Last edited Tue May 5, 2015, 10:20 PM - Edit history (1)

which brought Greenspan and the Randian psychopaths of Wall Street and the Neo-Liberal triangulators who believe they must court such psychopaths in order to govern.

Add the 30 plus year Neo-conservative war on terror in the Middle East which has bankrupted us, and is it really that perplexing to see how fast this downward fall has occurred?

Works great for those with money.

is a shell game, a pyramid scheme, and a gambling addiction all rolled into one.

And anyone who plays it will eventually go bust. Look at the S&L scandal, the tech bubble, the sub-prime mortgage debacle, the automobile makers bailout, etc. etc. etc.

It is an old game with a new name, and everyone eventually suffers - the 99% the worst of all.

Know your BFEE: They Looted Your Nation’s S&Ls for Power and Profit

As you know, War Inc and the PNAC crowd need all the help he can get. Money makes "Command & Control" easy.

I remember how the CON was usually the joke, the turd in the punch bowl, the one we laughed at. The Frank Burns type, in the series "M*A*S*H", for example. Comic foil and punching bag - subject of derision and ridicule. Then reagan came onstage and suddenly the CONS were gods. They very effectively turned that COMPLETELY around - with liberals now being the nation's punching bag and objects of scorn.

Thank you louis powell and your schmucky greedy imperialist antisocial goddamn Powell Memo. I put a link to it in my sig line (along with those TOLL FREE Capitol Hill switchboard numbers), cuz I do tend to post quite often here and those resources should be as easy as possible to find.

I hope I live to see the day when that curse has, hopefully, finally been UNDONE.

to see what his famous memo wrought. In the day it was written there was nothing like the concentrated wealth, both individual and corporate that there is today. Nor was there the reichwing infrastructure. As a SCOTUS justice he was centrist to slightly conservative and I think that more accurately reflects his personal policy preferences. My third-year paper adviser in law school clerked for him and I asked him once about the memo - yes I knew of its existence 30 years ago - and my prof's discussion is reflected in my thoughts.

His memo was not unlike George Kennan's famous "X" memo of 1947. The fledgling Cold Warriors read none of Kennan's nuance, adopted the hardest-line parts while ignoring his shadings and arguments that policymakers remain open to change and evolution in the face of changing and dynamic situations. Kennan himself came to disown most of the memo after seeing it tortuously misinterpreted and used to justify what he saw as disastrous policy decisions.

What happened is that the hard right in this country has been on the warpath since the New Deal; their objectives haven't changed one bit since the Wall Street Plot of FDR's first years in office. Feudalism in economics together with fascism in domestic policy and imperialism in foreign policy have been the Repub agenda for 80 years. They just have a lot more money and influence now and are openly willing and able to buy politicians to further their ends.

It's a more tangled and subtle history than I originally thought and I have been reading a ton about it lately. The agenda of the right has never changed, though.

Here is one section only that for me really shows what he was attempting to create and what he participated directly in creating as a Supreme Court Justice.

A More Aggressive Attitude

Business interests — especially big business and their national trade organizations — have tried to maintain low profiles, especially with respect to political action.

As suggested in the Wall Street Journal article, it has been fairly characteristic of the average business executive to be tolerant — at least in public — of those who attack his corporation and the system. Very few businessmen or business organizations respond in kind. There has been a disposition to appease; to regard the opposition as willing to compromise, or as likely to fade away in due time.

Business has shunted confrontation politics. Business, quite understandably, has been repelled by the multiplicity of non-negotiable “demands” made constantly by self-interest groups of all kinds.

While neither responsible business interests, nor the United States Chamber of Commerce, would engage in the irresponsible tactics of some pressure groups, it is essential that spokesmen for the enterprise system — at all levels and at every opportunity — be far more aggressive than in the past.

There should be no hesitation to attack the Naders, the Marcuses and others who openly seek destruction of the system. There should not be the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it.

Lessons can be learned from organized labor in this respect. The head of the AFL-CIO may not appeal to businessmen as the most endearing or public-minded of citizens. Yet, over many years the heads of national labor organizations have done what they were paid to do very effectively. They may not have been beloved, but they have been respected — where it counts the most — by politicians, on the campus, and among the media.

It is time for American business — which has demonstrated the greatest capacity in all history to produce and to influence consumer decisions — to apply their great talents vigorously to the preservation of the system itself.

There is little nuance here. This is definitely about the future blending of politics and big business. He may have been surprisingly moderate on social issues, however, he was decidedly swayed in his ruling by his pro big business attitudes. First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti is the precursor of Citizens United. This 1978 decision which he wrote the majority opinion for was instrumental in creating a First Amendment “right” for big business to garner influence over ballot questions. We can see over the decades then how Citizens United was assured with such a ruling.

His memo was not released until after his confirmation hearing. He followed through on his promise to big business once he became a justice. And this memo inspired the creation of such powerful entities as the Heritage Foundation, the CATO Institute, and Accuracy in Academe. Within less than 20 years, their influence on power in Washington was set in stone first with Reagan and Bush and then with Clinton and the DLC. The Heritage Foundation health insurance mandate plan is now Obamacare, so we can correctly state that even Mr. Hope & Change was influenced by this man and his 1971 memo.

The agenda of the right has now become the agenda of the left and right together. There is no pure left or right anymore. There is only corporate governance neo-liberal domestic policies and neo-conservative post Cold War foreign policy.

They know, deep down they can't win; the odds are always to the house; but, they keep coming back for more and more. Before long, it's just to feed a fantasy: "This week I'll win the powerball, get rich and quit this crappy job."

For Reaganomics, it was always: "Someday, someday, I'll be rich too, and then I won't want them soshoualists taxing my money away to feed the loafers.

The house always wins!!!!!!

They'd make even more money with liberal polices. Even after higher taxes. More people being able to afford their products and services means lots more money.

To claim otherwise is to claim the boom of the 50's and 60's didn't exist.

But we abandoned long-term thinking, so they're only capable of thinking about next year's tax return.

on our time and think that is the time the U.S. lost its mind. When you look back on the last 40 years, it reminds me of Pinochet' s reign in Chile. This awful time has been an experiment to test neoliberal totalitarian theories. We need a different perspective to see where we are so we can know how to get out of the ditch we're in.

I wonder what it will take for Americans to wake up to this problem and demand a solution.

Here's the direct link to the NYT article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/business/economy/income-inequality-is-costing-the-us-on-social-issues.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Feconomic-scene&contentCollection=business&action=click&module=NextInCollection®ion=Footer&pgtype=article

The focus is on the "powerful."

But, this country has VERY WILLINGLY come along for this ride.

I was a young adult in the 90s and was flummoxed at how much this country gobbled the bullshit the republican party was spewing up.

The republican party is even more brazen and does not even try to package their bullshit under some counter intuitive bullshit today. They just wake up each day screaming hateful things. And, the country is MORE prone to follow along today.

People get agitated when I say this.

It isn't the pols fault, it isn't even the monied interests fault.

It is OUR fault.

To answer your question, sadly after a quarter century of seeing it get worse, I don't think we do.

I certainly agree that we share responsibility for this problem. But I do think it is the fault of the politicians and especially the monied interests. They have done a great job of controlling the narrative by buying up the mass media and they have done an excellent job of dumbing down the masses by dismantling education programs (through their bought politicians). These are the two things that have helped them pull this off.

Regardless of whose fault it is, I do think it is up to us to fix it. Things will not get better until the American people come together to demand it.

it isn't young people for the most part who buy their shit.

This is an example of people finding some rationale to point at the boogymen who are manipulating us.

This IS happening, but that they do it is no the CAUSE.

They do it because it works.

We are too affluent, too distracted and self interested, and such far too eager to lap up the bullshit.

There are and always will be people with money and power who manipulate things at the top.

And, there will always be some people who go along for the ride with them.

But, we have been screaming about the oligarchs forever now, and they only keep having more power and influence because we aren't focused on who we should be focused on.

US ...

This has taken place slowly over the last 30 or so years. Dumbing down the electorate absolutely is a part of the problem.

I don't really think what we are saying is that different. I absolutely agree that the only way to fix the problem is by changing ourselves. This won't end until the citizenry gets fed up enough to rise up and fix the problem.

This could be why

They control both chambers of congress, the supreme court and the court system overall, the majority of state capitals ...

We have a solid democratic president who can't do shit so it is all good?

The NYT article cites research supported by the National Bureau of Economic Research, an organization that sets a very high standard, and the paper is available at

http://www.nber.org/papers/w20525.pdf

Other links from the NYT article include a Brookings Institution blog that reported a simulation of the effect of increasing educational levels. Simulations are as good as their assumptions, but the report makes a good point: raising educational levels may be a good thing in many ways, but it won't have much impact on inequality, because the inequality is coming from incomes at the top.

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2015/03/31-what-increasing-education-will-and-wont-do-for-earnings-inequality-hershbein-kearney-summers

Another link is to a paper from a Stanford education researcher. I don't have the background to judge it but it seems to be a well-known study. It is available here:

https://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/reardon%20whither%20opportunity%20-%20chapter%205.pdf

It seems that we have two problems: poverty at the bottom and growing inequality at the top. It's tempting to say that these are two sides of the same economic coin -- that "the poverty of the poor is a condition for the luxury of the rich" -- but that may not be so. Raising the standards of the poor could so increase their productivity that it would also increase the profits of the rich. But what is clear is that they are two sides of the same political coin: policies supported by the billionaire class are continually impoverishing the working class, and this is destructive of our society in many ways, ways that will eventually bring down the billionaire class itself, probably with great violence.

The control of government allowed them to pollute our environment more since they could pass whatever deregulation they want, look at BP and their Deepwater drilling with no safeguards.

It's appalling to me that many of them, despite being good people, have completely drunk the Fox/Limbaugh Kool-Aid and have zero awareness of articles like this one. This is the best country in the world. We have the best of everything. Rich people got their money by being brilliant and hardworking. The only reason those stats look bad is because we have all these minorities who are stupid, lazy and can't keep their pants on. Cops only shoot people who deserve it. Our bombs only kill bad people. And so on.

'Scuse me, I'm going to go enjoy a fantasy where a giant freak electrical malfunction fries everyone at Fox simultaneously.

I notice the same thing, though I'm in my early 50's and the people I hear as you describe are in their 60s and 70s. Many used to be working class democrats but once they retired and felt they had no more skin in the game they got more conservative.

and I have many older acquaintances. I have come to the realization that most of the people my age and older are looking at the world the way it used to be when they were young, and they are not noticing the changes.

We could afford college because 1) tuition was so much lower, even when considering lower wages, and 2) there were a lot of summer jobs where we could work to pay for the rest of the year's tuition.

Also, when they were saving for retirement, they were making better money, and the earnings on their saving accounts was much higher, allowing them to grow their nest egg quicker.

Then there is the amount of money that is required to be paid out from paychecks that was not necessary for them. Today, we have to pay for TV when it was free over the air when they were younger. All the bells and whistles today with phones and internet service were not available then. They did not have to pay copays and partial or whole premiums for health care, the employer did that. And the employer also covered defined pension plans, so they did not have to set aside every penny they would need in retirement out of their pay.

I am always trying to tell them that they were very fortunate to have grown up at just the right time, when many things for the middle class were working out. They just don't seem to be able to look past their own experiences.

We are both"70-ish." Many of her opinions are so out of date that she often spouts ideas and values of her grandparents' generation, if not earlier. That wouldn't be much of a problem because she is easily stopped from discussing those views with me. But she fully expects literally everyone to behave in accordance with the manners of the early 20th Century, before even her mother had been born, when her grandmother was a child.

It's all on automatic.

Like before there was Social Security and old people were often homeless and had to live with their children. Or before there was Medicare and older people could not afford any medical care, so died of treatable illnesses for lack of the money to treat them.

My mother's stories from growing up very poor during the Depression will stay with me forever. Those were not good times unless you were wealthy.

but respectable and something to be proud of. As bad as His Chimperial Majesty was, Raygun was the worst president since James Buchanan.

Since I live 2000 miles from Hartford, I've never attended one but have considered going this time. I wasn't particularly close with those running the reunion, but have checked a few out on Facebook. Shocked to find so many right wingers. I've never really gotten over the shock that people I know believe such bullshit. Don't think I've ever fully recovered from the 1980 election.

Despite all the turmoil of the 60's, I truly believed we would change the world and, in many ways things are better, but the core is rotten.

Close to you.

It was intentional.

eom

will continue to destroy America...unless Bernie stops them...

In terms of population, we're around more developing world countries than developed ones. Economically, we're obviously in the developed sphere. It's an odd place to be in as a country.

Plunge them into poverty with regressive social policies.

Lots of people get sick & die.

It takes us 2 generations to figure out that there may be a connection.

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE IN THIS COUNTRY?

has been in the planning stages for a couple of decades at least. Let starvation, disease and neglect do the job of eliminating 10-20% of the population - it's far cheaper than camps and can be used for propaganda as a part of the success story of predatory capitalism and Social Darwinism.

And refuse to look at the damage it has done.

by now, then I'm afraid no amount of research or statistics or whatever it is ... no amount of that is going to persuade those who are NOT that wealthy that their well-being has been compromised over the last 40 years by corruption of our national government.

But K&R for the effort anyway.

and the saddest thing is that two two-term Democratic presidents have done, in essence, nothing to stop it, but have more often than not been aiders and abettors of these disastrous polices which can now justifiably be called lethal policies.

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Thank you for calling this to our attention, eridani.

Welfare Queens like Wal-Mart, McDonald's, Papa John, Target and other large corporations that rely on minimum wage employees to sell cheap products while their CEO rake in millions. These corporations figured they can stick with the minimum wage since they know that our tax dollars will make up the difference in what they (the corporations) pay and what people need to really survive in today's society.

We need a serious discussion in minimum wage increase. You cannot be for cutbacks in entitlements for low income families and oppose minimum wage increases. One or the other. We the taxpayers have been carrying the load long enough - time to have these filthy rich CEOs pay the right salaries. I remember reading in the NYTimes Real Estate section how how one of the Walton Heirs bought a condo in NYC for like $20 million. How many people are collecting housing assistance from taxpayers so a Walton Heir could have a $20mil condo in NYC?

Nothing will change, in fact they are hoping we accept an ever declining "new normal" a phrase they love to use.

:eye:

In fact, I think we should abolish the office.

Didn't Republicans recently vote to cut food stamps even more? Whilst extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy etc..

What is deplorable is that articles like this and equivalents on mass market television network news hardly get any time or space. These issues should be debated constantly in the public arena. I suspect this article will only be reprinted on a few liberal friendly websites and blogs and be then shoved off the table into the dustbin of history.

I hope I am proved wrong and this article is given discussion time on the Sunday round table talk shows. But I'm not holding my breath.

I hear the royal baby is doing well, there are riots in Baltimore, and Bruce Jenner is anatomically a full fledged woman now. That's more important!

While politicians talk bull people are dying and getting old as hell while they enjoy everything and talk about 10 and 20 yr plans,kiss my ass! I have been hearing this same shit for decades now the republiCONS tell us everything wrong in the black community is because of no fathers in home and liberal policies over the decades. Weren't reagan,bush,bush in offices for many of those years?

Everyday for years we hear how great they were and how trickle down saved the country. Where is the proof? They talk about fathers is the father in the home when assholes like Scarborough has three wives they marry get divorced are their children being raised by single mothers.

Eric Garner was a father in the home.Freddie had a father among others. What master plan so the republiCons have to put fathers in the homes. I thought they didn't interfere in peoples personal lives. Hypocritical,lying as mfkers!!!

--for the last 40 years.

sworn in 1980 . The patient is very near death now and going fast .

Period. We're eating poison at a faster rate than Europe and most other industrialized nations.

MSM is nearly useless as a source of timely information.

Wingers have been pretty much wrong about everything and they still are.

Asia will fix all that. I have it on good authority that this topic polls well among your base.

Seems to me both parties are in the pockets of Wall Street.

America's decline is solely the result of Gay Marriage, and
The Cult Of Side-Boob in The Huffington Post.



Oh, by the way, Milton Friedman says hello ... from Hell.