All of the polarization and insanity in modern American politics is not nature. It is nurtured.
If you want to destroy Government, turn it into the inefficient, bumbling bogeyman. Remove dialogue and reason from governmental operations and the public discourse. Make compromise a dirty word.
Which begs the discussion of the use of another highly charged word about the people who hide in the shadows, and pay for all of the gridlock and discord, and their multi-pronged disenfranchisement of America's voters:
Is Tea without reason, treason?
Last month, the American news media broached the word "fascism," in its discussion of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's outrageous campaign pledges.
Trump is a happy accident for America's quiet fascist funders, who have been manipulating the American political landscape for generations. He is not a cause. As I pointed out at the Huffington Post in “Win the White House, Why?” people who want to break down democratic government don’t want to govern. In fact, Grover Norquist wants nothing more than a rubber stamp president at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The American fascists who wield real power are not your garden variety skinheads, or weekend Wagner-loving Hitler worshippers. They are some of the 1% of the 1%, America's wealthiest and oldest industrialist dynasties, and some of the "new" billionaires and millionaires who align with them.
They avoid the spotlight, although the organizers and apparent leaders of their movement, the Koch brothers, have become infamous in liberal political circles.
Call them the Dead Billionaires Club (DBC).
The Dead Billionaires Club are true free-market capitalists: Staunchly anti-socialist. No Social Security. No Medicare. No labor unions. No government regulations. Anti-tax, and most importantly anti-government. Grover Norquist once quipped that they want to drown our government in the bathtub. It wasn’t a joke. It’s a long-awaited redemption from the Great Depression and silver stake in the heart of FDR’s dreaded “New Deal” America.
Their grandparents and great grandparents were the robber barons, industrialists of the pre-Great Depression era. They ruled a 19th century America that they carved out of our political system with no worker protections, no workplace safety, child labor, and poor houses for those who were spent and used up, or those who were unable to live up to the Horatio Alger myth of pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, a tenet of their Social Darwinist beliefs that they are superior financially because they are genetically superior.
The Kochs are infamous, but the Coors, Mellon-Scaifes, Bradleys, Milbanks, Olins and their foundations like Adolph Coors Foundation, are all significant DBC funders.
Many DBC funders are actually, really dead. Their foundations fund their anti-New Deal crusades against government from the grave. Many have their children, and their grandchildren carry on their crusade. The recently departed Richard Mellon-Scaife carried on mother Sarah Scaife’s work, via her foundation, and tossed in a little funding for the Watergate burglars and the Tea Party along the way.
Some, like the Koch family, were members of the extremist John Birch Society movement that espoused many of the tenets that the DBC is moving the Republican Party towards.
They are joined by the modern nouveau-riche robber barons: The DeVos family (AmWay). Freiss. Ricketts (TD Ameritrade), and their Junior League of lower-end millionaires, the Club for Growth.
At one point the DBC moved from the Birch movement to the Libertarian Party. In fact, David Koch ran for Vice President as a Libertarian candidate on a platform of near-zero government, abolishing any group that could oppose capitalist power: The Federal Reserve, the Securities & Exchange Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency were top of his list.
Their failure as an independent party taught the Kochs and the DBC a very valuable lesson about outsider politics in a two-party system:
Don't run for office. Own the Republican Party. Own enough of the offices to control the system.
One Big Happy Family
To develop the master plan for transplanting American government with their anti-government, they built a vast network of conservative think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Hoover Institution.
The DBC funders joined the Neoconservative movement’s push to take control of government at all levels, using agents like Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff, and Ralph Reed to put the plan to begin at the beginning, and build up networks of conservative groups that would be all but impossible to stop.
As Jack Abramoff notes in his tell-all book, "Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth About Washington Corruption From America's Most Notorious Lobbyist" their operatives have groomed a generation of dogmatic, obedient politicians to do their bidding at the federal, state, and local levels.
People often ask how some of the patently insipid people who hold office got there: The Palins and the Bachmanns and the other Tea Party politicos. They ask how these politicians can survive politically when they routinely vote against the popular will of their constituencies to shut down the government, curb science in the schools, and call global warming a myth when their “base” is barely 1 American citizen in 10. The answer: The DBC needs loyal adherents, not people with their own big ideas. The Kochs and their followers are the coaches. The leaders of the “populist” groups they create are the quarterbacks. Their congressmen and senators, federal and state, are just there to follow the playbook.
The Big Split
The Neocons and the DBC began to split apart in 2008. Huge ideological disagreements began to erupt over Wall Street’s housing bubble and the looming Great Recession. The George W. Bush Administration, of the Neocon camp, went to the Fed to rescue Wall Street.
The Kochs and their DBC, who want the Fed abolished, saw an opportunity to shatter government once and for all. They militated for the Bush Administration to let Wall Street and big corporations like General Motors fail. They were ignored. Along with Bush’s costly wars, several raises to the debt ceiling, and their constant compromise with the Democrats to broker deals, it was a bridge too far.
By 2009, the Kochs and the DBC funders moved to take control of the Republican Party. They launched faux grass roots organizations, and shadow funding groups with flag-waiving titles: Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Partners, Freedomworks and American Encore. Groups that find ways to keep their donors out of the public eye. The 2009 Americans for Prosperity meeting began a super-secretive annual gathering of some of America’s wealthiest, like-minded fascists, who gather to give for the cause.
What is that cause? To bring down the New Deal American political system, and to install a system where the private sector runs America.
Our democracy has been inconveniently getting in their way. The country moved away from their brand of capitalism during the 20th century. It allowed unions. It created a social safety net. It regulated their profits. It limited how they could treat their timber lands. It integrated minorities into segregated society.
America became more inclusive, more tolerant of religious and cultural diversity. It took the care of the poor and sick and aged away from religious institutions that they controlled. No more poor houses. No hat-in-hand to the DBC or the institutions which they funded to keep those with less in their place.
If Donald Trump and Ted Cruz scare you, then these families are Freddie Kruger, Chucky and Jason on steroids.
Puppets like Cruz and Carson may come and go, but these extremist power-brokers are generational, and patient. Lose one year? They have money to wait out the decade. Decades.
One Cause. Many Brand Names.
They also don’t worry about a plan or pathway. If something stops working, switch. The DBC funded the Tea Party brand when it helped them. When the Tea Party brand started to drop like a stone, they rebranded their politicians as the newly-minted "Freedom Caucus" of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Their tactics change too. Tea Party congressmen were easy for the media and watchdog groups to identify. The Freedom Caucus has now become secretive about their membership. While Pew Research has been able to identify 36 of them, many will neither confirm nor deny their association.
How To Kickstart a Corporatocracy
How do you bring a political system down that is popular, though, in a nation which is diversifying culturally and socially away from your politics, when your ideas do not play well to any but a handful of extremists?
Own, dominate or intimidate every avenue of government, the law, and the media.
The Government: They feed their political pitbulls with their McLegislation mill. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) uses corporate "need" bills to fund and finance their operations, then generates laws to disenfranchise minorities, disempower women (anti-abortion and anti-glass ceiling laws), and break government, which they dub the "nanny state," down.
Before ALEC, lobbyists used to go to senators and congressmen and suggest policy that should be included in a bill. ALEC delivers whole bills which they hand off to their tea party politicians, who usually bring them to their state houses or the Congress verbatim, or with minimal re-writes just to make them look like they have some authorship.
The Media: The DBC have ties to a number of Fox News hosts past and present to provide a big, loud platform for their message. They beefed up the talk radio noise machine that keeps their drumbeat that “freedom” equates to no government, in the ears of the extremists who follow them.
The Courts: You may recall the Far Right’s battle cry about "activist judges," aimed at liberal justices. During the Reagan and Bush I & II years, they installed right-wing activist justices at the Supreme Court.
The lower courts are subject to codes of conduct that limit their political interaction, but the Supremes are not limited. Justices Scalia and Thomas, amongst their many questionable ethics calls, have been guests at the secretive DBC meetings held by the Koch Brothers where the guest lists aren't even made available to the resorts where the guests are staying.
Is it particularly shocking, then, that the court affirmed Citizens United, or the court's decision to relax civil rights monitoring of states which unleashed more voter suppression laws in its wake.
The Electorate: The DBC has broadly disenfranchised the American electorate. No, not just the voter suppression laws that were enacted over the last ten years to reduce minority participation. Real disenfranchisement requires decades of propaganda.
The Dead Billionaires Club has transformed the American political system. They have spent billions over decades on this anti-government messaging “turning off” the American public to its own political system. Seeding their belief that government doesn't work. Deflecting their responsibility for gridlock with propaganda that both parties are to blame for the gridlock in government. Installing polarized politicians on the conservative end of the spectrum who gridlock the political process.
There are a record number of people registered as independents. They self-disenfranchise from the political parties, which means for most that they can't vote in key primaries to select who will run for office. That tends to leave the more extreme elements in both parties in charge, and only accelerates the DBC's control over the political process.
Bringing the Government Down
The DBC has analyzed and mastered the American political system. They are expert at exploiting its weaknesses.
Their activities have coined a new verb: To "primary." Primarying a politician is the act or the threat of running a more extreme candidate in the primary race of a more moderate politician to either coerce them to vote with the DBC cause, or to oust them and insert a DBC-loyal politician in their seat. It is also is called "RINO" (Republican in Name Only) hunting.
The Club for Growth, the low-end millionaires of the DBC, has been a driving force in big-game hunting of Republican moderates and Neocons who still believe in government and compromise.
The majority of states, thirty-four (34) in all, elect their governors during federal mid-term elections, where fewer voters have turned out since the 1840s.
It is hard to beat back moderates and liberals in a Presidential election. Mid-terms are where they work hardest to improve their position in state houses and on Capitol Hill.
The DBC knows that they can motivate the remaining dogmatic extremist, largely religious Right base of the modern GOP to turn out in these elections and purge moderates from the Republican Party's state and federal offices. Install enough, and you create the gridlock that is the sand in the gears of government that break it, that bring it down.
The Dead Billionaires: Moving Backwards Forward
Even though they will lose at times, overall, they know that if they keep at it long enough, they can develop "gridlock blocks" that can bring a state or the federal government's processes to a halt with their no votes and with the intimidation of Neocons fearful of being primaried.
They fund their political ambitions through their vast wealth. On occasion, they cook up a financially lucrative scheme like contango, which unleashed speculators on the oil markets and sent gasoline soaring to the financially crippling $4+ per gallon range.
While Rupert Murdoch has been quite friendly to their conservative messaging, they continue to seek investments into the media. The Kochs investigated buying the Tribune family of major American newspapers and, as their spokesperson told HuffPo "Koch continues to have an interest in the media business and we're exploring a broad range of opportunities where we think we can add value."
The DBC are molding the American electorate and economy back into the two-tier social strata of their grandparents and great-grandparents pre-Great Depression heyday.
Is what the Dead Billionaires Club doing treason?
Treason is an extreme term, just like fascist. The Founding Fathers were keenly aware of the misuse of the word by the English government, which used charges of "treason" to indict and prosecute dissenters under a politically arbitrary system that first and foremost served the whims of the Crown and Parliament.
The constructionists of the U.S. Constitution more narrowly defined the American political definition of treason in Article III, Section 3, of the United States Constitution.
Treason can only be committed by any person who levies war against the United States or gives aid and comfort to its enemies.
The idea was to discourage use of the same draconian treason laws by political groups within the fledgling American government to seize power and polarize the electorate. The primary threat to American democracy was always shaped to be external.
The framers envisioned government as the focal point of American political life. People of good will with differing, and often extremely polarized, views of the political, economic, or social direction of a city, state, or the nation, would engage in the democratic process via government to achieve consensus, and move in a common direction forward.
If a keystone holds an arch together, compromise is democracy’s keystone. Remove it, and all collapses.
Compromise is the heart of the American political system, and there is a reason that it is a dirty word to the DBC and their politicos. Eliminate compromise, and you break the United States' democratic system.
It’s the Founding Fathers’ fatal flaw. They never envisioned their citizens not using government’s mechanisms to work within the system.
Undermining the government from within is treason.
Treason, as it is defined in most dictionaries is the act of overthrowing one's government, a violation of allegiance to one's government, a breach of faith of the public trust with the intent of damaging or destroying the structures that uphold the social fabric of a nation.
The Dead Billionaires Club treasonous acts are aimed at demolishing American government from within. On their best day, ISIL and Al Qaeda could not do as much damage to the United States government as the DBC. They have cost us billions of dollars, imprisoned or marginalized millions of Americans, and destroyed the ecosystem we need to survive. Their “worst hits” list includes:
The will of this tiny fragment of America’s wealthiest families is negating the hopes, aspirations, and dreams of 83% of the rest of the American people.
The Dead Billionaires Club doesn’t care if you like Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, or the Fed.
They don’t want government to help you. They want you at the mercy of the private sector for everything, at all times.
As I point out in “Government is Good,” the government isn’t a joke. It isn’t the bogeyman. It has always been an expression of our common needs, and, while it is seldom efficient and never perfect, it represents the ebb and flow, push and pull of our democracy where everyone is heard, and the popular will, not the will of fifty or sixty of the nation’s wealthiest families, carries the day and moves the nation forward.
If you cannot be heard, because David and Charles Koch and their pals don’t agree with you, there is no democracy.
Until the funders, the Dead Billionaires Club, are held accountable, and stopped, America's downward spiral into their nihilist nirvanah of free-market capitalism that subjugates the majority is all but inevitable, and our democracy will continue its death spiral into their hands.
My shiny two.