Be libertarian one time? Is that the same thing as "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas"?

Author’s note: I wrote this brief dispatch about my run-in with libertarian pro-marijuana activist/former judge James P. Gray back in March of 2011. But the piece disappeared into the black void of my computer hard-drive, and I forgot all about it—until now. I’m glad the text turned up, because Judge Gray’s sleazy efforts to bring lefties and progressives into the Libertarian Party fold under the innocuous banner of pot legalization is much more relevant today than it was 2011. After all, Judge Gray is now the running mate of Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson is using the weed wedge issue to siphon off votes from Obama.  —YL

Last Friday, I tagged along with a friend to a community center/Methodist Church in Hollywood for a documentary screening and panel discussion about California’s marijuana legalization movement. The film was a continuous stream of talking heads—interviews with aging hippies, baby-boomer marijuana patients suffering from cancer, former drug addicts, inmates, a few policy wonks, mystical Ibogaine practitioners and a bunch of assorted lefties and new agers involved in the marijuana legalization movement. All in all, it was a predictable set of people, and people in the audience seemed to be of the same activist demographic. But when the lights were turned on and people started talking, a cold chill ran down my spine: it was as if everyone around me had suddenly turned into a libertarian.

There were a bunch of them in the audience, including a quiet, mousy intern from Antiwar.com and her hippy bohemian writer chick friend who had been recently been converted to libertarianism, who admitted that she thought libertarianism was “really cool,” as people stood outside on the stairs and passed around a joint. The panel of experts was also stacked with libertarians, including a retired libertarian judge from rightwing Orange County who shared the stage with pot activists spewing new age gibberish about a “spiritual evolution” putting an end to the War on Drugs. New age stoners, crusty lefties and wonky progressives getting along with free-market extremists? Yes, sir. They were on the same team—and proud of it. They had risen above “mere” politics and put aside “petty” ideological differences to engage in a nonpartisan effort for the greater good of Gaia…or something like that.

I knew that libertarians have come to dominate the drug legalization movement, but I had never seen the spectacle up close and personal. And what I saw was deeply disturbing. Because from where I sat, it didn’t look like bipartisanship in action: it looked like a straight up con and a perfect example of how America’s oligarchy infiltrate the gullible leftie ranks and bootstrap liberal/progressive issues to the freemarket/anti-regulation cause.

My journalist buddy, who’s been watching and reporting on California’s drug legalization movement for the past decade, said this was not new. Libertarians have wormed their way into the drug scene in a major way, and were a big reason why marijuana legalization had suddenly gained so much mainstream credibility over the past five or six years. It made sense: the Koch-funded thinktank-industrial-complex has limitless cash, connections and access to media outlets. The Kochs also have a major objective that fits right in with the stoner scene: cloaking libertarianism with a liberal veneer and attracting lefties and progressives to the dark side.

"Three Strikes! You're out for life!"

The libertarians at this discussion were not trying to hide and operated right out in the open, starting with the keynote speaker, the Honorable James Gray. He had spent years working as a rightwing judge in Orange County, locking people up for petty drug crimes, but had suddenly seen the light and was now a vocal proponent of marijuana legalization. A former Superior Court judge coming out strongly against drug criminalization? It’s no small thing—his presence gave the stoner-dominated weed legalization movement a huge boost in credibility and respectability, and made Judge Gray a celebrity, a hero among liberal legalization activists.

Up on the stage, Judge Gray talked a lot about the failure of America’s drug policies. He talked about the stupendous amounts of taxpayer wealth wasted to no good effect. He talked about the insane incarceration rates for non-violent offenders, and the unnecessary suffering and misery caused by the War on Drugs, breaking up families, robbing young people of opportunity and leaving kids to grow up without fathers and mothers. It all made sense. And given that Gray had spent 25 years as a real life judge putting away all those people he now talked about with such empathy and feeling added some serious moral heft to his words. I gotta admit it was hard not be moved.

There was one problem with the act: it was full of shit. As a libertarian true believer, Gray has no problem with legalizing child labor, scrapping welfare, letting people die on the street for lack of healthcare and allowing companies to turn our air and drinking into into toxic sludge. So why the empathy for moochers and losers rotting in jail? It didn’t any make sense.

When I got home, I looked this guy up and it didn’t take long to figure how much he really cares. All I had to do was go the “About” section of his website. It’s all right there, down to the photo of him posing with his hero Milton Friedman, that great defender of the common man.

"Ha ha ha! Those liberal suckers think we're against the War on Drugs!"

Gray started his legal career as a JAG at the U.S. Naval base in Guam—which by the way is a government job. Next he was appointed to the bench in 1983—yep, another government position—right when Reagan’s war on drugs started picking up steam. California’s prison population tripled under his watch. Which might make you say: “Hey, you know, he saw the debacle with his own two eyes and now wants to stop it. What if he really does care about the poor and the oppressed? Give him a chance, will ya?” Sure, he cares. That’s why three years after he was appointed to the California Superior Court, he won the Business Litigation Judge of the Year award from the Orange County Bar Association— you know, because he sided with the common man.

And after he retired, Gray got a cushy job making $400 an hour at ADR Services Inc., a firm that handles out of court arbitration for corporate clients. Arbitration is a loophole created by corporate America to scam people out of their constitutional right to a fair trial by jury, bypassing the public legal system altogether and forcing Americans into a rigged private justice system. A 2007 Public Citizen report revealed that arbitrators working for outfits like Gray’s ruled against consumers 94 percent of the time:

“Many consumers will find themselves forced into the shadowy world of binding mandatory arbitration, where their chances of successfully defending themselves are slim to none. . . . Safeguards built into the justice system are not found in binding mandatory arbitration. For example, arbitrators decide most credit card cases on the basis of documents supplied by the company without the presence – and sometimes without the knowledge – of the consumer. Consumers must pay to have a hearing. Hearings are not open to the public, no transcripts are produced . . . And appeal is nearly impossible. ”

Looking through the articles and press clippings amassed on Gary’s site, it’s clear where he stands on the issues. On top of getting rid of government social programs and minimum wage, he wants to enact the “FairTax” (hint: it’s only fair to billionaires) and get rid of restrictions on political donations, freeing Americans to contribute as much as they want want to political candidates—money is speech, after all.

But what about the War on Drugs? Well, no matter what he tells his progressive stoner groupies, Judge Gray sees nothing wrong with the War on Drugs per se, as long as it was being waged by the states and not the federal government. The semantics may be a bit too complicated for the legalize it crowd to follow, but let’s take a look anyway.

On his “Primary Issues” page, Gray does not actually say that he is against drug prohibition, nor the heavy handed sentencing requirements. Instead he is against the federal government meddling with the affairs of local governments:

Repeal the failed and hopeless War on Drugs by restricting the role of the federal government to assisting each state to enforce its chosen laws. Crime was reduced by more than 20 percent within one year after we pursued this course with the repeal of Alcohol Prohibition, and the same results will be realized when we finally repeal Drug Prohibition. People must be held accountable for their actions, instead of for what they put into their bodies. The War on Drugs has directly created an enormously large and lucrative black market that has corrupted institutions, people in all walks of life, and, most especially, children, here and all around the world.

He said the same thing on Bill O’Reilly in 2008:

If I was the drug czar, I would advocate letting each state decide what to do with regard to this critical issue. Invoke the concept of Federalism and get the federal government out of the equation, except to allow them to help each state to enforce its own rules.

You hear that stoners? Drug legalization is all about states rights. As in, the state can do whatever it feels like. And my current home state of California has been doing a bang up job managing the largest, most overcrowded prison gulag network in the whole country.

Remember that when you go to the polls and feel your hand drifting towards the Libertarian Party checkbox.

PS: Read David Sirota’s analysis of the GOP-LP “marijuana conspiracy” in Colorado that Mitt Romney’s hoping will siphon off enough of the progressive pro-pot vote away from Obama and hand him the state.

PPS: On top of everything, Judge Gray’s not even a real libertarian. He was a lifelong Republican until 2004, when he suddenly switched to the Libertarian Party to run for Senator Barbara Boxer’s seat.

Yasha Levine is an editor of The eXiled and co-founder of the S.H.A.M.E. Project. Read his book: The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell.

Click the cover, buy the book!

Reposted from The SHAME Project

“In propaganda, truth pays off.”

— V.I. Lenin

SHAME’s recent exposé of Newsweek/The Daily Beast correspondent Megan McArdle went into great detail about her deep, close ties to the Kochs’ libertarian influence-peddling machine and her failure to disclose the connections. The most important thing you need to know about Megan McArdle is this: She is the only journalist in America whose byline has appeared on Newsweek and Atlantic Monthly cover stories, while at the same time is so close to Charles Koch that she was chosen to emcee the big 50th Golden Anniversary bash that Koch threw last year to celebrate the success of his libertarian think-tank the Institute of Humane Studies, the first of countless dozens of think-tanks (Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, Competitive Enterprise Institute, etc.) that the billionaire oligarch controls today.

Megan McArdle (top) beams with joy as Charles Koch’s party clown-for-hire at the 50th anniversary bash of the Institute for Humane Studies

The SHAME profile only touched on McArdle’s underhanded strategy of issuing fake “full disclosures” to obscure just how deep her ties to the Kochs really go. And there’s a good reason she doesn’t want the public to know about her Koch connections. If people knew, they wouldn’t waste time debating, reading or even paying attention to someone so clearly corrupt and conflicted. The real question is: Why have the Atlantic Monthly and now Newsweek provided a Koch operative like McArdle with the “centrist” credibility that she so desperately needs in order to do her job as a propagandist?

As far as we could find, there have only been a handful of instances over the years when McArdle felt compelled to issue a ”full disclosure” about her journalism conflicts of interest. And every time, these “full disclosures” have been used as smokescreens to give readers the false impression that McArdle was being up-front about her conflicted relationships, when in fact her disclosures were highly selective and edited, and now raise more questions than they purport to answer. As in, “Why did she knowingly give false incomplete information?”

For example: In March 2009, McArdle led a propaganda campaign to discredit an investigation that Mark Ames and I published in Playboy that first exposed the first Tea Party protest as an astroturf campaign backed by the Koch billionaire brothers and the Koch-linked advocacy outfit FreedomWorks. McArdle smeared our reporting as a conspiracy theory, initially arguing from her Atlantic Monthly perch that FreedomWorks did not play a leading role in orchestrating the Tea Parties. She also defended the Kochs with her now-infamous line: “I don’t see any evidence offered that Koch money funds FreedomWorks, or any astroturfing organization . . . from what I know of [the Kochs], astroturfing doesn’t really seem like their style.”

Indeed.

At the very end of her smear-piece, McArdle offered readers of The Atlantic a “full disclosure” about her then-fiancé’s employment at FreedomWorks:

Full disclosure:  It’s pretty much an open secret in DC, but given the content of the article I’m discussing, I think I ought to mention that I live with Peter Suderman, who once worked for Freedomworks.  Other than giving me the name of the right employee to email to make inquiries (no word back yet), I haven’t asked him about his former employer, and he hasn’t told me anything.  I debated whether to write about this, but since I’m not actually defending Freedomworks, I think it’s kosher.

Doesn’t seem so bad, does it? Well, that’s because McArdle strategically left out a few salient details.

For one thing, McArdle’s now-husband Peter Suderman was much more  familiar with FreedomWorks than she was letting on—and his work for FreedomWorks was directly relevant to the Tea Party campaign that McArdle ran cover for. As documented in the S.H.A.M.E. profile, Peter Suderman worked for FreedomWorks on an astroturf campaign called Angry Renter that was essentially a Tea Party 1.0, a 2008 precursor to the Tea Party movement of 2009.

In May 2008 The Wall Street Journal exposed McArdle’s husband’s AngryRenter.com outfit as a “fake grass-roots effort” to kill off proposed Democratic Party legislation to provide mortgage relief to struggling homeowners.

A year later, FreedomWorks was using many of the same PR strategies, tapping the same libertarian networks and even pretty much the same rallying cry—an alleged groundswell of popular opposition to a bill that would provide mortgage relief to struggling homeowners—in order to launch and promote the Tea Party movement.

McArdle also didn’t mention in her initial 2009 “full disclosure” that her husband Peter Suderman’s ties to the Kochs, even though she spent much of that article defending the Kochs. Suderman had spent most of his professional career drawing paychecks from various Koch organizations and propaganda outfits. When McArdle published her smear on the article exposing the Tea Party as a Koch-FreedomWorks operation, her boy Peter Suderman was regularly blogging for Reason magazine and would be hired on as Reason’s associate editor just a few months later.

But all the info that was airbrushed out of Suderman’s resume is nothing compared with the slash job McArdle did on her own Koch history.

To wit, there is no mention of “Megan McArdle” in Megan McArdle’s “full disclosure.”

This was February 2009, two years before McArdle would be honored for her services to the Koch cause by serving as Charles Koch’s party clown at the 50th Golden Anniversary bash of the Institute for Humane Studies. The IHS was Charles Koch’s first libertarian baby—it’s the ship that launched a thousand free-market front-groups. So it means a lot to Charles Koch to hire Megan McArdle as his party emcee—and it should mean a lot to McArdle’s readers and editors at Newsweek too, though for different reasons.

In her defense of the Kochs in 2009, McArdle didn’t mention the journalism training and job placement support she received from the Institute for Humane Studies, a libertarian think tank tightly controlled by Charles Koch since the 196os. (Over the years this program has launched the mainstream media careers of a long list of conservative operatives, along with Megan McArdle.) Nor did she inform readers that just a month before the Tea Party Movement she was singled out at a Koch-funded event for her “leadership role” as a  conservative activist pushing for “re-branding the Republican party,” and that she gave a strategy speech in which she echoed the objectives of the Tea Party movement. And there are at least a half-dozen other serious conflicts that she could have picked from . . .

Without getting stuck in the details of McArdle’s numerous Koch connections (that’s what the handy list below is for), the fact that she airbrushed them out from her “disclosures” is an indication of just how aware she is of the damage those ties to the Kochs would bring to her “credibility” if the public became aware of them.

Those omissions were not, and are not, mere slip-ups. McArdle had a chance to add the omitted conflicts into a subsequent post she published on the The Atlantic, supposedly to clarify and expand on her initial “full disclosure” of Peter Suderman’s connections to the Kochs. Instead, she went into sickening detail about how, when and under what circumstances she and Suderman became romantically involved, and how they decided to sleep outside an Apple store while partying at Matthew Yglesias’ house. Here’s just a small sample:

…on July 10th, when Peter and I slept out in line for the iPhone, we weren’t dating.  We were good-ish friends.  In the interests of absolutely full disclosure on this vital topic, Peter Suderman had that very week left his job at Freedomworks, and was about to join the ill-fated Culture11. [Culture11 was funded in part by trust billionaire Steve Forbes, who happened to run FreedomWorks along with Dick Armey. —YL]  The two of us decided to camp out in line three weeks before, at a party which I believe to have been hosted by Matthew Yglesias and his roommates, though it could also have been at one of a half-dozen other friends.  We met up that evening at a book party for Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, and then decamped for Virginia.  While it is true that we shared a queen-sized air mattress for several hours, Peter was a perfect gentleman. . . . Peter and I started dating two weeks after that, on July 24th, if you can refer to his invaluable help cleaning up my apartment after a fairly lengthy cocktail party as a “date”.

All her wink-wink yammering about her relationship, all the mind-numbing details and the sarcastic, mocking tone she takes towards “full disclosure” is not McArdle being stupid—it’s her acting stupid to throw you off the scent. She is most definitely not stupid, whatever her critics say. What McArdle is doing here is throwing out a crisis-management diversion—the shill equivalent of a squid squirting ink or a skunk discharging its anal stink-glands. She wants readers to wrinkle their nose and turn away in disgust—anything to keep critics from scrutinizing her Koch ties and uncovering her corruption.

We were able to dig up four other “full disclosure” statements by McArdle from the past few years, and they all use the same Peter Suderman decoy trick. In fact, it’s so consistent that you gotta wonder: Did McArdle marry Suderman just so she could could hide behind his Koch ties and give the appearance of offering “full disclosure”?

Here’s a tweet from 2011:

This “full disclosure” is from an Atlantic blog post from February 16, 2012, defending the Koch-founded Heartland Institute after a scientist obtained internal docs showing that the outfit planned to fund anti-climate-change propaganda aimed at kindergarteners and schools:

Full disclosure: One of the donors in the apparently authenticated documents is Charles Koch, and my husband did a year-long fellowship with the Koch Foundation. However, nothing I’m going to write either defends or indicts Mr. Koch, who’s actually pretty incidental to both Heartland’s funding, and this story.

This one is from a follow-up post on the Heartland Institute scandal a week later:

Full disclosure: in 2011 the Heartland Institute received a small donation from the Charles Koch foundation, which in the past also sponsored a journalism fellowship for my husband.

And this one is from an Atlantic post from February 24, 2012, that defended the Kochs from a negative Obama campaign email:

My husband once had a fellowship with the Charles G. Koch Foundation, and works for Reason Magazine, which has been a recipient of funds from Koch charitable organizations.

There might be more of these fake McArdle “full disclosures” floating around the Internet, and we welcome readers to send any new ones they find.

Meanwhile, seeing how Megan McArdle can’t or won’t fully disclose her conflicts of interest on her own, we will do it for her. So in the interests of media transparency, SHAME offers our readers this handy list of McArdle’s conflicted Koch connections. While by no means complete, we think it’s a good start. Hopefully some day McArdle will find the time to stop deceiving her readers and fully disclose on her own.

Megan McArdle’s Undisclosed Koch Connections (in reverse chronological order):

• In June 2012, Megan McArdle spoke at a Koch-linked Students for Liberty “Women for Liberty” event held at the Institute for Humane Studies. McArdle was described as a “shining” role model that “young women in the movement should look up to.” Students for Liberty is a Koch-funded youth club founded by alumni of the Institute for Humane Studies.
• In 2012, McArdle served as a judge for the Reason Foundation Bastiat Prize, awarded to libertarian media pundits. Reason Foundation is closely linked to the Koch think-tank network and is funded in part by a number of different Koch foundations. (She has served in this capacity for a number of years.)
• In 2011, McArdle took part in a Cato Institute panel called “U.S. Debt and the Millennials: Is Washington Creating a Lost Generation?” She described Social Security and Medicare as a “gigantic space alien that’s larger, like five times the size of earth.”
• In October 2011, Mcardle was honored by being chosen to emcee Charles Koch’s 50th Anniversary gala celebration of his flagship libertarian think-tank, the Institute for Humane Studies, featuring Charles Koch as the keynote speaker and guest of honor. McArdle and Koch were joined by hundreds of leading GOP donors and activists. An IHS newsletter wrote of her performance: “Emcee Megan McArdle wove a humorous narrative through the program.” The IHS attempted to hide McArdle’s involvement, scrubbing her name from the dinner announcement page.
• In February 2011, McArdle was the keynote speaker at the annual International Students For Liberty Conference, where she delivered a talk titled “Building the Case for Liberty in the New Century.” The conference included a sneak preview of the film Atlas Shrugged.
• In 2011, McArdle was a guest lecturer at the Institute for Humane Studies’ “Journalism & the Free Society” summer seminar program. The program tackled such topics as “Is an ‘objective’ press possible — or even desirable?” Other faculty members joining McArdle that year included Radley Balko, then-editor at the Kochs’Reason magazine
• In 2010, she was a moderator at a Mercatus conference about credit card regulation. Koch Industries funneled a combined $3.7 million to Mercatus in 2007 and 2008. The Wall Street Journal called the Mercatus Center “the most important think tank you’ve never heard of.”
• In June 2010, McArdle married fellow Koch activist Peter Suderman. Suderman spent much of his adult career on the Koch payroll, rotating through positions at America’s Future Foundation, Competitive Enterprise Institute, FreedomWorks, as well as the Moonie-owned The Washington Times. Suderman is currently a senior editor at Reason magazine.
• In June 2009, McArdle served as moderator at a Cato Institute’s healthcare reform conference. The title of McArdle’s panel was: “Should Congress Mandate Coverage?”
• In Spring of 2009, McArdle served as a judge for a Koch-funded blogger contest held to identify “young conservative and libertarian talent who wish to pursue careers as journalists and writers.” The winner received a $10,000 prize. Other judges included Cato/Reason’s Radley Balko, Jonah Goldberg, and libertarian economist Jonathan H. Adler.
• In January 2009, McArdle was a speaker at an America’s Future Foundation (AFF) event that featured “young libertarians and conservatives who have taken a leadership role in . . . re-branding the Republican party.” AFF is a libertarian organization that exists to “identify and develop the next generation of conservative and libertarian leaders.” It has close ties to the Koch-funded think-tank network, including Mercatus, ALEC and Institute for Humane Studies.
• In September 2008, McArdle took part in a panel discussion at AFF about “who should libertarians and conservatives support.”
• That same month, McArdle was a featured speaker at an anti-regulation event hosted by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her talk focused on how “government regulation actually contributed” to the financial meltdown.
• In March 2007, McArdle partied at Reason magazine’s “Happy Hour” with David Weigel, Radley Balko, as well as The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund.
• In the mid-2000s, McArdle received journalism training from the right-wing Institute for Humane Studies, headed by Charles Koch since the 1960s. According to the IHS, its journalism program “places talented writers and communicators—who support individual liberty, free markets, and peace—at media companies and non-profit newsrooms” and offers “mentoring and job placement assistance.” The program currently includes a $3,200 stipend, as well as travel allowance.

Yasha Levine is co-founder of the S.H.A.M.E. Project and author of The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell.

Click the cover, buy the book!

S.H.A.M.E. just published a brand new shill profile. Its latest subject: Megan McArdle, who was just hired on this September as Newsweek/The Daily Beast’s “special correspondent on economics, business and public policy.” In case you’re wondering, yes, that’s her in the image above, beaming with joy as Charles Koch’s party clown-for-hire at the 50th anniversary bash of Koch’s flagship libertarian think-tank, the Institute for Humane Studies. But more on that later. . .

McArdle should be very familiar to eXiled readers. Many of you probably first learned of McArdle’s existence more than three years ago, when she led a smear campaign from her perch at the Atlantic to discredit the first media investigative piece exposing the Tea Party as an Astroturf campaign funded by the Kochs and FreedomWorks, written by eXiled editors Mark Ames and Yasha Levine and published in Playboy in February, 2009. That’s when we first got to know the McArdle name too, and we were wondering then why someone who called herself a “journalist” would work so hard to discredit other journalists’ investigative work while defending powerful rightwing oligarchs, rather than the other way around. The S.H.A.M.E. profile on Megan McArdle clears up the air on McArdle’s long, deep undisclosed ties to the Koch brothers’ libertarian influence-peddling machine, and to the GOP activist community. Read the profile on the S.H.A.M.E. site or check it out below—we’re sure Mrs. McArdle will appreciate it if you do.

And remember, we can’t keep exposing corrupt media figures and outing covert propagandists without ongoing support from readers like you. Do your part, don’t be a tightwad, contribute your part to SHAME using PayPal or WePay and help us Shame the Hacks!

—YL & MA

Megan McArdle

Special correspondent on economics, business and public policy; Newsweek/The Daily Beast

Megan McArdle is a Koch-trained conservative activist working as a business journalist and pundit. She earned her MBA from the University of Chicago, received journalism training at the Kochs’ flagship libertarian think-tank, the Institute for Humane Studies, and has used her position at The Atlantic and, most recently, Newsweek/The Daily Beast, to run cover for and promote Koch interests and the Republican Party agenda. In early 2009, a GOP outfit backed by the Kochs hailed McArdle for her “leadership role in … re-branding the Republican party.” McArdle continues to conceal the extent of her deeply conflicted relationships with the Koch influence-peddling machine.

The recovered history of Megan McArdle

• Megan McArdle built her career on bashing public servants and government, but her father’s taxpayer-subsidized work in government and as a government lobbyist funded her upbringing as a “child of privilege” as she described herself. McArdle’s father, Francis McArdle, was a career public servant in the New York City administration who took the revolving door to the private sector as chief lobbyist for the General Contractor’s Association of New York, where her father represented private contractors “primarily engaged in construction of public buildings and plants.” In 1987, the head of the New York state Organized Crime Task Force accused Francis McArdle’s clients of pervasive corruption, bribery, racketeering and union-busting. Thanks to New York’s lucrative public construction projects, Megan was able to attend Riverdale Country School, the most expensive prep school in America, according to Time magazine. Today, annual tuition at Riverdale runs over $40,000.
• In the early-mid 1990s, McArdle attended the University of Pennsylvania. She converted from “ultraliberal to libertarian” in her junior year, after working as a canvasser and field manager for Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Groups, which she called “the most deceptive, evil place I’ve ever worked.” [ 1 ]
• In 2001, after her job offer in management consulting was “rescinded”, McArdle was given a day job in the construction industry, which her father was lobbying for at the time, and started blogging free-market Republican propaganda under the Ayn Rand-inspired pseudonym “Jane Galt.” McArdle claimed she did not use her real name for fear of being persecuted for her libertarian views: “I lived in the Upper West Side so I couldn’t discuss these things with anyone. I would just stew.” Her first blog post to go viral in the conservative blog network argued for scrapping corporate taxes. [ 2 ]
• In 2002, McArdle applied for a job in the Foreign Service but was rejected, which she blamed on asthma. “Apparently, they don’t want a foreign service full of people who are, like, ‘Well, I can only go to Paris,’” she told the Koch-funded AFF newsletter, Doublethink.
• In 2003, The Economist hired McArdle as a blogger. On the eve of the Iraq invasion, McArdle gleefully advocated the use of violence to suppress antiwar demonstrations, writing: “I’m too busy laughing. And I think some in New York are going to laugh even harder when they try to unleash some civil disobedience, Lenin style, and some New Yorker who understands the horrors of war all too well picks up a two-by-four and teaches them how very effective violence can be when it’s applied in a firm, pre-emptive manner.”
• McArdle received journalism training from the right-wing Institute for Humane Studies, headed by Charles Koch since the 1960s. According to the IHS, its journalism program “places talented writers and communicators—who support individual liberty, free markets, and peace—at media companies and non-profit newsrooms” and offers “mentoring and job placement assistance.” The program currently includes a $3,200 stipend, as well as travel allowance.
• In 2011, McArdle returned to her Koch alma mater as a guest lecturer and instructor at the Institute for Humane Studies’ “Journalism & the Free Society” summer internship program. The program tackled such topics as “Is an ‘objective’ press possible — or even desirable?” Other faculty members joining McArdle that year included Radley Balko, then-editor at the Kochs’ Reason magazine
• In a sign of just how close and trusted McArdle is to the Kochs, in October 2011, she was chosen to emcee Charles Koch’s 50th Anniversary gala celebration of his flagship libertarian think-tank, the Institute for Humane Studies, featuring Charles Koch as the keynote speaker and guest of honor. McArdle and Koch were joined by hundreds of leading GOP donors and activists. An IHS newsletter wrote of her performance: “Emcee Megan McArdle wove a humorous narrative through the program.” The IHS attempted to hide McArdle’s involvement, scrubbing her name from the dinner announcement page. (See side bar for more info on the gala event.)
• In 2006, McArdle published an article in Reason, a magazine controlled by the Kochs since the 1970′s, headlined, “The Virtue of Riches: How Wealth Makes Us More Moral“. McArdle’s article argued that wealth makes people “more tolerant of minorities, more welcoming to immigrants, more solicitous of their fellow citizens, more supportive of democratic institutions, and just plain better specimens of humanity.” In fact, studies show that the wealthiest Americans are more likely to lie and steal, while the poor donate proportionally much more of their incomes to charity.
• In August 2007, The Atlantic hired McArdle as a business and economics blogger. Her first post, titled “Dont panic!” [sic], wrongly predicted that the liquidity shock that hit the financial system earlier that month was nothing to worry about: “Having a nasty market contraction does not mean that your economy automatically goes down the tubes.”
• In September 2008, as the financial markets collapsed, McArdle gave a talk at an anti-regulation event hosted by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University focusing on how “government regulation actually contributed” to the financial meltdown. [ 3 ]
• That same month, in September 2008, McArdle transformed her blog at the The Atlantic into a feverish Wall Street crisis-management propaganda outlet. She argued that bankers were largely innocent, blamed government regulators and homeowners for tanking the economy, and mocked news of a criminal investigation into Wall Street crimes, writing, “For what, I have no idea.” McArdle also bizarrely claimed that bankers were victims of the real estate bubble, while blaming borrowers for being greedy profiteers: “You know who made most of the money on the subprime bubble? Anyone who bought a house in the last ten years. Yes, that’s right, you, with your low fixed interest rate on a reasonably sized house. You’re the profiteer who laughed all the way to the bank.” The truth is that rampant fraud and predatory lending had decimated homeowner net-worth, leaving people substantially poorer and more in debt than they had been in decades.
• McArdle’s position on financial regulations was in perfect sync with Koch Industries. The company is a major player in financial markets and emerged as one of the most powerful forces lobbying against financial reform following the crash, according to Bloomberg. Just in the last four months of 2008, Koch Industries spent over $7 million on lobbying efforts, much of that directed at fighting various financial regulation bills. Despite blatantly promoting the Kochs’ political and business agenda, McArdle failed to disclose her numerous Koch conflicts of interests.
• In 2008, McArdle argued that the recession had a silver lining for liberals and the 99%, claiming the economic downturn would reduce wealth inequality because it hurt the rich more than middle- and lower-income Americans: “Recessions are bad for everyone, but they’re worse for the wealthy.” In fact, wealth inequality has substantially worsened since then.
• McArdle proposed permanently ending inheritance taxes on the super-wealthy, citing her own experience as a “child of privilege” which gave her insight into how the super-rich never paid their taxes anyway, so why waste money forcing them to offshore their earnings. She also claimed that “estate tax may actually cost the treasury money.”
• In January 2009, McArdle was singled out for her “leadership role” by the Koch-connected America’s Future Foundation and took part in a panel of GOP strategists and top conservative activists pushing for “re-branding the Republican party.” McArdle’s strategy speech argued that so long as unemployment remained high and housing prices remained low in 2010, the Republicans would win the mid-term elections, and it would be easier to shift blame for the 2008 economic collapse onto Democrats and Big Government.
• McArdle spent the next two years criticizing proposals that threatened to improve voters’ lives before the 2010 elections. She pushed hard against health care reform, mortgage relief, financial consumer protection and unions.
• In February 2009, McArdle led a propaganda campaign in her Atlantic blog to discredit investigative journalism exposing the first Tea Party protest in February 2009 as an Astroturf campaign backed by the Koch brothers and FreedomWorks. McArdle wrote of the Kochs: “from what I know of them, astroturfing doesn’t really seem like their style. I’ve seen Koch in action at private events, and though I’ll respect the privacy, I’ll say that even in the company of other like-minded rich people, he displayed rather a mania for honest dealing.” The Tea Party was launched in February 2009 to oppose a White House bill providing mortgage relief to struggling homeowners, and thereby stabilize housing prices. In the “Republican rebranding” campaign, it was important to present the Tea Party as completely autonomous and grass-roots, rather than backed by the Kochs and FreedomWorks. Thanks in large part to McArdle’s efforts discrediting the exposé, the media spent the next year-and-a-half misrepresenting the Tea Party as an authentic grassroots uprising rather than a Koch-sponsored Astroturf campaign. [ 4 ] [ 5 ]
• A year before the Tea Party, in 2008, McArdle’s fiancé Peter Suderman worked on an identical Astroturf campaign for FreedomWorks called “AngryRenter.com”, a fake grassroots movement launched by FreedomWorks’ wealthy Republican donors designed to kill proposed legislation to provide mortgage relief to homeowners, which then-President Bush opposed. In May 2008, the Wall Street Journal exposed AngryRenter.com as a fake campaign funded by Republican donors and lobbyists: “Though it purports to be a spontaneous uprising, AngryRenter.com is actually a product of an inside-the-Beltway conservative advocacy organization led by Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, and publishing magnate Steve Forbes, a fellow Republican. It’s a fake grass-roots effort — what politicos call an AstroTurf campaign.” McArdle did not disclose that her fiancé worked on FreedomWorks’ AngryRenter.com Astroturf campaign when she attacked the 2009 exposé on the Tea Party as a FreedomWorks/Koch project.
• In May 2009, McArdle led a smear campaign against New York Times reporter Ed Andrews who published a book about how he went broke under the weight of mortgage and credit card debt. To “prove” that Andrews’ bankruptcy story was really his own fault, McArdle obtained his wife’s records showing she had declared bankruptcy in the past, and used that to paint the author as untrustworthy and profligate. In fact, his wife was forced to file for bankruptcy before she met Andrews, when she had been a single mother with an ex-husband who refused to pay court-ordered child support. However, the damage was done; numerous publications attacked Andrews’ credibility, effectively blunting the effect his book might have had on the public discourse on debt and bankruptcy.
• In June 2010, McArdle married fellow Koch activist Peter Suderman. Suderman spent much of his adult career on the Koch payroll, rotating through positions at America’s Future Foundation, Competitive Enterprise Institute, FreedomWorks, as well as the Moonie-owned The Washington Times. Suderman is currently a senior editor at Reason magazine.
• In 2010, McArdle wrote about how she bought a house in a low-income black neighborhood in Washington DC that was in the process of being gentrified, and claimed she’d met an anonymous black man on a bus who told McArdle he (and presumably many more) blacks fully approved of their neighborhoods being gentrified and pushed out by wealthier whites. McArdle quoted the anonymous pro-gentrification black man telling her: “‘You know, you may have heard us talking about you people, how we don’t want you here. A lot of people are saying you all are taking the city from us. Way I feel is, you don’t own a city.’ He paused and looked around the admittedly somewhat seedy street corner. ‘Besides, look what we did with it. We had it for forty years, and look what we did with it!’”
• In December 2010, McArdle attacked a New York Times investigation into the dangerous effects of formaldehyde, which causes cancer in humans. McArdle mocked those dangers: “It’s a chemical! Indeed it is. You’re surrounded by chemicals. Your couch is made of chemicals. So is the table. So is the hand-carded wool sweater you bought from the woman who raises her own sheep on organic feed. Distilled water is a chemical. Fine wine is full of them.” Once again, McArdle ran cover for Koch Industries’ business interests: According to an investigation into the Koch family by New Yorker reporter Jane Meyer, “Koch Industries has been lobbying to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying formaldehyde, which the company produces in great quantities, as a ‘known carcinogen’ in humans.” [ 6 ]

Wall of S.H.A.M.E.

“I don’t see any evidence offered that Koch money funds FreedomWorks, or any astroturfing organization . . . ”

“…from what I know of [the Kochs], astroturfing doesn’t really seem like their style.”

—From McArdle’s attack on an investigative article exposing the first Tea Party protest as a Koch/FreedomWorks Astroturf campaign; February 2009

“I’ve seen Koch [sic] in action at private events, and though I’ll respect the privacy [sic], I’ll say that even in the company of other like-minded rich people, [Charles Koch] displayed rather a mania for honest dealing.”

—McArdle on the Kochs’ moral character; February 2009

“My husband once had a fellowship with the Charles G. Koch Foundation, and works for Reason Magazine, which has been a recipient of funds from Koch charitable organizations.”

—McArdle issues a partial disclosure about her husband’s Koch ties; February 2012

“I also disagree with the notion that the concentration of wealth is a large political problem. … while the wealthy certainly have the ear of politicians, and also give a lot of money to those politicians, it’s not clear to me how tightly these things are linked on matters of broad national policy.”

—McArdle isn’t bothered by economic inequality and concentration of wealth; February 2008

“consumption inequality, not income inequality, is what matters. If the rich have access to broad classes of goods that the poor can’t have, I find this worrying. On the other hand, if the problem is that Bill Gates has a really awesome 80 inch flat panel television, while the poor have to be content with a 32 inch CRT, well, I can’t say my heartstrings are plucked very tight by this injustice.”

—On why she doesn’t believe in income inequality; July 2009

“Borrowers were not brought down by predatory lending. . . . Borrowers were brought down by a willingness to gamble on rising home prices–exactly the same thing that knocked out Lehman Brothers. At least Lehman Brothers had the excuse that ten years of rising prices had completely screwed up their default models.”

—McArdle on why homeowners were more to blame than bankers for tanking the economy; September 2008

To me, the unsung villain of the mortgage crisis is the 30-year fixed rate self-amortizing mortgage with no prepayment penalty…The 30 year fixed rate mortgage was ultimately at the heart of the Savings and Loan crisis.

—McArdle discovers another red herring to blame; July 2010

Am I suggesting that the Iraqis should pay for occupation expenses? Nope. We can afford it, and there’s something repellent about making impoverished Iraqis pay for a war foisted on them by an evil dictator. But most of that $2t, if it is any sort of a real number, will be stuff for Iraqis: roads, schools, hospitals, government buildings, power plants and sewers and all the good stuff that lets us live like citizens of the 21st century. That stuff should come out of Iraqi oil revenues.

—McArdle belittling Iraq war critics Eric Alterman as “nuts” and economist James Galbraith as “paranoiac” for (correctly) predicting the war would cost trillions; March 2003

“I love Cato. I love school choice. I read their stuff all the time, and I think a lot of it is great. I cite it and use it.”

—McArdle on the quality of Cato Institute’s scholarship; May 2008

“For some reason, marriage always and everywhere, in every culture we know about, is between a man and a woman; this seems to be an important feature of the institution. We should not go mucking around and changing this extremely important institution, because if we make a bad change, the institution will fall apart.

—McArdle argues against rushing to legalize gay marriage, which she described as “a bedrock of our society” and compared gay marriage rights to a government welfare program; April 2005

“One of the dividing lines between me and a lot of the commentators on the Wall Street crisis is that I am not outraged by their pay.”

—McArdle explains her position on exorbitant Wall Street bonuses; April 2009

McArdle on Science

“Here’s the thing: humans aren’t like bonobos. And do you know how I know that we are not like bonobos? Because we’re not like bonobos.”

—McArdle explains why she’s not convinced by evolutionary biology; August 2010

“I’ve basically outsourced my opinion on the science to people like Jonathan Adler, Ron Bailey, and Pat Michaels of Cato . . .”

—McArdle on where she gets her climate change information; February 2012. (Pat Michaels admitted on CNN he gets 40% of his funding from the petroleum industry.)

Undisclosed Koch Work

View full IHS anniversary dinner brochure (pdf file)

Megan McArdle frequently speaks at and moderates conferences and events hosted by Koch-funded organizations, including Cato Institute, Mercatus, the Institute of Humane Studies and many others. Here is a partial list (in reverse chronological order):

• In June 2012, McArdle spoke at a Koch-linked Students for Liberty “Women for Liberty” event held at the Institute for Humane Studies. McArdle was described as a “shining” role model that “young women in the movement should look up to.”
• In 2012, McArdle served as a judge for the Reason Foundation Bastiat Prize, awarded to libertarian media pundits.
• In 2011, McArdle took part in a Cato Institute panel called “U.S. Debt and the Millennials: Is Washington Creating a Lost Generation?” She described Social Security and Medicare as a “gigantic space alien that’s larger, like five times the size of earth.”
• In 2011, McArdle served as emcee at the Institute of Humane Studies’ 50th Anniversary gala event, introducing her patron Charles Koch onto the stage. View the full brochure of the IHS anniversary dinner (pdf file).
• In February 2011, McArdle was the keynote speaker at the annual International Students For Liberty Conference, where she delivered a talk titled “Building the Case for Liberty in the New Century.” The conference included a sneak preview of the film Atlas Shrugged.
• In 2011, McArdle was a guest lecturer at the Institute for Humane Studies’ “Journalism & the Free Society” summer seminar program. The program addressed such topics as “Is an “objective” press possible — or even desirable?”
• In 2010, was a moderator at a Mercatus conference about credit card regulation.
• In June 2009, McArdle served as moderator at Cato Institute’s healthcare reform conference. The title of McArdle’s panel was: “Should Congress Mandate Coverage?”
• In Spring of 2009, McArdle served as a judge for a Koch-funded blogger contest held to identify “young conservative and libertarian talent who wish to pursue careers as journalists and writers.” The winner received a $10,000 prize. Other judges included Cato/Reason’s Radley Balko, Jonah Goldberg, and libertarian economist Jonathan H. Adler…
• In January 2009, McArdle was a speaker at an America’s Future Foundation (AFF) event that featured “young libertarians and conservatives who have taken a leadership role in . . . re-branding the Republican party.” AFF is a libertarian organization that exists to “identify and develop the next generation of conservative and libertarian leaders.” It has close ties to the Koch-funded think-tank network, including Mercatus, ALEC and Institute for Humane Studies.
• In September 2008, McArdle took part in a panel discussion at AFF about “who should libertarians and conservatives support.”
• That same month, McArdle was a featured speaker at an anti-regulation event hosted by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her talk focused on how “government regulation actually contributed” to the financial meltdown.
• In March 2007, McArdle partied at Reason magazine’s “Happy Hour” with David Weigel, Radley Balko, as well as The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund.

Notes:

1. McArdle’s breaking point with the group came after she was assigned to canvass a poor suburb of Philadelphia, which she described as full of “welfare mothers, elderly people collecting the minimum Social Security payment, young men on disability.” [↩]
2. McArdle’s first blogging partner was another pseudonymous right-wing blogger, Andrew Hofer, a banker with Brown Brothers Harriman and graduate of Exeter, Yale and Columbia, who denounced Bush’s critics as “elitists.” [↩]
3. Koch Industries funneled a combined $3.7 million to Mercatus in 2007 and 2008. The Wall Street Journal called the Mercatus Center “the most important think tank you’ve never heard of.” [↩]
4. The investigate piece that McArdle smeared was authored by S.H.A.M.E founders Yasha Levine and Mark Ames. [↩]
5. The Tea Party was central to the Republican Party rebranding strategy that McArdle helped map out in January 2009. [↩]
6. The company has long been involved in funding front groups and fighting against laws that would classify it as a carcinogen. [↩]

This article was first published at The Daily Banter

Progressive intellectuals have been acting very bipolar towards labor lately, characterized by wild mood swings ranging from the “We’re sorry we abandoned labor, how could we!” sentiment during last year’s Wisconsin uprising against Koch waterboy Scott Walker, to the recent “labor is dead/it’s all labor’s fault” snarling after the recall vote against Gov. Walker failed.

It must be confusing and a bit daunting for those deep inside the labor movement, all these progressive mood swings. At the beginning of this month, New York Times’ columnist Joe Nocera wrote a column about having a “V-8 Moment” over the abandonment of labor unions, an abandonment that was so thorough and so complete that establishment liberals like Nocera forgot they’d ever abandoned labor in the first place!

The intellectual-left’s wild mood swings between unrequited love towards labor unions, and unrequited contempt, got me wondering how this abandonment of labor has manifested itself. While progressives and labor are arguing, sometimes viciously, over labor’s current sorry state, one thing progressives haven’t done is serious self-examination on how and where this abandonment of labor manifests itself, how it affects the very genetic makeup of liberal assumptions and major premises.

So I did a simple check: I went to the websites of three of the biggest names in liberal activist politics: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the ACLU. Checking their websites, I was surprised to find that not one of those three organizations lists labor as a major topic or issue that it covers.

Go to Amnesty International’s home page at www.amnesty.org. On the right side, under “Human Rights Information” you’ll see a pull-down menu: “by topic.” Does labor count as a “Human Rights topic” in Amnesty’s world? I counted 27 “topics” listed by Amnesty International, including “Abolish the death penalty”, “Indigenous Peoples”, “ “Children and Human Rights” and so on. Nowhere do they have “labor unions” despite the brutal, violent experience of labor unions both here and around the world. It’s not that Amnesty’s range isn’t broad: For example, among the 27 topics there are “Women’s rights”, “Stop Violence Against Women” and “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity”. There’s even a topic for “Business and Human Rights”—but nothing for labor.

Puzzled, I called Alex Edwards, Amnesty’s Media Relations guy in Washington DC, to ask him why labor unions didn’t rate important enough as a “topic” on Amnesty’s “list of topics.” Edwards was confused, claimed that he was totally unaware that there was a “list of topics” on Amnesty’s home page, and promised to get back to me. I haven’t heard back from him.

Amnesty’s “Topics”: Labor rights “disappeared”

Next, I checked Human Rights Watch. From my experience in Russia and Eastern Europe, I’ve learned to expect less from HRW than I would from Amnesty—my memory of HRW during the Kosovo conflict and in others is that, when called to, HRW acts as a propaganda arm for the liberal hawk war party. But HRW has also done a lot of important good work in areas not covered by the press, and they’re certainly better than most—so does Human Rights Watch consider labor unions an important human rights issue?

Checking Human Rights Watch’s homepage (www.hrw.org), there’s a tab listing “topics”—14 topics in all. Once again, labor is not listed among Human Rights Watch’s covered “topics.” Instead, Human Rights Watch lists everything from “Children’s Rights” to “Disability Rights” to “LGBT Rights” and “Women’s Rights”—along with “Terrorism”, “Counterterrorism” and, I shit you not, “Business”—as vital human rights topics. But not labor. “Business”—but not “Labor.”

On the advice of an old friend, Jan Frel, I read an excellent book on the human rights industry, James Peck’s Ideal Illusions, which helps answer why labor rights have been airbrushed out of the language of human rights. It wasn’t always this way: Economic rights and workplace rights were for decades at the very heart of the human rights movement. This was officially enshrined in 1948, when the United Nations adopted a 30-point “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” putting labor rights and economic equality rights alongside those we’re more familiar with today, like freedom of expression, due process, religion and so on. But somehow, labor rights and economic justice have been effectively amputated from the human rights agenda and forgotten about, in tandem with the American left’s abandonment of labor.

In Peck’s history, Human Rights Watch stands out as a force for rank neoliberalism, a major player in the extermination-by-omission of labor rights and economic equality rights from the language of human rights. How this happened sheds at least a bit more light on how the left abandoned labor.

Aryeh Neier, founder of Human Rights Watch and its executive director for 12 years, doesn’t hide his contempt for the idea of economic equality as one of the key human rights. Neier is so opposed to the idea of economic equality that he even equates the very idea of economic equality and justice with oppression—economic rights to him are a violation of human rights, rather than essential human rights, thereby completely inverting traditional left thinking.

Here’s what Neier wrote in his memoir, Taking Liberties:

“The concept of economic and social rights is profoundly undemocratic… Authoritarian power is probably a prerequisite for giving meaning to economic and social rights.”

Neier here is aping free-market libertarian mandarins like Friedrich von Hayek, or Hayek’s libertarian forefathers like William Graham Sumner, the robber baron mandarin and notorious laissez-faire Social Darwinist.  As with Neier, William Graham Sumner argued that liberty has an inverse relationship to economic equality; according to Sumner, the more economic equality, the less liberty; whereas the greater the inequality in a society, the more liberty its individuals enjoy. It’s the fundamental equation underlying all libertarian ideology and politics—a robber baron’s ideology at heart.

Neier goes further, explicitly rejecting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because nine of its 30 articles focus on economic rights as human rights. Neier objects to that, singling out for censure “such economic issues as a right to work; to social security; and to an adequate standard of living.” The human rights article on “a right to work” that Neier dismisses as “authoritarian” is Article 23, and it reads:

“Article 23 (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work. (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.”

It’s interesting that Neier rejects Article 23, the article on labor, which he mislabels as “a right to work”, because back in the 1970s, when Neier was executive director of the ACLU, he supported big business’s “Right To Work” anti-labor laws, against the rest of the left and the ACLU, which at the time still supported labor rights as civil rights. The so-called “Right To Work” laws are grossly misnamed—they’re really laws designed to bust unions by making it even more difficult for them to organize worker power against the overwhelming power of the corporation. It was corporate PR flaks hired to deceive and conceal the real purpose of those laws who came up with the false name “Right To Work” laws. Fred Koch, father of Charles and David Koch and one of the founders of the John Birch Society, got his start in rightwing politics as a leader of the “Right To Work” movement in Kansas in the mid-1950s.

Less than twenty years after Fred Koch fought to destroy labor rights through “Right To Work” laws, the executive director of the ACLU, Aryeh Neier—the same Aryeh Neier who later led Human Rights Watch— colluded with William Buckley to push the ACLU rightward against labor by getting the ACLU to represent big business and “Right To Work” laws, under the guise of “protecting free speech”—the same bullshit pretense always used by lawyers and advocates to help big business crush labor and democracy. This “free speech” pretense is the basis on which the ACLU currently supports the Citizens United decision, which effectively legalized the transformation of America into an oligarchy.

I found an article from 1971 written by William Buckley in which the National Review founder praises Neier for working with him to turn the ACLU against labor: “I invited the ACLU to practice consistency by associating itself with a lawsuit which would prove unpopular among its labor union supporters,” Buckley wrote. “The executive director, Aryeh Neier, has replied, rather straightforwardly, I think. He says, ‘for many years, it has been the ACLU’s policy that the union shop does not, by itself, violate civil liberties. I have felt for some time that we should review this policy and I will use your request to initiate reconsideration,’ going on to say that it will take a while to canvass the directors.”

New Right “libertarian” William Buckley teams up with ACLU’s Neier to destroy labor

A few years later, Buckley boasted of his first early success in turning the ACLU against labor, citing not just his ally Aryeh Neier, but also another well-known name in the so-called “left,” Nat Hentoff. Buckley wrote in 1973:

“Meanwhile, Mr. Nat Hentoff, a left-winger of undiluted loyalty to the first amendment, has urged his very important constituency to side with me and with Evans [M. Stanton Evans, an early libertarian and longtime defender of Joseph McCarthy] and has attempted to persuade the American Civil Liberties Union to file a brief amicus curiae. He has almost singlehandedly persuaded the ACLU to change its historic opinion about union membership. The union shop, the ACLU now says belatedly, ought not to be required for people who are journalists.”

The lawsuit Buckley refers to, Buckley and Evans vs. AFTRA, was backed by the National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation, the legal arm of the notorious union-busting outfit of the same name. And “leftist” Nat Hentoff. People used to think Hentoff was a leftist—and he seemed like one to de-politicized Baby Boomer imbeciles, who figured the Village Voicelabel on Hentoff’s columns meant whatever he said was leftist. Today, Hentoff is finally in his ideological home at the Cato Institute, the Koch brothers’ anti-labor, pro-oligarchy libertarian think-tank. Despite the Cato Institute’s tireless efforts to undermine democracy and labor, many progressives today consider Cato as “left” or “progressive”—a perversion only possible in today’s mutant left, stripped of its historical relationship to labor and economic justice.

The ACLU under Aryeh Neier also allied with another Buckley in another key decision that hurt labor and democracy and helped the oligarchy: Buckley v Valeo in 1976. Neier was the ACLU head at the time that the ACLU sided with William Buckley’s brother, James Buckley, in a lawsuit to open up the money floodgates into American politics. Most people don’t know Neier’s role in moving the ACLU against labor and against egalitarianism—instead, he did a lot of cheap grandstanding on behalf of Nazi marchers in Skokie. That’s the sort of pseudo-politics and pseudo-bravery that, stripped of economic politics and labor politics, results in the pseudo-left of today, a left absorbed by “identity politics” at the expense of labor, egalitarianism and socio-economic justice.

And that brings me to the ACLU today—the most depressing part of this story. I had an inkling that the ACLU had abandoned labor before my simple exercise check of their website. Mike Elk has shared with me some of his research into this subject. And it’s well known that the ACLU vigorously supported the disastrous Citizens United decision; the ACLU also took $20 million dollars from the Koch brothers, whose libertarian outfits have played a major role in making Citizens United a reality. Supposedly that money was meant to “fight the Patriot Act”—which is odd, considering that the director of the Koch brothers’ Center for Constitutional Studies at Cato and Vice President for Legal Affairs at Cato, Roger Pilon, explicitly supported the Patriot Act from 2002 through 2008, and that the Kochs’ Cato Institute hired John Yoo to serve on their editorial advisory board for the Cato Supreme Court Review. One should be skeptical when it comes to Koch “donations” sold to the public as charity work in the service of human rights.

Maybe there’s no connection there whatsoever between the Kochs’ $20 million gift to the ACLU, and the ACLU’s advocacy for the Kochs’ pet political issue, Citizens United, which transferred greater power from democracy and into the hands of billionaire oligarchs like the Kochs. Maybe it’s all a coincidence, I don’t know. But we do know that there is precedent for the ACLU taking money from corporations, advocating their cause under the guise of “protecting free speech” and hiding the conflict of interest from the public in order to make their defense seem more convincing.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ACLU vigorously defended the interests of the tobacco lobby under the guise of protecting their “first amendment rights”—and they did it for payments in-kind. Leaked tobacco documents in the 1990s exposed the ACLU working out explicit deals with the tobacco industry to take their money in exchange for advocating their interests in public, without disclosing that gross conflict of interest and violation of the public trust. The documents and memos revealed that the hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to the ACLU by the tobacco companies were payments in kind to for the ACLU’s defense of Big Tobacco, a relationship that both parties tried to hide in order to confuse the public into believing that the ACLU’s arguments for tobacco were motivated by purely altruistic constitutional arguments, rather than sleazy under-the-table cash payments. The ACLU is, after all, a trusted institution among progressives—that made them the ideal “Third Party Advocate” in PR terms for the tobacco industry’s interests.

Yessiree, it’s all about protecting our Constitutional liberties!

One of the best accounts of the ACLU’s sleazy relationship with big tobacco comes from former Washington Post investigative reporter Morton Mintz, in his piece, “The ACLU and the Tobacco Companies,” published in Harvard University’s Nieman Reports. Mintz reported how the ACLU laundered the tobacco lobby’s money as supposedly charity money to fight for workplace rights. This abuse of public trust so outraged former ACLU legal director, Melvin Wulf, that he publicly denounced the ACLU’s rationalization as a “sham” — the ACLU worked with tobacco to fight against second-hand smoke laws, the very opposite of “workplace rights”:

“The justification that the money is used to support workplace rights is a sham. There is no constitutional right to pollute the atmosphere and threaten the health of others. The revelations…support the conclusion that the ACLU’s mission is being corrupted by the attraction of easy money from an industry whose ethical values are themselves notoriously corrupt and which is responsible for the death annually of 350,000 to 400,000 persons in the U.S. alone.”

So it should come as no surprise that on the ACLU’s website, on the page marked “Key Issues”— labor does not appear. Not among the 14 categories of ACLU “Key Issues” — which include “HIV/AIDS”, “LGBT Rights”, “Technology and Liberty” and “Women’s Rights”. Not even among the 90 sub-categories of “Key Issues” is there a single mention of “labor rights.”

Everything under the civil liberties sun but labor rights and economic/social equality are named as ACLU “key issues.” Among the 90 sub-categories: “Marijuana Law Reform”, “Flag Desecration”, “LGBT Parenting”, “Medical Care in Prison” and “Mental Care In Prison” [separate sub-categories], “Biological Technologies”, “Internet Privacy”, and “Sex Education.” All of these certainly qualify as key issues to progressives; but the list of categories, 114 in all, without a single mention of labor unions, let alone economic equality or even the very word “equality”—provides a grim and shameful picture of a left stripped of labor, stripped of economic egalitarianism. It is not a left at all: It is, alas, libertarianism. The left was born of labor struggles and the fight against oligarchy and for egalitarianism, economic justice and equality. Now there isn’t even a memory of that.

Stunned by the fact that the ACLU didn’t even include “labor” or “equality” among the 114 “key topics” listed, I called and then wrote to the ACLU asking for comment.

Here is the response I received from Molly Kaplan, the media relations liaison at the American Civil Liberties Union:

Hi Mark,

Labor rights are certainly a key issue for the ACLU; it is folded into our work for free speech, immigrants’ rights and women’s rights. If you look into the pages for those issues, you will find that labor rights have a presence. Let us know if we can be of any further assistance.

Cheers,

Molly

Well, at least someone has labor rights.

Would you like to know more? Read Mark Ames exposé “Debunking Cato Institute Myths: GOP Bad Ideas Mill, Home to John Yoo and Rupert Murdoch“. Also read “The Oligarchy’s Rule Of Law”.

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

Oklahoma oligarch Aubrey McClendon with his niece-in-law, swimsuit model Kate Upton

This article was first published in the Daily Banter

At the end of the 1990s, after the total collapse of the mass-privatization experiment in Boris Yeltin’s Russia, some of the more earnest free-market proselytizers tried making sense of it all. The unprecedented collapse of Russia’s economy and its capital markets, the wholesale looting, the quiet extermination of millions of Russians from the shock and destitution (Russian male life expectancy plummeted from 68 years to 56 years)—the terrible consequences of imposing radical libertarian free-market ideas on an alien culture—turned out worse than any worst-case-scenario imagined by the free-market true-believers.

Of all the disastrous results of that experiment, what troubled many Western free-market true-believers most wasn’t so much the mass poverty and population collapse, but rather, the way things turned out so badly in Russia’s newly-privatized companies and industries. That was the one thing that was supposed to go right. According to the operative theory—developed by the founding fathers of libertarianism/neoliberalism, Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman and the rest—a privately-owned company will always outperform a state-run company because private ownership and the profit-motive incentivize the owners to make their companies stronger, more efficient, more competitive, and so on. The theory promises that everyone benefits except for the bad old state and the lazy.

That was the dominant libertarian theory framing the whole “shock doctrine” privatization experiment in Russia and elsewhere. In reality, as everyone was forced to admit by 1999, Russia’s privatized companies were stripped and plundered as fast as their new private owners could loot them, leaving millions of workers without salaries, and most of Russia’s industry in far worse shape than the Communists left it.

If only they had “rule of law” the libertarian experiment would’ve turned out so much better!

Most of the free-market proselytizers—ranging from Clinton neoliberal Michael McFaul (currently Obama’s ambassador to Moscow) to libertarian Pinochet fanboy Andrei Illarionov (currently with the Cato Institute)– blamed everything but free-market experiments for Russia’s collapse.

But some of the more earnest believers whose libertarian faith was shaken by what happened to Corporate Russia needed something more sophisticated than a crude historical whitewash.

Lucky for them, Milton Friedman provided the answer to a Cato Institute interviewer: Russia lacked “rule of law”—another neoliberal/libertarian catchphrase that went mainstream in the late 80s. Without “rule of law,” Friedman and the rest of the free-market faithful argued, privatization was bound to fail.  Here’s Friedman’s answer in the Cato Institute’s 2002 Economic Freedom of the World Report:

CATO: If we reflect upon the fall of communism and the transition from the centrally planned economy to a market economy, what have we learned in the last decade of the importance of economic freedom and other institutions that may be necessary to support economic freedom?

MILTON FRIEDMAN: We have learned about the importance of private property and the rule of law as a basis for economic freedom. Just after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, I used to be asked a lot: “What do these ex-communist states have to do in order to become market economies?” And I used to say: “You can describe that in three words: privatize, privatize, privatize.” But, I was wrong. That wasn’t enough. The example of Russia shows that. Russia privatized but in a way that created private monopolies-private centralized economic controls that replaced government’s centralized controls. It turns out that the rule of law is probably more basic than privatization. Privatization is meaningless if you don’t have the rule of law. What does it mean to privatize if you do not have security of property, if you can’t use your property as you want to?

Others expanded on Friedman’s rationalization, arguing that without this “rule of law” to protect their private property, the new private owners of Russia’s industries were incentivized to plunder their companies as quickly as possible for fear that the state would steal their companies back. Of course, all this rationalizing was undermined by fact that Russia’s oligarchs stole their companies in the first place, and thieves do tend to steal what they’ve stolen. But never mind—the libertarian ideology was salvaged, as Russia’s privatization experiment was declared “not a real free-market” without Friedrich Hayek’s “rule of law” in place.

The Kochs’ Americans For Prosperity also has a rule-of-law fetish

The reason I’m bringing this up now is because over the past month, one of America’s most rapacious oligarchs, Aubrey McClendon, was exposed by Reuters for plundering Chesapeake Energy, the second-largest natural gas producer in the country after Exxon-Mobil. McClendon, co-founder, CEO and until a few weeks ago Chairman of Chesapeake, was discovered running a hedge fund inside of Chesapeake, personally profiting on the side from large trading positions that his public company Chesapeake took in the gas and oil markets.

Reuters also discovered that McClendon took small personal stakes in natural gas wells bought by Chesapeake, then borrowed against the wells’ reserves from the same banks that Chesapeake borrowed from—basically, the banks kicked back sweet lending deals to McClendon on the side as McClendon arranged less-than-sweet loans to his publicly-owned company, Chesapeake, kicking profits from Chesapeake’s shareholders and employees’ pockets into the banks and into Aubrey’s accounts.

The loser in all this, as always: Employees, retirees, and shareholders. As Reuters reported, Chespeake is one of a small handful of companies whose employee 401k retirement packages consist mostly of Chesapeake stock, and the company requires employees to hold on to their stock for the maximum amount of time allowed by law:

Thousands of Chesapeake workers have retirement portfolios that are heavily invested in Chesapeake stock, which has declined sharply following revelations about Chief Executive Aubrey K. McClendon’s business dealings.

But while retail and institutional investors have sold the stock, employees don’t always have that option.

It’s not the first time McClendon has been caught plundering Chesapeake at the expense of shareholders, pension fund investors and employees: In 2008, McClendon bet and lost about $2 billion worth of Chesapeake Energy stock he owned—94% of Aubrey’s personal stake in Chesapeake– on a margin call when natural gas prices collapsed. Aubrey bet that natural gas prices would continue soaring, you see.

But like his peers in the oligarchy class, Aubrey’s loss became everyone but Aubrey’s loss: He was awarded a “CEO bailout” by his board of directors, who honored Aubrey with a $75 million “bonus” to bring his total pay in 2008 to $112 million, making Aubrey McClendon the highest-paid CEO in Corporate America that year. Even though Chesapeake’s earnings dropped in half, and its stock fell 60%, wiping out up to $33 billion in shareholder wealth.

Now, we’re learning, Aubrey was profiting in other ways off of Chesapeake that same year.

There is so much more to hate about Aubrey McClendon than this—the millions McClendon poured into Gary Bauer’s gay-bashing outfit “Americans United To Preserve Marriage” and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the role McClendon and his Whirlpool heiress wife played in stealing waterfront land from Benton Harbor, an African-American slum and the poorest city in Michigan, in order to expand an exclusive golf course country club for residents of St. Josephs, where McClendon owns several plots of land. McClendon’s wife, Katie, is from St. Joseph’s; so is Katie’s cousin, Fred Upton, the Republican Congressman from St. Joseph’s. Aubrey and his wife are what pass for royalty (sans noblesse oblige) these days: Katie from the Whirpool fortune, Aubrey an heir to the Kerr-McGee fortune. (If you’ve seen the movie Silkwood, you might remember Kerr-McGee as the company that iced the labor union activist played by Meryl Streep.)

This is just one of many stories about how publicly-traded companies have been and can be transformed into elaborate schemes to loot and steal from the public and enrich a tiny handful of oligarchs. We saw this in the 1980s when Reagan deregulated the Savings & Loans, which were quickly transformed into a means of looting, fraud and plunder; we saw it in the 2000s, after the de-regulation of the financial sector.

The problem goes much deeper than Milton Friedman’s “rule of law” fetish. “Rule of law” is just another red herring diversion to provide cover for continued oligarchy plunder, failure and barbarism. The problem is systemic, and more importantly, ideological. We still operate under the same neoliberal/libertarian major premises we inherited from the Hayek-Mises-Friedman era, an ideology that considers notions like “the public good” to be quaint delusions at best—as opposed to today’s still-dominant, still-standing foundational ideology, which says that freedom equals the ruthless pursuit of individual self-interest, the unlimited acquisition of private property and wealth, framed within a cold, dystopian “rule of law.”

That is where the problem starts. That is why, every week, I could tell another story about another Aubrey McClendon or Dick Parsons, and it will never end until the ideology that enables them is buried.

Would you like to know more? Read previous “Class Warfare” columns by Mark Ames including “Failing Up With Citigroup’s Dick Parsons” and “The One-Percent’s Doctrine For The Rest Of Us: We Are Not Human Beings, But Livestock Whose Meat They Extract As ‘Rent’”.

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

The Murdoch monkeys didn’t like me messing up their corporate Astroturf campaign, but since they couldn’t find fault with my reporting, they fell back on the old hack’s smear by labeling my article “conspiracy theorist.” Lobbyist-turned-Murdoch-columnist Christian Kerr wrote, in a feature article titled “The pernicious effect of conspiracy theories”:

The ABC’s The Drum website published a 1300-word dissertation hinting at dark links between the rally organisers and US industrialists David and Charles Koch, the alleged bankrollers of the Tea Party movement.

Christian Kerr thinks: “From sleazy lobbyist to Murdoch propagandist, I’ve come a long way!”

Kerr, a Murdoch monkey who apparently still refuses to believe the Koch brothers bankrolled the Tea Party (despite the Koch brothers’ own proud boasts admitting as much), went crazy with his conspiracy-theory smears, lumping myself and the environmental movement together with Holocaust-denier conspiracists like David Icke:

British journalist and author David Aaronovitch warns of a relativism in debate magnified by the web. In his book, Voodoo Histories, a debunking of conspiracy theories, he offers the bleak assessment: “if all narratives are relative, we are lost”.

Relativism, Aaronovitch reminds us, “doesn’t care to distinguish between the scholarly and the slapdash, the committed researcher and the careless loudmouth, the scrupulous and the demagogic”.

Next month another British author will visit Australia. David Icke, a former BBC sports presenter and spokesman for the Green Party, believes the human race was engineered and is secretly controlled by a band of reptilian shape-shifters from the Draco constellation. He has sold out all his four lectures, in Perth, Melbourne, the Gold Coast and Sydney, the venue for which, in a clear sign of the relativism Aaronovitch warns of, has been kindly provided by the University of NSW.

Icke’s conspiracies may appear to be curious but harmless fantasy. Yet Jewish groups have been horrified to discover that new-age magazines available in most newsagents have carried advertising for the League of Rights publishing arm that still peddles older, darker conspiracies, such as the infamous anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

…Talk of “big tobacco”, “big pharma”, “big oil” and “big coal” stems from conspiracies, and yet has become part of the mainstream.

Writing on The Conversation website, the ANU’s Will Grant and Rod Lamberts slammed “the mindless and counterproductive demonisation of Big Oil and Big Coal in tackling climate change”.

The industries, the pair explained, were not run by the equivalents of Monty Burns of The Simpsons, Maxwell Smart’s KAOS adversary, Siegfried, or the diabolic mastermind of three Bond books and films, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. “Those who got into the coal and oil industries did so for the simple goal of making a profit by providing us with the energy we need for the modern economy,” Grant and Lamberts wrote.

“They didn’t do it to be evil. They don’t want to destroy the world. They are not the nefarious oligarchs that so many would have you believe.”

This, it seems, is the libertarian Right’s latest line of attack here in Oz: pretending that the Koch Brothers are just another conspiratorial catch-all – another unreal-sounding bogeyman, like the Bavarian Illuminati, or the Trilateral Commission. [In the USA, Koch apologists at the Cato Institute, Reason magazine, and Koch whores like Megan McArdle and Slate’s David Weigel once argued that the Koch brothers were little more than conspiracy theory catch-alls too, but they've since dropped that propaganda strategy—our Aussie libertarians are a little slower than yours.] Not just the Koch brothers, in fact, but any possibility that Big Oil and Big Coal might have a vested interest in fighting environmental protections is, to a lobbyist-turned-Murdoch-monkey like Kerr, just a “pernicious” conspiracy theory. Move along, people – there’s nothing to see here.

Christian Kerr should get ready to eat his words, because his favourite libertarian think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, has spent the past three weeks hosting British conspiracy theorist (and climate change denier) James Delingpole and subsidising the Australia-wide book tour of his magnum opus, Killing the Earth to Save It – a sleazy pamphlet claiming that climate science is a dastardly plot, by the Club of Rome, to form a world government. Yes, the same think-tank that lists Christian Kerr as a member promotes the real thing in whacko conspiracy theory propaganda. Our lobbyist-turned-Murdoch monkey might want to get some toothpicks, I hear those crow pies leave a lot of small bones.

* * *

If last Monday’s issue of The Spectator is to be believed – which is an open question – then Delingpole’s tour has been a smashing success with the Right. He’s appeared on Andrew Bolt’s TV talk show, met with Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, visited five capital cities, spoken at the Royal Perth Yacht Club and stayed at an “exclusive safari camp” near Exmouth with single rooms valued at AUD $1028.00 a night. (They really look after you, those right-wing think tanks!)

Delingpole can’t help but gloat about how much the local Tories adore him:

My first Sydney gig, as we rock stars call them (hosted by the Centre for Independent Studies), went down a storm, helped hugely by two hecklers. (I do love a bit of argy bargy.) Someone said, apparently, that I was the second-best thing they’d heard after P.J. O’Rourke, which is good enough for me. [The Spectator Australia, 5 May, 2012]

And, as I noted when Mark Steyn was touring Australia, conservatism in this country has become a Gogolian comedy scenario, with a pack of corrupt, provincial squires falling over each other to please the first huckster who rides into town: “Please, Mr. Delingpole, tell us all about London… It must be very exciting, going to all those Heartland Institute conferences… Would you like a cigar, Mr. Delingpole? Some scotch? Ah! Here come my daughters! Go on, take your pick!”

Quality doesn’t matter here. Think-tank culture will make VIPs out of the rankest puffballs, the nuttiest tin-foil-hatters, as long as they walk in lockstep.

James Delingpole: A real-life Nathan Barley, and proud of it!

One of Delingpole’s sponsors has even asked him if he would consider moving to Australia. He weighs the pros and cons in his regular, British, Spectator column:

‘Ah but you’d miss the culture [in London],’ Aussies tell me. Well, maybe. Except that unlike, say, Barry Humphries or Clive James or my Oxford tutor (Tasmanian-born) Peter Conrad, I’ve spent my formative years so super-saturated with all that arty-farty-literary stuff I don’t have the craving to escape and broaden my mind that ambitious Australians have. It’s all in there, stored like the fat in a camel’s hump.

Charming. After everything his Aussie sponsors have done for him, he still can’t resist patronising them – and they only love him more for it. In fact, even as his hosts ply him with fine food and expensive hotels, Delingpole still finds things to bitch about. His “exclusive safari camp” might provide “canapés and… Bombay Sapphire gin and… five-star cuisine,” but it gets a thumbs-down from our “rock star” conspiracy theorist because the showers have a 20-litre-a-day water limit.

His biggest complaint, though, is this:

Who the hell is Jon Faine and what is his problem? Ever since our sticky encounter on his ABC Melbourne talk radio show I’ve had conservative Aussies coming up to pat me on the back for having stuck it to him good and proper. Really? Had I realised just how brusque and negative his line of questioning was going to be, I would have been much, much ruder. My policy in interviews is much the same as Israel’s in international diplomacy: be courteous to me and I’ll be lovely to you; step out of line and it’s mass retaliation time.

Oh, Jamie! It must hurt so much, having to deal with all these non-sycophants and their negative vibes. I can’t imagine how much it hurts – how much it hurts to be a precious little yuppie conspiracy theorist, to be so selectively bred for incest that the tiniest whiff of real debate fills your House-of-Usher nervous system with searing pain! (It’s a good thing Delingpole has those “conservative Aussies” around to pat him on the back and heal the wounds of his fragile self-esteem.)

* * *

But there’s something missing from The Spectator’s coverage of Delingpole’s “sell-out” book tour: we never hear much about the actual book, Killing the Earth to Save It (or Watermelons, as it’s titled in the US).

So I guess I’ll have to describe it.

Like all climate-change deniers, Delingpole faces a challenging problem: explaining why anyone would want to fabricate global warming – and take so much effort to maintain this “hoax.” Delingpole’s answer is to borrow a page from the John Birch Society playbook and claim it’s all a conspiracy by the Club of Rome to form a world government, “an eco-fascist tyranny so powerful and all-encompassing it makes Nazi Germany look like Mary Poppins’ nursery.”

The Club of Rome, says Delingpole, “is the Macavity the Mystery Cat of the global green movement. Its invisible paw prints are all over everything, but by the time you get to the scene of the crime, the sinister feline has vanished.”

Anyway, the conspiracy in Delingpole’s book goes like this:

1) In the 70s, the Club of Rome invented the “weasel concept of ‘sustainability’” as a ploy to make governments surrender their sovereignty to the “New World Order agenda” and submit to the misanthropic religion of Gaia worship.

2) The UN got in on the scheme after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, developing “a document known as Agenda 21,” which is a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” intended to strip local, state and national governments of their power and “[give] unelected bureaucrats from the UN the right to decide how much meat you eat, how much fuel you use, even how habitable your office is in the sweltering heat of high summer.”

This Agenda 21, Delingpole tells us, is “a little like returning after a long holiday to your local church. You discover that it has been decorated with pentacles and that the vicar is now wearing a cloak and preparing to sacrifice a goat where the altar used to be.”

This feverish metaphor continues for another paragraph:

“What’s going on?” you ask, in horror. “Well, it’s what we all agreed on,” says the vicar. “When did we agree to all this? No one asked me!” “We put a message on the notice board. We held consultation meetings for anyone who was interested. Did you not get a call from young Damien, on our steering committee? The general feeling was that Christian worship was too old-fashioned, patriarchal and Western for our younger members, and that Satanism was a more vibrant, diverse and inclusive way forward for the community.”

“But I want the old church back. I liked the old church!”

“I’d love to help but I’m afraid it’s out of my hands. You see, as a signatory of Agenda 666 this church is now statutorily committed to our new code of practice…”

Delingpole seems to have a curious obsession with the Number of the Beast. Earlier, attacking the UN’s 1987 Brundtland Report on sustainable development, he writes:

The idea that began a decade earlier as a twinkle in the eyes of [Club of Rome founders] Alexander King and Aurelio Peccei had finally been made flesh. Few were capable of spotting at this stage that this oh-so-nice-looking, bonnie, bouncing, gurgling babe had a birthmark on his scalp that read “666.”

Amber Alert! Someone, please give James Delingpole a shirt! Better yet, a straightjacket!

By now you might be wondering about Delingpole’s sources, and where he picked up all this Agenda 21 conspiracy stuff. Well, he tells you, right on page 174: “Probably the best analysis of the Club of Rome’s tangible effects on global environmental policy comes courtesy of a website called ‘The Green Agenda.’”

It seems Delingpole gets a lot of his information from that site, because two pages on, he cites its expert “analysis” once again:

Yes, Sustainable Development sounds like a good thing too – but that is only because we have been culturally programmed to think that way. We associate it with pleasant notions like wild flower meadows left to flourish and Icelandic waters teeming with cod (unlike the poor, overfished, never-to-be-restored Grand Banks), but in fact its underlying philosophy has much more to do with taxation, regulation and control.

As the Green Agenda website puts it:

It is an all-encompassing socialist scheme to combine social welfare programmes with government control of private business, socialised medicine, national zoning controls of private property and restructuring of school curriculum which serves to indoctrinate children into politically correct group think.

So what is this Green Agenda website which Delingpole cites as evidence? It’s a page maintained by an obscure Christian fundamentalist group in New Zealand calling themselves the “Gethsemane Olivet Fellowship.” Their main website, The Watchman’s Post, which is only a click away from the Green Agenda site, has this greeting for visitors: “WELCOME to this Christian/Messianic End Time Messenger!”

That’s right! End Time Messenger! It’s a website full of apocalyptic prophecies about One World Governments, the Antichrist, the coming “Magog War” and the Second Coming of Jesus. And it even has a little text box reading: “Significant Link: The Green Agenda – We strongly recommend that you make time to read our sister site for some vital information.”

So we have two sites; the Green Agenda webpage, which offers the “factual, SECULAR material” about the dastardly One World Government conspiracy, and The Watchman’s Post, which punctuates the same information with millennial ravings from the Book of Revelations:

WE NOW CONSIDER THE ISSUES OF THE ‘ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT’ OR: ‘GLOBAL GOVERNANCE’ FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE SCRIPTURES, THE HOLY BIBLE, AND WHAT ARE THE DANGERS FOR THIS WORLD AND FOR YOU.

The present reality is that influential individuals and groups since 1970 have been working very carefully to develop plans, TO UNITE THE WORLD, which are all based on totally anti-Creator God principles, in deliberate rebellion against the Most High God, Creator of Heaven and Earth!

They have chosen Environmental changes to use as a ‘whip’ to bring Individuals (especially teenagers) and Governments to do what they want!

[…]

The POWER BEHIND THIS GOAL of a single Government for the entire World – is a very real, EVIL, SPIRITUAL BEING: SATAN.

[…]

Satan’s LAST Plan – the biggest prize of all – is for his MAN to dominate the entire world and eliminate those ‘other people of God,’ God’s ‘treasured possession,’ chosen, called and redeemed ~ Gentile Christians!

Delingpole, it seems, lifted the “secular” version of this conspiracy from the Green Agenda website and put it straight into Chapter Eight of his book. He claims that Mikhail Gorbachev is “now involved with this conspiracy. Big time.” Gorbachev’s a villain, according to Delingpole, because he co-produced the Earth Charter (“yet another master plan for global, socialist eco-tyranny”) with former UN under-secretary general, Maurice Strong.

The original Earth Charter document, Delingpole writes, is “kept in a specially constructed ‘Ark of Hope,’ painted with panels representing the flora and fauna of the world ‘as seen through the images of the world’s traditional artists.’”

To Delingpole, this isn’t merely symbolic, but all part of “the New Age religion of the New World Order.”

Now here’s the same conspiracy theory, as it appears on Green Agenda’s non-“secular” sister site:

THE MODERN STRATEGY – THOSE PLANNING FOR A ‘ONE WORD [sic] GOVERNMENT’ ARE USING

The basic idea, (or excuse) being used by the ‘World Planners’, to build the platform for WORLD CONTROL, (without the God of Heaven) will be:
“DANGER TO PLANET EARTH”.

1. Concern for the environment has provided a useful strategy to bring the concept of world unity and control, into focus! It appears to be sensible and caring, but it has a sinister and sad hidden agenda. We strongly recommend you see our partner web site: http://www.green-agenda.com/index.html for a full description of these programmes. We give some background information below.

2. The beginnings of ‘concern’ for the future of the world.
It started with 2 books, the 2^nd published by The Club of Rome in 1971 called “Limits to Growth”. This is a sinister plan to limit the world’s population, which spells out population growth as the basis of future world disaster. Along with other causes of the world’s problems such as misuse of chemicals, and later environmental mismanagement, Christians, and Muslims were seen as responsible for most of the world’s problems, along with ‘over-population’.

3. More arguments added. Gradually many more concepts were developed and were initiated, which we haven’t room to explain. But a group of people like Mikhail Gorbochev [sic], through to Robert Muller, David Rockefeller, Sir James Lovelock and Al Gore have been active in developing all their sinister strategies, ‘to save the Planet’. [The Bible indicates it is all based on lies! 2 Thess 2: 9 - 12]
These strategies are already affecting rules and regulations of national and local governments worldwide and where you live!
It is called ‘Agenda 21.’

4. Main personalities involved in the planning.
One very key person was a Maurice Strong who worked for the UNO environment department. He was a mainly responsible for a much more significant world plan and endorsement of all the sinister plans for world control of every part of life in every part of the world that we ever knew were actually happening, though we know from the Bible about the End controlling Power that will come! Many organisations now work together to promote the plans for control of resources, and much more.

5. A ‘new’ religious dimension has been added as they preach: “it is a moral duty on individuals and Governments ‘To Save the Planet’.”
While the “Earth Charter” was being presented at the 1^st World Earth Summit in Sth [sic] America, Maurice Strong’s wife Hanna was leading a Satanic based ritual outside with a group of people to invoke success for the plans. Later an “Ark of Hope” was launched, with involvement of children and housing a special document called “Earth Charter” – a set of commandments, which as Gobachev [sic] said – “will replace the Judeo/ Christian 10 commandments and the Sermon on the Mount”. These plans and rules have been widely circulated, and adopted by individual regional powers in most countries. Example: 37 areas of N.Z. have signed up, under the guise of ‘Saving the Planet’ from “human infestation”. So already all aspects of commercial, civic, educational and residential life are being controlled according to these rules.
The ILLUMINARY CONSPIRACY site or Green-Agenda explains.

Yup, that’s where Delingpole got his information from – a schizophrenic Kiwi doomsday cult. (It’s enough to make you wonder if all those Antichrist jokes in his book are really meant to be jokes.)

But – you might ask – why would an artsy, Oxford-educated libertarian yuppie go around recycling batshit conspiracy theories from Christian fundamentalist websites? It’s simple – by smearing global warming as a “green religion,” you can bring together two right-wing groups that would ordinarily hate each other under one grand pro-corporate right-wing tent: Bible-bashing reactionary Christians, and “rational” atheist Penn & Teller libertarians. Just tell the Bible-bashers that environmentalists are trying to supplant Jesus and watch them chase the greenies like a pack of rabid dogs. As for libertarians, it’s the “religion” bit they hate. So, for a triangulation strategy, the “green religion” slur is perfect – it unites both sides of the right-wing coin, neither of which likes to think it has anything in common with the other.

Of course, Delingpole isn’t just a conspiracy theorist – he’s a self-aware, hipster conspiracy theorist, a tinfoil-hat version of Dave Eggers who won’t stop telling you how self-conscious he is of the fact that his conspiracy theories sound like conspiracy theories. Like, if he’s self-aware, it must mean he’s not really a conspiracy theorist, y’know?

See, there are certain suckers who really get taken in by that reverse psychology crap – people who’ll trust anyone who says “…but don’t trust me.” Delingpole knows this of course, and so (towards the end of a chapter titled “Welcome to the New World Order”) he treats us to a nauseous display of self-consciousness:

In his memoirs, [Club of Rome founder, Alexander King] confided somewhat chillingly: “My chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.”

[…]

You’ll find quotes like this repeated endlessly on the internet [sic], as often as not on conspiracy sites warning of the coming New World Order. This, of course, makes it much, much easier for their significance to be downplayed by green opinion-formers in the mainstream media: “Oh you don’t take that kind of thing seriously, do you? It’s just a bunch of 9/11 Truthers and Alex Jones nuts and right-wing fruitcakes, indulging in their c-r-azee conspiracy theories.”

This is supposed to disarm readers and leave everyone reassured that Delingpole hates conspiracy theorists, you know, as much as the next guy: “Hey, he realises Alex Jones is a wacko; I guess he’s not that loony after all!”

There’s a little problem, though. Delingpole is an Alex Jones nut – a simple YouTube search reveals that he has been a guest on Jones’s show on no less than FIFTEEN separate occasions! (And those were just the ones I could count from the first three pages of search results.)

Here are the links to a handful of James Delingpole’s many stimulating discussions with Mr.  Jones:

“Australian Private Property Rights Abolished: James Delingpole Reports” on TheAlexJonesChannel — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CML3JTrO7Ak

“James Delingpole: Gore’s UN Gaia Loving Cultist [sic] are More Dangerous Than Radical Muslims!” on TheAlexJonesChannel — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1iTGsMDvwU&feature=relmfu

“Global Warming: A Religion of Anti-Science – Journalist James Delingpole” on TheAlexJonesChannel — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDlhs45YkDU

“James Delingpole: UN Climate Summit – World Government Through the Backdoor” on TheAlexJonesChannel — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXWW1z6BX6g

Yes, “World Government Through the Backdoor” – I didn’t make that title up.

Funnily enough, you won’t find any mention of Alex Jones in the section of Delingpole’s website where he lists his various TV, radio and podcast appearances. It’s almost like he leads a double life.

In fact, our entire culture of right-wing think tanks – and think-tank-happy magazines like The Spectator – seems to lead a double life. By day, we have the Nonchalant Right, the Christian Kerrs and Speccie editorial writers who feign boredom at every new scandal (“Criminal phone hacking? How tiresome! This whole discussion fills me with ennui!”) the denialists who hold up the façade of a calm, level-headed, sceptical “centre-right” – pretending that pseudoscientists, conspiracy theorists, religious fundamentalists and Rand cultists are only “fringe elements” within the movement.  But after sunset, those calm, level-headed “centre-right”-wingers are more than happy to wine, dine, subsidise and canonise cranks like Delingpole.

When it comes to neocons and libertards, the fringe runs all the way to the core.

This article was originally published in The Nation.

It began as a fairly straight-forward story about a shareholder lawsuit: The Koch brothers, Charles and David, who together own 50 percent of the libertarian Cato Institute, filed suit to recover a 25 percent stake held by longtime chairman William Niskanen, who died last autumn and whose widow has yet to relinquish those shares.

Cato’s shareholder’s agreement is “pretty clear” according to legal writer Alison Frankel: shareholders cannot sell or transfer their shares without first offering them back to the Institute and then to the remaining Cato shareholders. But there’s one legal ambiguity: Cato’s shareholder agreement “doesn’t specifically address what happens when a shareholder dies.”

What started as a rather arcane legal dispute between the Koch brothers and their longtime lieutenant, Cato president Ed Crane, quickly transformed into a PR-manufactured Washington melodrama: The famed and revered (in some quarters) Cato Institute has turned against its Dr. Frankenstein, Charles Koch, attacking its maker with the full range of PR-weaponry that has served Cato effectively over these past four decades. The same pundits who only yesterday fell over themselves defending the billionaire Koch brothers as principled libertarians now denounce their benefactors as venal Republican Party warmongers out to crush the Cato Institute’s “nonpartisan” “independent” “scholarship” for the crime of being, yes, principled libertarians.

It would all be good for a laugh, if the spin hadn’t succeeded in conning the media and confusing the public, even roping in some well-meaning progressives like Common Cause, who defended Cato’s “independence.”

But in order for progressives and others to make an honest and practical assessment about the Cato Institute and its battle with the Kochs, we need to first set the record straight about some of the claims being spun.

Cato Claim #1: The Cato Institute was one of the earliest and most principled critics of the Bush Administration’s wars abroad and attacks on civil liberties at home (here and here).

Fact: The Cato Institute’s actual record during the Bush Administration years was anything but principled and far from heroic.

• John Yoo, author of the notorious “torture memo,” served on the Cato Editorial Board for Cato Supreme Court Review during the Bush presidency. At the same time, Yoo was writing the Bush administration’s legal justifications for waterboarding, Guantanamo, warrantless wiretapping and more. Yoo also contributed articles to Cato Supreme Court Review and a chapter to a Cato book titled The Rule of Law in the Wake of Clinton criticizing President Clinton’s “imperial presidency.”
• The “Cato Policy Report” attacked progressive critics of Bush’s War on Terror as “Terrorism’s Fellow Travelers“ in its November/December 2001 issue. Former Vice President of Research Brink Lindsey wrote, “Most of the America haters flushed out by September 11 are huddled on the left wing of the conventional political spectrum.”
• Another Cato executive, Ted Galen Carpenter, former VP for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies, enthusiastically supported Bush’s war on terror and called on Bush to invade Pakistan.
• The Cato Institute advised the 2002-04 Republican-dominated Congress to commence military strikes in Pakistan in its Cato Handbook for Congress arguing, “Ultimately, Afghanistan becomes less important as a place to conduct military operations in the war on terrorism and more important as a place from which to launch military operations. And those operations should be directed across the border into neighboring Pakistan.”
• Another Cato Institute executive, Roger Pilon, vigorously supported Bush’s attacks on civil liberties. Pilon, Cato’s VP for Legal Affairs and founding director of the Cato Institute’s “Center for Constitutional Studies,” supported expanded FBI wiretapping in 2002 and called on Congress to reauthorize the Patriot Act as late as 2008.
• While it’s true that compared to other pro-Republican think-tanks, Cato did have periods when it was critical of Bush’s wars and attacks on civil liberties, those attacks weren’t consistent and showed every sign of being subordinated to the Cato Institute’s political demands.  The most obvious example of this came in 2005, when Cato suddenly called a halt to its growing criticisms of Bush’s War on Terror and fired one of its most ardent anti-interventionists (another resigned), sparking a backlash from some prominent non-Cato libertarians like antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo, who wrote: “Now that the majority of Americans have turned against this war, the Cato bigwigs are lining up with the neoconservatives who want to ‘stay the course.’” In 2006, with Bush’s presidency in tatters, Cato re-started its criticism in earnest.

John Yoo, Cato Editorial Board member 2001-2007

Cato Claim #2: The Cato Institute is independent of the Republican Party establishment and often as much in opposition to the GOP as to the Democrats.

Fact: In reality, the Cato Institute has been one of the leading Republican Party policy and propaganda factories since at least the early 1990s.

• In 1995, the LATimes described the Cato Institute as the Republican revolution’s favorite hangout, “the hottest think tank in town. On any given day, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas might be visiting for lunch. Or Cato staffers might be plotting strategy with House Majority Leader Dick Armey, another Texan, and his staff. Cato’s constitutional law briefs cross the desks of conservative Supreme Court justices and their clerks.”
• In 2005, a Washington Post article observed, “Nowadays, Cato alumni are everywhere in the Bush administration.” Among Cato figures in the Bush Administration named in the article: Andrew Biggs, Derrick Max, Charles Blahous, Leanne Abdnor and Carolyn Weaver, who helped launch Cato’s war on Social Security back in 1979.
• President Bush’s high-priority Social Security privatization plan was all thanks to lobbying by Cato president Ed Crane and Cato executive José Piñera, a former Pinochet official who heads Cato’s Social Security privatization project.

Cato Institute McCarthyism: Cato calls leftist critics of Bush’s War on Terror “Terrorism’s Fellow Travelers”

Cato Claim #3: The Kochs are staging an unprecedented GOP takeover of the Cato Institute by staffing it with Republican Party operatives and backers (here and here).

Fact: The Cato Institute’s board of directors and staff have always been stacked with Republican Party supporters, donors and operatives.

• Rupert Murdoch was a Cato board member, serving at least through the early 2000s. When Murdoch first joined Cato’s board, Ed Crane hailed the News Corp chief as “a strong advocate of the free market and a committed civil libertarian.”
• So was Murdoch’s longtime US partner, John C. Malone of Liberty Media, whom Al Gore once reportedly calledthe Darth Vader of cable. Malone is a major GOP donor and the largest private landowner in the US.
• Stephen Moore, longtime Dick Armey sidekick and author of the 2004 hagiography Bullish on Bush: How George W. Bush’s Ownership Society Will Make America Stronger, was Director of Cato’s Fiscal Policy Studies and remains a Senior Fellow.
• Other major GOP sponsors on the Cato board before the Kochs’ recent “coup” include K. Tucker Andersen,Howard Rich (funder of the term-limits movement) and Ethelmae C. Humphreys, who along with her son has “doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates.”
• Republican operatives in Cato are numerous and include former Phil Gramm staffer and Bush HUD deputy assistant secretary Mark Calabria, director of Cato’s Financial Regulation Studies; and former Senate Republican Policy Committee analyst Michael Cannon, director of Cato’s health policy studies and adviser to Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott. Cannon’s “independent scholarship” includes his famous November 2008 Cato blog post: Blocking Obama’s Health Plan Is Key to the GOP’s Survival. That’s before Obama took office.

Cato Claim #4: Cato’s employees are “independent” scholars free from the corrupting influence of “special interests.”

Fact: The Cato Institute is one of the leading manufacturers of toxic corporate propaganda, cynically undermining science and scholarship to serve the interests of tobacco companies, oil and gas, chemicals, health insurance, financial industry and other Cato donors.

• Cato chairman Robert Levy, who today accuses the Kochs of turning Cato into “a mouthpiece of special interests,” once faithfully served the tobacco industry as a leading tobacco-death denialist. In his article, “Lies, Damn Lies & 400,000 Smoking-Related Deaths”, Levy claimed, “children do not die of tobacco-related diseases” and “there is no credible evidence that 400,000 deaths per year—or any number remotely close to 400,000—are caused by tobacco.” (In fact, tobacco use kills more than 5 million people a year worldwide.)
• Greenpeace labeled Cato a “Koch Industries climate denial front group” that is “focused on disputing the science behind global warming and questioning the rationale for taking action.” Among Cato’s anti-science propagandists:Patrick J. Michaels, called “a serial deleter of inconvenient facts” by ThinkProgress and Steven Milloy, a onetime Cato adjunct scholar on the payroll of Philip Morris, oil companies and others.
• Philip Morris listed Cato VP David Boaz as one of its “National Allies“ in a 2000 memo.
• In 2001, a British-American Tobacco executive sent a thank-you letter to Levy and the Cato Institute, noting: “I was also pleased to learn after our meeting that our subsidiary company, Brown & Williamson, provided the Cato Institute with funding in 2000.”

So there you have it: a brief look at the Cato Institute’s factual record, which reads nothing at all like the heroic fairytales spun by Cato and its allies about its principled opposition to the Bush Administration’s imperial presidency, or its opposition to the Republican Party, or whatever else Cato’s minions tell us to win our hearts rather than our minds.

In fact, it’s hard to know what, if anything, to believe about Cato—PR and spin are so ingrained in their thinking and their breathing, one wonders if Cato’s own flaks can tell the difference themselves between reality and spin. Lately, they seem to have a hard time keeping track of their numerous and rather careless flip-flops, particularly when it comes to how they characterize their longtime benefactors, the brothers Koch. Most of the same libertarians who attacked the Kochs as unprincipled GOP usurpers of the Cato Institute only yesterday defended the same Kochs as principled patrons of purist libertarian scholarship.

Last October, David Boaz, Ed Crane’s number two in Cato, defended the Koch brothers as principled libertarians under attack for “opposing a president who supports fiscal irresponsibility, the Patriot Act, the war on drugs, and secret wars.” Five months later, Boaz darkly warned that the very same Koch brothers posed a “direct threat to the independence, nonpartisanship and libertarianism of the Cato Institute.”

Slate’s David Weigel—a libertarian graduate of the Kochs’ Reason magazine and the Kochs’ Institute for Humane Studies—defended the Kochs last year during the Wisconsin protests against Scott Walker: “How did the Kochs become the villains of Madison?” Weigel asked. “They have, for decades, bankrolled libertarian think tanks and programs, and they help put on conferences where conservative ideas are spread. Among the ideas they end up spreading are drug legalization and opposition to the Patriot Act.” And last May, during the uproar over a donation by the Charles G. Koch Foundation—with strings attached—to Florida State University’s economics department, Weigel defended the billionaires by way of sneering: “The Koch pushback continues, as non-controversial donation after non-controversial donation is blown up into a controversy—a byproduct of the brothers’ new fame.”

Skip a few months, and the Koch brothers circa 2012 are suddenly, implausibly, the very antithesis of the Koch brothers circa-2011: “If the Kochs win control of his shares, and the Koch-skeptics bolt, a much-less-credible Cato Institute will never be so rude to the Republican Party.” Now, non-controversial donations are suddenly controversial—without explanation. Weigel never explains to his readers why owning 75 percent instead of 50 percent of Cato will turn the Koch brothers from last summer’s principled libertarians into this spring’s evil GOP neocons. His substitution of one unsupported message with its antithesis is confusing—to put it as kindly as possible.

Julian Sanchez is another Cato flip-flopper. Shortly after Jane Mayer’s article on the Kochs appeared in The New Yorker, Sanchez rushed to their defense: “as someone who’s directly or indirectly benefited from Koch largess for most of my adult life—the Koch Fellowship as a student; gigs at Koch-funded Reason and Cato—I’d expect folks to be justly skeptical of anything favorable I might write about them. …The idea that they’ve poured a hundred million and change into funding libertarian think tanks, advocacy groups, and educational programs over the years in order to line their own pockets or boost the corporate bottom line seems kind of bizarre.”

That was autumn 2010, when the Kochs were still dreamy libertarians. A year and a half later, Sanchez is full of righteous indignation against those same, but now-unprincipled, Koch brothers: “I hereby tender my pre-resignation from Cato, effective if and when the Kochs take command. I’ll be sad to go, if it comes to that, but sadder to see a proud institution lose its autonomy.”

Without explaining his flip-flop, it’s hard to take Sanchez’s “presignation” announcement as little more than a PR stunt.

The more you get to know the real Cato Institute, the more you see a rank, powerful right-wing corporate front group deeply woven into the Republican Party machinery, as unprincipled and cynical in its relentless service of the 1 percent’s interests as it is hostile to the progressive cause.

Ask Naomi Klein. In 2008, the Cato Institute unleashed a full-frontal PR attack on Klein in the form of a twenty-page brochure denouncing and belittling The Shock Doctrine, which offended Cato because it took on two of the think tank’s golden calves: Milton Friedman and Augusto Pinochet, whose onetime labor minister, José Piñera, has been working for Cato since 1995 trying to strip Americans of their Social Security. The Cato attack against The Shock Doctrine was petty, bizarre and remarkably shallow even by PR hack standards—at one point, the Cato brochure attacked Klein for hosting blurbs by fiction writers on the jacket of The Shock Doctrine and implied that those blurbs were evidence that the book was itself fiction.

Klein was left understandably bewildered: “The greatest challenge in responding to the Cato paper is the scope of its dishonesty,” she wrote.

More recently, since the killing of Trayvon Martin, the Cato Institute has been one of the staunchest defenders of the “Stand Your Ground ”laws.

Remember that when you see Cato flaks squaring off against their onetime sugar daddies, the Koch brothers. Until we better understand what they do, and what sort of people they are, and how they’ve actually operated according to the record, rather than responding to what they’re telling us without questioning it, the only sure thing about this Cato-Koch struggle is that whoever comes out on top, Ed Crane or Charles Koch, the rest of us are guaranteed to be the big losers.

Late note: Charles Murray, whose “racial eugenics” book The Bell Curve argued that blacks and Latinos are genetically inferior to whites, has announced his support for the Cato Institute. Murray, whose racist viewsinfluenced John Derbyshire, disclosed, “Ed Crane is a close personal friend.” Murray has also “enjoyed a friendly acquaintance” with both Koch brothers “for more than twenty years.”

Read The Nation, or click here.

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

This article is first published at ConsortiumNews.com on March 12, 2012

On Saturday, the tiny EU nation Slovakia held parliamentary elections, and the results surprised the “experts”: The center-left party Smer, derisively described as “populist” in the American media, won in a record landslide, the first time a single party will control the majority in parliament in Slovakia’s post-Communist history.

The “populist” Smer won on an unexpectedly large turnout of 60 percent –the so-called experts had been assuring readers there’d be a low turnout of 40 percent.

The high turnout reflects real suffering for the people of Slovakia that goes well beyond mere cynicism — they’re suffering from real, mass impoverishment, brought on by a decade of brutal free-market reforms, which hit the privatized pensions especially hard. That’s where we Americans come in, specifically the Cato Institute — but I’ll get to that in a moment.

Although there’s been almost no coverage of Slovakia’s mass protest movement, the country has seen the largest demonstrations since the Velvet Revolution. The protests were sparked in part by the “Gorilla” scandal, leaked recordings of Slovakia’s free-market politicians negotiating their bribes with bankers from a top hedge fund, Penta, in exchange for Penta’s lucrative privatization deals.

But what’s sustained the protests, and what brought people out to vote in droves for the “populists,” is the mass impoverishment that’s worsened life for most of Slovakia’s citizens — and first to suffer have been Slovakia’s pensioners, who are forced to subsist on roughly $400 per month.

Here’s where the Cato Institute, the libertarian think-tank founded by the Koch brothers, comes in — and where Slovakia’s problems become our problems.

In the early 2000’s, the co-chairman of the Cato Institute’s Project on Social Security Privatization, José Piñera, played a key role advising and overseeing Slovakia’s mass pension privatization, which passed in 2003 under the free-market government of Mikulas Dzurinda. Today, Slovakia’s retirees are groaning under the austerity pain administered to them by the Cato Institute.

José Piñera, who has led Cato’s Social Security Privatization Project since the 1990s, has a dark history of administering pain on a nationwide scale: Piñera served in the military junta under Chile’s Generalissimo Augusto Pinochet, first as Pinochet’s Minister for Labor, helping suppress unions in one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world; later, Piñera oversaw Pinochet’s radical privatization of Chile’s pension program.

Today, Chile suffers one of the worst wealth inequality problems in the developed world. And for the past two decades, José Piñera, working at the Cato Institute, has been trying to impose the same pension austerity on Americans.

It’s a match made in Hell: Cato and the Koch brothers have been pushing to dismantle Social Security since the Kochs set up the Cato Institute in the late 1970s. Thanks to the Cato Institute’s tireless efforts, today dismantling Social Security is practically gospel in the Republican Party — and not far off the top of the “To Do” list for some “centrist” Democrats either.

Sacking Slovakia

Cato’s José Piñera was brought in to oversee Slovakia’s pension privatization only after the 2002 elections put in power the free-market rightwing Democratic and Christian Union Party, led by Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda. The pensions were privatized in 2003, along with a free-market program that lowered the top tax rate to a flat 19 percent, eliminated inheritance taxes, and generally shifted the burden down the economic scale.

The reforms were wildly unpopular with Slovaks, to the same degree that they were popular with Western bankers and banking institutions like the World Bank, which named Slovakia the world’s top economic reformer in 2004, and one of the top 20 business-friendly nations in the world.

In 2005, Bush’s ambassador to Slovakia co-authored a glowing article with Cato’s Marian Tupy, praising Dzurinda’s pension privatization, and noting Cato’s José Piñera’s role in making Slovakia’s pension reforms happen. In their article, they ominously compared Slovakia’s pre-reform pension “crisis” to America’s “crisis” in Social Security.

The timing of the joint Cato-Bush praise for Slovakia’s pension privatization was interesting for a couple of reasons:

First, because the same free-market government that Cato advised and Cato-Bush praised has now been implicated in cutting secret kickback deals with a leading hedge fund to sell off Slovakia’s state assets in exchange for millions in bribes; and secondly, that year, 2005, was the year President Bush made his big push to privatize America’s Social Security program, with the Cato Institute as both the lead adviser and promoter.

The Bush-Cato plan to privatize Social Security began over dinner in 1997, when Bush was still governor of Texas. Ed Crane, the president of Cato, and José Piñera, Cato’s co-chair of the Social Security Privatization Project, flew to Austin to sell the future president on their plan to privatize Social Security.

According to the Washington Post: “Crane said that after Pinera’s presentation, Bush declared, ‘This is the most important policy issue facing the United States today.’”

As soon as Bush was elected President, he set up a commission to privatize Social Security, and staffed it with the Cato Institute’s free-market zealots. Unfortunately for them, the 9/11 attacks distracted the Administration. But in 2005, Bush made Social Security privatization his top priority for his second term — and once again, he put the Cato Institute in charge.

By the end of 2005, however, Bush’s presidency was practically in tatters as the country turned against his wars, and Hurricane Katrina made privatizing Social Security politically impossible. The project to do to America what Cato did to Slovakia was essentially abandoned, and the Cato Institute turned critic of Bush’s war on terror policies.

Bush pays attention to his Social Security privatizer and former Cato flak Andrew Biggs

A Family Project

Lately, Cato’s José Piñera has seen his younger brother, billionaire Sebastian Piñera, making international news as Chile’s most unpopular president since democracy replaced the free-market military junta of Generalissimo Augusto Pinochet in 1990.

Thanks to younger brother Sebastian’s free-market privatization of Chile’s education system, the country has erupted in nationwide protests and violence on a level not seen since, well, Generalissimo Pinochet overthrew Chile’s democratically elected government in 1973, and installed a brutal regime that crushed dissent and murdered and tortured thousands — handing the economy over to free-market fanatics including Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Sebastian’s brother, José Piñera.

Neither age, nor time, nor working at the American-based Cato Institute, dining with future presidents and convincing them to gut the population’s Social Security, has mellowed this former Pinochet sidekick’s distaste for democracy. As Piñera wrote in 2003,

“To hand over a blank check to inherently unstable majorities concerning virtually all the major economic, social, and political issues of a society is to institutionalize instability, open the way to more serious abuses, and condemn a country to underdevelopment. How is anyone to make rational decisions about work, savings, and investment if key variables — such as taxes, labor legislation, and regulations — can be altered by 50.01 percent of the citizens through a vote that, in countries with low levels of education, can almost never be said to show the characteristics of an ‘informed vote’?”

On Saturday, the Slovaks voted overwhelmingly to reject the damage and plunder that the Cato Institute’s advisers wreaked on that tiny country’s citizens. Naturally, to free-market zealots like the Piñeras, the Kochs, the Cato Institute and the rest of the oligarchy’s minions, this only proves their point about why democracy must be “limited.”

The people can’t be relied on to vote the way oligarchs want them to — they can’t be relied on to react with cynicism and defeatism to all the news of political and corporate corruption.

The hope among the elites in Slovakia and elsewhere was that the voters’ mass impoverishment and anger would lead to a withdrawal from politics — but the high voter turnout turned out to be perhaps the greatest victory for the people of Slovakia. The politicians are to be expected to sell out and disappoint — but the more engaged in their democracy the people are, the more power they’ll have to eventually change their politics for the better, and finally bring an end to the rotten politics of oligarchy and plunder that mark our age.

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

I travelled to Breitbart’s hood to carry out a private investigation of what happened…and found a grisly, blood-splattered crime scene just a block away from his home.

***

It didn’t take long after Andrew Breitbart’s death was reported for the Baggertarian Believers to start ominously tweeting out some of the craziest (and funniest) conspiracy theories this side of the John Birch Society. Part of the blame goes to the official “Breitbart died of natural causes” story they put out—no one believes he died of “natural causes,” neither his fans nor his detractors. But if you’re a fan of Breitbart, you can’t face the awful reality of what everyone knows did kill him—degenerate personal habits, and bile.

So naturally, Breitbart’s abandoned hate-junkies turned to wild conspiracy theories and plots that did everything to avoid his obvious drug addictions and swollen arteries, and instead externalized the cause to the usual list of villains: George Soros, Media Matters, Jihadis, liberals, #OWS, the Illuminati, One World Government, and so on. And of course, the “socialist” “Islamic” “Kenyan” is the Breitbart-Bircher crowd’s number one favorite as the guy running the conspiracy…because you know, Andrew Breitbart knew too much, man! He flew too high!

“Did President Obama or the criminal interests that put him in office have Andrew Breitbart killed?” asked Truth-Bircher Alex Jones in a special conspiracy report filed from his bedroom studio, focusing on the popular-among-Breitbaggers theory that President’s Obama’s henchmen whacked Breitbart to prevent the release of damaging mpeg evidence and protect Obama’s radical Muslim-Marxist secret identity. WorldNetDaily, Michael Savage, and countless other winger outlets reported the same conspiracy theories. Even Fox News got in on the action, reporting that Obama’s “assassins” might not have destroyed every single copy of Breitbart’s secret tapes…

I live just a few townships over from the very sidewalk where Andrew Breitbart died. And I was starting to think, “If these Birchers are serious about their conspiracy theories, that Brentwood sidewalk is going to be the Daley Plaza of the winger-world.”

I thought I’d get in my car and check it out myself, look at the “scene of the crime” and try to see the Brentwood sidewalk where the “assassins” hired by Obama might have hatched their deadly plot. I never thought about this much before he died (oops, I mean “was assassinated in a vast conspiracy”), but Andrew Breitbart and I had been practically neighbors. He lived in a chi-chi estate in Westwood near the UCLA campus, just fifteen minutes from my rank apartment in Venice Beach.

My plan was simple. 1) Go to scene of conspiracy; 2) Get into the mindset of a Birch-bagger, think like a Birch-bagger, feel like a Birch-bagger, dress like a Birch-bagger, become a Birch-bagger; in other words, “Be The Birch-Bagger Conspiracy Theorist”; 3) Retrace Breitbart’s last neighborhood stroll, and observe the scene of the crime for clues about where Obama’s assassins might have hidden; 4) Record everything I see and think, and report “the truth” to the world.

The results of my experience will shock and startle you. Or make you giggle. Depending on what your bag is.

***

CONSPIRACY SETTING: Breitbart’s home sits on the northern edge of LA’s massive Veterans Cemetery and within spitting distance of Interstate 405—the busiest, most congested freeway in the country. I arrived there at 2200 hours. I noted that the  lights were on inside the house, and I could see someone in the kitchen rummaging through the fridge. What was in that refrigerator? The secret evidence that will expose the plot? Breitbart’s frozen heart? A pint of Chunky Monkey?

The freeway noise was deafening–the perfect cover for a hit job, I thought to myself.  You bastards!

I observed two razor scooters leaning against a wall near the entrance and a note hung on the door. What follows is a dossier of secret photographic evidence of the crime scene that I’m sharing with the world for the first time.

Andrew Breitbart’s brother-in-law mans the gate and keeps the family safe from throngs of mourners stopping by to pay their respects to a great American patriot…

…there was only one note on the door. I read: “Susie — I love you guys and will find you soon. Ken”

Breitbart walked down this big government sidewalk, never to return…

Further down the street:  What looks like a normal sidewalk, holds all sorts of hidden dangers…

…Close up shows 2 strategically located cracks in the curb (circled in pink), plenty of defensive positions (pink arrows) and a layer of invisible slippery twigs (green circles).

Why hasn’t the FBI launched an investigation into what appears to be a deadly IED, camouflaged as an oil slick stain? Is this how America treats its patriots?

The Manchurian Sidewalk: Did unionized city employees turn a patriotic pedestrian walkway into a coldhearted assassin programmed to kill Andrew Breitbart and make it look like an accident?

What was a maintenance truck doing here parked at 11 p.m.? And why does it look exactly like the one used in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing? Was Breitbart targeted by al-Qaida because of his courageous Islamofacism?

A block away I stumbled on a grizzly scene. Dark red spots that looked like blood.  Did he hit head and bleed all over the place.  Or was he taken out by a bullet that came from the McMansion across the street?

“The Bathroom Man” in the window has a clear line of sight to the location of the blood smears…

Follow the Bag: Mysterious ‘Plastic Bag Man’ spotted lurking around the Baggy Knoll…

…holding the same exact plastic bag Obama carried out of a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco during a campaign fundraiser on Feb. 16, 2012! Which means….Oh shit! Mystery Bag Man links Breitbart’s assassination directly to President Barack Obama himself! Here come the black helicopters. Must inform the world….ugh!…hard … to…breathe…it hurts…can’t….reach the…puh…puhblish  button…

***

Yasha Levine is a  founding editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com.

Want to know more cool shit? Read Yasha Levine’s investigation into the life of Harry Koch, the man who spawned Charles and David Koch, the two most powerful oligarchs of our time: The Birth of the Koch Clan: It All Started In a Little Texas Town Called Quanah

Y’all have probably heard of the ancient Sumerian peoples and their penchant for spooky burial rituals and books like the Necronomicon Ex Mortis, which was penned in human blood and has the ability to raise the dead. But did you know they also cared deeply about liberty, freemarkets and private property rights?

Or at least that’s what the Liberty Fund, a libertarian moneybag outfit that bankrolls all sorts of Koch-linked youth-oriented baggertarian propaganda projects, would have you believe. In what must go down as the mother of all cuneiform-malapropisms, the Liberty Fund appropriated a weird looking Sumerian cuneiform symbol as its cult-logo, in what appears to be an attempt to prove that libertarianism is not just an ideology thought up by a bunch of rank 20th century oligarchs, but rather comes from an ancient small government tradition older than even Jesus. It goes back back to the dawn of civilization itself!

If you go onto one of the Liberty Fund’s project websites, the Library for Economics & Liberty, you’ll find this ancient cuneiform symbol at the footer of the home page:

The Liberty Fund-backed website goes on to explain that the significance of the amagi symbol goes deeper than just the word “liberty.” It represents the first popular struggle against big government tyranny:

Lagash was the site of the first recorded social-reform movement. Once considered a relatively free society of farmers, cattle breeders, boatmen, fishermen, merchants, and craftsmen, the Lagashites found that a change in political power had stripped them of their political and economic freedoms and subjected them to heavy taxation and exploitation by wealthy officials.

Sumerian historians believe that at this low point in Lagash’s history, Urukagina became the leader of the Sumerian city-state of Girsu/Lagash and led a popular movement that resulted in the reform of the oppressive legal and governmental structure of Sumeria. … On the tablets of the period is found the first written reference to the concept of liberty (amagi or amargi, literally, “return to the mother”), used in reference to the process of reform…

There’s only problem with Liberty Fund’s lesson in Sumerian history and language: the real meaning of the amagi cuneiform isn’t about abolishing “big government” or abolishing the Fed–nope, it’s about abolishing debts to free citizens from debt slavery. What the history-failures at Liberty Fund hilariously mistranslated was that the term “return to mother” is Sumerian-speak for “jubilee”–as in “debt forgiveness” or “freedom from debt.”

Here’s how David Graeber explains it in his brilliant book Debt: The First 5,000 Years:

Faced with the potential for complete social breakdown, Sumerian and later Babylonian kings periodically announced general amnesties … Such decrees would typically declare all outstanding consumer debt null and void (commercial debts were not affected), return all land to its original owners, and allow all debt-peons to return to their families. Before long, it became more or less a regular habit for kings to make such a declaration on first assuming power, and many were forced to repeat it periodically over the course of their reigns.

In Sumeria, these were called “declarations of freedom”—and it is significant that the Sumerian word amargi, the first recorded word for “freedom” in any known human language, literally means “return to mother”—since this is what freed debt-peons were finally allowed to do.

So in other words, amagi’s not about “freedom” from government interference at all–it’s about welching on your debts and sending Sumerian deadbeats back home to mooch off mommy. “Moochers,” “deadbeats,” “debt welchers”–Now that sounds more like the true face of libertarianism!

Despite the misunderstanding—or maybe because of it—the amagi symbol has become all the rage with baggertarian youngins’ all across the USA, many of whom have been known to get their pasty white hides branded with “deadbeat 4-ever” tats en masse at Koch-sponsored Free State campouts.

So does this make them moocher-bashing moochers? Or maybe closet-freeloader freeloaderphobes?

We’d like to thank Koch operative Peter Eyre for taking the time to maintain an up-to-date bagtard tat page, which includes a big collection of Sumerian deadbeat tats, as well as a nice range of other freemarket groupie ink. Eyre’s got himself branded a “deadbeat” in 2007, back before it was considered cool:

An amagi – one of two tattoos (the other being a quote on my left forearm) I got during a break at the Free State Project’s 2007 Liberty Forum. Months before the conference I researched tattoo shops in the area and had scheduled my session. The amagi appealed to me as the oldest written word/symbol for liberty as it shows these ideas are universal and that rights are not contigent on where one happens to be born but inherent in each individual. Done at Gothic Tattoo in Concord, NH.

Here are a few deabeat tats from Eyre’s ink page:

Deadbeat #1: This guy’s name is Daryl and he’s running for President 2016…

Deadbeat #2: Nothing says sexy like “deadbeat moocher chick” in Sumerian…

Deadbeat #3: Some libertarian dude who thinks wristband tats are macho…

Deadbeat #4: Freeloadin’ Assistant Professor of Economics at Loyola… Totally, brah!

Update: The libertarian “moocher-4-life” campaign has made it across the Atlantic. The official journal of the Hayek Society at the London School of Economics is called “ama-gi,” and sports the awesome Sumerian “freedom for deadbeats” cuneiform. Which is a fitting for a man like Hayek. After all, we here at the eXiled were the ones who first outed Freddie von Hayek as a socialized medicine queen, who sucked on America’s Social Security teat with blessings from his patron and master, Charles Koch.

***

Want to know more? Read Yasha Levine’s account of LAPD’s appalling treatment of detained Occupy LA protesters…His other Occupy LA coverage…And LA Weekly’s writeup of his arrest.

Yasha Levine is an editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com.

This summer I traveled to Quanah, the dusty North Texas railroad town that Harry Koch called home, to find out more about the life of the man who spawned the two most powerful oligarchs of our time…

A version of this article was first published in The Texas Observer…

CHARLES AND DAVID KOCH are the most powerful right-wing billionaires of our time. They have spent hundreds of millions bankrolling a broad attack against Social Security, organized labor, financial regulations, environmental protection and public education. The brothers plan to funnel at least $200 million to elect right-wing, anti-government Republicans in 2012, according to Politico. They seem hell-bent on dragging America back to the dark days of unregulated capitalism. The history of their grandfather in Texas may help explain why. Because, apparently, it runs in the family.

Little has been written about Harry Koch. He’s the least-known member of the Koch family. What has not been reported is that the Koch family has been marching under the same laissez-faire banner for the past three generations, ever since Harry emigrated to America in 1888, settled in a North Texas railroad town and became an aggressive newspaper publisher and booster. He shamelessly shilled for railroad and banking interests, amassing his wealth by helping big business fight organized labor and squelch reforms.

Much of the Koch brothers’ ideology can be found in Harry Koch’s newspaper editorials of nearly a century ago. Take, for instance, the Kochs’ current fight against Social Security. Harry Koch took part in a multi-year right-wing propaganda campaign to shoot down New Deal programs. Grandfather and grandsons employ eerily familiar talking points to bash government pension and welfare programs.

“No political system can possibly guarantee either a national economic security or an individual standard of living. Government can guarantee no man a job or a livelihood,” Harry Koch wrote on February 1, 1935, nine months before Charles Koch was born.

Fast-forward 75 years and you can see Charles Koch using the same lines of attack in his company’s newsletter: “government actions … stifle economic growth and job creation, which in turn will significantly reduce the standard of living of American families.”

This summer I traveled to Quanah, the dusty North Texas railroad town that Harry Koch called home, to find out more about the life of the man who spawned the two most powerful oligarchs of our time. After spending days hunkered over newspaper archives and rifling through a century’s worth of county records in the town’s tiny courthouse, I began to see a picture emerge of a man who spent his life learning how to use newspapers and media for ideological manipulation and as a platform for pro-business agendas. As I strained to read the battered microfilm, I was constantly surprised at the degree to which Harry’s views—on everything from the economy to the role of government in a democratic society—have been passed on nearly unchanged through two generations, and are now being pushed by Charles and David Koch.

HARRY KOCH WAS BORN in Holland in 1867 to a wealthy German-Dutch family of merchants, farmers and doctors. After apprenticing to a newspaper publisher, he decided to seek his fortune in America. At 21, he set off on a steamer and arrived in New York on Dec. 5, 1888. He spent his first few years in America working for various Dutch newspapers in Chicago, New Orleans, Grand Rapids and Austin until, in 1891, he finally settled down in Quanah, a town that the railroad had established just a few years before. Harry always remained curiously vague and evasive about why he decided to stake his claim in a remote North Texas town, but there is no real mystery to it: he came because of the railroads.

In the second half of the 19th century, America was in the grip of a massive railroad boom. Boosted by eager investors, lucrative subsidies and free land, railroads sprung up connecting every corner of the United States without much thought for demand or necessity. America’s rail mileage quadrupled from 1870 to 1900, with enough track laid down by the end of the century to stretch from New York to San Francisco 66 times.

In those wild early days of the railroad age, real estate speculation was a central plank of the business plan. The U.S. government had given vast stretches of public land to railroad companies, and the companies needed to sell that land to settlers to create customers and pay off debts. And that meant railroads were in constant need of local publishers to promote the countless railroad towns that had been planned and parceled by the railroad companies across the country, with the aim of luring enough gullible settlers with wildly exaggerated stories of fertile soil and prosperity to trigger real estate booms—all so that railroad insiders could make easy money offloading overpriced dirt lots on the hapless settlers.

Dutch investors were heavily involved in several railroad lines in the North Texas area, including the Fort Worth and Denver Railway Company, which had spawned Quanah in 1887 and owned just about all the land in town. County records show Harry provided advertising services and worked directly for the Fort Worth and Denver for nearly 20 years, sometimes receiving payment in the form of land transferred directly from the legendary railroad builder Grenville M. Dodge, who helped lay the Union Pacific and more than a dozen other lines across the country.

Harry bought up two of the town’s newspapers, apparently with his own money, merged them into the Quanah Tribune-Chief, and began printing beguiling stories of Western prosperity.

When Harry moved to Quanah, it was little more than a dusty settlement with a patchwork of dirt lots, a few rudimentary buildings and a railroad platform—a get-rich-quick scheme laid out on paper. It was his job to create the demand, bring people in and make the town a reality. He ran his paper like a chamber of commerce newsletter, cramming it full of stories about growth, expansion and the limitless possibilities of life on the frontier. He helped inflate a real estate bubble that, along with the presence of the railroad, nearly quadrupled the county’s population to more than 11,000.

Harry Koch worked hard to bring a number of railroad spurs to Quanah, and helped make it a major transportation hub by the early 1900s. He acquired stakes in local businesses, got into the oil business and boosted for notorious railroad barons like Jay Gould. As the town grew, so did Harry’s fortune. He amassed substantial real estate holdings in and around Quanah, which allowed him to cash in on the real estate boom he had helped to create.

Harry enjoyed his success. He got married, had two sons, traveled regularly to New York and Europe, and was proud of having crossed the Atlantic nine times. He even described being in Berlin, caught in a huge crowd that had gathered to hear “der Fuhrer” make a speech.

The best way to understand railroads, writes Richard White in Railroaded, “is to regard them not as new businesses devoted to the efficient sale of transportation but rather as corporate containers for financial manipulation and political networking.” And in that sense Harry Koch was very much of the club.

By the time he retired, Harry Koch was not just a respected newspaper publisher in Texas, but a powerful and highly connected regional business player. He was also extremely well liked. “There is no more popular member of the Association than Harry Koch,” read his bio by the Texas Press Association, where he served as president in 1918.

But the bustling city he helped create was mostly made of hype. Today, Quanah’s population has sunk back to 1890 levels and has little industry left. A gypsum plant on the outskirts of town is the only major employer, and it happens to be owned by the Koch family.

Harry Koch’s rise from immigrant small-town newspaper publisher to entrenched business heavyweight might seem like a classic coming-to-America story, confirming that through hard work, perseverance and luck, anything is possible. But that narrative would be misleading. Harry may have lived among settlers who struggled to eke out a living on the frontier, but he was never really one himself. The difference was right there on the surface for everyone to see: While Harry Koch prospered, most everyone else in North Texas descended into poverty.

Towards the end of the 18th century, 100,000 poor white farmers streamed into Texas every year to escape the brutal peonage of the sharecropping system of the South. But despite the stories of success and security spun by railroad companies and boosters like Harry Koch, newcomers found themselves facing a grim reality, and the same monopolistic big money forces conspiring to keep them enslaved in extreme poverty and debt. On top of the crippling boom-and-bust cycles that gripped the country from the 1890s through the late 1920s, settlers low agricultural prices, monopolistic railroad practices, outrageously high interest rates, and inflated real estate prices that made it impossible for new farmers to afford land.

“On the ‘sod-house frontier’ of the West, the human costs were enormous,” writes historian Lawrence Goodwyn in The Populist Moment. “Poverty was a ‘badge of honor which decorated all.’ Men and children ‘habitually’ went barefoot in summer and in winter wore rags wrapped around their feet. A sod house was a home literally constructed out of prairie sod that was cut, sun-dried, and used as a kind of brick.”

The misery and hopelessness of frontier life sparked a powerful new grassroots populist movement, which sought to reform and curb the worst of corporate abuses. Harry Koch was not sympathetic to the cause.

In 1897, while the country was still in the grips of one of the worst economic depressions in its history, Harry Koch penned a long, gushing account of a luxurious trip to a National Editorial Association convention in Galveston, a multi-day affair thrown for boosters and businessmen. Between detailed descriptions of all the oysters eaten and champagne bottles emptied at the swanky parties, he took jabs at organized labor in response to a strike organized by street railway workers on the day of the convention. Koch was furious, calling the strike “disagreeable surprise” that marred an otherwise perfect outing, forcing guests to walk on foot to the next segment of their entertainment. Luckily, disaster was averted when “Santa Fe officials took pity on the suffering newspaper men and made up a train to Woolman’s lake where the oyster roast was to be held,” Koch wrote approvingly.

In a series of early editorials, scoffed at the idea that land rents should be regulated, and ridiculed the plight of heavily indebted farmers, writing that while they might find indebtedness unpleasant, a much bigger problem was their laziness and inability to take care of the farm equipment they had purchased on credit. He patronized Quanah farmers with platitudes about honesty and success: “Be honest. Dishonesty seldom makes one rich, and when it does riches are a curse. There is no such thing as dishonest success.” He delighted in the fact that unlike other cities and towns across America—filled with strikes, riots, political agitation and violent unrest—the people of Quanah largely steered clear of politics, concerning themselves with what they understood best: hard, honest labor. “A very commendable trait among western people,” Harry wrote, “is that they have no time to give to politics.”

To Harry, regular Americans had no place in politics, a domain of capitalists, railroad men and progressive boosters like himself. Democracy itself was an abomination, a dangerous idea that needed to be constrained and restricted to the upper classes of society. In fact, he considered laws to be overrated. “If we depended upon laws to make us perfect the United States should be a near Utopia and Texas would be the most heavenly spot on earth,” he editorialized.

THROUGHOUT THE 1890S, Harry never shied from using his newspaper to promote specific business interests, and as a platform to express his aristocratic views on society.

But something began to change at the turn of the century. Koch shed his abrasive attitude toward the masses and began reinventing himself as a champion of the common man.

In 1901, Koch published a long editorial that hinted at this transformation. In the piece, he defends popularly embattled trusts and monopolies with the counterintuitive argument that such protectors of wealth were a force for the common good. He based his argument on the false notion that trusts lowered the price of consumer goods:

“Let this thing be borne in mind as significant, that all real trusts, all that are destined to succeed and endure, are established on a basis of permanent lower prices for their products. Everybody knows that sugar and oil have been considerably cheaper since these industries have been under trust control. And the same is true, barring periods of fluctuation, of all industries under effective monopoly, from steel rails to cigarettes.”

Harry Koch’s transformation was remarkable: Not only was he attempting to convince readers of his point of view by appealing to their own best interests, but he was fleshing out economic arguments in language that his grandsons continue to use today. Harry’s defense of trusts reads exactly like the pro-monopoly propaganda regularly cranked out by scholars at The Cato Institute—a libertarian think tank founded by Harry’s grandson Charles Koch in 1977. University of California-Irvine Professor Richard McKenzie recently published an article in Cato’s Regulation magazine titled “In Defense of Monopoly,” in which he echoes Harry’s 110-year-old editorial, including this claim: “The monopolist does not charge higher prices; it lowers them.”

This new rhetorical approach was not Harry Koch’s invention. Rather, Harry was being swept up in a larger national revolution in the way American business elites communicated with the public.

At the turn of the 20th century, growing public outrage at the way financial elites were handling the economy, combined with a rapid expansion of voting enfranchisement began posing a real threat to the entrenched interests of corporate power. To protect itself, American business began experimenting with modern public relations techniques and developing strategies to manipulate and manage public perceptions. The goal was to find a way to maintain power in a political system which depended on consent of a largely poor, non-propertied population. With the help of pioneers in modern propaganda techniques like Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee, the ruling class experimented with techniques that allowed  it push the same old pro-business, pro-oligarchy agenda in a way that was inline with the democratic aspirations of the day. Bernays, who helped tobacco companies lure women into smoking and primed Guatemala for a CIA coup by creating the appearance of Communist activity in the country, openly talked America’s new, guided democracy and the need to manipulate the public in his 1928 book Propaganda, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”

Public relations were a revolutionary development, giving ruling elites a powerful new way of controlling a democratic society without the constant need for brute physical force.

Harry Koch was right in the middle of this transformation.

In 1910, Harry Koch became the founding director, as well as one of the biggest shareholders, of a small North Texas railroad company called the Quanah, Acme & Pacific, rumored to be part of Jay Gould’s vast railroad empire. After two decades of laboring and promoting other people’s railroad interests, he had finally come into his own. The Tribune-Chief became the de facto advertising arm of the QA&P, extolling the region’s bright future and guaranteed prosperity while hawking company shares and promoting land in towns created and owned by the line. He was no longer just a hired PR hand, but a major player at the top of the food-chain with access to lucrative insider perks, including the easy money QA&P made through its pay-to-play practice of soliciting bribes—or “bonuses”—from cities that wanted to be connected to their line.

It is not clear how long Harry Koch remained involved with the QA&P railroad, but one thing is certain: it was a major learning experience. Like every other railroad in the land, the QA&P was always battling unions, government regulations and labor laws, and that gave Harry ample opportunity to experiment with and master Berneys’ newfangled propaganda techniques.

In the early 1920s, a series of railroad strikes that erupted across the country in response to a federally mandated cut in wages were brutally suppressed. In Texas, the governor declared martial law and dispatched State Rangers and the National Guard to break a strike tying up a railroad junction half a day’s ride east of Quanah, and repeated the process in other towns across the state. It was a dark day for unions, which had suffered a stunning and demoralizing defeat on both national and local levels. And when the dust finally settled, Harry Koch moved in for the kill shot to solidify the railroads’ victory.

He didn’t attack unions or insult striking workers. Harry didn’t mention labor disputes at all, but took a more sophisticated approach: He published an item in the Quanah Tribune-Chief promoting QA&P’s decision to award bonuses to some of its employees. The paper said that the company’s generosity made its employees “the most loyal railroad men in the Southwest” and held up QA&P as a model of corporate unselfishness. Not surprisingly, Harry’s PR blurb was picked up by the national trade magazine Railway Age, which praised QA&P and came out in support of paying bonuses to workers, according to The Quanah Route, a history of the QA&P.

The implication of his editorializing was simple enough: railroads are good to their workers; it’s the strikers who are greedy, thankless ingrates. It was a total inversion of reality, and a textbook example of a public relations technique that proved to work wonders—and still does.

There is even a good chance Harry Koch participated in a bit of old-fashioned astroturfing in the 1930s, when a suspicious publication called “QA&P Employee’s Magazine” suddenly sprang into existence. Supposedly created and published independently of management by employees in order to “create a closer relationship among the employees, to make them feel more like one big family and to arouse an enthusiasm for more earnestness and sincerity in our work for the road,” the magazine was a big hit with QA&P brass, who “enthusiastically supported the venture.” One of the magazine’s special Christmas issues was so flattering that it made the QA&P’s president “nearly burst with pride.” The publication was also a big hit with the general business community, generating fan mail from top executives from around the country.

By the end of 1920s, employee magazines were part of the standard propaganda practice in most American corporations, showing just how important perception management had become to the free enterprise system.

But brutal reality kept breaking through the corporate illusion.

IN THE 1930S, corporations were forced to ramp up their pro-business public relations campaigns to deal with the violent backlash in public opinion caused by the Great Depression. “With tens of millions of jobless and hungry, business was initially stunned by the intensity of public hostility,” Alex Carey writes in Taking Risk out of Democracy. “For the first time American business’s ideological hegemony over American society was temporarily broken.” With the free-enterprise system under threat, American business, led by lobby groups like the National Association of Manufacturers, launched a blitzkrieg propaganda campaign that used news articles, editorials, radio speeches, advertising, cartoons and even films. The campaign was “skillfully coordinated so as to blanket every media,” and “it pounds its message home with relentless determination,” according to the president of NAM. The organization still openly talks about this campaign in its publicity material:

“In 1934, concern over many of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal proposals and key labor issues prompted the NAM to launch a public relations campaign “for the dissemination of sound American doctrines to the public.”

Not surprisingly, Harry Koch was right there along with them, rolling out an aggressive multi-year attack against the New Deal at exactly the same time. And while there is no evidence linking Harry Koch to NAM, the Tribune-Chief seemed to hit all the same points: The paper slammed public pensions, regulations, tariffs, unions, muckrakers, labor laws and deficits, and filled its op-ed space with pro-business opinion pieces delivered fresh from New York lobby groups like the American Bankers Association, whose president, R.S. Becht, wrote to assure Quanah readers that there was no need for the government to regulate banks. Industry self-regulation—or “voluntary self reform,” as he called it—would be enough.

Despite, or because of, overwhelming public support for FDR’s pension and welfare programs, they became major targets, with Harry Koch publishing two or three op-eds in a single day attacking them. “Some ten million old folks are wanting to draw $200 a month from the government, and one hundred million stand ready to quit work when they do. Why not pension all of them?” Koch wrote in a February 1935 editorial, while claiming in a different editorial that the “idea of an old age pension is a splendid idea … such a pension is proper. But great care should be taken…in preparing old age pension laws.”

His editorials contained the same familiar right-wing claims that we hear today: that there is not enough money to support “entitlement” programs, that government will tax industry into ruin, that similar programs in other countries have failed, that regulation is unconstitutional and workers, given the opportunity, will quit en masse and live off government charity.  And just like modern pundits, Harry Koch didn’t shy away from whipping up racist fervor to turn poor whites against pension legislation, and against their own interests. In 1935, Koch published a bizarre editorial about a rumor that spread “among Quanah’s colored population that the Tribune-Chief contained a request from the government that every man past sixty should report as an applicant for an old age pension” that soon had “every elderly negro in town” cramming into Tribune-Chief‘s offices. It was proof positive that African-Americans, who had been depicted in the paper as “partly civilized” and unable to observe “laws made by and for white people,” were clearly already scheming to tap into the programs.

In a 1934 editorial titled “Democracy’s Problem,” Harry rejected “mobocracy,” which had “been discarded as undesirable, even if attainable.” Mobocracy was the right’s popular name for “tyranny of the majority,” and remains a favorite whipping horse of Koch-funded libertarians, who increasingly promote the idea that America is not a democracy and was never intended to be one. Here’s Steve H. Hanke, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, writing in a 2011 editorial: “Contrary to what propaganda has led the public to believe, America’s Founding Fathers were skeptical and anxious about democracy. They were aware of the evils that accompany a tyranny of the majority. The Framers of the Constitution went to great lengths to ensure that the federal government was not based on the will of the majority and was not, therefore, democratic.”

Following NAM’s lead, which had described government programs like social security as the “ultimate socialistic control of life and industry,” the Tribune-Chief kept upping the Communist threat all through the 1930s. He equated all proposals to tax the rich and help the less fortunate with a slippery slope to a Bolshevik takeover of the United States, and joined up with the rest of the country’s pro-business press to smear Democratic Senator Huey Long, a wildly popular freshman from Louisiana and presidential contender who could threaten FDR from the left wing of his own party. Violent editorials constantly appeared in the Tribune-Chief, pegging Long as a covert Bolshevik for his “Share Our Wealth” program, which sought to put a cap on net worth and set up a comprehensive welfare system. After the Senator was shot and killed by a lone assassin in 1935, Koch issued a tacit endorsement of the murder, remarking that it was “not unexpected.”

But the constant fear mongering and red baiting was just another calculated public relations technique, used selectively against political enemies.

What few of his readers knew was that at the same time Harry screamed about the Red Menace, his youngest son, Fredrick C. Koch, was in the Soviet Union working for the Bolsheviks, building refineries, training Communist engineers and laying down the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure. Fred even hosted a delegation of Soviet planners in his company headquarters in Wichita, Kansas. Fred’s Soviet contract to build 15 refineries personally netted him $500,000, a huge sum of money in the 1930s, but he continued his father’s cynical red menace attack strategy, and took it to a whole new level after he became one of the founders of the far-rightwing John Birch Society, which tried to convince the American people that unions, colored people, Jews, homosexuals, President Kennedy and even Dwight D. Eisenhower were all Soviet agents plotting to overthrow the U.S. through higher taxes and safety net programs.

Harry Koch passed away in 1942, not long after business’ epic battle against the New Deal reforms. The Quanah Tribune-Chief was passed on to his eldest son, who took over the paper with his wife and kept it in the family until the 1970s. Meanwhile, Harry’s other son, Fred Koch, used the fortune he made building refineries for Stalin in the 1930s Soviet Union to ramp up his own business in Wichita, Kansas. He would  build a successful oil transportation empire that would one day grow into Koch Industries, the largest private oil company in the country.

But even after the family’s base of operations moved away from Quanah, Harry Koch’s ghost would never be far removed. His life at the intersection of news media, big business, public relations and ideological warfare would be passed on as a family tradition from father to son to grandson, elevating his offspring to ever higher levels of wealth and influence.

This story was first published by The Texas Observer. Check out their great work…and subscribe!

***

Yasha Levine is an editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com. Want to know more? Read Yasha Levine and Mark Ames’ article about the “Koch-Hayek Social Security-Fanboy Letters”:Monster Koch Bust: Charles Koch Used Social Security to Lure Friedrich von Hayek to America.

Things heated up last Friday after Herman Cain finished his stand up routine at the Kochs’ Americans For Prosperity event in Washington D.C. and the crowd settled in for a late night Ronald Reagan tribute dinner. At least 500 protesters, including a group from Occupy DC, marched on the convention center where the rightwing summit was being held. They surrounded the building, jammed intersections, drummed, chanted and generally did all they could to make AFP’s guests and donors very, very uncomfortable.

It was a chaotic scene. Luckily, a rightwing blogger named Stephen Gutowski was there, ready to collect mpeg evidence of  leftwing criminal aka 1st amendment activity and hand it over to the police. Sadly, the cops didn’t seem to appreciate Stephen’s heroic volunteer-snitching:

A few minutes after the security guards were able to push the protesters out and most of the protesters had moved on from scene several police officers arrived at the scene. Oddly, though, they were uninteresting [sic] in hearing what had happened. I offered them the video I had shot but they didn’t want it and didn’t appear to be gathering any information about what went on. They appeared apathetic and merely showing a police presence. That, in my experience, became standard operating procedure the rest of the night for the police.

By golly, what’s a good All-American Stoolie like Stephen Gutowski to do!?

Volunteer-snitch Stephen Gutowski (left) pictured wearing the colors of  his alma mater, Messiah College…

PS: While Stephen was busy playing informant, a silver Lexus plowed through two lines of 99%ers blocking the street, knocking down and injuring three four protesters, including a pregnant woman. The cops let the driver go, and cited the three rammed pedestrians for obstructing traffic.

“I’ve never met either of the Koch brothers, I suspect that like most libertarians, they’d rather avoid the unseemly world of politics as often as possible, where winning generally means forcing other people to bend to your will. (David Koch did run for Vice President on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1980, but on a platform of legalizing drugs and prostitution, and abolishing the FBI and CIA.) They seem more interested in contributing to voluntary, civil society, by promoting ideas … the arts, research, and by fighting particularly pernicious laws like the PATRIOT Act…”

—Radley Balko, “The Koch Brothers’ Right-Wing Conspiracy to Undermine the PATRIOT Act,” Feb. 25, 2011

If the Kochs are so anti-interventionist, then why does a 2005 State Department cable show Charles Koch’s premier libertarian think-tank meddling in the former Soviet Union and circle-jerking with one of the most notorious CIA/State Department front-groups for the American Empire?

The cable is brief, but revealing: Titled “Tajikistan: Freedom House In Strategic Retreat,” the communique was sent from the U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, on November 9, 2005, and notified the folks back home that Freedom House, an infamous CIA/State Department outfit that had been tasked with funding pro-Western opposition movements and seeding regime change across the former Soviet Union, was being booted out of Tajikistan and had no choice but to abandon the NGO front group it had set up in the country. But luckily all was not lost. As the cable explained, the Institute of Humane Studies, a libertarian recruitment and educational organization controlled by Charles Koch since the early 1960s, had come to the rescue, and was ready and willing take over running and funding the Tajik NGO directly.

It would seem the Kochs have been more involved in meddling in the internal affairs of other countries than they and their lackeys lead on…

Here’s the text of the cable:

SUBJECT: TAJIKISTAN: FREEDOM HOUSE IN STRATEGIC RETREAT

¶1. (SBU) Primarily due to the ending of its DRL grant, Freedom House is shifting its Tajikistan efforts to a local NGO. Robert Freedman, Washington-based Program Director, told the Ambassador November 9 that Freedom House did not want its Tajik partners and human rights defenders to feel abandoned. In order to maintain a presence, and build on the NGO’s successes, local staff had founded and registered a new NGO, Freedom, to work with the human rights community. Although DRL funding has expired, Freedman said potential donors, especially the Institute for Humane Studies, are interested in funding a Tajik think tank to allow journalists and scholars to look at domestic problems and find domestic solutions.”

¶2. (SBU) Freedman observed that Tajikistan provided a great  deal of “political space” in which human rights workers and  others met freely and discuss sensitive issues without fear of  arrest or repercussions from the government. “This would never  happen in Uzbekistan,” he emphasized. He gave the example of a  Tajik student who participated in a Freedom House training  program, and then published an op-ed piece about her positive  experience. He did caution that freedom of expression might be  constrained in the period leading to the November 2006

¶3. (SBU) COMMENT: For a director whose NGO has been specifically targeted by the Tajik government, Freedman was surprisingly positive about the human rights atmosphere in Tajikistan. However, as pleased as we are that things are not as bad as in Uzbekistan, the situation for NGOs in Tajikistan is far from good. We support the notion of establishing a think tank in Dushanbe, particularly one focused on economic or legal rights, which would fill a need for more focused intellectual debate. END COMMENT.

What exactly were the Kochs doing in Tajikistan? Why the interest in helping train Tajik “journalists and scholars to look at domestic problems and find domestic solutions”? The answer might lie with Freedom House, the non-governmental organization the Kochs had volunteered to replace.

For those not familiar with the organization, let’s just say Freedom House isn’t what you’d call a typical NGO. It’s not big on charity, feeding starving third-world kids or even educating them—and is about as far from libertarianism and libertarian ideals as you can possibly get.

Initially founded by Eleanor Roosevelt as part of FDR’s domestic propaganda effort to get Americans excited about WWII and fighting the Nazis, the NGO eventually evolved into a semi-covert operations arm of the CIA/State Department. It is staffed and run by spooks, and funded almost exclusively by the federal government. Its mission is “to challenge regimes hostile to U.S. interests and values” while “promoting the cause of political and economic freedom outside the U.S.” Over the years it provided covert support to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, the Contras in Nicaragua and has had a huge presence in Cuba, serving as a base for all sorts of harebrained ploys to destabilize and fuck with Fidel’s rule. A Cuba UN rep described it as “a machinery of subversion, closer to an intelligence service than an NGO.”

During the Bush years, Freedom House was a natural hangout for hardcore neocons. In the early 2000s, headed by James Woolsey, former head of the CIA and a grade-A neocon (who now lobbies on behalf of an Iranian terrorist organization), Freedom House’s primary mission became regime change and propaganda warfare in support of Bush’s insane plan to take over the world. [Read Mark Ames' 2005 "Freedom's Just Another Word For Fascism."] Freedom House was also involved in the brief coup against President Hugo Chavez in 2002, but its main focus during the Bush years was Russia and the former Soviet Union. That’s where it really shined.

From 2000 to 2004, Freedom House, along with Soros’ Open Society Institute and the National Endowment for Democracy, engineered political opposition movements that toppled old Soviet-era leadership in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine and installed “reformers” handpicked by U.S. business interests. It funded and set up political groups, NGOs and media organizations that rallied behind freemarket ideas and Western-friendly politicians. They trained organizers and activists and had PR experts cook up catchy slogans and logos. The plan was to tap into people’s genuine desire for reform and channel their naive trust in the West into votes for politicians who took their marching orders directly from the IMF.

Cheney and Bush hanging with the help…

So where does the Institute for Humane Studies fit into Freedom House’s regime change marathon?

Today, the Institute for Humane studies is a place where Kochite elders like Reason’s editor Nick Gillespie and its anti-police state expert (now HuffPo star columnist) Radley Balko are paid to train up-and-coming Koch warriors. But through the 40-plus years of its existence, the Institute has been one the Kochs’ premiere libertarian organizations and served as a home base for the biggest names in libertarian thought, including Friedrich Von Hayek.

The Kochs themselves are supposed to be strict adherents of the libertarian way: against state intervention and the projection of government power both domestically and internationally. And it seems that they are. After all, David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1980, and sought to abolish the CIA, among other things. According to Justin Raimondo, the paleolibertarian editor of Antiwar.com, that’s what makes them different: “the one factor that sets the Kochs apart from post-cold war conservatives (and liberals), and that is their untrammeled anti-militarism.”

So it’s easy to see how people would get the impression that the Kochs are staunch anti-interventionists. Even Glenn Greenwald thinks the Kochs, through their Cato Institute, are all about peace and love–seemingly no different than Code Pink:

Whatever else is true, there are people on the Right who believe in the same things people on the Left when it comes to war and civil liberties. Anyone can go read the Cato Institute’s writing about these issues over the last seven years and let me know which group has done more to oppose extremist Bush policies than they have.

The Institute for Humane Studies, as well as other Koch libertarian outfits like Cato Institute, have had a history of translating and smuggling banned libertarian literature into the Soviet Union. But the Kochs’ involvement with Freedom House is different. It was no longer just about spreading ideas, but about taking over for a CIA arm designed for foreign intervention and regime change.

And why would the Kochs want to do that?

It’s not clear. The Wikileaks cable dump make no further mention of the Kochs’ involvement in Tajikistan, so we don’t know why they wanted in on the project or how it turned out for them in the end, but that doesn’t really matter. Just the fact that they were on the scene, buddying up with war-crazed neocons, CIA goons and State Department bureaucrats famed for their covert regime change ops tells us all we need to know: the anti-interventionist/anti-empire position of libertarianism is just another Koch con meant to give libertarians credibility, and bowl over gullible lefties and progressives into supporting the Kochs’ brutal 19th century economic policies.

But there’s more to it than that.

Interestingly, just a month before the U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe sent the above cable, a guy named Peter Ackerman replaced Woosley as the head of Freedom House. As it turns out, Ackerman, a finance guy who worked with Michael Milken and got rich off junk bonds, had served on Cato Institute’s Board of Directors since 1995. But his connections to the Koch propaganda machine seems to go even deeper: Ackerman had studied non-violent political movements under Gene Sharp and wrote a dissertation on how to create and manipulate astroturf movements in order to achieve political change. And guess what? In Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe write that a book Ackerman wrote on the subject is required reading for FreedomWorks employees.

All of a sudden, the Kochs’ involvement in funding propaganda and potentially helping organize a fake opposition group in a country halfway across the world no longer appears to be out of character. After all that’s what their vast libertarian/free-market apparatus is designed to do right here in America. And there’s no reason it can’t scale up to go international.

Yasha Levine is an editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com. Want to know more? Read Yasha Levine and Mark Ames’ article about the “Koch-Hayek Social Security-Fanboy Letters”: Monster Koch Bust: Charles Koch Used Social Security to Lure Friedrich von Hayek to America.

Read Yasha Levine’s dispatches from the frontlines of California’s real estate meltdown: Victorville.

“Ha-ha! Those suckers will believe anything! “

This article appeared in the October 17, 2011 edition of The Nation

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.

This extraordinary correspondence regarding Social Security began in early June 1973, weeks after Koch was appointed president of the Institute for Humane Studies. Along with his brothers, Koch inherited his father’s privately held oil company in 1967, becoming one of the richest men in America. He used this fortune to help turn the IHS, then based in Menlo Park, California, into one of the world’s foremost libertarian think tanks. Soon after taking over as president, Koch invited Hayek to serve as the institute’s “distinguished senior scholar” in preparation for its first conference on Austrian economics, to be held in June 1974.

Hayek initially declined Koch’s offer. In a letter to IHS secretary Kenneth Templeton Jr., dated June 16, 1973, Hayek explains that he underwent gall bladder surgery in Austria earlier that year, which only heightened his fear of “the problems (and costs) of falling ill away from home.” (Thanks to waves of progressive reforms, postwar Austria had near universal healthcare and robust social insurance plans that Hayek would have been eligible for.)

IHS vice president George Pearson (who later became a top Koch Industries executive) responded three weeks later, conceding that it was all but impossible to arrange affordable private medical insurance for Hayek in the United States. However, thanks to research by Yale Brozen, a libertarian economist at the University of Chicago, Pearson happily reported that “social security was passed at the University of Chicago while you [Hayek] were there in 1951. You had an option of being in the program. If you so elected at that time, you may be entitled to coverage now.”

A few weeks later, the institute reported the good news: Professor Hayek had indeed opted into Social Security while he was teaching at Chicago and had paid into the program for ten years. He was eligible for benefits.

On August 10, 1973, Koch wrote a letter appealing to Hayek to accept a shorter stay at the IHS, hard-selling Hayek on Social Security’s retirement benefits, which Koch encouraged Hayek to draw on even outside America. He also assured Hayek that Medicare, which had been created in 1965 by the Social Security amendments as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, would cover his medical needs.

Koch writes: “You may be interested in the information that we uncovered on the insurance and other benefits that would be available to you in this country. Since you have paid into the United States Social Security Program for a full forty quarters, you are entitled to Social Security payments while living anywhere in the Free World. Also, at any time you are in the United States, you are automatically entitled to hospital coverage.”

Then, taking on the unlikely role of Social Security Administration customer service rep, Koch adds, “In order to be eligible for medical coverage you must apply during the registration period which is anytime from January 1 to March 31. For your further information, I am enclosing a pamphlet on Social Security.”

* * *

The private correspondence between two of the most important figures shaping the Republican Party’s economic policies—billionaire libertarian Charles Koch and Nobel Prize–winning economist Friedrich Hayek, godfather of today’s free-market movement—were obtained by Yasha Levine from the Hayek archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This is the first time the content of these letters has been reported on.

The documents offer a rare glimpse into how these two major free-market apostles privately felt about government assistance programs—revealing a shocking degree of cynicism and an unimaginable betrayal of the ideas they sold to the American public and the rest of the world.

Charles Koch and his brother, David, have waged a three-decade campaign to dismantle the American social safety net. At the center of their most recent push is the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, which has co-sponsored Tea Party events, spearheaded the war against healthcare reform and supported Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attack on public sector unions. FreedomWorks, another conservative group central to the rise of the Tea Party and the right-wing attempt to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, emerged from an advocacy outfit founded by the Koch brothers called Citizens for a Sound Economy. FreedomWorks now exists as a separate entity that champions the “Austrian school” of economics.

Hayek, a founder of that school of thought, is primarily known for two major works. The first, The Road to Serfdom (1944), grudgingly accepts the possibility that some “free” countries might find it necessary to set up a bare-minimum catastrophic social insurance program limited to the very neediest, so long as the benefits do not incentivize productive members of society to abandon free-market retirement savings or medical insurance.

Hayek’s comparatively liberal attitude toward social insurance hardened considerably by the time he published his 1960 opus, The Constitution of Liberty. Despite privately spending the intervening years paying into Social Security, Hayek devoted an entire chapter—titled “Social Security”—to denouncing the modern welfare state as a gateway to tyranny and moral decay. Ironically, one of Hayek’s main objections to government programs like Social Security was the “fundamental absurdity” of using tax dollars to promote their benefits. In other words, Hayek publicly objected to the kind of brochure that Charles Koch sent him. In their private correspondence, however, we could find no objection to this “fundamental absurdity.”

By the mid-1970s, Hayek had fully distanced himself from the modest benefits he’d originally conceded to in The Road to Serfdom. In his preface to the 1976 edition, he explained his “error”: “I had not wholly freed myself from all the current interventionist superstitions, and in consequence still made various concessions which I now think unwarranted.”

Publicly, in academia and in politics, in the media and in propaganda, these two major figures—one the sponsor, the other the mandarin—have been pushing Americans to do away with Social Security and Medicare for our own good: we will become freer, richer, healthier and better people.

But the exchange between Koch and Hayek exposes the bad-faith nature of their public arguments. In private, Koch expresses confidence in Social Security’s ability to care for a clearly worried Hayek. He and his fellow IHS libertarians repeatedly assure Hayek that his government-funded coverage in the United States would be adequate for his medical needs.None of them—not Koch, Hayek or the other libertarians at the IHS—express anything remotely resembling shame or unease at such a betrayal of their public ideals and writings. Nowhere do they worry that by opting into and taking advantage of Social Security programs they might be hastening a socialist takeover of America. It’s simply a given that Social Security and Medicare work, and therefore should be used.

* * *

Shortly after this exchange, in 1974, Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics. The next year he went on something of a victory tour of the United States, which ended at the IHS, where he spent the summer as a resident scholar. Hayek returned to Menlo Park again in the summer of 1977. The Nation has filed a Freedom of Information Request with the Social Security Administration to discover if, in fact, Hayek received Social Security payments or used Medicare during his residencies at the institute or at any other time. At press time, these requests have not been answered.

Meanwhile, in 1974, Charles Koch founded the Cato Institute (called the Charles Koch Foundation until 1977). This think tank has done more than any other to push for an end to Social Security. In 1983 the Cato Journal published a blueprint of how to destroy Social Security, “Achieving a ‘Leninist Strategy,’” by Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis. The authors acknowledged that a strong coalition of Americans backed Social Security and thus saw the need for “guerrilla warfare against both the current Social Security system and the coalition that supports it.” Victory could be far in the future, “but then, as Lenin well knew, to be a successful revolutionary, one must also be patient and consistently plan for real reform,” they write.

As part of Cato’s campaign, the institute has launched various groups and projects, including the Project on Social Security Choice, whose co-chair is José Piñera, architect of Augusto Pinochet’s controversial pension privatization scheme in Chile. Cato Institute members and alumni also dominated President George W. Bush’s commission on Social Security in his first term and spearheaded Bush’s failed attempt to privatize the program in the early months of his second term.

Thanks in part to Hayek’s writings and to the Koch brothers’ decades-long war on the social safety net, Americans are among the Western world’s few citizens without universal healthcare. Not surprisingly, life expectancy here has fallen to forty-ninth place in the world, while medical costs are double those of other Western nations. By contrast, Hayek’s native Austria, which has a public health plan that covers 99 percent of the population, boasts a healthcare system ranked ninth in the world by the World Health Organization.

* * *

When Texas Governor Rick Perry, a front-runner in the Republican primary for president, derides Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” or a “monstrous lie,” that rhetoric can be traced back to the work of Hayek and Koch. And yet we now know that in private practice, Hayek was perfectly content to pay into Social Security and that Koch encouraged him to draw upon both Social Security and Medicare. Did they really believe what they wrote? Or were these attacks just scare-talk meant for the rubes, for you and us, “the public”?

Calling this mere hypocrisy downplays the seriousness of their fraud. Koch and Hayek are no more hypocritical than the used-car salesman who knowingly sells a lemon to a gullible buyer, or the financial agency that rates “AAA” instruments it knows are crap. This is a grand swindle played on a trusting, gullible public, a scam whose goal is to con America’s dying middle class into handing over their retirement money to the richest 0.1 percent, convincing them that in doing so, they’re “empowering” themselves and protecting their “individual liberty.”

Another question hangs over all this: Why didn’t Charles Koch offer to put up some of his enormous wealth to pay for Hayek’s temporary medical insurance? One obvious answer: because the state had already offered a better and freer program. But perhaps Koch’s stinginess also reveals the social ethic behind libertarian values: every man for himself; selfishness is a virtue.

Read this story at TheNation.com.

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

Slate’s David Weigel is one of the few libertarian media figures who at least has had the courtesy to disclose, on occasion, his past relationships with Koch-funded outfits (Institute for Humane Studies, Reason Magazine…). But half-disclosures can be deceiving. The record shows that every time the Koch-machine finds itself under media scrutiny, and its unnerving influence on our political and economic culture is exposed, you can count on David Weigel to rush to the scene and declare, “Nothing to see here folks. Boring. Seen it all before. Don’t have a cow.” He did it again yesterday, in reaction to the Mother Jones exclusives on the Koch Brothers’ secretive oligarch-gathering in Vail. Weigel’s response? “No surprise.”

As you’ll see, this “no surprise” yawn is the same response just about every time.

Which would be fine, except that as far as the public is concerned, David Weigel is a columnist for Slate, the Washington Post Group’s respectable online magazine. Readers are barely aware of Weigel’s long relationship with the libertarian nomenklatura and Koch-funded outfits. So unless Weigel drops one of his occasional disclosures, the public reads Weigel ho-humming the latest Koch scandal, and assumes he means it without having a personal stake in it. So that when Weigel says there’s no story there, most readers will assume that maybe Weigel gets it, as a Slate insider, in a way that they, John Q. Reading Public, can’t get.

And that is why David Weigel is such a valuable asset to the Koch PR Machine.

Here are some highlights of the David Weigel playbook of “Pretending The Koch Expose Isn’t A Big Deal”:

On yesterday’s breaking story from Mother Jones exposing the Kochs’ secretive meeting and the names on the list of their “Million-Dollar Donor’s Club,” Weigel laughed knowingly and dismissed the hullaballoo with the all-knowing sneer of a graying, grizzled veteran reporter:

“The Koch Brother-Anna Nicole Smith Connection”

Mother Jones uncovers the Hope Diamond of liberal anger circa 2011: Audio from a private Koch brothers et al retreat, in which the names of people who donated at least $1 million to the Kochs’ causes are identified.

No surprise: Most of the money on this list is coming from people who stand to make even more money in the energy industry if more leases are given out and more regulations are deep-sixed.

No surprise indeed. This is a classic example of the David Weigel Koch-Defense Strategy: Declare it’s “no surprise,” roll contemptuous all-knowing eyes at all the rest of us excitable novice reporters who clearly don’t “get it.” We should feel lame, we who are given to hysteria when we read about the Kochs and their billionaire friends’ anti-democracy arrogance and power, and their smarmy bigotry towards Obama (not to mention the appalling provincialism of their hate, right down to the Birther/Teabagger Muslim-baiting).

That’s “no surprise” to Weigel. And he wants us to think it’s no surprise too. So rather than focus attention on what every reporter and his dog knows is the real story–the rare glimpse of the oligarchy unplugged and unmediated, provided by the Mother Jones scoop–Weigel flaps his arms to distract his Slate readers: First, by claiming there’s no story in the Mother Jones scoop; and then, once that’s established, by pretending that a real ace investigative reporter (such as Weigel) looks at that material and spots the real buried lede here–the Anna Nicole Smith-Koch connection, overlooked by all the do-gooder mediocrities and liberal elitists.

Did you hear that, budding cub reporters? The real story according to David Weigel is the Celebrity Idiot angle. If we’re to believe Weigel, the way to really fight the power of the the Kochs is to stop prying into the rich and powerful figures gathered together in Vail; and instead, focus on the celebrity/RealityTV part of the story: Anna Nicole Smith, the dead Playmate who OD’d on elephant tranquilizers or whatever! It’s so whacky! Because focusing on celebritards worked out so well for American journalism during the Bush years, why not keep it rolling into this decade too?

Weigel’s “nothing to see here folks” reaction to the Mother Jones expose is almost identical to his quasi-jaded reaction a year ago, when details emerged about last year’s secret billionaires’ Koch Cartel meeting in Aspen. Most Americans who read about that secret Koch oligarchy-gathering were shocked; not Old Man Weigel, who’s seen it all, ‘n’ done it all:

“The Banality of the Koch Conspiracy”

…Indeed, the Kochs’ “secret meeting” in June with investors and high-profile journalists was written about at the time by Tim Carney, who has another take on it today. The details of who shows up at such things are sort of interesting. The fact that these things happen is completely banal — elevating it is really just the left’s revenge for a decade or so of the right attempting to scandalize and criminalize the influence that George Soros and other billionaires have on Democrats.

It’s like reading a fashion blogger commenting on a hipster’s open-toed ankle-boots, only applied to the world of power and corruption. “Gawd, you’re so banal! You’re so two seasons ago, omigawd!”

Every time someone shines a light on the Kochs’ democracy-killing power and influence, the jaded 29-year-old-going-on-92-year-old David Weigel grows wearier and wearier. For example, a couple of months ago, The Nation and the Center for Media and Democracy published a powerful and in-depth investigation into another Koch-backed outfit, ALEC, revealing how they coordinate legislation at the state level. While most Americans were shocked to discover how deeply their state legislatures were in the pockets of corporate interests, David Weigel shrugged and rolled his eyes:

REVEALED: Libertarian Pro-Business Group Writes Libertarian Pro-Business Legislation

Behold AlecExposed, a new project from the Center for Media and Democracy which makes available all of the American Legislative Exchange Council bills that had been locked behind an incredibly pricey paywall. The revelation that ALEC writes model legislation for conservative/libertarian legislators is surely among the least surprising news ever, but the project is worthy — you can see where those mysterious bills introduced by GOP freshmen actually came from.

Yes, it’s the least surprising news ever. In the history of unsurprising news. Now, Anna Nicole Smith, a celebrity on drugs, mixing with a billionaire whose son did business with Charles Koch...now thatsastory! [Note: This ALEC Exposed story just won the Sidney Hillman Award for Investigative Journalism.]

Dontcha feel stupid now, you who fell for the whole “ALEC is a terrible thing for a country that wants to be a democracy” angle? You poor naive fools! Like, how lame are you, you know? David Weigel already went through his ALEC phase like 2 years ago, you’re so outta date, omigawd!

Earlier this year, when the Wisconsin protestors zeroed in on the Kochs’ influence (thanks in part to the great Ian Murphy prank call to Gov. Scott Walker), Weigel quickly arrived on the scene in Wisconsin to declare, again, how this was all old hat, calling out liberal hysteria, telling everyone to keep moving along, nothing to see here folks, just a bunch of paranoid liberals who don’t understand things the way Old School 29-year-old David Weigel of Slate does:

“Public Enemies Nos. 1 and 2: How did everyone in Wisconsin become obsessed with the Koch brothers?”

When it comes to the Kochs, progressives in Wisconsin are ready to believe the absolute worst. Inside the capitol there are dozens of agitprop signs accusing the brothers of buying the election for Walker. There are detailed lists of Koch companies and which products to boycott in order to starve them. There are articles taped to the walls from Forbes magazine (“Texas Koch Brothers Behind Wisconsin Effort To Kill Public Unions”) and the New York Times (“Koch Brothers’ Money Fuels Wisconsin Fight“). On Wednesday, a new sign started appearing around the halls, informing protesters of a picket outside the stately office building, not far from the capitol, where Koch Companies have hired seven lobbyists.

In sum: They have found the enemy, and it is Koch.

The Kochs’ media monkeys have three basic rhetorical tricks that they keep trying to play to counter all the bad light shined on their Masters’ vast oligarchical influence: 1). It’s lame, it’s yesterday, it’s not a big deal, you don’t really get it; 2). Unions do it too, only worse (ignore the fact that union power has completely collapsed over the same time period that the Kochs’ wealth has soared exponentially to over $45 billion, and that he’s comparing two completely unrelated numbers); 3). It’s lame, you’re a conspiracy theorist, you’re lame. Lame, lame, lame.

Here is more Weigel in the same article, deploying the second of the three Koch-defense tricks at the height of the Wisconsin battle:

How can we judge how deep the Kochs’ influence runs? That New York Times story points out that all Koch-affiliated companies and employees gave about $1.84 million to Republicans, nationwide, in the 2010 election cycle. Americans for Prosperity, the nonprofit Tea Party-organizing group co-founded by David Koch—he’s still on the board—had a $40 million budget in 2010. (On Tuesday AFP announced a $342,000 ad buy supporting Walker.) Nationally, the labor movement spent far, far more than this. To take one example, AFSCME, whose green-shirted members have made their presence known in Madison, spent $87.5 million on the election.

There, the false-equivalency between moribund-union power and Koch oligarchy power: That’s “Koch-Defense Rhetorical Trick #2.”

And at end of the same sly Koch-apology article, Weigel plays Koch-Defense Rhetorical Trick #3, deployed to ensure that any of you respectable types who worry about being socially-cool will feel all lame and uncool and stuff if you continue to pursue the Koch Brothers’ story:

How did the Kochs become the villains of Madison? They have, for decades, bankrolled libertarian think tanks and programs, and they help put on conferences where conservative ideas are spread. Among the ideas they end up spreading are drug legalization and opposition to the Patriot Act. The Tea Party was the first movement funded in part by the Kochs that really took off.

So why credit everything that Republicans are trying to do now to Kochs’ influence? Partly because they do have some influence, and partly, as the Assembly Democrats kept goading Republicans, because they are shadowy “New York billionaires.” A complicated fight over public-sector unions can be broadened into a stand against secretive malefactors of wealth, who can be connected somehow to every conservative victory or idea. And the fear and paranoia grows, because, theoretically, they could be spending more than anyone knows.

Weigel is a smart guy, yet even he can’t stop himself from deploying these crude tactics to protect the Kochs from the scrutiny and anger that they, as the most influential and powerful oligarchs in the country, with decades of political and ideological activity on a scale we’re still getting a handle on, deserve. No matter what the controversy his former funders fall into, Weigel can be counted on to show up and announce to the world how underwhelmed he is.

For example, earlier this year, controversy erupted when the Kochs essentially bought Florida State University’s economics department. Most Americans were appalled, including university students and professors. Weigel, however, rolled his jaded been-there-seen-it-all, 29-year-old eyes and delivered another ho-hum verdict, with some added snark designed to make you feel lame if you actually were lame enough to care ‘n’ stuff:

The Kochs Invade Florida State Unviersity!

The deal was in place two years ago. (My headline is a bit over the top, so, sorry about that.) How’d it get attention all of a sudden?

Endowed academic positions are so prevalent that they’re unextraordinary.

…The Koch pushback continues, as non-controversial donation after non-controversial donation is blown up into a controversy — a byproduct of the brothers’ new fame.

No, don’t apologize for the headline David, it actually helped a lot of reporters and others worried about the Kochs’ influence realize how lame they were being–being lame, that’s worse than death, you know?

Weigel also added a new rhetorical defense strategy to help the Kochs: paint critics of Koch corruption as McCarthyites. Characterize those who worry about the corruption of academia as the real problem, the real oppressors, the real corruptors. Anyone who objects to the billionaire Kochs’ vast investments into the vulnerable field of academia is nothing but an anti-intellectual Stalinist out to oppress those who disagree with them (roughly the same argument used by Koch-funded climate-change-deniers). Here is Weigel in the same Florida State ho-hummer:

But one point of scandalizing this when it’s relatively new is to start raising questions about what comes out of FSU’s economics department. It’s very easy for Republicans to come out with a letter from X number of economists saying Y Obama policy will destroy freedom and drain your precious bodily fluids. But what if you can challenge the authority of those economists by saying this one or that one is just a shill for Charles G. Koch? Oh, sure, he’ll be matched by lots of other economists who don’t have any particular lucre convincing them that Murray Rothbard was right. But raise a couple of questions and you discredit the source.

It’s an old attorney’s tactic played whenever they have to defend their filthy rich corrupt clients from public wrath–declare the client a victim of tyranny and a martyr to the Constitution. Apparently Weigel isn’t ashamed to use it at Slate.

He even has a change-up strategy to defend Masters Koch. Even as jaded as ol’ David Weigel usually pretends to be, he too can be susceptible to the same sort of “gollee, look-ahere!” naivete he usually trashes. Though he seems to get afflicted with gullibility at just the right time for a pro-Koch PR campaign. Like this “Santa Koch” PR campaign, designed to counter the Kochs’ increasingly bad image as one of the country’s biggest polluters and the largest funders of anti-environmental legislation and propaganda:

SCANDAL: David Koch Wants Rich People to Fund Cancer Research

The irony seeps through the screen in this report on David Koch at the opening of the MIT cancer research center he donated $100 million to build.

For once in his Koch-watching career, David Weigel didn’t have a “no surprise here” or “nothing new” snide dismissal; as in, “No surprise here: a billionaire opponent of climate change science and notorious polluter gives charity money to cancer research to improve his image, it’s the oldest trick in the Rockefeller Foundation book.” This time, Weigel dropped the Jaded Old Veteran Reporter schtick, and celebrated the hilarious side-splitting irony of it all, irony so delicious it just had to be fattening…

To be fair to David–and I have to be honest, I’ve met him and I found his friendly Spock-like ability to make Rutherford B. Hayes analogies kind of disarming–he has at least disclosed more than the rest. His disclosure goes pretty much like this, and I mostly quote: David Weigel spent two and a half years at Reason magazine, which receives some funding from the Kochs, and in January 2009 Weigel attended and received payment for a Liberty Fund meeting in Alexandria, Va. — one of the frequent intellectual salons organized by the Institute for Humane Studies, funded in part by the Kochs.

That may not seem like a lot to those unaware of what the Institute for Humane Studies means, or until you factor in the fact that Weigel’s only 29, and so a good third of his media career has been funded by or affiliated with Koch-founded outfits. That doesn’t include Weigel’s stint as editor of the rightwing-libertarian student newspaper Northwestern Chronicle, one of several Dartmouth Review-like student newspapers that emerged out of a project launched in 1979 by Irving Kristol, godfather of neoconservatism, and William Simon, former Nixon Treasury Secretary and one of the main forces in the rise of rightwing think-tanks in the 70′s and 80′s. Weigel’s paper emerged from the Kristol-Simon Institute for Educational Affairs. The IEA’s first college newspaper project was run by none other than John “Tiffany Normanson” Podhoretz while he was a student at the University of Chicago…other alumni include Dinesh D’Souza, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, and just about every other rank hagfish we’re stuck with today.

What makes this even more depressing is that Weigel probably isn’t all that aware of his journalistic corruption. By this point, it’s too deeply ingrained. Hell, his employer, the Washington Post Group, survives on fleecing poor and often minority youths via the WaPo Group’s for-profit education scams. These days, he’s not alone; in fact, among his libertarian peers, David Weigel is probably the best there is.

Would you like to know more? Read Mark Ames’ article “The Koch Whore Archipelago: How The Billionaire Kochs Screwed My Scoop While Screwing America.”

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

Joel B. Pollak, Teafailure: Be careful, he might use a proxy on you!

Urgent update, folks! Andrew Breitbart’s Koch-monkey, Joel B. Pollak, just outdid himself as the top ace gumshoe reporter of the retarded-right. Yes folks, Joel. B. Pollak, peddler of the “Johnny Chen Conspiracy Theory” that changed the face of journalism as we know it, now has another shocking scoop about eXiled editor Mark Ames–and to get the scoop, he even used what hi-tech futuristic types call a “proxy.” Yep, betcha you never heard of a “proxy” before, but that’s because you’re not an ace reporter like Joel B. Pollak. But don’t take it from me, take it from the shocking “UPDATE” posted by Joel B. Pollak himself:

UPDATE: Ames responded on August 30 in a rambling ad hominem attack that made no effort to dispute the claims made in the article above. Indeed, its basic factual errors–e.g. my graduation date, easily checked–reinforce Ames’s sloppy reputation.**[see below--Exiled Editor]

Would you like to know more? Read more about Joel B. Pollak, Breitbart’s Koch-monkey: ANDREW BREITBART ATTACKS EXILED EDITOR MARK AMES!…HIRES FAILED TEABAG REPUBLICAN TO INVESTIGATE THE GREAT “WHO IS JOHNNY CHEN?” CONSPIRACY.  For more background, read “Jim Goad and Gavin McInnes Beg Mark Ames: ‘Answer Me, Please?’” Also read “KKKat Fight! White Power Fashionista John Galliano VS. White Power Fashionista Gavin McInnes.”

Khloe Kardashian, Donna D’Errico of Baywatch, former Miss USA Susie Castillo, Playboy nude-model Tammy Banovac, Jesse Ventura and Alex Jones: to most Americans, a list of names like that sounds like the punch-line to an elaborate pop culture comedy routine. Or maybe the cast of another John Waters kitsch-flick, or another one of those degrading reality shows. If that’s what you’re thinking, then you’re clearly one of the brainwashed “sheeple.” You can’t appreciate that Khloe Kardashian & Friends are modern-day American Martyrs– victims of TSA airport gate screener “Nazis,” a jack-booted “Gestapo” who “gate-rape” and “genocide” Americans on a daily basis. Khloe, Donna, Tammy and Susie aren’t sheeple, though–they’re our modern-day George Washingtons and Thomas Jeffersons fighting for our constitutional liberties, and some day our children may owe their freedom to Khloe Kardashian’s Army.

That’s one way of looking at it. Anther way is that Kardashian and D’Errico represent the sorts of martyrs-to-inanity that could only make sense to a generation raised on trash-reality TV.

Whether they’re freedom-fighters or celebritard publicity-whores, we leave that up to our readers to decide. To help you, we’ve put together a quick dossier on Khloe’s Army of Celebrity Martyrs to TSA Tyranny:

#1: Khloe Kardashian

Kardashian sisters bravely head into battle against TSA tyranny

Last December, Khloe Kardashian–the Jan Brady of the Sisters Kardashian–claimed she was the victim of a TSA “rape.” While every other victim of rape in human history has found the experience almost too traumatic to talk about, Khloe went straight to that most ideal of forums to disclose one’s rape trauma–George Lopez Tonight: “Well, they basically just are raping you in public,” Kardashian chirped. “The people are so aggressive! It’s like, ‘Chill out, you didn’t find anything on me yet, calm down.’ They say, ‘OK, I’m going to be patting you down and I’m going to be touching the crease of your ass.’ That is so inappropriate!”

“Inappropriate” was a word many rape-victims’ activists associated with Khloe Kardashian. Jessica Sears Brown, Co-founder of Pandora’s Project, told reporters: “Comparing the two is inappropriate and cheapens the devastation of sexual violence. We understand that Ms. Kardashian found her screening to be uncomfortable. However, I highly doubt she’ll need years of therapy to rebuild her sense of safety and trust in the world after undergoing a TSA screening.”

Hollywood uber-lawyer Gloria Allred agreed: “Words matter and the word ‘rape’ should be used with caution and with great respect for the victims who have been forced to endure it. It is completely inappropriate to use that word for scans or pat downs at airports.”

Khloe just couldn’t get a break, as more and more rape victims’ advocates slammed her poor taste in analogies. Jazmin Robles of the Santa Barbara Rape Crisis Center told Radar Online,

“I think it was an ill-informed thing for her to say. It was a very strong comment to make because rape is defined as ‘forceful penetration’ and a lot of young women look up to celebrities like the Kardashians.

“We are all about educating people about rape at our Center and by using the word in this context it blurs the issue as to what it actually constitutes. Maybe Khloe Kardashian is not educated enough on this subject to be talking about it in the context of airport security.”

Clearly, they just don’t understand the pain that Khloe suffered. It’s like, everyone thinks she just exaggerated it for publicity or something, omg!

#2: Donna D’Errico

Martyrs inspire others into action, and the timing of Khloe Kardashian’s martyrdom suggests she may have been inspired to go public as a TSA “gate-rape” victim by Donna D’Errico, ex-wife of Nikki Sixx, and co-star of Baywatch, Baywatch Nights, and the straight-to-video Candyman 3. Just a couple of days before Kardashian’s TSA “rape” D’Errico complained to AOL News that she’d been singled out for a full-body scan, while her boyfriend– Roy J. Bank, president of Merv Griffin Entertainment—“sailed through with no problems, which is rather ironic in that my boyfriend fits the stereotypical ‘look’ of a terrorist when his beard has grown in a bit, which it was that evening.”

While D’Errico appeared to be unhappy at the TSA’s failure to racially-profile her boyfriend, she wouldn’t go so far as to suggest she’d been singled out in a TSA conspiracy against a celebrity—“I’m not sure whether they had recognized me or not. If they did, they didn’t say anything,” she told AOL News.  Whatever the case, D’Errico claimed to be “humiliated” by the TSA agents’ “whispering” to each other and “smiling,” suggesting to D’Errico that she’d been the victim of X-Ray scan “peeping Toms.”

Unfortunately, not everyone believed Donna’s story–and it wasn’t just because she’d whined that the TSA hadn’t racially-profiled her terrorist-looking boyfriend. Cynics and nay-sayers pointed out that some things didn’t make sense. Like how D’Errico claimed that the lascivious male TSA perverts never gave her the option of a pat-down. Think about it: What sort of TSA “rapist” would pass up the opportunity to run his perverted statist hands all over D’Errico’s curvaceous body, instead forcing her to pose for a shitty X-ray photo that may or may not show her body contours. And it’s not like these TSA Nazis weren’t patting down everyone else, including her son–it’s that they didn’t even give her the option of a pat-down. Some totalitarian Nazis they turned out to be! D’Errico seemed actually offended by the fact that they made her son do both the scan and the pat-down, but not her:

“They never told me that they were going to be conducting a full-body scan, or that I had the option of being searched instead. Had they explained what they were doing, I would have opted for the search. As a matter of fact, my son was made to not only go through the full-body scan, but they also conducted a pat-down search on him as well.”

Either they were more interested in her son than in her, or…but nah, only Sheeple would accuse D’Errico of shameless publicity-slumming!

Then of course there’s the whole “but you’ve spent your life posing nude” issue. When the AOL News reporter reminded D’Errico that she’d spent her entire career exposing her private parts for public consumption—Playboy Playmate of the Month spread, Baywatch episodes in bikinis as skimpy as dental floss, posing for Hustler magazine with ex-husband Nikki Sixx—D’Errico suddenly forgot her victim-of-humiliation story, and got her Tea Party ranting-about-her-rights on: “I posed for Playboy 15 years ago. I was on ‘Baywatch‘ 13 years ago. I could have stopped or changed my mind at any time. None of those conditions are present when TSA decides for you that you will consent to being scanned or felt up, or you simply won’t be allowed your constitutional right to travel from one place to another freely.”

Oh and speaking of Tea Party Libertarians and Koch Whores running the anti-TSA publicity campaign, guess who Donna D’Errico supports?

#3: Tammy Banovac (aka “Tammy Lynn Brewer”)

Donna D’Errico wasn’t the only Clinton-era Playboy nudie-turned-martyr of a TSA “sexual assault.”

Last November, a 52-year-old “retired surgeon” showed up at Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City in a wheelchair, wearing nothing but a bra and panties beneath her trench coat. The “retired surgeon,” identifying herself as Tammy Banovac, claimed she was protesting against the TSA’s pat-downs: “If it happened anywhere else, it would have been sexual assault,” she told reporters.

Unfortunately for Banovac, her martyrdom was itself martyred, as some people in the media started thinking to themselves, “H’m, something doesn’t seem right about this.” So they checked into just who Tammy Banovac really was, and discovered that her real name was Tammy Lynn Brewer. And that discovery led to a strange paradox: The same woman claiming to be “outraged” over the TSA pat-down had posed nude in a 1997 Playboy spread featuring sexy nude dental girls.

But Banovac had an even better story that she kept hidden: She’s a “retired” dentist because she once killed a 7-year-old patient. Yes, back in the early 1990′s, sexy dentist Banovac-Brewer was such a reckless idiot that she killed a poor 7-year-old boy after pulling nine of his teeth in the back of a physical therapist’s office. For that, her license to practice was revoked, and she was charged with gross malpractice because she used a local anesthesia on the 7-year-old boy against the explicit orders of both the boy’s parents and his cardiologist. He died shortly after those nine teeth were yanked.

According to Oklahoma City TV station KOCO:

The boy suffered from tricuspic atresia, a congenital heart defect, and polycythemia, which caused high blood pressure, the board complaint document said.

The documents said Banovac practiced dentistry in Pima County in two locations; the first was a church and the second was a medical office using portable equipment.

However, Banovac didn’t have a license to practice in Pima County nor gave the board notice to inspect the locations, the documents said.

In 1993, the board said Banovac made false sworn statements during the investigation and found her guilty of gross malpractice of a medically compromised patient and was fined a penalty of $5,000.

In subsequent hearings the board unanimously voted to censure Banovac on two separate complaints. On both complaints she was fined $1,000 each.

Here is a news report from Phoenix TV:

But despite all of this, what the sheeple don’t understand is why Tammy Banovac stripped to her underwear and showed up in a wheelchair when she doesn’t even need a wheelchair. Isn’t that, you know, sort of exploitative and in bad taste? Answer: ”She said she was not trying to draw attention to herself or make a scene,” as one media outlet reported. Nope–it was all about defending her liberties, and fighting against fascist TSA humiliation.

Spoken like a true Martyrtard!

#4: Susie Castillo

In 2003, Susie Castillo was crowned “Miss USA” and the world was her oyster. Eight years later, her resume logged yet another “canceled reality show” to her sputtering career as NBC’s “School Pride” went the way of Castillo’s other reality shows. Canceled shows, that is–such as the one-season dud, “America’s Prom Queen,” described by Salon.com as “a reality show that’s exactly as horrifying as that Stephen King movie ‘Carrie,’ except without all of the pig’s blood splattering all over the place.”

Which was downright effusive praise compared to the fate of Castillo’s last reality TV show disaster, “School Pride,” which not only received terrible ratings and reviews, but worse, was accused of faking reality at the expense of inner-city school children, and then leaving the school in worse shape than when they first arrived to “fix” it up.

According to the LA Times, “Local school officials reluctantly allowed a reality television show [‘School Pride’] onto campuses with promises of remodeling, then got stuck with a substandard paint job at one school and at another an embarrassing made-for-TV ‘reenactment’ of an event that never occurred.”

H’m, let’s see: Faking reality? Exploiting other people’s real problems for entertainment and fame? Sounds familiar? Nawww, don’t even think about it, folks!

A few months after “School Pride” was unceremoniously canceled, Susie Castillo filmed herself in Dallas Ft-Worth Airport giving the performance of a lifetime, crying that she’d been “molested” by a TSA screener during a pat-down, just as Khloe Kardashian and Tammy Banovac before her:

“That’s why I’m crying, that’s why I’m so upset. They’re making me choose to either get molested, because that’s what I feel like, or go through this machine that’s completely unhealthy and dangerous.”

Castillo posted her video of herself squirting more tears into her phone camera than Bugs Bunny managed in his Oscar-winning performance, and wouldn’t you know it, the video went viral:

Naturally, this had nothing to do with Castillo’s tanking reality-TV career, and everything to do with the highest possible motives:

“This isn’t about me,” she told ABC News. “Iit did happen to me, it’s not just about my rights, it’s about all rights, the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution is being violated.”

Indeed. Castillo’s website promoted her martyrdom video as a call to action rallying behind Martyr Susie. Readers were asked to sign a petition that she planned to take to Congress. About defending their liberties and stuff. Susie hoped her performance would inspire 1,000,000 freedom-loving Americans to sign her petition for her big presentation in Washington, DC; so far, 977 have signed the petition, meaning she’s a mere 999,003 signatures away from her goal!

And while signing up to defend their Constitutional liberties, visitors to susiecastillo.net were also invited to look at  her acting reels and, you know, compare them to her performance at Dallas airport!

Here, check this acting reel out, boy can she act!

Wow, how is it possible that she’s not a star? Welp, that may be about to change. Just a couple of weeks after Castillo’s Dallas martyrdom performance, Texas state Rep. David Simpson, a far-right Tea Party Republican, introduced legislation criminalizing TSA pat-downs. Simpson was part of an insurgent group of Texas Tea Party Republicans who sought to oust the Jewish Republican Speaker of the Texas House and replace him with a Christian. Previously, Rep. Simpson had introduced a state Constitutional amendment further restricting abortions, a bill allowing concealed firearms on Texas college campuses, and blocked legislation that would outlaw “puppy mills.”

[Late note: for some reason, Castillo seems to have removed her video of her moving Dallas airport performance, although other versions can still be found.]

#5: Jesse Ventura

It was inevitable: The publicity-hounding host of a floundering quasi-reality show on TruTV, “Conspiracy Theory,” falls victim to the greatest conspiracy of the Third Millennium: The TSA. In January, Jesse Ventura filed a lawsuit against the TSA alleging, like Martyr Kardashian and Martyr Banovac and Martyr D’Errico before him, that the pat-downs and the TSA’s body imagining “meet legal definitions of unlawful sexual assault and unlawful video voyeurism.”

HONORABLE MENTION: Alex Jones, leader of the 9/11 Truth-Out movement and the Internet’s biggest promoter of TSA Gestapo oppression, is also leading the fight for American liberty. By leading a “mob” to storm the Texas state house building in Austin after Rep. David Simpson’s bill was allowed to die.

Watch as Alex Jones breaks it all down what’s really happening here: It has nothing at all to do with publicity-seeking or political theater, and everything to do with defending America’s civil liberties:

Yes folks, it’s all about defending our civil liberties. We sheeple may not understand it, but the intrepid celebrities of Khloe’s Army sure do. And thanks to them, some day we may be able to fly in such a way that only non-unionized private security employees pat us down, rather than unionized government workers. And that will make all of us a lot more free–if we can just earn enough money to fly, that is.

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

This anti-TSA protester coming straight outta Waco!

On Saturday June 4, a dozen or so anti-TSA protesters marched on the Texas State Capitol, demanding that state legislators and Governor Rick Perry stand up to the federal government and pass a bill that would allow cops to arrest and imprison TSA screeners.

As readers of The eXiled know, Mark Ames and I have thoroughly exposed America’s anti-TSA “movement” as a rightwing union-busting PR campaign designed to prevent TSA workers from unionizing, pushed by an alliance of Koch-funded libertarians, warmongering neocons, notorious DC union-busting front-groups and rabid Christian homophobes. Well, the anti-TSA movement in Texas pretty much fits the bill…

Saturday’s rally was organized by a pro-police-state/anti-fluoridation libertarian group called Texans for Accountable Government, along with a whole bunch of  far-right authoritarian Christian activists. And as you can see from the picture above, some of them look like they were bussed in straight from some Branch Davidian compound.

Does the TSA make you mad as McManus?

Take the guy being interviewed in the video above. He might look like you and me, but it turns out Adam McManus is a crusading Christian talk radio host, who describes himself as an “articulate champion of the traditional Christian values that have made this country great” and brags that he was a 40-year-old virgin until he got married five years ago, after finally deciding that he “no longer wanted to burn with passion” (and wrote a painful 40,000-word online book about how he met and fell in love with his wife, who presumably deflowered McManus and stole his innocence).

But McManus is not just a repressed freak. Turns out he’s also a really big fan of freedom and liberty, which is why he hates the TSA so much!

Although McManus, like all the anti-TSA crowd, is kind of selective about his civil liberties concerns: In 2005, McManus mailed out a bunch of action alerts promoting news stories that described Guantanamo  as a  paradise of freedom, where prisoners are lavished with first-world luxuries like Twix candy bars and subscriptions to “Martha Stewart Living”—things they could never have experienced back home.

But that’s not all. On his website, he clearly positions himself as a pro-police state, homophobic anti-abortion activist, who wants to force other people to act in accordance with Biblical law.

Here’s McManus on the “gay problem“:

“I’ve been accused of being ‘homophobic’. But I’m not afraid of homosexuals, I’m afraid for homosexuals. The average age of death for a homosexual male with AIDS is 39. And the average age of death for a homosexual male without AIDS is only 42. It seems like the compassionate approach would be to challenge the person to stop participating in unnatural deviant behaviors that lead to his own premature death.”

Here’s McManus on curbing state power:

“When it comes to capital punishment, I’m pro-choice. The inmate can choose the electric chair, the gas chamber or a lethal injection.”

McManus on the nanny state:

“There’s one thing the government can never dole out: self-respect. That can only come with hard work, integrity and personal responsibility.”

Yes, sir! Every moral fiber in Adam McManus’ flabby body screams in agony at even the slightest hint of a government handout! No wonder he’s so proud of his younger brother, John McManus, who’s spent the last decade working in D.C. as a lobbyist-shill for the pharmaceutical industry. On the website of his lobbying firm, The McManus Group, little brother McManus brags that while working for Republican Congressman Bill Thomas, he helped engineer the half trillion dollar federal welfare program for the pharmaceutical industry, otherwise known as the “Medicare Modernization Act of 2003.”

Yup, that’s the anti-TSA, pro-liberty Tea Party crowd for you.

But Christian free-market extremists like McManus weren’t just rallying outside the capitol building, they were also the ones inside, writing and pushing the anti-TSA legislation.

Take David Simpson, the freshman senator who introduced the anti-TSA HR 1937 bill. Not only does Simpson own a lumber business, he is also the proprietor of his own Christian publishing company, which prints titles like “We Must Obey God: The Biblical Doctrine of Conscientious Disobedience to Human Authority with Special Reference to Operation Rescue,” a book that puts “[r]ighteous disobedience to civil and other authorities in biblical perspective” and explains why God wants you to bully and harass women, and take away their reproductive rights.

While Simpson is a political rookie, he has been getting plenty of support from Texas’ far-right Christian political establishment. His chief of staff, Kathi Seay, comes with serious Koch pedigree and has been a longtime fixture in Texas’ anti-abortion movement. She previously served as a staffer and spokeswoman for Texas Rep. Frank “Look at the Fetus” Corte and has been a longtime member of a rightwing youth training outfit called Torch of Freedom Foundation, where she sits on the board of directors, along with Morton Blackwell, founder of Koch-controlled Leadership Institute (which teaches young rightwingers how to prevent people from voting and churns out rightwing operatives like James O’Keefe, of ACORN pimp fame).

Then there’s Dan Patrick, the Texas state senator listed as the sponsor of Simpson’s anti-TSA bill. Turns out puffy-faced Patrick, whose forehead looks like it’s been treated with Juvéderm, is also a hardcore Christian radio host and author. He wrote a book called “The Second Most Important Book You Will Ever Read: A Personal Challenge to Read the Bible” that was so bad, even illiterate believers gave it bad reviews on Amazon:

1.0 out of 5 stars Sceptical, July 28, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Second Most Important Book You Will Ever Read: A Personal Challenge to Read the Bible (Hardcover)

I think it is good to read about religion but I’m not so sure about this book’s author’s intentions. Da n patrick has always been prety arragant and now we hear him shamelessly self promote his book day after day after day after day on his radio. It just seems like he is out to make money, not converts.

Arrogant or not, Patrick is a big supporter of civil liberties and the Constitution, including the First Amendment, which he demonstrated by launching boycotts against newspapers and media outlets that he thought had a pinko bias.

Not surprisingly, Dan Patrick is also part of a conservative think tank that’s been supported by Koch Industries, among other corporations. Yep, he’s just the kind of freedom fighter the oligarchy needs. And it’s clear from the way he describes himself on his website that Senator Patrick knows that he been done doin’ good by his masters:

Dan Patrick is considered by many as the most conservative member of the Texas Senate. In just his first term, he has become a leading conservative voice in Texas and in the Texas legislature.  In a recent Austin political news magazine ranking the most influential Republicans in Texas, Senator Patrick was listed at #3, just two spots behind Governor Rick Perry and the only member of the Texas Senate to be named in the top 20.

Senator Patrick has accomplished more in his first term than some legislators accomplish in a career. He passed legislation placing “In God We Trust” permanently in the Texas Senate Chamber and passed the Senate bill to place “Under God” in the state pledge.  Senator Patrick passed the largest tax cut of any legislator in the country in 2009 – a $172 million cut to business taxes for small business.

Governor Rick Perry just convened a special secession of the Texas legislature to take another stab at passing the anti-TSA bill. Meanwhile, Kochites in Utah and New Hampshire are following Texas’ lead…But it doesn’t matter where the anti-TSA gather next or what Glenn Greenwald of the libertarian Cato Institute might tell you, the fight against  TSA screeners is not about civil liberties. It is about attacking labor and pimping privatization. The rightwingers and Christian homophones leading the fight are not so much concerned with being “groped” at the gate, as they are about being groped by unionized workers. Getting their asses felt up by minimum-wage grunts working for private security firms is just fine by them–and apparently fine by Jesus, too. This is what their fight against the TSA is all about, and it fits in with the larger attack by free-market extremists on government-run security. It’s all about busting up the 43,000 TSA workers before they can form a union, which they’re voting on right now.

Take George Koch-Mason University-educated ”economist” Edward Stringham, who recently wrote a paper singing the praises of  David Lipscomb, a 19th-century biblical anarchist who preached that Christians should not participate in civil government. Turns out that Stringham not only advocates for privatizing the TSA, he also goes around giving Koch-sponsored talks on the benefits of privatizing the entire process of law and order—yeah, the whole thing. Here’s an email announcing one of his pro-private-security propaganda talks at a college in Denver:

From: Padilla Alexandre
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2011 3:46 PM
To: XXXXXX
Subject: Save the Date: EEF Lecture Series: Do We Need Government?: Private Law & Private Enforcement Speaker: Edward P. Stringham, Monday, March 25th, 11:00 am- 12:15 pm TIVOLI 320s

Dear students,

I am pleased to announce that the next Exploring Economic Freedom Lecture Series talk will take place on Monday April 25th, 2011 from 11:00 to 12:15 pm in Tivoli 320s. Our speaker for this event is Dr. Edward P. Stringham from Fayetteville State University. His talk is entitled: “Do We Need Government? Private Law & Private Enforcement” Economist Edward Stringham will ask whether law enforcement must be provided by government. He will talk about how private law enforcement is extremely common in the United States and the world, and discuss ways in which private law enforcement is an attractive alternative to government law enforcement.

This talk is generously sponsored by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Pizzas and sodas will be available for free for attendees. I have included below a short biography of Dr. Stringham.

Please let me know if you have questions.

Sincerely yours,

Dr. Alexandre Padilla
Associate Professor of Economics & Interim Director
Honors ProgramMetropolitan State College of Denver

You can’t deny that for the Kochs and their ultra-rightwing billionaire buddies, “private law enforcement is an attractive alternative to government law enforcement.” The fact is that while it’s not hard to get unionized rightwing white cops to beat up on blacks, Mexicans and junkies, it’s not so easy to get them to go against their own kind. And there’s always a chance, no matter how slim, that union cops will turn on the oligarchy. A private mercenary force is so much more efficient:

Yasha Levine is an editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com. Check out other Koch takedowns here: The eXiled vs. The Kochs.

Want to know more? Then read our anti-TSA expose:

Really?

This is the year that the Republican right-wing, backed by corporate sponsors like the billionaire Koch brothers, have declared all-out war on public sector unions. It’s the culmination of a decades-long crusade against organized labor, which has only hit the national radar screen in recent months. The showdown in Wisconsin between Scott Walker and the unions has changed all that: suddenly, Americans had their eyes opened up to just how ruthlessly and cynically the Republican right was ready to fight to destroy public sector unions because they see it as a way to cripple the Democratic Party by killing off a major source of funding, as well as political muscle and votes.

If there’s some good to come out of the right-wing’s war on Wisconsin and other state employees, it’s that we now have a better insight into the Republican playbook against public sector unions, which boils down to this: 1) Manufacture a fake budget crisis in order to frighten the state’s residents; 2) PR the false-crisis hard enough until it breaks out of the right-wing/libertarian pipeline and into the mainstream media; 3) Blame the fake crisis on a fake villain — “greedy” state employee unions — thereby pitting the public against state workers. That way, when Republicans pass new laws destroying teachers and firefighters unions, they’ll come off as heroes defending the public from greedy unions, rather than as sleazy mercenaries carrying out their corporate sponsors’ dirty work.

Republicans have used this playbook before, of course, it’s just that Wisconsin finally made us all too aware. Perhaps the most obvious example — and the least understood — is from last November, when the same basic strategy was used to wage war against the TSA’s 55,000 employees, who have been locked in a savage decade-long battle to gain the same collective bargaining rights that employees of all other federal agencies enjoy. Unlike in Wisconsin, the Republican right succeeded in burying the story about the TSA employees’ struggle for collective bargaining rights underneath a sophisticated, well-PR’d campaign demonizing TSA screeners as modern-day Gestapo agents, rapists and child molesters.

But lost in all the media hysteria vilifying the TSA was the appalling story of labor abuse against the agency’s screeners, a consequence of Republican anti-union policies. If anyone is wondering why collective bargaining rights are so important to public sector workers, look no further than the TSA, whose employees suffer the lowest morale and highest attrition rates of any federal agency, year after year. Complaints and lawsuits abound, accusing TSA management of rampant sexual harassment, racism, bullying, wrongful termination and abuse of power. If that didn’t make working in the TSA difficult enough, the recent campaign demonizing TSA agents as modern-day Gestapo-agents turned them into the most hated of all federal employees; passengers, encouraged by incendiary PR, hurled abuses in TSA screeners’ faces, and in a few cases even physically attacked screeners.

Last November, we published an article in The Nation questioning the media-driven anti-TSA campaign, which we argued smelled of AstroTurf. For one thing, it made little sense that an issue like TSA pat-downs, offensive as they were, could dominate headlines for two straight weeks at a time when America was suffering from unprecedented corruption, lawless evictions of homeowners, unheard-of inequality, and wars that barely make news.

Sure enough, we uncovered numerous Koch-linked libertarian activists spearheading the campaign to demonize TSA screeners, DC lobbyists specializing in fake-grassroots campaigns setting up “Opt Out” websites while posing as regular Joes, and sleazy Republican hacks who had shown little interest in protecting civil liberties suddenly getting their ACLU on over the TSA’s intrusive pat-downs and “porn scans.” Progressives were understandably drawn into the anti-TSA campaign and hysteria, as the PR campaign cleverly framed it not as a union-bashing operation, but rather, as a purely civil liberties issue.

The anti-TSA campaign was at its media-hysteria peak in the weeks after the Republican election sweep, spurred on by last year’s hero, John Tyner, who refused a pat-down, telling TSA agents, “You touch my junk and I’m going to have you arrested.” Tyner disappeared from the scene after he apologized on his blog, and admitted that he didn’t tell the whole story and had actively tried to erase it.

Read the rest here…

From The eXiled’s Australasia Correspondent

PERTH, AUSTRALIA–You have to give David Foster Wallace some credit – he was better at making his fans bash themselves than any other writer of the Pynchon school. His magnum opus, Infinite Jest, is a 1000-page novel full of intestinally-shaped sentences and fine-print notes on calculus, organic chemistry and VCR programming. Normally, when a book like that comes out, people realise its purpose right away: terrorising B.A. students into meek submission. Wallace, however, found a very shrewd way to counter this by pretending that his work was really “a late-night conversation with really good friends, when the bullshit stops and the masks come off.” So instead of menacing the reader in the old Joycean way, Wallace chums it up whenever the technical stuff appears, acting like he really doesn’t mean to discourage anyone. Swapping lecture theatre dread for tutorial group paternalism – that’s the aesthetic in a nutshell. (And even if he IS being dense on purpose, it’s all for our own good of course.)

So far, it’s worked well. Most David Foster Wallace fans have a self-mortifying attitude that goes something like this: “I don’t feel I’m even close to understanding Infinite Jest, but I don’t want to think that’s deliberate. Wallace always seemed like such a warm, down-to-earth person. No, not arrogant at all. He had long hair. He wore T-shirts, for Christ’s sake! Better to think he was struggling to communicate something, something deeply felt, about the limits of language. How he really wanted to connect with other people but couldn’t. Just think of him in front of the word processor, caged in his own affectedness like John McCain in the Hanoi Hilton. Imagine him for a moment, tortured by the Viet Cong of whitebread smugness! Really imagine! It’s MY fault I haven’t gotten it, not his.”

This is where DFW’s suicide has really paid off – without a corpse, it’s harder to convince your audience that insincerity qualifies you for victim status, no matter how much you “struggle” with it. Nowadays Wallace is seen as a brilliant young(ish) author who was tragically tiger-mothered to death, killed by his own voluminous intelligence. None of his buddies fail to relate how friendly and approachable his writing supposedly is, either. In the New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen is tactful enough to deny that Wallace was a saint, only to mention “how recognised and comforted, how loved, his most devoted readers feel when reading [his fiction].” But Franzen paints an unpleasant picture of Wallace’s private life, even suggesting he killed himself to “betray as hideously as possible those who loved him best.” Yet while “David” was all-too-willing to hurt his wife and con his psychiatrists, Franzen wants us to believe he had nothing but frankness and affection for thousands of readers he’d never met.

Dave Eggers is even more shameless in his introduction to Infinite Jest’s 10^th-anniversary edition. Not only does he claim that Wallace is “rigorously unpretentious,” but he compares Jest to “a spaceship with no recognisable components, no rivets or bolts, no entry points, no way to take it apart. It is very shiny and has no discernible flaws,” he writes, also saying that “it bears little resemblance to anything before it, and comparisons to anything since are desperate and hollow.” Blurb-to-English translation:  “IT’S A COOKBOOK! IT’S A COOKBOOK!”

As usual, Eggers is lying like a dog. Infinite Jest belongs (or tries to belong) to quite a few literary traditions, some good, others not. The first chapter, where a rich overachieving brat has a weird seizure in front of three university administrators, is a very plain Kafka imitation. One administrator even compares the kid’s speech sounds to “some sort of animal,” a direct quote from The Metamorphosis. Wallace doesn’t get it, though, that tragedy isn’t just about what befalls the protagonist, but whether the protagonist is admirable enough to make it truly tragic. Gregor Samsa is a poor, self-sacrificing mensch who gives everything away to a family that slowly and painfully betrays him. Jest’s protagonist (“Hal”) is a rich, athletic WASP whom we’re supposed to sympathise with because he writes academic papers in his teens, with titles like “Montague Grammar and the Semantics of Physical Modality.” Oh, and he’s also “very shy,” as if that makes a difference at the top of the high school food chain. Maybe Wallace thinks that Samsa’s muteness is just as cruel inflicted on a pompous 17-year-old tweedmeister as a sad, fin de siècle Jewish wage-slave, but I beg to differ.

Yet there’s another, seedier literary tradition that Infinite Jest can lay claim to – the Great Protestant Addiction Novel, a gloomy genre developed by Hubert Selby Jr. Selby’s strategy was pretty similar to what Insane Clown Posse (ICP) did in the 90s – taking an Evangelical message and dressing it up with enough Korn dreadlocks and John Wayne Gacy makeup to slip it past the kids, hoping they wouldn’t notice how strangely pro-family and anti-drug those albums by “Psychopathic Records” were. In other words: pure stealth Christianity.

And nothing in modern US literature comes closer to ICP than Selby’s Requiem for a Dream, a sadistic 280-page Chick tract disguised as an avant-garde heroin novel. In his ‘99 preface, Selby attacks what he calls “the Great American Dream,” the evil, illusory pursuit of pleasure and possessions that “ultimately… destroys everything and everyone involved with it.” This is the novel’s Puritan core – all ‘worldly’ pleasures are false and drugs always lead to the worst fate imaginable. Requiem has an Evangelical stink right from the schmaltzy dedication page: “This book is dedicated, with love, to Bobby, who has found the only pound of pure – Faith in a Loving God.”

Selby also plucks an epigraph from the book of Psalms (“Except the LORD build the house, they labor in vain that build it…”) just to drive home the (Calvinist) point that human beings can’t do anything for themselves without a Higher Power. He illustrates this by shifting the narrative between four characters: a junkie named Harry, his token black friend Tyrone, his Jewish mother Sara, and his model girlfriend Marion. I guess this is meant to show that addiction is a universal condition, affecting all the Unsaved: young and old, male and female, Jew and gentile, black and white. (Except it’s not true – few things are more relevant to the consequences of drug use than money and skin colour; sometimes they’re more relevant than the drug itself.)

While Harry and Friends are feeding their smack addictions, the mother starts amphetamines to drop a few kilos, convinced she’ll soon appear on a game show. Within three months, she loses her mind, undergoes ECT (an extremely unlikely treatment for speed psychosis, even in the 70s) and spends the end of the book as a drooling vegetable. Meanwhile, Harry’s girlfriend Marion suffers a fate worse than death. (Having to work for a living, basically.) As for Harry himself, he loses an arm. Darren Aronofsky, who directed the film version, calls this “a very traditional heroin story.” No, Darren, it’s a fucking depressing heroin story! What kind of sick fuck would write a novel about a one-armed junkie? An Evangelical, that’s who.

Hubert Selby, Jr.

Still, a few passages in Requiem are slightly amusing, like this block of dialogue between Harry and Tyrone as they’re about to visit their dealer:

Sheeit. Why you wanna go there man? Why do I wanta go there? Because they give blue chip stamps with the dope. You know something Harry? You is simple minded. You shouldn’t fuck aroun when you talkin about somethin serious like dope man. Aspecially when you be talkin about mah dope. Yours I’m not carin about. Just mine. And whats so great about the dope here? O man, what you mean? Theys just as many connections right here as there. We could even try somebody new. New? Yeah baby. We could jus ease on down the street and see who have the most fingers up their nose and noddin out an we know where the good dope be, ah mean the outta sight jim. An anyways, we save the cab fare. Cab fare? Who died and left you rich? This moneys goin for dope man. It aint goin for no cab. Ya gotta take care a necessities before ya fuck with luxuries.

Sheeit. You aspect me to ride them mutha fuckin subways with all them poiverts and winos? Damn. You outta your mine. They rip you off before you gets anywheres. Hey man, don’t go pullin that lazy ass ol black joe shit on me.

“Gee, this heroin stuff’s no laughing matter. We shouldn’t be standing around here filibustering like a couple of GOP Senators auditioning for Godot. This is serious business, all these chills and bone aches we’re getting right now. Fuck, it’s serious. (You’d think we’d’ve already worked out a routine, considering we’ve done this often enough to get hooked.) And we should stop using the word ‘dope’ out in plain sight like this – better to say ‘it,’ as in ‘did you get it?’ But Tyro-o-one, what if I don’t know what you’re referring to? I mean, ‘it’ could be almost anything! That’s the whole point! But Tyro-o-one, how much are we gonna set aside for the cab? CAB?! Harry, you must remember that we are heroin addicts; cold, expedient creatures with Spartan discipline, not given to squandering potential smack money on frivolities such as cabs… Gosh, sorry Tyrone, I forgot.”

After having the most pointless conversation two sick junkies have ever had on their way to score, they walk (yes, walk!) to the café where they plan to meet their dealer. Leisurely smackhead that he is, Harry even pauses to observe that the neighborhood is mostly black. At the café, “a cop, blacker than his donut and bigger than a goddamn Mack truck” sits next to him. Harry fantasizes about killing the cop with his own gun until Tyrone returns from the deal. And guess what you get after they inject the “dynamite shit”? Another three pages of streaming dialogue about what very excellent heroin it is.

To Aronofsky, though, this pap was “so violently honest and arresting” that he couldn’t finish it in one go and absolutely had to film it. And he got off so much on filming anti-drug propaganda that he went on to make four Montana Meth Project scare ads, or mini-Requiems, as I like to call them. The Montana Meth Project is run by an IT security billionaire called Thomas Siebel, who donated half a million dollars to George W. Bush’s 2000 election campaign. He then clamored for software contracts from Homeland Security, apparently before the DHS was even formally established. Nice patrons Aronofsky’s got.

What Siebel’s case shows is that very little of today’s anti-drug propaganda is as primitive as Reefer Madness. Films from the 30s about marijuana-induced killing sprees are so tame by now that hipsters watch them for laughs, though few of those hipsters realise that Requiem for a Dream is just as absurd. (With “hard” drugs, there’s no such thing as too lurid.) In short, the propaganda empire never ended; it just went art house.

The same thing’s happened in literature. All those drug-horror paperbacks from the 50s – like Narco Nympho by “John Dexter” – have been replaced by a much fancier crop of titles. See, some people are still provincial enough to think avant garde means “resembling a book written by Joyce in the 1910s,” instead of “at the forefront of art and fiction.” Under this reasoning, anyone who uses pastiche and stream-of-consciousness is “experimental” by default, even if they’re emulating books that are nearly a hundred years old.

And there’s often a second, bigger pitfall right around the corner – that “experimental” fiction goes hand in hand with progressive politics while right-wingers are a bunch of toffs who humph at anything written or painted after 1900. True, you still have a few Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer types who hate rock music, swear words, “postmodernism,” and embalmed-shark sculptures, but not all reactionaries are that scrupulous. Christian fundamentalists – the biggest troglodytes of all – will happily mutilate any music style, from rap to goth to heavy metal, if they’re convinced it’ll “win” young souls. And Aronofsky’s certainly happy to make film-schoolish propaganda for his Republican, corporate Medicis. He’s not the only fancy director Siebel’s poached, either – Tony Kaye, Wally Pfister and Alexandro Gonzalez Iñárritu have also filmed his meth ads. Anyone still think right-wingers are squeamish about aesthetics? Shit, half of the original, 20^th-Century modernists ended up on the Axis side.

The current generation of “avant garde” drug-horror writers started popping up in the 80s and 90s. The prototypical example is Bret Easton Ellis, lamenting how hard it is for rich people to communicate because of their sheer self-absorbtion. Like most young 90s Puritans, Ellis is just rehashing a very old Christian theme – Augustine’s idea that fallen man is incurvatus in se or “turned in on oneself” – with secular postmodernish jargon. And while Augustine should probably be credited for inventing the basic structure of half the titles in your local bookshop’s biography section, there’s a crucial difference between his Confessions and books like Less than Zero. To Augustine, character flaws aren’t just a cause for moping and generational angst, but sins that could affect whether or not he goes to Hell, which, unlike Ellis, he strongly believes in. It’s not pear tree theft or whether his motives are impure that Augustine’s worried about, but the fact that those things put him in danger of burning forever in a lake of fire.

The Augustinian structure flops immediately without eternal torment as a conceit. Sure these jaded Los Angeles kids are a “lost” generation, but why’s it so bad that they’re “lost”? They have plenty of sex, drugs, threads, cars and cash. Lacking a Christian Hell, the writer needs an equally powerful lie to prop up the narrative – either they pretend that insincerity is an emotional hell no amount of money can make up for, OR, they pretend that members of the Hollywood brat pack have the same life expectancy as Ethiopians, dropping like flies from an endless parade of overdoses and Lamborghini accidents, rarely hitting 30. The second option usually requires the writer to massively exaggerate the dangers of drugs, since they’re the easiest way to kill off rich characters without using your imagination too much. Naturally, this has lead to lots of books portraying your Ellis-Frey type as the sole survivor emerging from the wreckage. In the end, this is worse than if these brat pack authors were openly Christian – Augustine’s Catholic Hell would be just as scary if sex and drugs had no material consequences at all. It’s the terror of the hereafter that counts, not the pain of the present. Ellis can’t grasp this. He begins American Psycho with the words “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE,” but can’t find anything fearful enough to keep that promise. All his supposedly damned narrator can do is assure us that “there are no drugs, no food, no liquor that can appease the forcefulness of this greedy pain.” Pain which Ellis pulls out of nowhere.

The McSweeneyite clique that nurtured David Foster Wallace is slightly less mass-market than Frey and Ellis, but still a hive of bland, wholesome crypto-cons. Dave Eggers, the nucleus of the group, is pretty much the Bono of literature – a sneering, leathery vampire utterly dependent on the plasma of African children to survive. He began his career by dragging his kid-brother (now long-forgotten) around for sympathy. Then, once little Toph was too pubescent to make a good prop, Eggers dumped him for an ex-soulja-boy from Sudan. Who rarely gets mentioned, though, is his older brother William, an equally ghoulish-looking neocon who was once Director of Government Reform at the Koch brothers’ free-market Reason Foundation. He is also a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, an ultra-right Republican think-tank whose other members have included Charles Murray, author of an infamous book (The Bell Curve) arguing that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites.

Kinda puts a damper on Eggers’ goody-goody pretensions, doesn’t it?

But Eggers isn’t the worst member of the McSweeney’s group. That honour goes to William T. Vollmann, one of the most god-awful prose writers in the English language. In fact, if there’s one nice thing I can say about David Foster Wallace, it’s that he never wrote a book as hideous as The Atlas, a collection of stories from Vollmann’s international trips. Here’s a sample of that book’s rottenness, a piece called “Lunch,” about New Yorkers in a restaurant:

Faces at lunch, oh, yes, smirking, lordly, bored or weary – here and there a flash of passion, of dreams or loving seriousness; these signs I saw, notwithstanding the sweep of a fork like a Stuka dive-bomber, stabbing down into the cringing salads, carrying them up to the death of unseen teeth between dancing wrinkled cheeks; a breadstick rose in hand, approached the purple lips in a man’s dull gray face; an oval darkness opened and shut and the breadstick was half gone! A lady in a red blazer, her face alert, patient and professionally kind like a psychoanalyst’s, stuck her fork lovingly into a tomato, smiling across the table at another woman’s face; everything she did was gentle, and it was but habit for her to hurt the tomato as little as possible; nonetheless she did not see it. Nodding and shaking her head, she ate and ate, gazing sweetly into the other woman’s face. Finally, I saw one woman in sunglasses who studied her arugula as she bit it. It disappeared by jagged inches, while across the table, in her husband’s lap, the baby watched in dark-eyed astonishment. Her husband crammed an immense collage of sandwich components into his hairy cheeks. He snatched up pommes-frites and they vanished in toto. When the dessert cart came, the starched white shoulders of businessmen continued to flex and shine; their faces glazed at one another over emptiness, much happier now that they had eaten, unthinking of what they had wrought.

This is one of the purest examples of first-year workshop prose you’ll ever read – even Martin “sharking” Amis would edge away from a phrase like “cringing salads.” In fact, I can’t imagine how anyone could produce this except as a class exercise (“WEEK 5: Write a short story, 250 words or less, showing use of defamiliarisation. Be creative!”) and, even then, it’s the kind of thing that gets written in a rush the night before.

William T. Vollman: “Buy my shitty novels or I’ll shoot this artfag!”

If you read carefully, you’ll notice another thing. Vollmann doesn’t mention anyone eating meat, not in the entire restaurant. All the horror at “what they had wrought” is directed at vegetarianism. If this seems odd for a wannabe war-nerd like Vollmann, try to imagine how the story would read if you replaced the salads with “cringing” bacon strips. That’s right – it’d be an anti-meat diatribe! This wouldn’t work in Vollmann’s favour, because there are few things more uncool to his hipster audience than believing strongly in something. Even the vegetarians in those circles usually claim to be doing it for “economic reasons,” since shouting “meat is murder!” is almost as uncool as being a pro-lifer. In all those indie ensemble films that hipsters love it’s usually characters with strong beliefs that get played for laughs, whether it’s the Nietzschean teenager in Little Miss Sunshine, or the existentialists in I Heart Huckabees (with the smug hero rejecting both pessimism and optimism for a bland middle option), or countless set-ups where you have a hipster Everyman playing the “straight” role against a rabid Marxist or feminist. It’s also thanks to hipster irony that no one can use the word imperialist seriously anymore. (Some people even consider it too loaded for essays on the Roman Empire.) Under this situation, Vollmann’s piece makes perfect strategic sense. A story depicting vegetarianism as a Nazi war crime may well be the most retarded thing ever submitted for workshop, but at least it isn’t “didactic.” And that’s what hipsters care about above all else.

The Atlas has plenty of moments like this. Despite visiting all seven continents many times over with Bob Guccione Jr’s money, Vollmann still seems short of material and has to slap together a few desperate workshop pieces. The absolute pits is a story about an airport departure lounge in Mauritius. Describing a crowd of passengers boarding their flight, Vollmann writes: “The loudspeaker called them, and they were gone forever like a convoy to Auschwitz.” It seems Hannah Arendt’s banality-of-evil thesis is license enough to compare anything even slightly boring to Nazism. Still, it scores defamiliarisation points from readers who judge books solely on how many rhetorical devices they can cram per page. And (goes the hipster reasoning) he’s not comparing anyone to a Nazi in, like, like, a preachy, judgmental way or anything. (God forbid!) He’s just doing it to be, y’know, deeeep.

But Vollmann’s most famous for writing about whores. Drug-addicted ones. This isn’t easy to do if you associate with a wholesome group of writers like the McSweeneyites, unless you categorically deny you’ve ever hired a prostitute for fun. I recall reading one of those Paris Review “Art of Fiction” thingies where Vollmann even claimed that he’d pretend to jerk off while interviewing his whores so they didn’t get suspicious. He admitted to fucking them once or twice, of course, but that was all a research necessity. And I confess – nothing makes me shudder more than his Travis-Bickle-like insistence that he’s not just another john, how he’s a sensitive guy who understands these women better than any of their other clients and really prefers getting them to pose for watercolours. Just to show his McSweeneyite audience how sensitive he is, Vollmann describes all his encounters with whores in the most flowery, studiously un-masculine prose you can imagine. It’s a wonder Oprah hasn’t picked him for her Book Club yet, since he has exactly the sort of cheaply paradoxical character her fans crave: “Oh, that sad, sad man. It really touches me that a person so ugly on the outside can be so beautiful on the inside. I never thought I’d be this moved by a book about prostitutes in the Tenderloin but my friend Darcy said: ‘You have to read this! It’ll blow you away!’ So I did and, lemme tell you, it’s not sleazy at all. I don’t think there’s even anywhere in the novel where this guy gets it up if you gals know what I mean, and hallelujah to that! It’s not that kind of story. It’s really about finding beauty and meaning in the most unlikely places and how even the toughest lady on the street has an inner 10-year-old that just wants to be comforted. And I’m still saving the biggest miracle: it was written by a man so hideous he doesn’t even shave his warts!”

Yet, as you’d expect from someone who thinks a Veggie Tales re-enactment of Shoah is the stuff of great fiction, Vollmann isn’t really that sharp around the ladies of the evening. In a story that comes immediately after his legume Holocaust, “Brandi’s Jacket,” he describes how a crack-addicted whore he knows greets him in the Tenderloin, tries to pick his pocket while hugging him, mooches $20 out of him (promising to buy him some rock) and runs off, leaving a jacket as dummy collateral. After he realises she’s gypped him, Vollmann empties the pockets:

There was no crack pipe of course, but I found three lighters, a tube of Vaseline, lots of dirty tissues, a hamburger wrapper wet and yellow with oil, a broken cigarette, some matches, and finally, like some sweet secret, a little Tootsie Roll. Something about the Tootsie Roll touched me, I don’t know why. It was like her, the dearness of her hidden inside all the greed and the lies, the goodness of her that the badness drew on and exhibited and used for its own selfish work.

I left the coat in the hallway where she could get it if she ever came back. I wanted to keep the Tootsie Roll but that would have been like robbing her of her soul.

No, you creep! That “little Tootsie Roll” is not a sign of girlish innocence. The woman’s a homeless addict, making her unlikely to keep a proper diet. This leads to low blood sugar, which is why most street junkies eat large amounts of candy. Female ones, male ones, black ones, white ones – even the rare, mean ones who’ll try to mug you. Personality doesn’t come into it. Vollmann, though, takes an ordinary junkie snack and expands it into a fantasy so cutesy that it borders on lolicon. It’s the kind of thing that appeals to his paradox-hungry fanbase who want contradictory, “well-rounded” characters. (And if a whore doesn’t want to show Vollmann any other sides to her life, well, he’ll just have to invent them.) This is also why conviction doesn’t go down well with Generation Y – strong beliefs are taken as a sign of “flat” personality, since people always seem more complex and thoughtful when they’re weighing their options, stroking their chin and avoiding all commitment. Why else do you think Obama’s such a dreamboat?

And yet despite selling himself as a near-asexual White Knight who only hires hookers for deep literary reasons, Vollmann’s just as prone to cheap sadism as Selby. This is how he opens his novel, Whores for Gloria:

We all know the story of the whore who, finding her China white to be less and less reliable a friend no matter how much of it she injected into her arm, recalled in desperation the phrase ‘shooting the shit,’ and so she filled the needle with her own watery excrement and pumped it in, producing magnificent abscesses.

In other words: “Heh, heh, heh! Those junkies’ll do anything!”

Not only is Vollmann happy to insult his subjects’ intelligence just to titillate a few sheltered readers but he tries to excuse his stupid little 2-girls-1-cup fantasy by pretending it’s a well-known urban legend. (So well-known, he has to recount it in full.) If Whores for Gloria began with a story about a lush who drank his own urine, after “recall[ing] in desperation” that alcohol is sometimes called “piss,” Vollmann’s fawning reviewers would laugh him out of the house. But no one thinks about it when it’s a frightening, unknown, “hard” drug.

A section of The Atlas (“The Best Way to Shoot H”) is more-or-less the same. For some icky reason, Vollmann likes to have his whores give themselves vaginal injections. And do it to each other, with a bit of lesbianism tossed in. He likes to describe the abscesses that result, too. Oh, and he persistently refers to one woman as “the whore who’d been raped with a vacuum cleaner.” (I dunno, maybe she doesn’t have a first name.) Far from being “experimental” fiction, this is just the same old formula as all those Narco Nympho paperbacks from the 50s and 60s. You’ll notice on the covers of those books that female junkies are always shown posing in their lingerie, next to tag-lines like: “Pitilessly exposes the depravity of the true addict, who takes lovers without number, performs every heinous vice, in order to embrace her one true love… the Needle!”

The reason the syringe always ends up as a phallus is because only a small portion of the population will tend to drool over descriptions of opiate use, whereas everyone likes sex. And nobody hams up injection scenes like Vollmann:

The old lady was hitting her with the needle and the black woman’s face was turned away and the old lady slyly knuckled her vulva but the black woman said: I been in the pen but I ain’t never been no lesbian. I don’t have no use for girls, ‘cause they don’t have three legs! Course, I don’t need boys either, when I got dope. (I dunno about that vein there, baby. Maybe you can’t stick that vein.) Dope’s my sex. Dope comes first, food comes second, and boys come last. Sorry, honey, but your finger just ain’t on my list. An’ them boys, they should be thankful they’re on the list at all. ‘Cause if they don’t like it I can just go to the store and buy me a rubber husband. Plug it in and turn it on an’ I don’t need any other kind.

The old lady wasn’t listening. She slid her middle finger inside the black woman’s vagina. Then she eased the plunger down and the black woman’s eyeballs rolled up in gladness.

It irks me anyone could mistake this piece of double-entendre sex comedy – this Carry On Smackhead – for legitimate drug lit. But I’ve always suspected that Vollmann is more of a horny cokehead than a junkie. (Trying opium in Myanmar, he was surprised that it didn’t numb his throat like crack. Dead giveaway, that.) That might explain why he makes everything as hammy as possible – even opiates, the subtlest drugs on earth, whose users can stay poker-faced no matter how much they’re enjoying themselves.

So why do those nice, enlightened McSweeneyites tolerate a guy who devotes half of his fiction to sadistic abscess porn that treats junkies like zoo animals, and the other half to corny China Doll fantasies with all the women as defenceless little flowers? Quite simply, because he fits their definition of a ‘good person.’ He won’t admit to hiring hookers for fun or visiting warzones for the adrenaline rush. Those are the two things you’re not allowed to do in those stuffy circles. Oh sure, Dave Eggers once held a book reading with “exotic dancers” performing in the background, but strippers are mild stuff, the sexual equivalent of marijuana, the kind of thing even politicians happily own up to since it makes them look slightly naughty without really offending anyone. (Kevin Rudd, Australia’s ex-PM, had great success with this in 2007.) You can’t do the same thing with whores unless you can invent a pious excuse for why you’re seeing them. It doesn’t have to be plausible. It just has to be utterly humourless, without the tiniest hint of joy, as if getting full service is about as desirable to you as going through chemo. If you can keep a straight face – congratulations! You are now a certified Nice Person. (Your misogyny license should arrive in the mail within 2-4 weeks.)

David Foster Wallace is a subtler bigot than Vollmann, and a better writer, but, like Selby, he’s still a Calvinist – I think that’s what you call someone who believes human beings are doomed to be wankers no matter what. It’s a lazy ideology that fits the Eggers circle like a glove: “Well, it’s not like I could ever be completely sincere about my parents’ deaths, without at least some profit motive, so I may as well stop trying altogether and hope you’ll love me out of reverse psychology.” But while it works for Augustine to question his motives endlessly, getting all miserable over the fact that even his best deeds have microscopic traces of selfishness, there’s no good reason to worry about this unless you believe in a literal Hell. In fact, it’s downright annoying behaviour for anyone born after the Middle Ages. I guess I can forgive religious people for it, since they’re doing it out of sheer terror, but I can’t forgive mopers who expect sympathy for expecting sympathy for expecting sympathy and expect me to care. And unlike Augustine (who at least had some belief in free will) writers like Eggers and Wallace don’t even try to break out of the pattern because they find it cleverer to flaunt their (painless, terrorless) yuppie version of Mediaeval Scholasticism. (Or worse – because they think “analysis-paralysis” is the only intelligence there is.)

And it’s the rehab clinic chapters of Infinite Jest where Wallace’s prejudices really come out. This is the opening to one of them:

If, by virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA’s state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts.

(A list of “exotic new facts” follows for about six pages.)

The most interesting word here is “you” – this is the chapter where Wallace reveals his ideal reader. And what kind of reader is that? Apparently, someone who finds it “exotic” that “females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and eliminatory functions as males.” Or “that cockroaches can, up to a certain point, be lived with.” Or “that not all U.S. males are circumcised.” Or that “black and Hispanic people can be as big or bigger racists than white people.” So, Wallace pretty much admits that his book is written for pampered yupps who’ve never lived in a house with cockroaches or heard a woman swear before.

How about his other “exotic new facts”? Some of them are downright wrong. (“That female chicanos are not called chicanas,” for instance – they damn well are! But Wallace claims in another chapter that Armenians are “Slavic” and have “cabbage”-scented farts, so non-WASP anthropology isn’t his strong point.) It gets worse – his list of factoids contains some of the oldest, lamest Christian platitudes you’ll ever find. That “it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.” (In that case, every passive-aggressive mooch on earth would be a hero.) The rotten lie that “having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward.” That “it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people.” And that’s the ideology that appears again and again in Infinite Jest – drugs and intelligence lead to death and destruction, while ignorance and weakness are the narrow path to salvation. I don’t have the faintest idea why Jest fans mistake crusty Evangelical values like these for some cutting-edge piece of quantum mechanics, but they do.

And then there’s the “exotic new fact,” that “some drug-addicted prostitutes have a harder time giving up prostitution than they have giving up drugs, with their explanation involving the two habits’ very different directions in currency flow.” This is like saying that “some” cocaine-addicted lawyers have a harder time giving up legal practice than coke, their explanation being that blow’s a drug and chasing ambulances is their fucking livelihood! But, to Wallace, prostitution’s a “habit.” Like Selby, he’ll lump nearly anything into one big category of Addiction with a capital-A, whether it’s opioids, masturbation, TV or chocolate. And despite giving a famous lecture telling people to question everyday life (that one about fish not knowing what water is) Wallace never ponders basic things like why whoring’s even illegal. Or whether addiction would be that bad if people could buy opiates cheaply in measured amounts (like they could in De Quincey’s time when opium cost less than beer). Towards the end of the book, Wallace writes that an “addict [is] at root a craven and pathetic creature: a thing that basically hides.” A book written in the 50s could’ve easily swapped “addict” with “homosexual,” or “quarter-Negro.” Before 1945, even “Jew” might’ve worked. But going straight to the politics is too much of a bummer for most McSweeneyites – too didactic, too pesado.

Wallace’s fanbase also seems to think he was a genius polymath. I’ll admit it takes a lot of cunning to make other people feel stupid and still seem approachable, and DFW pulled every trick he could. For starters, he claimed that Infinite Jest didn’t “work the way novels normally work” and was “really designed more like a piece of music than a book,” with lots of “leitmotifs and things that curve back” and “all this stuff about movement within limits and whether you can puncture the limits or not.” So how’s that different from the way “novels normally work”? Fiction doesn’t have rhythm or recurring motifs? Of course it does, but you won’t intimidate many people if you tell them to read your novel like a book. Better to play the obsessive Wagnerian genius, make everyone secretly insecure for touching your work without having a PhD in music history.

If you read Wallace’s conversations with David Lipsky, though, you’ll find out just what sort of torturous crap he really enjoyed – Alanis Morrissette, R.E.M. and Huey Lewis. He admits it right there on page 210 of Lipsky’s book – “I have the musical tastes of a thirteen-year old girl” – and goes on to say:

… But then I’ll happen to hear Alanis Morissette. On the radio. And you know just for some reason – that squeaky orgasmic quality in her voice will just hit me. And so I’ll go like listen to nothing but Alanis Morissette for two months.

And Wallace tells us that the Huey Lewis song, “I Want a New Drug” was “more or less an anthem for me in the 80s.” This confirms what we’ve always known: secretly, hipsters do like all the dreck they pretend to enjoy ironically. The “irony” provides an excuse to enjoy it in a social setting. Nothing more. And there’s no sparing anyone who thinks Patrick Foster Bateman’s personal “anthem” is a good song. It’s just one of those odes to getting pussywhipped into sobriety that Wodehouse was mocking over 50 years ago. Porn for Women’s Christian Temperance Union members who wished they had a chance to tame their own raging drunkard.

Now let’s shoot through those other signs of Wallace’s “genius.” First, for all you pedants, these are the drug-chemical-&-medicine-related howlers I could find in Infinite Jest. (I’d like to imagine Wallace writing them out on a blackboard, for all eternity, in the Circle of Footnoters):

(1) By definition, benzodiazepines are not “lightweight tranqs,” but drugs with a benzene and a diazepine ring fused together. 60s psychiatrists did call them “minor tranquilisers” (along with some other drugs) because they were less debilitating than antipsychotics. However, unlike antipsychotics, they turned out to be addictive, so the “major” and “minor” stuff went out of fashion. Since no one given a choice uses antipsychotics for fun, “lightweight tranqs” is a meaningless phrase on the street.

(2) Buspar isn’t a benzodiazepine – See above.

(3) 25mg of Ativan is not “enough to anxiolytize a good-sized Clydesdale.” Downers usually have the reverse effect on horses.

(4) Antipsychotics don’t cause death by respiratory depression, so you would not have prep-school kids who “never [last] more than a few seasons for the obvious reason that serious tranqs can make even breathing seem too much trouble to go to.” Nor can I imagine anyone abusing Stelazine.

(5) There are no such things as “Quaalude-isotopes” because Quaaludes are molecular and isotopes are atomic – same reason there’s no Mayor of the United States. This is high school chemistry.

(6) Although Infinite Jest takes place at some point between 2008 and 2011 – Wallace isn’t consistent with dates – his characters use an odd amount of drugs that fell out of fashion in the 70s: Preludin (a discontinued amphetamine-like drug popular with the Beatles), “reds” (used by Hunter S. Thompson, now rare), Talwin (an opioid, rarely prescribed after the 70s), Quaaludes (anyone seen them lately, outside South Africa?), Miltown/Meprospan (an obsolete “minor” tranquilizer from the 60s), and, of course codeine syrup in “little Eighty-Proof bottles” (eulogised by Reo Symes in Dog of the South). This means that Wallace probably used a 60s or 70s reference book as a crib for his footnotes.

(7) Another giveaway is that he refers to “quadracyclic” antidepressants, not tetracyclic, the correct word. TeCAs had only just come out in the 70s, and older books mightn’t mention them. DFW claims these “quadracyclics” are “new and side-effect-laden.” Since the real TeCAs wouldn’t be “new” in 2008-11, I’m guessing Wallace’s “quadracyclics” are completely fictional and that he used an old, second-hand pill reference. You’ll also notice that most of the post-70s drugs he does include are antidepressants like Prozac and Zoloft. But there’s no mention anywhere of Nardil – the antidepressant he owed his life to. Even though he freely tells Lipsky that he made suicide attempts in the 80s, he denies taking serotonin-boosting drugs for depression. Oh, the shrinks gave him tricyclics “early on,” but only for “terrible insomnia.” Seems he found it easier to admit he was institutionalised than admit he got the tiniest bit of help from Nardil.

(8) Further proof Wallace didn’t know shit about drug culture after the 70s. In his TV essay, “E Unibus [sic] Pluram” [sic] he writes: “My real dependency here is not on a single show or a few networks any more than the hophead’s is on the Turkish florist or the Marseilles refiner.” By the 90s, the French Connection was history, Turkey no longer grew much illicit opium and only beatnik-wannabe posers used words like “hophead.”

(9) I don’t know how common it is for addicts to get “wicked papular acne” during withdrawal, but this would not be because “the skin is actually the body’s biggest excretory organ”; nearly everything recreational goes out through the bladder, and this isn’t still happening “months afterward.”

(10) Doctors know perfectly well why alcoholics’ hearts are enlarged. It’s called cardiomyopathy.

(11) DFW can’t claim that “nalaxone [sic] hydrochloride” is “the Exocet missile of narcotic antagonists,” since naloxone was the only antagonist in use when he was writing his book. Doxycycline, meanwhile, is “the Cruise missile of gram-negative antibiotics.” This is your perfect Tom-Clancy attitude towards drugs. Lots of cool words from Jane’s All The World’s Quaaludes, no interest in the hands-on. And last but not least,

(12) Wallace, the Genius of Mankind, can’t tell the difference between millilitres and milligrams. Put out ten years after the original, the 2006 edition of Jest is still packed with references to “2ml./20ml.-saline pre-filled syringes” and other products with “ml/ml” instead of “mg/ml.” Martha fucking Stewart wouldn’t make a mistake like that.

So if you feel intimidated by all that technical prose in Infinite Jest, then rest assured: half the time, Wallace himself doesn’t know what it means, and those famous footnotes were most likely copied from some obsolete 60s/70s Merck Manual. The information might’ve been translated into 90s slacker diction – “lightweight tranqs” instead of “minor tranquilisers” – but it’s still bookish, armchair stuff. And some phrases (“Quaalude-isotopes”) aren’t there to do anything but make Wallace’s readers feel stupid.

That’s what most of his style adds up to, taking easy concepts and pretending they’re harder to explain than they really are. Like the scene I mentioned before, with the tennis brat, where a university administrator wears his tie in a “Kekulean knot.” In this context, all “Kekulean” means is hexagonal. (Yes, it also allows Wallace to namedrop the discoverer of the six-sided benzene ring. But what does that prove?) Or a withdrawal chapter where a cross-dressing junkie imagines “ants formicating up and down his arms’ skinny length.” Care to guess what “formicating” actually means? Anting. The guy’s being harassed by anting ants – “a gleaming red martial column of those militaristic red Southern-U.S. ants that build hideous tall boiling hills.” Now that’s how you pad a sentence, calling the ants “red” twice, and making it clear the insecting insects aren’t just “militaristic,” but “martial” to boot.

Still, Wallace had the nerve to complain about “puff words” in a popular YouTube video. Seems he has issues with a few small-timers who write utilise instead of use and prior to instead of before – they’re using “more syllables” and “it’s just puffed-up.” He then tells us that: “given the Latin roots, it should really be ‘posterior to’… so if you’re saying ‘prior to’ and ‘subsequent to,’ you are, in fact, in a very high-level way, messing up grammatically.” This is wrong. (Prior means the same thing in Latin as it does in English.) Course, you can forgive a writer for not knowing a dead language, but you can’t forgive them for bluffing about “Latin roots” and “high-level” grammatical errors. You can tell from the video that Wallace’s real gripe isn’t with “puff words,” or empty syllables, or even grammar mistakes. What he hates are plebeian writing errors – the innocent kind you’d hear from Joe Six-packs who haven’t studied creative writing or gotten properly sterilized by Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. But he has no problem with “formicating,” or “Kekulean,” or “Hobbesian” (used simply to mean “savage”), or “martial” in the same sentence as “militaristic.” They may be puff words, but at least they’re not lowly, Middle American puff words.

Just to prove how easy it is to make the most banal, hillbilly logic sound all educated-like, I’m going to give the David Foster Wallace treatment to the mind-blowing philosophy of Dog the Bounty Hunter. You know how he always pretends the druggie whose trailer he’s besieging is the most dangerous man in Honolulu? And how it always turns out to be a mild, courteous Samoan-attorney type? And how, once the guy’s in handcuffs, Dog forces him to listen to the moral of the episode? Well let’s see how Dog’s Final Thoughts translate into Jest-speak.

Dog Quote # 1: “You take that poison and think it’s not gonna happen to you. Well, what goes up must come down, and one day it’ll all come crashing down and next thing you know, you have a habit and yer in jail.”

Dog Quote #1 Wallacised: “Almost for sure, the delusion of Uniqueness blinding nearly all user-criminals comes from their failure to guess that the surfacing of addiction is not the sensation of walking, linear-wise, into a habit, but actually finding oneself inside of a habit, a sensation directly correspondent to waking up in the county lock-up, buddy old pal.”

Dog Quote #2: “Whatever you tell yourself, that crap yer smokin’s gonna catch up to you eventually unless you change yer ways now.”

Dog Quote #2 Wallacised: “While aforesaid tweak may propose that he can indefinitely withhold his methyl-alpha-methyl-phenethylamine-use-consequences under a Zeno’s Paradox schema, with the consequence (C) taking the form of a moving particle, sizeless, subatomic, and aforesaid tweak (T) positioned as the unattainable endpoint, the creep of C towards T can, in fact, be plotted on a Cartesian plane such that C, whether progressing geometrically or exponentially, will intersect T at a definite point of Deep Shit.” [See, you’ve gotta tack a bit of slang onto the end of the sentence to prove you’re the reader’s friend--R.G.] “However, as C is also a dependent variable relative to the extent of T’s use (U), it is possible to stall C indefinitely in real-time by ensuring that U ≤ 0, and doing it ASAP.”

Dog Quote #3: (*Talking through megaphone while his Neanderthal wife bangs on the front door.*) “ALRIGHT, IT’S UP TO YOU. WE CAN MAKE THIS AS HARD OR AS EASY AS YOU WANT, BUT YER NOT GONNA HOLD OUT FOREVER.”

Dog Quote #3 Wallacised: “The realisation dawned on the poor trailer trash, incrementally, with each violent thump, that Dog was not, in fact, a bounty hunter, but rather the bounty hunter, a being, which to their methed-out, methed-in, methed-over consciousness was a Platonic ideal given nightmarish, impossible form. The Heat Death of the Universe. The Old Cold Hound. Gödel, Escher, Dog.” [By the way, here’s one to try at home: listen to Tom Lehrer singing "New Math," then read the tax code chapters from The Pale King or the calculus sections in Infinite Jest. Who does it better? Who uses convoluted textbook language more effectively? My money's on the dweeby vaudevillian--R.G.]

This could be giving Wallace too much credit, since his beliefs weren’t really much less punitive than all those horrid A&E network shows. At one reading in 2006, he gave a strange, Mafioso-sounding warning to anyone who disagreed with the AA programme: “Anecdotal evidence suggests that people who shit on those traditions do not come to happy ends.” But was it really the 12 Step Programme that kept Wallace alive? You might notice that 1989, the year he joined AA and stopped trying to kill himself, was also when he took up antidepressants. And guess what happened when he quit in 2008? That’s right. Wallace came to an unhappy end by shitting on Nardil, not by crossing the recovery Mafia. To them, he was loyal. In all 1076 pages of Infinite Jest, there are exactly two paragraphs depicting a methadone dispensary. Unfortunately, methadone isn’t useless or paradoxical enough to get Wallace’s respect (just as he won’t admit his own arse got saved by something as un-literary as a mere psych drug). He even has one of his heroes, a former Demerol addict called Gately, play a vicious prank by hanging a sign on the clinic door reading: “CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE BY ORDER COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS.” That’s how much he hates ‘doners.

In fact, there’s something very alcoholic about his junkie characters. They get off on frat-boy sadism like the “Closed”-sign incident. They find Anonymous groups more natural than substitution therapy. And the transvestite harrassed by those anting ants spends two weeks (!) withdrawing, drinking codeine syrup (with the same alcohol content as vodka!) and getting Lost-Weekend-style animal hallucinations. In a ludicrously short time, he develops full-blown alcoholism with DTs. You wonder if this is because Wallace can only describe booze addiction, and needs some excuse to put it in the story.

Whatever the case, he’s not good at suggesting time dilation. An Australian writer, Luke Davies, shows how to do this competently in his novel Candy (not a perfect book, but hugely better than Jest). Here, the protagonists try to go cold turkey and last three days before giving up. And Davies stretches it out, about as much as anyone can without making it unreadable. Just when you think his characters have gotten through Friday, you realise it’s only been Friday morning and they still have afternoon and evening to go. Now look at Infinite Jest’s cold turkey chapter. It has lots of fancy metaphors about time passing “with sharp edges” and entering the tranny “via several openings.” But Wallace fucks everything up with just four words: “By the second week…” This makes his version of detox-time seem pathetically mild – Candy’s heroes would commit mass murder to reach Week Two in only six paragraphs!

Jest also fails to inject much horror into its main plot device, an evil videotape so entertaining that it turns people catatonic. The reason it doesn’t work (besides being a shameless rip-off of Monty Python’s “Funniest Joke in the World” sketch) is because Wallace gives a description of the movie – a hideous woman dressed a mother figure, standing over a camera and “explaining in very simple childlike language… that Death is always female, and that the female is always maternal… that the woman who kills you is always your next life’s mother.”

Where can I begin? First, when you’ve got an impossible, Lovecraft-type McGuffin that turns onlookers insane, it’s a bad idea to describe it in detail unless you want your readers to go: “That’s it?!” Second, if you absolutely have to give the McGuffin away, then at least make it interesting. But what does Wallace have against mother figures? Not just the woman in the videotape, but the domineering mother of his tragic tennis brat as well. If you read the notes he scribbled inside his self help book collection, you’ll find he’s pretty bitter at “becoming what narcissistically-deprived Mom wants you to be – a performer.” And it’s “worse if the parent is smart.”

That’s all Infinite Jest boils down to. An anti-intellectual (yet amazingly pretentious) Calvinist cautionary tale that makes the same death threats about thinking that Requiem for a Dream made about drugs – “Brains: Just Say No!” Plus a few voyeuristic scenes of depraved poor people in a rehab centre. Bum fights, in other words. Cleverish ones. Hobo torture porn for postgraduate smirkers.

Still, if the great Ned Flanders Lookalike Association of hipsterdom has one talent, it’s finding an excuse to adore practically anything. Poking fun at these vermin is like trying to kill bedbugs with pine-scented air freshener. They’ll always find a way to survive, at least until the rest of us take to the streets, form brigades and make it unsafe to be post-ironically ironic after dark. And even then, they’ll just join another, rottener subculture. Eventually, some Wallace groupie will find a way to spin everything in this article into a plus. I can already imagine the blurb: “Brilliant! Like a bum fight refereed by Einstein and Descartes!”

But that doesn’t make it any less of a bum fight.

Ramon Glazov lives and writes in Perth, Western Australia. Email him at “ramonglazov at gmail dot com”

More articles by Ramon Glazov: “Inside Wikileaks: Revenge of the Second Banana“ and “How Christopher Hitchens Robbed Hunter S. Thompson’s Grave“.

Update I below

On Thursday, we published an article documenting how last November’s strange anti-TSA hysteria was just the latest and most visible chapter in a decade-long corporate-sponsored rightwing war against public sector labor. Their goal: to prevent TSA workers from unionizing.

Our article was a follow-up to an earlier article in The Nation, which triggered a vicious smear campaign to tarnish our integrity and discredit our reporting. This isn’t the first time we’ve experienced this when exposing rightwing corporate-backed Astroturf campaigns. The exact same sort of smear-campaign was waged against our February 2009 investigative article exposing the Tea Party as a fake-grassroots movement sponsored by the Koch Brothers and FreedomWorks.

In our latest article on the TSA for Alternet, we not only provided overwhelming evidence that the anti-TSA campaign was just the latest chapter in a decade-long Republican war to prevent TSA employees from unionizing, but we also reported a shocking confession by John Tyner—the supposedly innocent bystander who fought back against the TSA Gestapo and became the unofficial spokesman of the anti-TSA movement—in which he admitted to deceiving the public and the media. Even more shocking: Tyner destroyed evidence that would have exposed his deception, because, as he admitted on his blog, he feared that if he didn’t scrub evidence that he’d planned the whole thing, the public wouldn’t believe his “don’t touch my junk” story with the TSA. Now, it’s impossible for any serious person to believe or trust anything Tyner says.

Even though Tyner has already admitted deceiving the public about having planned his “junk” stunt and then destroying evidence so that people would believe he hadn’t planned it, nevertheless, the same sleazy collection of hired PR flaks, libertarians, and others invested in the fake anti-TSA campaign (including some who claim to be progressives) are resorting to smear tactics all over again. At this point, it’s impossible for them to claim they innocently fell for Tyner’s TSA story, or the scores of other faked TSA incidents across the country.

So let us get a few things straight for the record:

* The Nation did not apologize for our November article on the TSA; it apologized personally to Tyner. The Nation did not call into question our reporting or our facts, nor did The Nation retract our article or take it down. That’s because our reporting was solid and well-sourced. Rather, the Nation apologized to Tyner—before Tyner confessed that he’d deceived us, The Nation and the public.

* Tyner claimed he had not planned in any way to make a scene or provoke the TSA. He even deceived Lawrence O’Donnell point-blank on live television:

O‘DONNELL:  So wait—so you—were you looking for trouble, John Tyner, when you went through that?

TYNER:  No.

But after Tyner was caught hiding and destroying evidence that he’d deceived the public, he confessed:

about two weeks prior to my encounter with the TSA at the San Diego airport, I wrote a blog entry about the TSA. Don’t bother looking for it because I deleted it prior to posting my recollection of the events and the accompanying video. I don’t have any copies of it, either.

…When I posted my account and video of my encounter at San Diego, I also deleted the post in question. I thought that no one would believe that my encounter was not a set up if they knew…

To those of you who feel duped, I apologize.

* Tyner concealed his extremist rightwing ideology by posing as a progressive-libertarian. Since then, Tyner has made common cause with John Birchers and Neo-Confederate conspiracy theorist groups which have been denounced by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Specifically:

• Tyner has an agreement with the far-right libertarian site LewRockwell.com to reprint Tyner’s blog entries. The SPLC has singled out the Alabama-based LewRockwell.com site on several occasions in its Hate Watch and its Intelligence reports, criticizing the site for regularly espousing Neo-Confederate propaganda “on the rightwing fringe”
• In his new home on the rightwing fringe, Tyner also positively cites the works of ultra-rightwing John Birch Society blogger William Grigg, whose books have argued that Mexicans are trying to conquer and annex the American Southwest, and it’s all part of a UN-Ford Foundation plot to subjugate America to a one-world socialist government. Tyner hat-tips Grigg in one blog, comparing his epithets for government workers (“thugs”) to his hero Griggs’ epithet (“tax-feeders”).

* Tyner had portrayed himself as pro-gay marriage and drug legalization one of the main points seized upon by his supporters in the progressive/libertarian community. Here, for example, is Glenn Greenwald attacking our first article by way of playing Tyner’s apparently-honorable pro-gay rights:

As for his standing accused by The Nation of suspicion on the grounds of his avowed libertarianism, consider what he wrote several weeks before the TSA incident.  In a post responding to this question — “When’s the last time you were seriously inconvenienced or injured by something that big government did?” – Tyner wrote:

Gay rights [infringements], TSA body scanners, highway checkpoints, the PATRIOT Act, warrantlesswiretaps, extra-judicial assassinations, indefinite detentions, inflation, etc. Don’t tell me that (some of) these don’t affect me.  When one person’s rights are trampled, everybody’s are, and that’s just at the federal level.

What a right-wing monster!  If only Democratic Party leaders — who support most of the serious rights infringements he condemns — were this monstrous.

Glenn may want to take another look, because this year, Tyner has come out of the states’-rights closet to declare gay marriage a states-rights issue. He’s no longer posing as a Glenn Greenwald-friendly progressive-libertarian; instead, meet the old 50′s-era states’ rights George Wallace-r: “The point was not to advocate for legalization of gay marriage or marijuana use. Rather, it was to point out that democracy is not the cure-all that people believe it to be. Democracy will always be a tool by which a majority will oppress a minority and ultimately the individual.“ Yes, like Strom Thurmond and John C Calhoun, Tyner is also against democracy.

* Finally, and most importantly, John Tyner also espouses radical anti-labor, anti-unionizing views that progressives would find repugnant. Here is a sample:

*  ”I had suggested that the proper remedy was for the government to fire workers who wanted to unionize, not restrict their civil liberties”

* Tyner says that government laws which outlaw firing unionized workers are “a clear violation of the employers’ property rights.”

* “Firing workers does not violate the workers’ freedom of association. The first amendment protects the right to freely associate. Nothing grants a person the *right* to be hired/employed by another.”

* “Actually, I want to get rid of the TSA and return responsibility for security to the airlines themselves. Then there would be no 4th amendment argument at all. The airlines would be bound by what the public wants, and a balance between security, convenience, etc. would be found pretty quickly.” [Ignoring that this is exactly what failed on 9/11, and what brought about the TSA]

We have done our job as journalists, which is to apply a skeptical and curious eye at public spectacles. No other journalists dared to even question Tyner’s motives, let alone the strangely well-coordinated anti-TSA campaign. On the contrary, most journalists’ first instinct was to attack a fellow journalist and avoid looking into Tyner’s story. No wonder the media is so sheepish, and so consistently wrong on so many stories.

It’s time that journalists stop defending sleazy corporate-backed PR campaigns (and more importantly, to stop participating in them without disclosing conflicts-of-interests), and stop the knee-jerk attacks on investigative journalists who write explosive stories exposing the way the public is being constantly manipulated by powerful corporate interests. If you’re incapable of doing your job right, or incapable of restraining yourself from selling your soul (and your blog) to the Koch brothers or Grover Norquist, then shut the fuck up, go find another line of work, and let us do our job. It’s tough enough as it is.

Update I: Reader points out that Tyner also deceived the public when he repeatedly claimed that he had no way of knowing that San Diego International Airport had installed the new backscatter machines. Tyner repeatedly told his readers and reporters that he was caught by surprise because he’d “researched” to make sure San Diego hadn’t yet installed its “porn-scan” machines.

However, local TV news outlets in San Diego reported the installation of the new scanners at the San Diego airport over a month before Tyner’s “Don’t Touch My Junk” act: the local NBC affiliate, TV6, and channel 10 News. Major print media also reported it: The San Diego Union-Tribune and San Diego Entertainer. National media like PC World and elsewhere also reported the porn-scan installations at San Diego International.

However, Tyner claimed on the day he posted his video that he’d “researched” and done everything to avoid the new porn-scan machines:

“Not wanting to go through them, I had done my  research on the TSA’s website prior to traveling to see if SAN had them. From all indications, they did not. When I arrived at the security line, I found that the TSA’s website was out of date. SAN does in fact utilize backscatter x-ray machines.”

So in other words, this anti-government, anti-TSA libertarian activist and software engineer was so concerned that the only website he researched (and trusted) out of all the media available on the entire internet was… the TSA’s website. Had he taken two minutes to search on google–which Tyner is certainly capable of doing, considering how expertly  he scrubbed his deleted blog post–he would have easily discovered that the airport he was going to had the new “porn-scan” machines. Which, we can assume, was the whole point.

Check back for more updates…