This article is cross-posted on Naked Capitalism.
Another Monday, another “deficit crisis” panic. If you haven’t got the feeling yet that you’re being played like a sucker over this alleged “deficit crisis,” then let me help you cross that cognitive bridge to dissonance. It comes in the figure of the recently-deceased William Niskanen, the embodiment of how Reaganomics and the Koch brothers’ libertarian movement were joined at the hip. Niskanen was an advisor to Ronald Reagan throughout the 1970s; a board director for the Koch-founded Reason Foundation; a member and chairman of Reagan’s Council on Economic Advisers from 1981-85; and he moved directly from Reagan’s side back to the Koch brothers’ side, as chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute from 1985 until 2008. This is a brief story about how the 1% transformed this country into a failing oligarchy, and their useful tools, starting with A-list libertarian economist William Niskanen, Chicago School disciple of Milton Friedman, advocate of the rancid “public choice theory.” (more…)
Here is the private letter from Charles Koch to Nobel Prize economist Friedrich Hayek, godfather of today’s free-market movement. The letter was obtained by Yasha Levine from the Hayek Archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. It is part…
There’s right-wing hypocrisy, and then there’s this: Charles Koch, billionaire patron of free-market libertarianism, privately championed the benefits of Social Security to Friedrich Hayek, the leading laissez-faire economist of the twentieth century. Koch even sent Hayek a government pamphlet to help him take advantage of America’s federal retirement insurance and healthcare programs.
Adam Curtis has just posted a must-read blog that tries to answer the big political dead-end we face today: Why can’t we think up any new ideas besides the failed libertarian free-market ideology that brought us to ruin? Curtis’ answer: We’re all prisoners of the Libertarian Think-Tank Archipelago.
This article was first published in Alternet. Now that the shock of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting is starting to wear off and the country is returning to its normal insanity again, we’re back to facing a far worse, far more…
Exiled Online editor Mark Ames delivers an address to the nation on MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show. The subject: A quick history lesson on why “austerity” is the worst, most insane idea imaginable to solve America’s economic woes–and how John…
This article first appeared in The New York Press. There was a strange moment last week during President Obama’s speech at Cooper Union. There he was, groveling before a cast of Wall Street villains including Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein,…
This article first was first published in Alternet. While Tea Party movement followers ran around Nashville last week dressed up in their Paul Revere period costumes, blathering about their heroic struggle against Obama’s Islamosocialist tyranny, the right-wing elite that nurtures…
