I respectfully ask that you Google Heritage Foundation. Look at the website, the articles and the way they are presented, the language that is used and then try to tell yourself that Trump has no connection to this organization. That's what kind of "idiot" you are are.
That’s funny. Wait and see. He fully endorses it and will carry it out if elected. Vance clearly endorses it as he has written in the introduction. And unless you are one of Trump’s billionaire friends, you will loose everything, should he be elected. But go ahead and believe what you believe with no critical thought or research.
Another excellent analysis! Thank you Heather for pointing out patriotism is not about wrapping yourself in the flag. While it should be obvious, many Republicans seem to have lost this simple understanding and rather follow tax cheats and criminals than stop and think what it means to be an American 🤔
A question from a relatively uneducated person (me) to a very intelligent person (you).
Since you been closely following the DNC speeches, what is the Democrats recent overuse of the word “Freedom” mean to you. What Freedom do we have now that will be taken away if Harris/Walz do not win?
Does it mean that Harris/Walz will prohibit federal agencies from ‘influencing’ media outlets to “suppress” and censor individuals opposing views. Will it mean Harris/Walz will prohibit federal agencies from hiring organizations to perform activities that the federal agencies to perform?
Wow!! You are deluded by the propaganda media machine! Pick one and we can have an intelligent discourse. But you will have to cite specifics not vague feelings. I can debate issues not emotions. If you want me to select one let me know, but this way you can choose the one you feel confident in debating. The above assumes that you are open to different opinions. May Prof Heather can moderate the debate. She can even give you information to cite in defense of your argument.
Olaf- if you are truly of Scandinavian blood like me, I will send you an article written by a Swedish journalist about the state of their beautiful country.
It’s not about the government’s freedom, it’s about the people’s freedom. It’s also about restoring freedoms that have been taken away by government from the people and many on that list which are being threatened by Mr.Trump’s Authoritarian ideology.
A little more background on the Supreme Court discussion prior to the ‘non-ruling’ ruling in the Missouri v Biden case, Justice Brown stated, "My biggest concern, is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways."
She is worried about the 1st Amendment hamstringing government. Poor government 😭😭 its citizens speech might hamstring it. Can’t let that happen.
You missed the entire point! The purported ‘freedoms’ I listed was a list of people’s freedoms that supposedly a Trump administration would take away. I asked and will ask again, “which of these” do you really think Trump will take away?
Since you also stated that some have already been taken away. Please state specifically which those are.
An aside question for you, are you aware of the details of the Missouri (Murthy) v Biden lawsuit and the steps by Biden administration agencies to censor individuals freedom of speech? Until you learn a little more you may want to be careful of your posting to the world. Remember “better to remain quiet and be assumed stupid than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt”!
All new buzz words and cliches to mold weak minds. ‘Joy’ cannot be used to pay for your groceries and your mortgage payment. But if you can mold weak people’s minds with vague platitudes you can control them. They don’t feel the pain the government causes them. Don’t look behind the curtain. I still believe that Biden is ‘sharp as a tack’ Don’t you agree Heather? ?
@Sleezer: Look at the crowds, the joy, the energy at the DNC. This is a new era. You're lucky to be invited to share in it. So you, too, can become a patriot again! ... and if you work hard and don't spend all your money on DJT action figurines and golden sneakers, you too can pay for groceries and your mortgage 😉
1. “Project 2025” is a HOAX created by Democrats as a ploy to manipulate the emotions & minds for purposes of trying win another term. It is “identical” to the “Russian Hoax” used in the past.
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, what kind of an idiot am I?!”
There is some such kind of document apparently, by some private organization, which has zero connection to Trump, the Republican Party, and which NO ONE had EVER heard of, until this campaign invented it’s hoax, using some unknown document.
If you actually believe such a crock of conspiracy theory crap, you might be engaging in projection, or you need to put on a tin foil hat.
The Heritage Foundation has been involved with Republican decisions for 30 years to not know this has you looking foolish. You really need to investigate on this group and you will see there is no fake conspiracy it is not a hoax it is a 900 page manifesto to guide the Trump organization.
A Fool by any other name... Woman, don't know where you've gotten research material, but it must be dripping in red. You can believe what you want, that's the beauty of living in the US. If you don't act out violence based on false information, no one will bother you. You are a weirdo that listens to liars. Good luck with your life, hope someday you'll understand that the Dems will be saving you and family from the Lost Republican party of Nixon, Bush, Reagan and weirdo tRump.
As Donald Trump tries to distance his campaign from Project 2025, those behind the right-wing policy blueprint to remake the U.S. government continue to brag in private about their close ties to the Republican presidential nominee and how they intend to push a radical right-wing agenda in a second Trump administration.
In July, Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought met with two people he believed to be relatives of a wealthy conservative donor interested in funding the effort. In fact, he was meeting with two reporters with the U.K.-based Centre for Climate Reporting as part of an undercover sting captured on video.
Over the course of two hours, Vought described Trump's disavowal of Project 2025 as mere theater and laid out plans for mass deportations, restricting abortion, gutting independent government bureaucracies, using the military against racial justice protesters and more.
The secret plans are "designed to ensure that this kind of radical agenda that the conservative movement has in the U.S. can be implemented from day one," says Lawrence Carter, founder and director of the Centre for Climate Reporting and one of the reporters who spoke with Vought. "They want to make sure that the mistakes from the first Trump administration, as they see them, where not much got done, are avoided this time around.
She sure does come across as either a Russian bot, or a provocateur! If the beastly one had nothing to do with project 2025, why are so many of his former (and apparently, future) employees up to their eyeballs in this nationalist (not Christian if you were to ask Jesus) coup plot in plain daylight? “If they tell you what they are and what they intend to do, believe them!” (me).
Remember, the “Con Don” already tried to overthrow the government and democracy after he plainly lost the 2020 election! He didn’t really care what happened to all the sad sacks who took up arms in his name and almost hanged Mike Pence, while he basked in the love of the crown of insurrectionists. That was just a taste of the power he now wants - too much and never enough (Mary Trump). He wants absolute power.
Lost track of the source but this fills in what I didn’t know back in the 80s before the CATO Institute (whose thorough seeming research I read back then), started doing conclusions that seemed so disconnected from the research. I think that was due to Koch Brothers wanting CATO to start leaning the way they wanted to start influencing everything else. The earlier hidden history is new to me though I do remember wondering where and why in blazes George Mason was seemingly being warped into a more aggressive political tool. I didn’t know much, but this seems to fill a lot of gaps and solve some of the mystery
Nancy MacLean's 2017 book, "Democracy in Chains" names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan
Bob W
Aug 12
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Bob’s Substack
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Subscribe
Betsy Smith, to reinforce your warning; this may be a long read. I pulled information for. number of sources:
Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Duke professor Nancy MacLean's 2017 book, "Democracy in Chains" names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.
In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.
Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy.
Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Mike Pence as Vice President, a longtime loyalist the cause, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, "Democracy in Chains" tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.
Duke historian Nancy MacLean 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...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?... 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...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...Buchanan wanted a private governing elite of corporate power that was wholly released from public accountability...Charles Koch, who became interested in his (Buchanan's) 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...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.... 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.”
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... 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...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.
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... “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."
“Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America” by Nancy MacLean Viking June 13, 2017
trump knows about 2025,& will carry it out if elected.
I respectfully ask that you Google Heritage Foundation. Look at the website, the articles and the way they are presented, the language that is used and then try to tell yourself that Trump has no connection to this organization. That's what kind of "idiot" you are are.
That’s funny. Wait and see. He fully endorses it and will carry it out if elected. Vance clearly endorses it as he has written in the introduction. And unless you are one of Trump’s billionaire friends, you will loose everything, should he be elected. But go ahead and believe what you believe with no critical thought or research.
Another excellent analysis! Thank you Heather for pointing out patriotism is not about wrapping yourself in the flag. While it should be obvious, many Republicans seem to have lost this simple understanding and rather follow tax cheats and criminals than stop and think what it means to be an American 🤔
Watch Bad Faith documentary. .project 2025 is a tip of the iceberg. .
A question from a relatively uneducated person (me) to a very intelligent person (you).
Since you been closely following the DNC speeches, what is the Democrats recent overuse of the word “Freedom” mean to you. What Freedom do we have now that will be taken away if Harris/Walz do not win?
Does it mean that Harris/Walz will prohibit federal agencies from ‘influencing’ media outlets to “suppress” and censor individuals opposing views. Will it mean Harris/Walz will prohibit federal agencies from hiring organizations to perform activities that the federal agencies to perform?
Freedoms, rights, and social safety nets on the line this election:
Voting rights - according to TFG he only needs people to vote for him one more time. Afterwards it will be fixed!
Freedom to love who you want
Freedom to get the healthcare you need
Freedom to marry who you want
Freedom for teachers to teach science and history without political or religious bias
Freedom of religion, incl freedom to not believe at all
Freedom to not have to have children
Freedom to have children via IVF
Right to a science based education
Separation of church and state
Rights of equal treatment before the law
Any discrimination based on sex, race, or religious preferences
Social security ...
Heather - just curious was I too harsh with my ‘deluded’ comment? Do you agree that if Trump gets elected all the above ‘freedoms’ will be lost?
Just checking to see if you agree with your followers.
Wow!! You are deluded by the propaganda media machine! Pick one and we can have an intelligent discourse. But you will have to cite specifics not vague feelings. I can debate issues not emotions. If you want me to select one let me know, but this way you can choose the one you feel confident in debating. The above assumes that you are open to different opinions. May Prof Heather can moderate the debate. She can even give you information to cite in defense of your argument.
Olaf- if you are truly of Scandinavian blood like me, I will send you an article written by a Swedish journalist about the state of their beautiful country.
It’s not about the government’s freedom, it’s about the people’s freedom. It’s also about restoring freedoms that have been taken away by government from the people and many on that list which are being threatened by Mr.Trump’s Authoritarian ideology.
A little more background on the Supreme Court discussion prior to the ‘non-ruling’ ruling in the Missouri v Biden case, Justice Brown stated, "My biggest concern, is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways."
She is worried about the 1st Amendment hamstringing government. Poor government 😭😭 its citizens speech might hamstring it. Can’t let that happen.
You missed the entire point! The purported ‘freedoms’ I listed was a list of people’s freedoms that supposedly a Trump administration would take away. I asked and will ask again, “which of these” do you really think Trump will take away?
Since you also stated that some have already been taken away. Please state specifically which those are.
An aside question for you, are you aware of the details of the Missouri (Murthy) v Biden lawsuit and the steps by Biden administration agencies to censor individuals freedom of speech? Until you learn a little more you may want to be careful of your posting to the world. Remember “better to remain quiet and be assumed stupid than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt”!
What is Agenda 47, a condensed version of Project 2025?
It's T's agenda; found on his website.
All new buzz words and cliches to mold weak minds. ‘Joy’ cannot be used to pay for your groceries and your mortgage payment. But if you can mold weak people’s minds with vague platitudes you can control them. They don’t feel the pain the government causes them. Don’t look behind the curtain. I still believe that Biden is ‘sharp as a tack’ Don’t you agree Heather? ?
@Sleezer: Look at the crowds, the joy, the energy at the DNC. This is a new era. You're lucky to be invited to share in it. So you, too, can become a patriot again! ... and if you work hard and don't spend all your money on DJT action figurines and golden sneakers, you too can pay for groceries and your mortgage 😉
Oh the ‘Joy’, I am so overwhelmed, NOT!
Olaf- where did you go? I am waiting your response on which of your laundry list of potential ‘lost freedoms’ you want to talk about.
1. “Project 2025” is a HOAX created by Democrats as a ploy to manipulate the emotions & minds for purposes of trying win another term. It is “identical” to the “Russian Hoax” used in the past.
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, what kind of an idiot am I?!”
There is some such kind of document apparently, by some private organization, which has zero connection to Trump, the Republican Party, and which NO ONE had EVER heard of, until this campaign invented it’s hoax, using some unknown document.
If you actually believe such a crock of conspiracy theory crap, you might be engaging in projection, or you need to put on a tin foil hat.
So uninformed-- the relationship is blatantly extensive
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/11/politics/trump-allies-project-2025/index.html
The Heritage Foundation has been involved with Republican decisions for 30 years to not know this has you looking foolish. You really need to investigate on this group and you will see there is no fake conspiracy it is not a hoax it is a 900 page manifesto to guide the Trump organization.
Maybe the problem is once again “projection” - Trump doesn’t follow someone else’s “playbook”, LOL!
A Fool by any other name... Woman, don't know where you've gotten research material, but it must be dripping in red. You can believe what you want, that's the beauty of living in the US. If you don't act out violence based on false information, no one will bother you. You are a weirdo that listens to liars. Good luck with your life, hope someday you'll understand that the Dems will be saving you and family from the Lost Republican party of Nixon, Bush, Reagan and weirdo tRump.
I’d add:
See Project 2025 Co-Author Lays Out “Radical Agenda” for Next Trump in Undercover Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQjdwsZhE_Q
As Donald Trump tries to distance his campaign from Project 2025, those behind the right-wing policy blueprint to remake the U.S. government continue to brag in private about their close ties to the Republican presidential nominee and how they intend to push a radical right-wing agenda in a second Trump administration.
In July, Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought met with two people he believed to be relatives of a wealthy conservative donor interested in funding the effort. In fact, he was meeting with two reporters with the U.K.-based Centre for Climate Reporting as part of an undercover sting captured on video.
Over the course of two hours, Vought described Trump's disavowal of Project 2025 as mere theater and laid out plans for mass deportations, restricting abortion, gutting independent government bureaucracies, using the military against racial justice protesters and more.
The secret plans are "designed to ensure that this kind of radical agenda that the conservative movement has in the U.S. can be implemented from day one," says Lawrence Carter, founder and director of the Centre for Climate Reporting and one of the reporters who spoke with Vought. "They want to make sure that the mistakes from the first Trump administration, as they see them, where not much got done, are avoided this time around.
Are you a Russian bot, Corrine?
Do you pay your bills?
She sure does come across as either a Russian bot, or a provocateur! If the beastly one had nothing to do with project 2025, why are so many of his former (and apparently, future) employees up to their eyeballs in this nationalist (not Christian if you were to ask Jesus) coup plot in plain daylight? “If they tell you what they are and what they intend to do, believe them!” (me).
Remember, the “Con Don” already tried to overthrow the government and democracy after he plainly lost the 2020 election! He didn’t really care what happened to all the sad sacks who took up arms in his name and almost hanged Mike Pence, while he basked in the love of the crown of insurrectionists. That was just a taste of the power he now wants - too much and never enough (Mary Trump). He wants absolute power.
It's sad you are so misinformed, if you are in fact a real person.
Lost track of the source but this fills in what I didn’t know back in the 80s before the CATO Institute (whose thorough seeming research I read back then), started doing conclusions that seemed so disconnected from the research. I think that was due to Koch Brothers wanting CATO to start leaning the way they wanted to start influencing everything else. The earlier hidden history is new to me though I do remember wondering where and why in blazes George Mason was seemingly being warped into a more aggressive political tool. I didn’t know much, but this seems to fill a lot of gaps and solve some of the mystery
Nancy MacLean's 2017 book, "Democracy in Chains" names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan
Bob W
Aug 12
∙
Bob’s Substack
∙
Subscribe
Betsy Smith, to reinforce your warning; this may be a long read. I pulled information for. number of sources:
Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Duke professor Nancy MacLean's 2017 book, "Democracy in Chains" names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.
In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.
Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy.
Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Mike Pence as Vice President, a longtime loyalist the cause, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, "Democracy in Chains" tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.
Duke historian Nancy MacLean 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...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?... 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...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...Buchanan wanted a private governing elite of corporate power that was wholly released from public accountability...Charles Koch, who became interested in his (Buchanan's) 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...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.... 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.”
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... 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...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.
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... “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."
“Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America” by Nancy MacLean Viking June 13, 2017
amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Rad…