politics

You forgot the part where Idiot Brain Worm tries to join Harris

Hey now, he's not Felon Drink Bleach. He's Felon Inject Bleach. Very different!

It turns out wealth ≠ intelligence. Maybe for first gen wealthy, but all subsequent gens are wealthy because of familial inheritance.

Almost exclusively, in fact. We mostly don't hear anything about it unless they star on a reality TV show, though, for two reasons:

1. most media is owned by people they play golf with

2. "rich person does nothing of value" isn't a great headline. Hell, generalize it to the absolutely factual "most rich people do nothing of value" and both Forbes and Fortune will probably sue you 🤷

Are we sure it wasn't this Melon?

They let him off easy. I couldn’t figure out how exactly they’re related, but Richard Mellon Scaife is a big part of the reason we’re in the political mess we are today day. Americans distrusted corporations in the 1970s - tobacco, Dow Chemical, Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed… also low income inequality. In response, future SCOTUS Justice Powell - who was on the board of Philip Morris and close friends with GM’s general counsel wrote what was intended to be secret memo for members of the US Chamber of Commerce:

‘Attack on American Free Enterprise System’ was written to transform corporate America into a “vanguard.” Contents include “the American economic system is under attack… [enemies are] perfectly respectable elements of society…the college campus, the pulpit*, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, politicians.” Capitalists need to wage “guerrilla warfare” against those seeking to “insidiously” undermine them. “Capture public opinion by exerting influence over the institutions that shape it - academia, the media, the churches, and the courts - to control debate at its source.” Said donors should demand a say in university hiring and curriculum and “press vigorously in all political arenas.” Key to victory is “careful long-range planning and implementation” with a “scale of financing available only through joint effort.” The memo spurred the ultra-conservative foundations to weaponize their “philanthropic” giving to “fight a multi-front war of influence over American political thought.”

The Coors family heeded the call first, followed by Mellon Scaife who massively overshadowed the Coors’. These foundations, that only existed for inheritance tax avoidance, were weaponized right at this moment… two months before Powell was nominated to The Court.

That’s how close we came to living in a good timeline.

And I’m only 1/4 of the way through Jane Mayer’s Dark Money; maybe just a tip of an iceberg. I’d suggest it’s required reading for every American. I should add Mayer is also responsible for unmasking Clarence Thomas in Strange Justice, the source for nearly everything we know about his grotesque history. I haven’t read it.

*this was pre-Moral Majority, but not by much.

i am, but keeps running faster