The Libertarian dreams of Charles Koch nearly came to being fulfilled with the “Red Wave” that was to put Republicans in control of the House & Senate
"The Libertarian Party platform on which Koch ran in 1980 was unambiguous. It included the following:
- We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.
- We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services. . . .
- We favor the repeal of the . . . Social Security system. . . .
- We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.
- We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.
- As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.
- We support repeal of all . . . minimum wage laws. . . .
- Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended. . . .
- We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency. . . .
- We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system. . . .
- We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration. . . .
- We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and “aid to the poor” programs.44
The list went on from there, including ending government oversight of abusive banking practices by ending all usury laws; privatizing our airports, the FAA, Amtrak, and all of our rivers; and shutting down the Post Office. In a bone they threw to the white supremacist, white evangelical, and Catholic Christian movements, they also called for an end of all tax-supported abortions (although the Hyde Amendment had already banned this in 1976)…
You might remember Pat Sellers for his “Referendum” designed to protect the “Saha Farm” from eminent domain and as a rigorous campaigner for the infamous “Bloc of Four” Coatesville City Council. Pat Sellers allegedly has a connection to Larry Pratt.
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Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Continued
The Day the Music Died
For years it worked like a charm, at least from the 1980s until around 2016. Even when Democrats did win elections, they had to eschew labels like “liberal” and take positions like Bill Clinton’s infamous “the era of big government is over,” as was “welfare as we know it.” President Barack Obama’s signature piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act, added billions to the coffers of big insurance and drug companies and continued to legally prevent Americans who were under 65 (and not disabled) from accessing Medicare.
And then, in 2015, a real estate mogul and reality TV star burst onto the scene, blowing up the carefully crafted Potemkin village that his fellow billionaires had built over two generations.
The Republican Party was corrupt, Trump said, lying to get Americans into phony wars for political gain, cutting taxes on rich people like himself at the expense of the average guy, and fawning over phony war heroes like John McCain and low-energy hustlers like Jeb Bush and Rick Perry. The Democratic Party was rigged, too, Trump pointed out, sympathizing with Bernie Sanders, who had been almost entirely ignored by corporate media for nearly a year even as he was drawing crowds of 5,000 to 30,000 at nearly every stop.
Trump talked about giving people the universal health care they’d been yearning for since the 1940s (when the GOP first shot down Harry Truman’s single-payer plan) and said he’d do so at a “lower cost” and with “better benefits” than either Obamacare or Medicare. Union jobs were going to flood back into the country. Billionaires were going to be crippled by higher Trump taxes—“I’ll take a huge hit,” he solemnly proclaimed.
Most of the conservative billionaire class was horrified, and the Koch network (which holds a semiannual get-together for billionaires to raise hundreds of millions to spend on politics) declined to support Trump in 2016. But a few, among them Sheldon Adelson and Robert Mercer, threw in with Trump, and with a little help from oligarchs in Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, Trump ended up in the White House.
Within a year of Trump’s taking over the Oval Office, and the GOP taking over both the House and the Senate, Americans began to realize that the entire thing was just another Reaganesque scam. Trump was able to hold together his base mostly by using race-based fear tactics about invading brown hordes from south of the border. He kept Republicans generally on his side by threatening to support Republican primary challengers if they didn’t swear fealty.
But it wasn’t enough, and the professionals in the Republican Party knew it. They could see the wipeout of 2018 coming, and it scared them to their core. Demonizing unions and universal health care didn’t work anymore, because candidate Trump had called them both out as benefits. The 2017 tax cut was widely seen as a $1.5 trillion gift to the billionaire class, put on the credit card of the nation’s children and grandchildren.
Even their fear tactics about black crime and invading Mexicans were backfiring, and the Supreme Court had had the gall to end the debate over gay marriage by simply legalizing it nationwide.
There was only one serious path left: figure out a way to prevent the wrong people from voting or, if they voted, to make sure their votes weren’t counted.
Voter suppression and election fraud became the principal method of ensuring electoral success, buttressed by hundreds of millions of dollars in TV advertising and sophisticated online influence operations."
FROM:
The Billionaires’ Trick to Keep Everyone from Voting
Sunday book excerpt: The Hidden History of the War on Voting
November 13, 2022
Every Sunday I share with you a chapter or two from one of my books. This is a serialization of the entire book, done a chapter or two every Sunday for the next few months, of The Hidden History of the War on Voting.
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The Libertarian dreams of Charles Koch nearly came to being fulfilled with the “Red Wave” that was to put Republicans in control of the House & Senate
McCarthy outed his plan to kill Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security if Republicans take the house. Senator Rick Scott plans to end Social Security and Medicare:
As I write this Democrats retained control of the Senate. Elections determining control of the House are not yet over.
"Top House Republicans are being increasingly open about their plans to hold the debt limit hostage to force through their extreme plans to slash Medicare and Social Security.
In a new interview with Punchbowl News, Minority Leader McCarthy indicated his support for House Republicans’ increasingly open plotting to threaten a catastrophic economic meltdown in order to force wildly unpopular cuts to the bedrock of American seniors’ financial security.
MORE AT:
Leader McCarthy’s Threat: Slash Medicare & Social Security or Tank the Economy
From the Speaker’s Press Office:
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