Never fight an inanimate object. – P. J. O’Rourke (1947-2022)

poem: Salute by James Schuyler

Salute
by James Schuyler

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.

Capitalism without democracy

Supreme Oligarchy: How Billionaires and the Supreme Court are Betraying the Promise of America - “Author, broadcaster and scholar Thom Hartmann warns of the existential threat of a virulent new oligarchy: the third frontal assault by the ultra-wealthy in American history to use their concentrated economic power to seize maximum political power—and overthrow democracy once and for all.”

If you look at the period of time from the 1930s until the 70s, late 1970s, we got a hell of a lot done, and it was the stuff that people wanted done. People wanted unemployment insurance. People wanted the right to unionize. People wanted Medicare. People wanted Social Security. People wanted the government building low-income housing. People wanted the government upgrading our infrastructure, our roads and bridges and things. People wanted a national railroad system, you know, like Amtrak. And people wanted the Civil Rights Act. People wanted everybody to be able to participate in our politics. People wanted the Voting Rights Act. We wanted all those things, and we got all those things. I mean, when you think about it, that period was really an astonishing period in American history, how much we got done.

And then in 1971, what Lewis Powell said was we need to take over the courts; we need to take over the educational institutions, particularly the colleges, seize the legislature; and we need to build our own media. It was a blueprint, the Powell Memo, 1971.

That was when business decided we’re going to wake the hell up. And so what happened was throughout the ’70s, the children of Fred Koch, and others, other right-wing billionaires, decided, cool, let’s do this. And so they built the Heritage Foundation, and they built the Mercatus Institute, and they built the Cato Institute, and they built the American Legislative Exchange Council, and they built 50 state policy centers, one in every state. And they started buying media, buying radio and television stations, buying newspapers, just built this huge right-wing infrastructure through the ’70s.

To Bessent, a believer in laissez-faire economics, it’s axiomatic that cutting taxes and deregulating industry will juice investment and job creation. … Many economists see instead a recipe for higher prices and depressed demand. Tariffs, if applied as inconsistently as they’ve been so far, create the kind of uncertainty that holds back investment and hiring.

  • Book: Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice and Alcohol-Free Beer, by P. J. O’Rourke. 1992

  • Book: Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government, by P. J. O’Rourke. 1991