This article is cross-posted on Naked Capitalism.

A friend of mine sent me this link claiming that UC Davis chancellor “Chemical” Linda Katehi, whose crackdown on peaceful university students shocked America, played a role in allowing Greece security forces to raid university campuses for the first time since the junta was overthrown in 1974. (H/T: Crooked Timber) I’ve checked this out with our friend in Athens, reporter Kostas Kallergis (who runs the local blog “When The Crisis Hits The Fan”), and he confirmed it–Linda Katehi really is the worst of all possible chancellors imaginable, the worst for us, and the worst for her native Greece.

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This article is cross-posted on Naked Capitalism.

Another Monday, another “deficit crisis” panic. If you haven’t got the feeling yet that you’re being played like a sucker over this alleged “deficit crisis,” then let me help you cross that cognitive bridge to dissonance. It comes in the figure of the recently-deceased William Niskanen, the embodiment of how Reaganomics and the Koch brothers’ libertarian movement were joined at the hip. Niskanen was an advisor to Ronald Reagan throughout the 1970s; a board director for the Koch-founded Reason Foundation; a member and chairman of Reagan’s Council on Economic Advisers from 1981-85; and he moved directly from Reagan’s side back to the Koch brothers’ side, as chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute from 1985 until 2008. This is a brief story about how the 1% transformed this country into a failing oligarchy, and their useful tools, starting with A-list libertarian economist William Niskanen, Chicago School disciple of Milton Friedman, advocate of the rancid “public choice theory.” (more…)

This article is cross-posted on Naked Capitalism

See the guy in the photo there, dangling an ax from his left hand? That’s Greece’s new “Minister of Infrastructure, Transport and Networks” Makis Voridis captured back in the 1980s, when he led a fascist student group called “Student Alternative” at the University of Athens law school. It’s 1985, and Minister Voridis, dressed like some Kajagoogoo Nazi, is caught on camera patrolling the campus with his fellow fascists, hunting for suspected leftist students to bash. Voridis was booted out of law school that year, and sued by Greece’s National Association of Students for taking part in violent attacks on non-fascist law students. (more…)

If you’re feeling like you’re being taken for a ride with all this nonsense about Iranian-Narco-Mexican terror hit-squads infiltrating this great nation, read on…

Last week, the curtains finally came down on Col. Qaddafi. The week before that, we were treated to a scary, impossible-to-believe, slapstick assassination plot involving Iran’s Quds terror agency, some shady Persian hustler with a mullet who looks like the villain in True Lies, and Los Zetas, the Mexican narco-gangsters–creating a perfect narco-Islamo-fasci-terrorist threat. (more…)

Last week, Yasha Levine and I broke our Nation magazine story on The Dylan Ratigan Show exposing free-market hypocrisy by Charles Koch and Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek on a scale so grotesque it was hard to know whether to laugh or scream, or both. A brief recap: We revealed letters from the early-mid 1970s in which Charles Koch– the biggest funder of a four-decade-long campaign to destroy Social Security and Medicare–privately championed Social Security and Medicare in order to lure Hayek out of Austria (where he enjoyed universal health care) and into America, so that Hayek could front for Koch’s war on entitlements. Hayek was more than happy to oblige Koch, except for one problem: Hayek was privately afraid of America’s free-market health care system, so afraid that he initially turned Koch’s offer down. But as Charles Koch was to find out, Hayek was a fellow traveler in free-market hypocrisy: Back in the 1950’s, while Hayek was at the University of Chicago, the Austrian-born economist had secretly and voluntarily opted into the Social Security program, and continued paying in for 40 quarters—qualifying Hayek for Medicare and Social Security, just in time for Charles Koch’s invitation. That was great news for all, because it meant Hayek could come out and help Koch destroy Social Security and Medicare while simultaneously living off those same programs, and not worry about falling through the brutal free-market “safety net” that Hayek privately feared. (more…)

Yasha Levine and Mark Ames went on MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan Show today to talk about their scoop in The Nation magazine about Charles Koch and Friedrich Hayek’s secret love affair with Social Security. While the private letters of Koch and Hayek reveal appalling hypocrisy and fraud, they also expose another far deeper problem: the corruption of ideas that feed into our corrupt politics.

Dylan Ratigan is leading a push to Get Money Out: Out of politics, and out of ideology. The cynicism shown between the billionaire funder of free-market ideology–Charles Koch–and the free-market economist, Friedrich Hayek, shows just how warped and corrupt America’s intellectual world has become. Or as Ratigan calls it: “Ideas For Sale.”

Watch the clip here: (more…)

Adam Curtis has just posted a must-read blog that tries to answer the big political dead-end we face today: Why can’t we think up any new ideas besides the failed libertarian free-market ideology that brought us to ruin? Curtis’ answer: We’re all prisoners of the Libertarian Think-Tank Archipelago.

Curtis argues that the reason we can’t think of any ideas is because free-market think-tanks have perverted and strangled ideological thinking–both in Britain, whose free-market think-tanks were essentially set up by one of America’s Founding Fathers of libertarianism, FA Harper–and in America, where the free-market think-tank archipelago has done a fantastic job of transforming the political imagination into something like Amway salesmanship. Above it all stands the Amway Master Salesman, Friedrich von Hayek, author of Glenn Beck’s favorite book, The Road To Serfdom. (more…)