No one can pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere while leaving “enough and as good” for everyone else. It has taken thirty years, but this undeniable fact has finally killed the propertarian movement in the United States.
Libertarians Can’t Save the Planet [John Quiggin/Jacobin]
CAP-AND-TRADE / CATO INSTITUTE / CLIMATE / CLIMATE CRISIS / DENIALISM VS NIHILISM / FREE MARKET ENVIRONMENTALISM / LIBERATARIANISM / PEAK INDIFFERENCE / REALITY HAS A WELL-KNOWN LEFTIST BIAS / STATE CAPACITY LIBERTARIANS
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/neoliberal-capitalism-and-the-limits-of-individual-choice
fitbit, 23& me etc
...These services also draw on, exploit and kick into high gear the notion that it is the individual’s responsibility, given this knowledge, to mitigate all health risks. As such, it becomes even more incumbent on the subject to align their interests, behaviours, and labour in ways that are consistent with neoliberal health objectives. This approach callously disregards inequalities of income, access, and education; the role played by the environment in determining health outcomes (e.g. pollution, waste, infrastructure) – which often cleave along racial lines, and the very real way in which the ability to engage in labour oriented around health and wellness requires that ones’ labour in the public sphere (i.e. productive work) is stable, sustaining, and life-affirming.
Notably, most of these services allow for and recommend that consumers to engage in form of communicative interaction through social networking such that the data that is produced, according to Tamar Sharon, becomes “not just a tool for gaining insights about oneself but becomes a medium for connecting with others.” In doing so, as stated by Deborah Lupton, they aim to fulfil the very human need to be part of a social community, albeit superficially, and does so by encouraging users to produce personal health narratives through blog posts, entries, and videos about ones’ findings, conditions and progress – all forms of affective, unpaid labour.
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/08/07/documents-shine-new-light-koch-brothers-early-efforts-abolish-department-energy
A scheme to abolish the Department of Energy (DOE) helped spur a failed 1980 Libertarian Party presidential bid — and in the process laid the groundwork for Charles and David Koch's powerful network of influence — as documents from a newly published archive show.
The documents in the new KochDocs.org archive include a relatively little-noticed column penned by fossil fuel industrialist Charles Koch for the Libertarian Review in August 1977, in which Charles, who had served as a member of President Carter’s energy task force in 1976, argued against Carter’s energy policy, writing that the “only ‘certainty’ to be associated with governmental planning is that it will not work, will tend to produce results opposite to those intended, and will doom any substantial private long-range planning in energy development.”
Within three years, the Energy Department had been established by federal law — and its abolishment had become a central plank of the Libertarian Party’s 1980 presidential campaign, which featured Ed Clark as its presidential candidate and Koch Industries’ David Koch as his running-mate.
“There’s nothing wrong with America’s energy problems that deregulated, decontrolled private enterprise can’t cure,” a Clark campaign ad published on May 5, 1980 proclaimed.
“One of my first priorities as President would be to abolish the Department of Energy,” the ad quoted Clark as saying.
The documents shine new light not only on the Kochs’ early opposition to the formation of the Department of Energy but also on their evolution from direct participation in politics to secretive behind-the-scenes funders of the American political right.
“That election also handed the Kochs their first political setback, driving them to rethink their approach to libertarian ideas,” The New York Times reported in 2014. “Instead of replacing the Republican Party, they have helped to profoundly reshape it.”
The Department of Energy plays a heavy role in the nuclear industry — a competitor for Koch Industries, which is heavily invested in fossil fuels — and includes branches that fund research into energy and technology and that offer the federal government a source of information and data about the country’s energy supplies intended to be independent from industry sources.
“Seeing that letter from Charles Koch, basically opposing the creation of the Department of Energy, really struck me as significant,” Lisa Graves, the director of the Koch Docs project, told DeSmog. “That’s in some ways the origin story.”
An Animating Battle
The drive to create a federal energy department arose following OPEC’s 1973 oil embargo, which ended in 1974 but left a huge mark on the next presidential campaign. “Carter won that race. He comes into office in 1977, he’s sworn in, and one of the things that he feels he has a mandate from the American people to do is to address comprehensively the energy needs of America,” Graves said, “but there’s Charles Koch saying 'no' and using pretty strong rhetoric in his article.”
The dispute could potentially affect Koch Industries' interests, and not just because the Carter administration was considering an energy policy that included taxes that would have affected the Kochs. The Department of Energy would also offer Congress independent expertise on energy. “In essence, are Americans going to have information about the best public policy options for energy coming exclusively from the industry itself,” Graves asked, “or from independent sources focused on the public interest?”
“This is a battle that [Charles and David] fought and lost 40 years ago,” Graves added, “and yet it’s still a battle that is animating the Republican Party candidates that Koch has backed.”
Though the Energy Department still exists today, it’s currently helmed by a man who, like the Kochs, previously called for its abolition. In 2017, President Trump appointed Rick Perry to run the Department of Energy.
During his own failed presidential bid in 2012, Perry had called for the DOE to be abolished (once famously forgetting the name of the department during a televised primary debate in 2011).
Following his nomination, Perry walked back his call to abolish the DOE outright. “My past statements made over five years ago about abolishing the Department of Energy do not reflect my current thinking,” Perry told Congress during his confirmation hearings. “In fact, after being briefed on so many of the vital functions of the Department of Energy, I regret recommending its elimination.”
Perry’s tenure in office at the DOE has been called “a bonanza for corporations and the Koch brothers,” as climate science deniers and Koch-network veterans joined the top ranks of the Energy Department.
“In essence,” said Graves, “they have dramatic control or influence within these agencies because so many of the people who’ve been appointed either to top positions or to not-Senate-confirmed positions have Koch ties, either to Koch Industries or to their nonprofit operations.”
Holding the Purse Strings
The Libertarian Party was formed in the early 1970s, holding its first national convention in 1972 — a time when it countedjust 150 members in New York City — and electing its first state legislative candidate in Alaska in 1978.
The KochDocs archive's documents show that from 1976 to 1979, David Koch repeatedly cut big checks for the Libertarian Party, receiving personal thank you notes from party officials.
That funding surged when David became the party’s vice presidential candidate.
“You may know or know of the Koch family of Wichita, KS,” Steve Buckstein of the Clark for President Finance Committee wrote in a May 14, 1980 letter to an oil executive. “David Koch is Ed Clark's running mate, and through a loophole in the FECregulations is able to avoid the contribution limits placed on PACS and individuals. David is personally contributing at least $500,000 to the Clark campaign.”
Of the $3.48 million that the Clark for President Committee ultimately fundraised, $2.086 million came from David Koch personally, according to a December 1980 report by Ed Crane and Chris Hocker of the Libertarian Party. All told, Koch contributed 57 percent of the Clark campaign’s finances, the report adds, after taking into account additional money given or loaned to the party’s national committee.
The campaign seems to have been aware that so much funding by one individual could create an appearance that the party was too much under the sway of the Kochs. Under the heading “MORE NASTY QUESTIONS,” a campaign document includes the question: “According to the Federal Election Commission, your running mate, Mr. Koch, has already contributed half a million dollars to your campaign. Do you think it’s healthy to rely so heavily on one person’s money?”
'Too Far Off the Deep End'
The KochDocs archive's documents highlight the disdain that the Kochs expressed not only for the Democratic Party, but also for Republicans.
“I have been a supporter of Libertarian activities since the early 1960s and have found them to be the only effective way to combat the rapidly increasing governmental control over all aspects of our lives,” Charles G. Koch wrote in a December 23, 1975 letter on Koch Industries letterhead to the Rocky Mountain Oilman association. “Prior to that time, I supported the Republican Party but abandoned them in disgust when I found that in spite of their free enterprise rhetoric they were no better allies in the fight for free enterprise than the Democratic Party.”
In more recent years, Koch Industries' reported political contributions have overwhelmingly funded Republican candidates, while continuing to espouse a libertarian ideology. That, however, is only the tip of the iceberg on the Kochs' deeply opaquepolitical spending. (A recently revealed memo from the Koch-founded group Americans for Prosperity suggests that the network might make an effort to fund incumbent Democrats against progressive challengers in upcoming elections, GQreported in June, writing that “[b]y bankrolling incumbents, they can potentially shut out future progressive upstarts like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, both of whom beat long-sitting congressmen in 2018.”)
David Koch has distanced himself from today's Libertarian Party, saying that the party had moved too far afield from mainstream politics.
“I think the Republican Party has a great chance of being successful and that’s why I support it,” he said in 2012.
“The Libertarian Party is a great concept,” he added. “I love the ideals, but it got too far off the deep end, and so I dropped out.”
The documents on KochDocs.org highlight the role that the Kochs played in pushing the Libertarian Party towards fiercely advocating on energy and adopting a political platform that went past deregulation and into the wholesale dismantling of programs like the U.S. Postal Service and the Federal Aviation Administration. As a Libertarian Party candidate, David Koch had personally pushed for the abolishment of the Department of Energy on behalf of the party.
“The policies followed under both Republican and Democratic administrations have given us our current energy problems,” David Koch said in a May 31, 1980 statement. “President Carter has continued these mistaken policies and given us the Department of Energy boondoggle, a hefty new tax on domestic production, and a 10-cent a gallon fee on imported oil.”
David Koch, the oil executive, wrote that this was good reason to support Clark over what he called“establishment politicians.”
“Specifically, a Clark administration will abolish the Department of Energy,” David Koch continued, “whose only functions are to interfere with energy production and distribution and hand out subsides.”
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/libertarians-hoped-for-a-renaissance-in-the-republican-party-then-trumps-gop-came-along/
==
http://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2016/11/07/the-bizarre-origins-of-the-word-idiot/
The 2016 election cycle in the United States has been one of the most bitter and divisive in recent memory. Both of the candidates—Hillary Rodham Clinton (D) and Donald J. Trump (R)—are regarded as so thoroughly unlikeable in every way that many people are outright refusing to vote for either of them. If you decide not to vote in this election, though, you are an idiot. I do not necessarily mean you are unintelligent or even ignorant for that matter; I merely mean that you are an idiot.
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You see, the word idiot is etymologically derived from the Attic Greek word ἰδιώτης (idiṓtēs), which literally means “a private person,” or “a person who does not take part in the affairs of the polis.” It is derived from the word ἴδιος (ídios), meaning “of one’s own,” which is also the root of our English word idiosyncratic. The word ἰδιώτης originally had no bearing whatsoever on how intelligent the person it was being used to refer to was. It merely indicated that the person did not take part in public affairs.
Although the word ἰδιώτης was not originally a pejorative, it quickly acquired derogatory connotations. The polis, or “city-state,” was the fundamental structure of all Greek society. It was so essential that, in his treatise Politics, the Greek philosopher Aristotle (lived 384–322 BC) actually defined a human being as a ζῷον πoλιτικόν (zdōon politikón), which literally means an “animal in a polis.” A citizen who abstained from involvement in the polis, therefore, was putting himself at a profound disadvantage.
The ancient Athenians also recognized that a democratic society can only survive as long as its members continue to participate in it. As soon as citizens begin to neglect their civic duties, democracy slowly begins to collapse into ruin and decadence. Thus, to the ancient Athenians, nothing could be more reckless and irresponsible than neglecting one’s civic duties.
In ancient Athens, taking part in the Assembly meeting was mandatory and any adult, male citizen who did not attend the Assembly was liable to be fined. To ensure that everyone in the city attended the meeting, publicly-owned slaves would be sent out while the Assembly was gathered, armed with ropes that had been dipped in red paint. Their duty was to find any citizen who was not at the Assembly meeting and mark him using the rope. Afterwards, anyone caught with red paint on his clothes would be fined for having skipped out on the meeting.
In later times, the word ἰδιώτης passed on into Latin as idiota. In Latin, the word acquired strongly derisive connotations and became synonymous with “ignorant person.” Eventually, the word passed from Latin into French as idiote and from French into Middle English as idiot. It was in Middle English that the word finally fully acquired the meaning it has today.
Today few people are aware of the original, political meaning of the word idiot. Likewise, voters are no longer forced to vote against their will. Nonetheless, even though you will probably not be fined for refusing to vote, you should still vote anyways because it is your civic duty and democracy can only survive as long as the public continues to participate in it. In many countries around the world, democracy is declining because people simply do not care enough to protect it. The greatest threats to the integrity of the United States Constitution are laziness and ignorance.
The ancient Athenian philosopher Plato (lived 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) wrote in The Republic 1, 347c, “τῆς δὲ ζημίας μεγίστη τὸ ὑπὸ πονηροτέρου ἄρχεσθαι, ἐὰν μὴ αὐτὸς ἐθέλῃ ἄρχειν,” which is Ancient Greek for: “But the greatest penalty is to be ruled under an evil person, if one does not take initiative in politics.” Basically, Plato is saying that, if you do not take political initiative and vote, the punishment is to be ruled by those you least wish to be ruled by. Keep these words in mind when you decide whether or not to go out and vote tomorrow.
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/11-questions-you-should-ask-libertarians-see-if-theyre-hypocrites/
Libertarians have a problem. Their political philosophy all but died out in the mid- to late-20th century, but was revived by billionaires and corporations that found them politically useful.And yet libertarianism retains the qualities that led to its disappearance from the public stage, before its reanimation by people like the Koch brothers: It doesn’t make any sense.
They call themselves “realists” but rely on fanciful theories that have never predicted real-world behavior. They claim that selfishness makes things better for everybody, when history shows exactly the opposite is true. They claim that a mythical “free market” is better at everything than the government is, yet when they really need government protection, they’re the first to clamor for it.
That’s no reason not to work with them on areas where they’re in agreement with people like me. In fact, the unconventionality of their thought has led libertarians to be among this nation’s most forthright and outspoken advocates for civil liberties and against military interventions.
Merriam-Webster defines “hypocrisy” as “feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not.” We aren’t suggesting every libertarian is a hypocrite. But there’s an easy way to find out.
The Other Libertarianism
First, some background. There is a kind of libertarianism that’s nothing more or less than a strain in the American psyche, an emotional tendency toward individualism and personal liberty. That’s fine and even admirable.
We’re talking about the other libertarianism, the political philosophy whose avatar is the late writer Ayn Rand. It was once thought that this extreme brand of libertarianism, one that celebrates greed and even brutality, had died in the early 1980s with Rand herself. Many Rand acolytes had already gone underground, repressing or disavowing the more extreme statements of their youth and attempting to blend in with more mainstream schools of thought in respectable occupations.
There was a good reason for that. Randian libertarianism is an illogical, impractical, inhumane, unpopular set of Utopian ravings which lacks internal coherence and has never predicted real-world behavior anywhere. That’s why, reasonably enough, the libertarian movement evaporated in the late 20th century, its followers scattered like the wind.
Pay to Play
But the libertarian movement has seen a strong resurgence in recent years, and there’s a simple reason for that: money, and the personal interests of some people who have a lot of it. Once relegated to drug-fueled college-dorm bull sessions, political libertarianism suddenly had pretensions of legitimacy. This revival is Koch-fueled, not coke-fueled, and exists only because in political debate, as in so many other walks of life, cash is king.
The Koch brothers are principal funders of the Reason Foundation and Reason magazine. Exxon Mobil and other corporate and billionaire interests are behind the Cato Institute, the other public face of libertarianism. Financiers have also seeded a number of economics schools, think tanks, and other institutions with proponents of their brand of libertarianism. It’s easy to explain why some of these corporate interests do it. It serves the self-interest of the environmental polluters, for example, to promote a political philosophy which argues that regulation is bad and the market will correct itself. And every wealthy individual benefits from tax cuts for the rich. What better way to justify that than with a philosophy that says they’re rich because they’re better—and that those tax cuts help everybody?
The rise of the Silicon Valley economy has also contributed to the libertarian resurgence. A lot of Internet billionaires are nerds who suddenly find themselves rich and powerful, and they’re emotionally and intellectually inclined toward libertarianism’s geeky and unrealistic vision of a free market. In their minds its ideas are “heuristic,” “autologous” and “cybernetic”—all of which has inherent attraction in their culture.
The only problem is: It’s only a dream. At no time or place in human history has there been a working libertarian society which provided its people with the kinds of outcomes libertarians claim it will provide. But libertarianism’s self-created mythos claims that it’s more realistic than other ideologies, which is the opposite of the truth. The slope from that contradiction to the deep well of hypocrisy is slippery, steep—and easy to identify.
The Libertarian Hypocrisy Test
That’s where the Libertarian Hypocrisy Test comes in. Let’s say we have a libertarian friend, and we want to know whether or not he’s hypocritical about his beliefs. How would we go about conducting such a test? The best way is to use the tenets of his philosophy to draw up a series of questions to explore his belief system.
The Cato Institute’s overview of key libertarian concepts mixes universally acceptable bromides like the “rule of law” and “individual rights” with principles that are more characteristically libertarian—and therefore more fantastical. Since virtually all people support the rule of law and individual rights, it is the other concepts which are uniquely libertarian and form the basis of our first few questions.
The Institute cites “spontaneous order,” for example, as “the great insight of libertarian social analysis.” Cato defines that principle thusly:
“… (O)rder in society arises spontaneously, out of the actions of thousands or millions of individuals who coordinate their actions with those of others in order to achieve their purposes.”
To which the discerning reader might be tempted to ask: Like where, exactly? Libertarians define “spontaneous order” in a very narrow way—one that excludes demonstrations like the Arab Spring, elections which install progressive governments, or union movements, to name three examples. And yet each of these things are undertaken by individuals who “coordinated their actions with those of others” to achieve our purposes.
So our first hypocrisy test question is, Are unions, political parties, elections, and social movements like Occupy examples of “spontaneous order”—and if not, why not?
Cato also trumpets what it calls “The Virtue of Production” without ever defining what production is. Economics defines the term, but libertarianism is looser with its terminology. That was easier to get away with in the Industrial Age, when “production” meant a car, or a shovel, or a widget.
Today nearly 50 percent of corporate profits come from the financial sector—that is, from the manipulation of money. It’s more difficult to define “production,” and even harder to find its “virtue,” when the creation of wealth no longer necessarily leads to the creation of jobs, or economic growth, or anything except the enrichment of a few.
Which seems to be the point. Cato says, “Modern libertarians defend the right of productive people to keep what they earn, against a new class of politicians and bureaucrats who would seize their earnings to transfer them to nonproducers.”
Which gets us to our next test question: Is a libertarian willing to admit that production is the result of many forces, each of which should be recognized and rewarded?
Retail stores like Walmart and fast-food corporations like McDonalds cannot produce wealth without employees. Don’t those employees have the right to “coordinate their actions with those of others in order to achieve their purposes”—for example, in unions? You would think that free-market philosophers would encourage workers, as part of a free-market economy, to discover the market value for their services through negotiation.
Is our libertarian willing to acknowledge that workers who bargain for their services, individually and collectively, are also employing market forces?
The bankers who collude to deceive their customers, as US bankers did with the MERS mortgage system, were permitted to do so by the unwillingness of government to regulate them. The customers who were the victims of deception were essential to the production of Wall Street wealth. Why don’t libertarians recognize their role in the process, and their right to administer their own affairs?
That right includes the right to regulate the bankers who sell them mortgages. Libertarians say that the “free market” will help consumers. “Libertarians believe that people will be both freer and more prosperous if government intervention in people’s economic choices is minimized,” says Cato.
But victims of illegal foreclosure are neither “freer” nor “more prosperous” after the government deregulation which led to their exploitation. What’s more, deregulation has led to a series of documented banker crimes that include stockholder fraud and investor fraud. That leads us to our next test of libertarian hypocrisy: Is our libertarian willing to admit that a “free market” needs regulation?
Digital Libertarians
But few libertarians are as hypocritical as the billionaires who earned their fortunes in the tech world. Government created the Internet. Government financed the basic research that led to computing itself. And yet Internet libertarians are among the most politically extreme of them all.
Perhaps none is more extreme than Peter Thiel, who made his fortune with PayPal. In one infamous rant, Thiel complained about allowing women and people he describes as “welfare beneficiaries” (which might be reasonably interpreted as “minorities”) to vote. “Since 1920,” Thiel fulminated, “the extension of the franchise to (these two groups) have turned ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
With this remark, Thiel let something slip that extreme libertarians prefer to keep quiet: A lot of them don’t like democracy very much. In their world, democracy is a poor substitute for the iron-fisted rule of wealth, administered by those who hold the most of it. Our next test, therefore, is: Does our libertarian believe in democracy? If yes, explain what’s wrong with governments that regulate.
On this score, at least, Thiel is no hypocrite. He’s willing to freely say what others only think: Democracy should be replaced by the rule of wealthy people like himself.
But how did Peter Thiel and other Internet billionaires become wealthy? They hired government-educated employees to develop products protected by government copyrights. Those products used government-created computer technology and a government-created communications web to communicate with government-educated customers in order to generate wealth for themselves, which was then stored in government-protected banks—after which they began using that wealth to argue for the elimination of government.
By that standard, Thiel and his fellow “digital libertarians” are hypocrites of genuinely epic proportion. Which leads us to our next question: Does our libertarian use wealth that wouldn’t exist without government in order to preach against the role of government?
Many libertarians will counter by saying that government has only two valid functions: to protect the national security and enforce intellectual property laws. By why only these two? If the mythical free market can solve any problem, including protecting the environment, why can’t it also protect us from foreign invaders and defend the copyrights that make these libertarians wealthy?
For that matter, why should these libertarians be allowed to hold patents at all? If the free market can decide how best to use our national resources, why shouldn’t it also decide how best to use Peter Thiel’s ideas, and whether or not to reward him for them? After all, if Thiel were a true Randian libertarian he’d use his ideas in a more superior fashion than anyone else—and he would be more ruthless in enforcing his rights to them than anyone else. Does our libertarian reject any and all government protection for his intellectual property?
Size Matters
Our democratic process is highly flawed today, but that’s largely the result of corruption from corporate and billionaire money. And yet, libertarians celebrate the corrupting influence of big money. No wonder, since the same money is keeping their movement afloat and paying many of their salaries. But, aside from the naked self-interest, their position makes no sense. Why isn’t a democratically elected government the ultimate demonstration of “spontaneous order”? Does our libertarian recognize that democracy is a form of marketplace?
We’re told that “big government” is bad for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is too large to be responsive. But if big governments are bad, why are big corporations so acceptable? What’s more, these massive institutions have been conducting an assault on the individual and collective freedoms of the American people for decades. Why isn’t it important to avoid the creation of monopolies, duopolies and syndicates that interfere with the free market’s ability to function?
Libertarians are right about one thing: Unchecked and undemocratic force is totalitarian. A totalitarian corporation, or a totalitarian government acting in concert with corporations, is at least as effective at suppressing the “spontaneous order” as a non-corporate totalitarian government. Does our libertarian recognize that large corporations are a threat to our freedoms?
Extra Credit Questions
Most libertarians prefer not to take their philosophy to its logical conclusions. While that may make them better human beings, it also shadows them with the taint of hypocrisy.
Ayn Rand was an adamant opponent of good works, writing that “The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves.” That raises another test for our libertarian: Does he think that Rand was off the mark on this one, or does he agree that historical figures like King and Gandhi were “parasites”?
There’s no reason not to form alliances with civil libertarians, or to shun them as human beings. Their erroneous thinking often arises from good impulses. But it is worth asking them one final question for our test.
Libertarianism would have died out as a philosophy if it weren’t for the funding that’s been lavished on the movement by billionaires like Thiel and the Kochs and corporations like ExxonMobil. So our final question is: If you believe in the free market, why weren’t you willing to accept as final the judgment against libertarianism rendered decades ago in the free and unfettered marketplace of ideas?
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https://www.alternet.org/heres-why-self-indulgent-libertarian-hypocrisy-knows-no-bounds
jeremy sherman
...
There’s a difference between being and feeling consistent. To be consistent you have to tame the tendency to extrapolate to universal principles from whatever you’re feeling in the moment. You have to be able to notice your inconsistencies.
Since that’s difficult and self-compromising, it’s easier to just feel consistent. For that you need only hold one idea constant. Just always chant, “I’m consistent. I have integrity. I’m not like all of the other people around me. Other people are inconsistent hypocrisy. I’m not.”
If you hold that one thought with all your heart then you don’t have to pay attention to your flip-flopping. You can have all your cakes and eat them too.
You won’t live by your inconsistent standards, but if you’re insistent enough, you’ll be able to convince yourself that you do, and maybe you’ll be able to convince others too. There are lots of hypocrisy cults you can join, mutual admiration societies that claim some absolute truth, thereby liberating themselves to follow their whims, confident that they’re consistent.
These days, libertarianism is one such cult, growing in popularity, in large part through sponsorship by the Koch brothers network of donors, spending billions through private charities to achieve a cabal of about 400 billionaires’ ultimate aim, to be unconstrained in everything they do. The cabal was inspired by a self-serving misreading of the Soviet Union. Fred Koch, the Koch brother’s father was a key provider to Stalin as he built the Soviet Union’s oil industry. When Fred saw the devastation wrought by his client Stalin he wrote that, “What I saw in Russia convinced me of the utterly evil nature of communism.… What I saw there convinced me that communism was the most evil force the world has ever seen and I must do everything in my power to fight it, which I have done since that time.”
Rather than bite Stalin’s hand that fed him he conveniently focused on the rationalization that Stalin employed to justify his dictatorship. Fred went on to say in 1938 that "Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard." He loved fascism; he hated communism.
Thus was born the hypocritical Koch campaign, control for freedom; constrain for liberty, dictate anarchy. It was easy to get other wealthy donors enthusiastic about the movement, donors like our new education secretary Betsy Devos, a self-declared libertarian who donated over $200 million to hypocritical campaigns for state-imposed religious education in the name of libertarianism. And it’s been easy to find politicians who will mouth and defend the hypocrisy for the money.
That’s what happened to what once was the Republican party. The Republicans who embraced American traditions bent to the Koch’s will or were chased out by Koch-funded candidates from the Tea Party. If you’re wondering whatever happened to our country, what explains the weird jack-knifing lurch toward libertarianism, the Koch brothers are a good place to find answers. The Tea Party wouldn’t have lasted any longer than the Occupy movement if it weren’t orchestrated and funded by the Kochs.
Do I sound like a conspiracy theorist? If the alternative to conspiracy theory is the assumption that there are never any conspiracies, we’re in real trouble. There are conspiracies. The difference between conspiracy theorists and people who reveal real conspiracies is in whether the eagerness to find one or the evidence leads one to the conclusion that there is one. If you read the facts on the Koch brothers, I think you’ll find that the evidence stacks up pretty conclusively.
But no matter how much money you pour into selling something, it won’t sell if there’s no latent appetite. With libertarianism as a rationalization, there’s plenty of appetite, the appetite for some alternative to having to think about what’s worth and not worth constraining.
Libertarians have bought themselves the ultimate freedom, paid in full with a commitment to hypocrisy, the freedom to never have to wonder about or learn from anything ever again, the freedom to feel consistent without having to trouble themselves with the hard question that shows up everywhere since sometimes freedom turns out well and sometimes it turns out badly:
In engineering: There are bolts and there are ball bearings. We bolt some things down and we let other things run free.
Computer engineering: Algorithms are constraints that enable you to input a free range of variables and get reliably constrained results.
Social engineering: We want people to have freedom to do what they want so long as it doesn’t cause more damage than their freedom is worth. Laws, at their best, are constraints that maximize freedom.
Liberty and justice for all: Justice constrains us, liberty frees us. Justice is security. Government at its best seeks the best mix.
Freedom and responsibility: You’re free on the dance floor, but unless you’re special (P.S., you’re not) your freedom comes with responsibility for not constraining other people’s freedom. You don’t get to crowd everyone into the corner by dancing wildly with your eyes shut shouting “I believe in freedom!”
Social movements: The best and worst movements in human history have all had the same rallying cry, a proud "We demand more!" That's the cry of those crowded out but also those who already have more than their fair share. It's the cry of the women's and civil rights movement but also of the Nazi's. So what's the difference between the good and bad versions of that rallying cry? Hypocrisy, demand for more dancefloor when you're already taking up plenty of it.
Player vs. married: A player is free to date whomever but the freedom comes with a loss of security, no reliable partner to come home to. A married person is more constrained but in the bargain gains some security.
Freelance vs. salaried: Salaried workers are more constrained than freelancers, but in exchange, they get a bit more security.
Evolution: Life is a trial and error process and we are the trials. This makes us ambivalent, rooting for ourselves as trials and rooting for the trial and error process. In our hearts, we cry “let the best man win and it damned well better be me!”
Sore losers: Sore losers smash the game board if they lose. Libertarians are like that. They think that if they don’t win, the game is rigged against them and must be destroyed so that they always win.
Free will vs. determinism: We claim that free will as better than determinism but actually we’re ambivalent. What we’d really like is the freedom to advance and the determinism that locks in the advances we’ve already made. What we really want is a ratchet, freedom to climb, constraint against falling.
We can have that ratchet if we shut our eyes, dance impulsively and shout “freedom is the only answer!” while crowding everyone else into the corners by meaning only our personal freedom, the hell with theirs.
==
https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/11/29/how-mont-pelerin-society-neoliberal-thought-collective-influencing-donald-trump-s-presidency
After Donald Trump won the US election, analysts, researchers and journalists got to work to track how this apparent political outsider would suddenly gather a team.
Despite promising to “drain the swamp” of vested interests and lobbyists, it became clear Trump was intent on refilling it with figures and ideas from the well-established network of conservative and neoliberal think-tanks.
Suddenly, staff from groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation were helping to draw up plans for a Trump administration.
Last month, Trump thanked one of those groups personally, with an address to the Heritage Foundation's annual meeting.
But those think tanks, and the people who lead and run them, have strong links to another influential group that has been trying to bend governments around the world to a particular ideology for almost 70 years.
The Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) was established in 1947 by economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek — a man considered by many to be the godfather of modern free market thinking.
Mont Pelerin Society Membership List
Some scholars have described it as the “neoliberal thought collective” with its ideas heavily influencing the political administrations of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US, and many world leaders since.
DeSmog has obtained a 2013 Mont Pelerin Society membership list, showing the group continues to boast influential members including former judges, former country leaders, wealthy industrialists, academics and think tank operatives in 62 countries from Argentina to Zimbabwe.
According to the Mont Pelerin Society, its members “see danger in the expansion of government, not least in state welfare, in the power of trade unions and business monopoly, and in the continuing threat and reality of inflation.”
Members continue to meet at annual conferences and regional meetings, often held in appealing locations. The next meeting will be held in Sweden's capital, Stockholm.
High profile members include former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, petrochemical billionaire Charles Koch and former Czech Republic president Vaclav Klaus.
Related DeSmog Coverage: Mont Pelerin Society A Window Into Ideological Heart Of Kochtopus Climate Denial
Heritage Foundation's Influence
As DeSmog has previously reported, many US, UK and Australia-based groups that have spread climate science denial are heavily represented among Mont Pelerin's membership list. Many groups funded by Charles Koch and his brother David through their family foundations and Koch Industries Inc, are also well represented on the MPS directory.
When Donald Trump won the election, one of the first people appointed onto his transition team was the Heritage Foundation’s Ed Feulner. Feulner joined MPS in 1972 – the year before he joined fellow Republican Paul Weyrich to start the Heritage Foundation.
Feulner was also president of MPS from 1996 to 1998 and has previously served as MPS treasurer.
In October, Trump gave a keynote address to the Heritage Foundation's annual President's Club Meeting.
“Heritage has been instrumental in providing the Trump administration with sound policies and experts who now serve in key government positions,” wrote Feulner in an email announcing Trump's appearance.
In the speech, Trump remembered the tax policies of the Ronald Reagan era, and recalled how President Reagan had worked closely with Heritage “to unleash the economic miracle of the 1980s”.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Reagan's chief economic advisor was the late Martin Anderson, who joined the MPS in 1965. Anderson once reported that 22 of the 76 economic advisors on Reagan's successful 1980 presidential campaign were MPS members.
Heritage, a conservative libertarian think tank, was also described by Politico as Trump’s “shadow transition team” as its fellows and staffers took up roles for the president.
In February, New Republic wrote how the Heritage Foundation was shaping Trump’s administration and was set to play a “key role in steering domestic policy” for the coming years.
This week, the administrator of Trump's Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, is scheduled to appear at a climate and energy policy summit hosted by the Heritage Foundation. Among the speakers will be several climate science denialists from the CO2 Coalition, including William Happer.
A Neoliberal Network
MPS is also heavily linked with the Atlas Network — a co-ordinating group of more than 460 think tanks and operatives in 96 countries.
Atlas president Alejandro Chafuen joined MPS in 2010 and the current chair of Atlas, Linda Whetsone, is the daughter of the network’s founder, Sir Antony Fisher.
DeSmog’s analysis of Mont Pelerin Society’s membership shows scores of members who are affiliated with the same network of think tanks that have fought against policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
When Trump is gutting environmental regulations, pulling out of international climate agreements and pledging to cut welfare support and social security, it starts to look a lot like the world MPS members have been pushing for over decades.
Democracy In Chains
That larger strategy to undermine democracies the world over is chronicled in an excellent book “Democracy In Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America” by award-winning historian Nancy MacLean of Duke University. The book was a finalist in the prestigious National Book Awards for 2017.
MacLean found what George Monbiot calls the “missing link” that helps to explain the radicalisation of governments from the US to the UK and beyond. In an abandoned building on the campus of George Mason University, MacLean found the paper trail of the life's work of James McGill Buchanan, including confidential letters with Charles Koch that confirm millions of Koch's dollars flowed to GMU in support of Buchanan's work.
Buchanan — who was a member and past-president of the Mont Pelerin Society — developed a strategy along with MPS member Charles Koch and other elite industrialists to construct a network of neoliberal think tanks that, as MacLean writes and documents, have infected democracies with radical right wing policy ideas designed to shield and benefit the wealthy elite, and to disempower the majority of citizens.
Buchanan served on the advisory board of the Exxon- and Koch-funded Independent Institute, and as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute, which Charles Koch co-founded with Murray Rothbard and Edward Crane. Crane is a long-standing member of MPS, and Rothbard is credited as having suggested to Charles Koch that he study the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and to view government as “our enemy.”
==
more techbros bs, sadly
firemylasers wrote seralini and other pro-gmo swill on rationalwiki
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food
gmo art starts with
Interviewer: Critics say, with genetically modified food we could end hunger. We could feed billions of people that we currently are not. What do you respond to that?
Hippie #1: Uhh, yeah, we *could* feed billions of people, but *they might grow four eyes, you know? I mean *YOU DON'T KNOOOW, you can't play with nature!
Hippie #2: What kind of people would they be? What kind of people would we *be creating*, you know? You are what you eat!
Penn Jillette: ...Well, I guess she eats: shallow, hateful, self-centered bullshit! We can't imagine how, but somehow these folks have forgotten that most people don't have the option of hopping on down to the Piggly-Wiggly and bonding with the produce. When the whole world has plenty of food, we'd love to hear this asshole's advice. But we're certainly not going to mistake it for information.
==
fail:
==
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/inside-total-catastrophe-ensued-after-elected-libertarian-mayor-promised-freest
... In 2006, fearing annexation by rapidly encroaching San Antonio, some in Von Ormy proposed incorporating as a town. But in government-averse rural Texas, incorporation can be a hard sell. Unincorporated areas are governed mainly by counties, which have few rules about what you can do on private property and tend to only lightly tax. There’s no going back from what municipal government brings: taxes, ordinances, elections and tedious city council meetings. Still, the fear of being absorbed by San Antonio — with its big-city taxes and regulations — was too much for most Von Ormians.
Enter Art Martinez de Vara. At the time, Martinez de Vara was an ambitious third-year law student at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, a local boy with a penchant for Texas history and right-wing politics.
Martinez de Vara suggested a compromise of sorts. Von Ormy could become a “liberty city” — a stripped-down, low-tax, low-government version of municipal government that’s currently en vogue among the tea party in Texas.
Initially, the city would impose property and sales taxes, but the property tax would ratchet down to zero over time. The business-friendly environment would draw new economic activity to Von Ormy, and eventually the town would cruise along on sales taxes alone.
There would be no charge for building permits, which Martinez de Vara said would be hand-delivered by city staff. The nanny state would be kept at bay, too. Want to shoot off fireworks? Blast away. Want to smoke in a bar? Light up. Teens wandering around at night? No curfew, no problem.
Martinez de Vara and his mother, Sally Martinez, along with other prominent residents, started the Commission to Incorporate Von Ormy. He gave Von Ormy a motto: “The Freest Little City in Texas.”
Folks in Von Ormy liked what they heard and in May 2008 voted to incorporate. Martinez de Vara was elected mayor that November.
In a 2015 presentation he gave at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, Martinez de Vara said that a group of people with no political experience took it upon themselves to do everything a large city like San Antonio does but at a lower cost. He touted Von Ormy’s ability to provide animal control services, a 20-officer police department — a mix of paid officers and volunteers — and an online city hall.
“We were blessed with this unique opportunity to experiment with democracy,” hesaid.
Today, there is no city animal control program and stray dogs roam the streets. The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office patrols the town instead of city police, and City Hall resides in a mobile home with one full-time staffer — though that’s a step up from the dive bar where City Council met until the owner bounced them out. If you go to the city’s website, you’ll be informed that it’s still under construction....
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https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/nancy-maclean/democracy-in-chains/
How American democracy is being destroyed by powerful libertarians.
Focusing on Nobel Prize–winning economist James McGill Buchanan (1919-2013), whom Charles Koch funded and championed, MacLean (History and Public Policy/Duke Univ.; The American Women's Movement, 1945-2000: A Brief History with Documents, 2008, etc.) elaborates on the revelations about the Koch brothers’ insidious, dangerous manipulation of American politics that has been presented forcefully by Jane Mayer in Dark Money (2016) and Daniel Schulman in Sons of Wichita (2014). Based on Buchanan’s papers as well as published sources, MacLean creates a chilling portrait of an arrogant, uncompromising, and unforgiving man, stolid in his mission to “save capitalism from democracy.”
To Charles Koch, he seemed a kindred spirit. Buchanan believed that growth of government undermines individual freedom. Government overreach, he maintained, included public schools, the Postal Service, prisons, labor laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid for the poor, guarantees of voting rights, foreign aid, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the graduated income tax. Government’s only role, Buchanan and his followers believe, “is to ensure the rule of law, guarantee social order, and provide for the national defense.”
MacLean traces Buchanan’s career at several universities—the last was the fledging George Mason, which the Wall Street Journal called “the Pentagon of conservative academia”—where he reigned over his own economics institutes, backed generously by wealthy libertarians; and his embrace by exclusive think tanks, such as the Mont Pelerin Society, the Hoover Institution, the Cato Institute, the Club for Growth, and the Heritage Foundation, among many other Koch-funded organizations. Besides influence at home, Buchanan helped design a constitution for the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, a document that ensured constraint of majority power. MacLean offers a cogent yet disturbing analysis of libertarians’ current efforts to rewrite the social contract and manipulate citizens’ beliefs—e.g., by spreading “junk pseudo science” about climate change.
An unsettling exposé of the depth and breadth of the libertarian agenda.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
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