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The Court That Let Democracy Bleed
The Court That Let Democracy Bleed MeidasTouch Network and Michael Cohen Jul 15, 2025 Guest article by Michael Cohen In a chilling, unsigne...
Tom Hartman American Billionaires
Tom Hartman American Billionaires
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.
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.
Exec at Trump Media Jumped the Line for U.S. Visa After Company Lobbied GOP Lawmaker
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A congressman intervened to help former President Donald Trump’s social media company jump the line for a difficult-to-obtain foreign-worker visa to bring a company executive to the U.S., according to interviews and records reviewed by ProPublica.
A former staffer for Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican, said the congressman personally instructed her to help Trump Media, even though she thought it was inappropriate to mix politics with the office’s constituent services duties.Exec at Trump Media Jumped the Line for U.S. Visa After Company Lobbied GOP Lawmaker
Site C Dam in BC
On a warm and calm Sunday, Ken and Arlene Boon stood on the banks of the Peace River in northeast B.C. and watched the water rise — an event they had dreaded for more than a decade.
It lapped near their former farm fields and a lodge where a beaver family was busy storing twigs, bark and leaves to eat over the winter. The water crept up a thick tangle of bushes along the shoreline where migratory songbirds nest, moving towards the fire ring around which the Boons spent many a cheerful evening with their extended family and friends.
The Boons felt somewhat prepared for the rising waters; they’d received an email from BC Hydro three days earlier, on Aug. 22, saying reservoir flooding for the Site C hydro dam
project was about to begin, after almost a decade of construction.
But it was still a shock, Ken Boon told The Narwhal. “It’s going to be pretty dramatic — and traumatic,” he said.
Republicans have pulled off a coup
Republicans have pulled off a coup against an entire branch of government, and nobody seems to have noticed. But if you pay attention, it’s shocking.
Sometimes you can learn as much from attending to what Republicans suddenly stop saying as from what they are talking about. In this case, it’s their half-century-long obsession with convening a constitutional convention to rewrite the US Constitution. Under Article V of our Constitution, when two-thirds of the states formally call for a “con-con” to rewrite our nation’s founding document, it officially comes into being.
They can then make small changes like enshrining the right of billionaires and corporations to bribe judges and politicians, or insert the doctrine of corporate personhood into the document, or simply throw the whole thing out and start over. Many on the right are hoping to insert a national ban on abortion into a new constitution; others want to end the right of women to vote, do away with all antidiscrimination laws, outlaw labor unions, or return the selection of senators to the states.
So far, 19 Republican-controlled states have signed on to a call for for a convention under Article V. The project, heavily funded by rightwing billionaires, even has its own website: conventionofstates.com. Consider just a sampling of recent GOP supporters of the project:
— Senator Marco Rubio: “One of the things I’m going to do on my first day in office is I will put the prestige and power of the presidency behind a constitutional convention of the states.”
— Governor Greg Abbott: “We need a Convention of States to restore the rule of law in America.”
— Governor Ron DeSantis: “An Article V Convention of States is the best way to bring power back to the states and the people.”
— Congressman Jodey Arrington: “We need to go back to our founding document, back to our Constitution, and put the restraints on Congress that our founders intended.”
— Senator Ted Cruz: “An Article V Convention of States is a powerful tool given to us by the Founders to rein in the federal government.”
— Senator Rand Paul: “I’m a big fan of the Convention of States project. I think it’s the solution to Washington’s overreach.”
But over the past year, Republicans have suddenly fallen silent on the issue. Project 2025, for example, the all-encompassing wish-list for the GOP and its billionaire owners, lacks even one single mention of a constitutional convention.
Interactive Finance Guide
Interactive Finance Guide: Economic Interactive Notes, Financial Market, Money and Banking charts, graphs, videos, terms and definitions with over 9800 quick links!
Elon Musk has a new nemesis: Ireland
Elon Musk has a new nemesis: Ireland
Elon Musk is having a rough week. His daughter has denounced him as a fake Christian, an absent father, and a serial adulterer. He’s been in court to fight a custody battle. His ex-partner Grimes said he “‘cannot distinguish the truth.” And that’s just his personal life. Musk’s businesses are also under fire. Tesla stock has plummeted. X has repelled so many advertisers that Musk has sued them over an alleged “illegal boycott.” Politicians have accused the platform of fuelling race riots. Musk has also been slammed for claiming “civil war is inevitable” in Britain. But his next battle could…This story continues at The Next Web
Project 2025 and Opus Dei
https://theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/26/kevin-roberts-project-2025-opus-dei?CMP=share_btn_url Opus Dei-led center in Washington DC, a hub of activity for the radical and secretive Catholic group.
CrowdStrike Falls as Delta Reportedly Hires Top Lawyer to Seek Outage Damages
CrowdStrike (CRWD) shares are falling 5% in premarket trading following a CNBC report that Delta Air Lines (DAL) has hired top attorney David Boies to pursue potential damages from the cybersecurity firm as well as Microsoft following the global IT outage on July 19.1
CNBC. “Delta hires David Boies to seek damages from CrowdStrike, Microsoft after outage.” Boies, chairman of Boies Schiller Flexner, represented the U.S. government in its antitrust case against Microsoft and helped secure same-sex marriage rights in California, CNBC noted. The outage of Microsoft's cloud services triggered by a defective update by CrowdStrike led to the cancellation and delay of thousands of flights worldwide, but Delta was the most heavily impacted of the major airlines.
CAQ Money and Influence Koch Industries
In Quebec, this lobby includes the MEI, where Youri Chassin, now a candidate for the CAQ, was an economist and then director of research from 2010 to 2017. It is worth looking into his actions there, because he could very well have an important position if elected with the CAQ. This means examining the hidden face of the MEI and its relationship with U.S. think tanks backed by oil magnates, including the brothers Charles and David Koch.
How America Changes If Trump Wins
How America Changes If Trump Wins
Today, following both Vance’s and Trump’s speeches at the RNC, the future trajectory of America if they’re elected is pretty clear.
First, it’s important to acknowledge that this is no longer your (or my) father’s GOP. Vance is the pre-packaged, well-massaged “product” of a group of Silicon Valley billionaires who are enamored of the writings of Ayn Rand and David Koch’s Libertarian movement. Trump has made it clear he’s happy to go along with the Galt’s Gulch crowd, particularly if it makes him more money.
These men (they’re nearly all men) are revolutionaries with little regard for political history or norms. Think Mao, Lenin, Pol Pot, or Mussolini. They don’t want to tweak government; they want to burn it down and start it over from scratch. Rebuild it as a completely different system of governance.
They’re convinced that the post-1933 New Deal America is a mistake and, along with their allies on the Supreme Court, are dedicated to “deconstructing the administrative state” that came out of FDR’s reforms and the 20th century reinvention of the American system.
And they have a couple of models they seem committed to following. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is probably the most prominent; he’s already done pretty much everything on the list below, and what he hasn’t done he’s openly considered or will do to hang onto power.
If you’re not familiar with Orbán and how he’s transformed his nation into what he calls an “illiberal democracy,” I’ve written extensively about him here and here and here. And Trump rambled at length about him last night. Here is their plan, based in large part on Orbán’s model:
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What’s next for SpaceX’s Falcon 9
What’s next for SpaceX’s Falcon 9
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is one of the world’s safest, most productive rockets. But now it’s been grounded: A rare engine malfunction on July 11 prompted the US Federal Aviation Administration to initiate an investigation and halt all Falcon 9 flights until further notice. The incident has exposed the risks of the US aerospace industry’s heavy reliance on the rocket.
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