Politics & Stuff

[NikkiCFC 7,662]

Isreal got sympathy votes. 

For Ukraine everyone is united in Europe against Russia.

But this conflict is more delicate. 

My impression is that for half Europe Israel=Ukraine - victim 

And for others is Palestine=Ukraine 

Depends on your look.

[cosmicway 1,272]

All of these songs are rubbish.

[cosmicway 1,272]

11 minutes ago, NikkiCFC said:

5.00 odds. Easy money 💰

I 'm going to subscribe to the communist party tomorrow.

[cosmicway 1,272]

Eurovision once upon a time:
 

 

 

 

... even Greece from a lower mark
 

 

[cosmicway 1,272]

My entry for 2025:
 

 

[TheHulk 1,453]

25 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

All of these songs are rubbish.

Came here after watching a good chunk of it and this is my opinion as well. Haven't seen so many garbage songs in a single edition before. Disappointing.

[cosmicway 1,272]

4 minutes ago, TheHulk said:

Came here after watching a good chunk of it and this is my opinion as well. Haven't seen so many garbage songs in a single edition before. Disappointing.

It's the last twenty years or so and it's getting worse and worse.
Must be some kind of extraterrestrial control experiment, there is no other explanation.

Granted it's not easy to write a "grand succès" song  - 't is a rare inspiration le grand succès.
But from some ten years ago I recall Greece entered the contest with one of those horriblies again.
Yet from the same year's Greek top ten why not this decent number ?
 

[NikkiCFC 7,662]

34 minutes ago, TheHulk said:

Came here after watching a good chunk of it and this is my opinion as well. Haven't seen so many garbage songs in a single edition before. Disappointing.

Loved granny from 🇪🇸 

[Vesper 27,507]

'Carry-dite-bye-raye-sigh-en': Trump mocked as rally shows his 'slurring is getting worse'

 

Epstein Victim Says She Was Forced Into Threesome With Alan Dershowitz

https://www.thedailybeast.com/epstein-victim-was-grilled-about-alan-dershowitzs-bleeding-penis-said-she-was-forced-into-threesome

 

 

[cosmicway 1,272]

I lost the fc*king trial to the neonazis.
Believe it or not.
Let me explain what happened.
It was one of the loudmouths of the golden dawn party who somehow was allowed to become the broadcaster for the national horse racing company in 2011.
There were lots of complaints -the race course telephone centre was jammed- and they fired him the next day (because of his intense activism on behalf of the neonazis).
The minister of sports Ioannidis is said to have been involved and asked the race course to do away with the character.
We understood it was an oversight. The race course directors in 2011 were from the socialist party and it must have been an oversight.

Years pass.
The race course becomes a private company in 2016.
This new company (OPAP.gr) was making many mistakes.
Turnovers were plummetting down - nothing worked.
From my blog I was trying everyday to point out their mistakes -in an effort to save the Greek races.
In vain.
In the end they closed down the race course. A 100 year history was erased in one day, this January the 31st.
I really wanted to save the races. I have writen an artificial intelligence program (CosmiC Racing).
It was very hard work - there is nothing else like it - now it has been rendered useless.

In between then what happened ?
The Golden dawn character reappeared in March 2018 as a broadacaster for OPAP !
I challenged this - I considered it gross defamation for the Greek races, as something likely to bring disaster for our races even closer.
I published in my site a video from 2012 in which he was calling for what appeared to be assault battalions against immigrants. Those were the same assault battalions who 
muredered people and eventually the Golden Dawn party was declared an "illegal criminal organisation" and its leaders are now in jail.

But not in my case !
They took me to court for calling them "assault battalions".
They were not that - they were boy scouts helping old ladies to cross the road was the indictment against me !
This kind of rubbish was then somehow accepted by the court early this morning,

In April 2018 they managed to virtually drag me out of hospital where I was about to undergo a serious operation.
They wanted to take me to "instant court" but could n't do it because of the hospital.
It went through the slow channels of regular justice and this morning we got the result.
A 5 month sentence against me !

I have no idea what the discussion went like.
My lawyer did not want me to be present (strange but he insisted).
I have no idea what the verdict was based on.
The man in the video was clearly calling for street violence against immigrants.

But I was alone.
As everybody knows -from here to the next galaxy- I have no relation or connection with the political left and the "anarchist circles".
If that was n't the case then some 50-100 people would be present in the chamber shouting and making noise.
I was and I am alone.

Of course the company with the big money  is behind this as you can readily understand.
Not the Golden Dawn clowns as such.

[Vesper 27,507]

Life in a Dystopian Satire

[Vesper 27,507]

Swedish PM says he'd consider hosting nuclear weapons in wartime

https://www.thelocal.se/20240513/swedish-pm-says-hed-consider-hosting-nuclear-weapons-in-wartime

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said there's broad consensus not to allow nuclear weapons on Swedish soil in peacetime, but added that wartime is a different matter.

Sweden's parliament is set to vote on a Defence Cooperation Agreement (DCA) with the United States in June which will give the US access to military bases in Sweden and allow the storage of military equipment and weapons in the Scandinavian country.

Sweden abandoned two centuries of military non-alignment to join Nato in March this year.

Calls have mounted in recent weeks, from the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Association among others, for the government to put in writing in the DCA agreement that Sweden will not allow nuclear weapons on its soil.

The government has repeatedly insisted there is no need to have a ban spelled out, citing "broad consensus on nuclear weapons" in Sweden as well as a parliamentary decision that bars nuclear weapons in Sweden in peacetime.

But Kristersson said on Monday that wartime was a different story.

"In a war situation it's a completely different matter, (it) would depend entirely on what would happen," he told public broadcaster Swedish Radio.

"In the absolute worst-case scenario, the democratic countries in our part of the world must ultimately be able to defend themselves against countries that could threaten us with nuclear weapons."

He insisted that any such decision to place nuclear weapons in Sweden would be taken by Sweden, not the United States.

"Sweden decides over Swedish territory," he said.

But, he stressed, "the whole purpose of our Nato membership and our defence is to ensure that that situation does not arise".

If Ukraine had been a Nato member "it would not have been attacked by Russia", he said.

Sweden's Social Democratic Party, which was in power when Sweden submitted its Nato membership application in May 2022, said at the time it would work to express "unilateral reservations against the deployment of nuclear weapons and permanent bases on Swedish territory".

Nordic neighbours Denmark and Norway, which are already Nato members, have both refused to allow foreign countries to establish permanent military bases or nuclear weapons on their soil in peacetime.

[NikkiCFC 7,662]

🙁

[NikkiCFC 7,662]

21 hours ago, cosmicway said:

I lost the fc*king trial to the neonazis.
Believe it or not.
Let me explain what happened.
It was one of the loudmouths of the golden dawn party who somehow was allowed to become the broadcaster for the national horse racing company in 2011.
There were lots of complaints -the race course telephone centre was jammed- and they fired him the next day (because of his intense activism on behalf of the neonazis).
The minister of sports Ioannidis is said to have been involved and asked the race course to do away with the character.
We understood it was an oversight. The race course directors in 2011 were from the socialist party and it must have been an oversight.

Years pass.
The race course becomes a private company in 2016.
This new company (OPAP.gr) was making many mistakes.
Turnovers were plummetting down - nothing worked.
From my blog I was trying everyday to point out their mistakes -in an effort to save the Greek races.
In vain.
In the end they closed down the race course. A 100 year history was erased in one day, this January the 31st.
I really wanted to save the races. I have writen an artificial intelligence program (CosmiC Racing).
It was very hard work - there is nothing else like it - now it has been rendered useless.

In between then what happened ?
The Golden dawn character reappeared in March 2018 as a broadacaster for OPAP !
I challenged this - I considered it gross defamation for the Greek races, as something likely to bring disaster for our races even closer.
I published in my site a video from 2012 in which he was calling for what appeared to be assault battalions against immigrants. Those were the same assault battalions who 
muredered people and eventually the Golden Dawn party was declared an "illegal criminal organisation" and its leaders are now in jail.

But not in my case !
They took me to court for calling them "assault battalions".
They were not that - they were boy scouts helping old ladies to cross the road was the indictment against me !
This kind of rubbish was then somehow accepted by the court early this morning,

In April 2018 they managed to virtually drag me out of hospital where I was about to undergo a serious operation.
They wanted to take me to "instant court" but could n't do it because of the hospital.
It went through the slow channels of regular justice and this morning we got the result.
A 5 month sentence against me !

I have no idea what the discussion went like.
My lawyer did not want me to be present (strange but he insisted).
I have no idea what the verdict was based on.
The man in the video was clearly calling for street violence against immigrants.

But I was alone.
As everybody knows -from here to the next galaxy- I have no relation or connection with the political left and the "anarchist circles".
If that was n't the case then some 50-100 people would be present in the chamber shouting and making noise.
I was and I am alone.

Of course the company with the big money  is behind this as you can readily understand.
Not the Golden Dawn clowns as such.

When you go to prison?

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,776]

53 minutes ago, NikkiCFC said:

When you go to prison?

Aren't Prisons in much of Europe like nice hotels? I think the dude who killed all those kids in Norway on that island had like a Playstation in his room......far cry from what you are going to get in an American jail.

[Vesper 27,507]

St Pauli: Bundesliga promotion and leftist principles combine (with ‘death head’ flag)

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5488021/2024/05/13/st-pauli-promotion-death-head/

When the whistle blew, supporters from every corner of the Millerntor-Stadion poured onto the pitch. After a 3-1 win over Osnabruck, St Pauli had been promoted back to the Bundesliga, Germany’s highest division, after 13 years away.

The players vanished. Eventually, they reappeared high on the shoulders of their adoring public. Captain Jackson Irvine, from Australia via Celtic, Hull City and Hibernian. Dapo Afolayan, who had wandered the football world in search of a home, before finding one in Hamburg. And Fabian Hurzeler, born in Houston, Texas. Still just 31 years old but already one of the brightest coaching minds in Europe.

These are not normal characters, nor is this a normal story — but then St Pauli are not a normal club. Owned entirely by their members and probably more famous for their left-wing values than their football, they have styled themselves as the sport’s conscience. The cost of which is to be seen as a place where causes and inclusivity are more important than the score.

But on Sunday, as the flares burned under a white-hot Hamburg sun and the fans and players celebrated together — holding each other, laughing, shouting and weeping — football seemed to matter more than anything else.

The Millerntor sits at the head of the Reeperbahn.

It’s the most famous road in Hamburg and at night, it plunges through bright neon and throbbing bass. It is the city’s red-light district — but it is a mess of music, culture, artisan coffee and pirated television feeds, too, and that makes it more of a dark heart than just a grubby Gomorrah.

Not far away is Hafenstrasse, which winds for miles along the north bank of the River Elbe and under the shadow of the tall cranes that still work the harbour docks. That is where St Pauli’s rebellious spirit comes from. It also forged the identity the world knows today. The skull-and-crossbones, the anarchy, the desire to be different — it comes from there.

In 1981, a dozen houses on Hafenstrasse were squatted by students, punks and activists. It created a decade-long conflict between those occupying residents and a city determined to evict them. The conflict between the police and the squatters turned Hafenstrasse into a battleground and, ultimately, a global news story.

One of the residents was Doc Mabuse, a local punk and St Pauli fan who had been going to the Millerntor since the late 1970s. One Saturday in the mid-’80s, he bought a Totenkopf from the local fair, stapled it to a broom handle and took it into the ground. In one form or another, the Totenkopf — literally ‘death head’ — has been there ever since.

The mood was ripe for rebellion. Hamburg’s docks were in decline, gentrification was driving people from their communities and a leftist movement, inspired by that social decay, had focus and energy. At the same time, a rising far-right presence at Hamburger SV, by far the city’s biggest and most successful club, was driving supporters in search of something different.

That is the abridged version of the St Pauli’s founding myth. Over the decades, the club became home to the disaffected, the disenfranchised and the displaced, and St Pauli’s reputation, as one of the few football clubs to have a distinct political identity, is a codification of that.

---

Derby Days: The Athletic visits the most ferocious rivalries in Europe

• Hamburg: The Stadtderby
• Lisbon: Benfica vs Sporting
• Glasgow: The Old Firm
• Athens: The Derby of the Eternal Enemies

---

Oke Gottlich used to stand on the Millerntor’s terraces. Gottlich is still a fan, but he has worn many hats. Fanzine writer. Journalist. Record label founder. He has been St Pauli’s president since November 2014 and The Athletic meets him in the weeks before promotion is secured.

He is someone with whom you can talk for hours. About football. About Hamburg. About the world. He is idealistic and forthright, and unapologetically so.

“Maybe this sounds too romantic and utopian, but I wish we could work together to make the world better. There are so many things in the football industry that are headed in the wrong direction. I want to say, ‘Where is the money coming from? Why are we taking this money? Why is it the most unregulated industry in the world?’.”

St Pauli’s promotion will cause little more than a ripple at the top of the game — but to Gottlich, the success is still one in the eye for the orthodoxy.

“Most people from conservative football believe participation, democracy, membership-driven models can‘t be successful. I want to run against this wall as long as I can. Even if it leaves me with a bloody head, I don’t care. I want something with the labels of participation and transparency to succeed, not just this old model where there is one captain — one guy with a lot of money or a lot of power.”

The value of this promotion is proof that a different approach can work. Different ideals, too. In 2009, St Pauli became the first German club to adopt a set of guiding principles around social responsibility. One of Gottlich’s predecessors, Corny Littmann, was the first gay president of a German football club. Today, three of the four vice presidents are women.

Promotion amplifies that example, but it also creates a complication. To some, St Pauli’s identity is too close to being a brand. Their ubiquitous Totenkopf, seen on clothing and merchandise around the world, has come to represent the endemic commercialism in football. Mabuse, for instance, has in recent years become happier at Altona 93, an even smaller Hamburg club playing in the fifth tier. St Pauli’s promotion will win even more new fans and bring even greater attention.

Gottlich is not afraid of the conversation about commercialism; he does not accept that the club has to choose between its many positions and its substantial commercial revenue.

“Yes, we are not quite understandable for people,” he says, “because on one side we are commercially successful and on the other, we are against commercialisation in football. How does this fit together? People have to understand that it’s not a marketing plan to be against modern football. It’s a strong attitude and it’s better for participation, the community and the integrity of the competition.”

“I want to have the most successful St Pauli, because the more successful we are, the more we can present (the) values that we are all promoting in our daily lives.”

It’s an area in which the club are misunderstood. St Pauli is not a church and Gottlich is not a preacher. Instead, to hear him explain the club’s worldview — beyond the central tenets of standing against racism, fascism, misogyny and homophobia — is just a reflection of its membership. The club do not impose a belief system from above.

“The only thing is that it has to be left of the middle and progressive. I’m not going to dictate what standpoints we have on different issues. People have to develop their own ideas.

“This club is in permanent transformation. This is really important because progress and values are changing. So, we have affordable ticketing prices so that people can bring their ideas into the Millerntor. We want young people to be able to come into the stadium as well and bring their ideas with them.”

“We have a 10,000 standing terrace on the ‘gegengerade’ (ie, the east stand) where the tickets are €12 (£10; $13). This is so important. This social aspect. And it’s one of the roots, saying, ‘We want people in the stadium who can’t pay €70 or €50.”

One of the reasons “conservative football”, to borrow Gottlich’s term, believes fan-owned clubs cannot work is because of internal conflict. That will be the case at St Pauli and during our conversation, he runs through the myriad issues raging all at once.

Is the social price point correct? Is the commitment to sustainable kit manufacturing the right approach, given that organic materials come at an extra cost? On and on; St Pauli might be the biggest and loudest town hall in Hamburg.

Another, clearly, is the relationship between the ideas and the team. How important is the football? St Pauli began to face a backlash during the last decade because of a perceived disparity. They were too popular. They became very famous all over the world without actually achieving anything on the pitch. Did it matter? It did to Gottlich.

Back in 2015, he was interviewed by the writer and historian Uli Hesse for EightByEight magazine. He was just a year into his presidency. The previous season, St Pauli had only just avoided relegation to the third tier and, unbeknownst to him, were due to spend another nine years in the Bundesliga 2.

He was unequivocal in what he wanted St Pauli to be.

“We will always take a stand against racism and homophobia, always look out after the weak and the poor, because it’s important for us. It’s in our blood. But we want to see that same passion and effort on the football pitch! It’s got to be about football. We have to ask ourselves, ‘What kind of football do we want St Pauli to play?’. And the answer has to be: football that will thrill the people here.”

This year, the football has thrilled people.

St Pauli’s rise under Hurzeler has been a joy. He has made them among the most attractive teams in Bundesliga 2, with a style built on short, ambitious passing, quick changes of rhythm and a determination to play from anywhere.

GO DEEPER

St Pauli, a planned attack on a supporters' coach and the possible political motivation behind it

This promotion can be traced back to the end of 2022 when Hurzeler was appointed in strange circumstances. The previous season, St Pauli had seen another promotion slip through their hands. In the months after, amid sales of influential players and with damaged morale, their form fell away. As European football paused for the World Cup in Qatar, the team were out of the Bundesliga 2 relegation places only on goal difference. Timo Schultz, the coach — a former player and a local hero — paid the price with his job. Hurzeler, one of his assistants, but only 29, was appointed to replace him.

Hurzeler is a compelling character. Smart and thoughtful in person, but occasionally maniacal on the touchline. It only took him until February to collect seven yellow cards this season. He is no wallflower. But that passion for the game makes him extremely popular. And he has a mind for it that should one day make him extremely successful. That combination has now taken St Pauli to the Bundesliga. In time, it should take Hurzeler to the very top of the game.

He was born in Texas but left the United States when he was just a few years old. He is one of four children to a mother and father who worked in dentistry and who moved from Zurich to Freiburg and, finally, to Munich, all the while bouncing back to the United States on family camper van holidays.

Back in Europe, his football career was not quite what he wanted it to be. He played for Bayern Munich’s II team but never rose above the Regionalliga, Germany’s fourth tier. He was a combative, occasionally wild midfielder, but of clear intelligence. He was a player-coach by 23, an assistant with the German Football Association’s age group sides by 25, and became Schulz’s assistant at St Pauli aged 27.

When The Athletic went to meet him, in January 2023, he was 29, had been coaching in the Bundesliga 2 for six weeks and was still to attain his full qualifications. He had asked the players whether he had their support in taking over. They did and they moved forward together.

Hurzeler is one of those coaches who speaks of the game in detail rather than generalities. Give him the chance and he will talk about rest defence and stability in transition. A phrase that is commonly used to describe his coaching is that he sees the whole pitch. He knows when to make football complex but he understands how to make it simple.

“I spent 10 years at Bayern, so it’s in my DNA to want possession and to dictate the game,” he told The Athletic. “That belief is still deep inside me. But I’ve learnt so much in the second division, which is a lot about long balls and set pieces and that you have to be very intense against the ball. You need to be able to defend deep and to defend high.”

There is no question he has built an attractive team, but they are a smart one, too, and have adopted the set-piece nous that he described. Hurzeler’s St Pauli have scored the third-most goals from free kicks and corners this season, while also conceding the fewest.

They have been tough, too: they were undefeated through the first seven months of this season.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect, though, is just how many of his players are in the form of their lives. St Pauli are not a pauper in second-division terms, but neither do they have the financial advantages of Schalke, Hamburg or Hannover. St Pauli’s wage spend is roughly the seventh-highest in the league but is only 40 per cent of Schalke’s and just over half of Hamburg’s.

GO DEEPER

Schalke - the fallen giants fighting relegation and financial ruin

The result is a squad of stories. Irvine, who emerged from a financial mess at Hull City, via Hibernian, to become a deeply beloved captain. Afolayan, whose circuitous route has led him from Chelsea to Canada, West Ham United to Bolton Wanderers, and now to the Bundesliga. Elias Saad, a winger who joined St Pauli from the Regionalliga, has become a senior Tunisia international within 18 months. Marcel Hartel might be Hurzeler’s player of the season. At 28, attacking midfielder Hartel had never scored more than five goals in a season. This year, he has 16 and counting.

There are many more. Each of them different. Somehow playing in perfect, intricate harmony.

But maybe that is exactly the right metaphor for St Pauli. Despite the many labels and the clarity of vision, no one fan seems exactly like the next. The cynics will say they are a club of cool, where nobody is half a step out of fashion. The scenes at the Millerntor say differently, though. Image was nothing under the flares and fireworks, and nothing mattered more than the fact this wild bunch, with its old and its young, its locals, its foreigners and its strays who belong nowhere other than in St Pauli, are now marching on the Bundesliga.

[cosmicway 1,272]

1 hour ago, NikkiCFC said:

When you go to prison?

Bound not ... prison.
Also a fine but I don't know yet how much it is.
However all the lefties I know here are expressing their joy - so much for antifascism.

The prime minister is calling them what I called them, the former prime minister, the chief public prosecutor mr. Dogiakos - but for the kangaroo court those street mobs were ... boy scouts accompanying old ladies to the bank and to the shopping. It figures however. The character who accused me was in relation with the giant bookmaker company so the rest follows.
Plus I had a useless lawyer. He prevented me frorm appearing in person - he even threatened with walk out. I don't know what to make of this but he was clearly less able to talk in the chamber compared to me.

[Vesper 27,507]

Meet the Hidden Architect Behind America's Racist Economics

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/meet-the-economist-behind-the-one-percents-stealth-takeover-of-america

Nobel laureate James Buchanan is the intellectual linchpin of the Koch-funded attack on democratic institutions, argues Duke historian Nancy MacLean

Ask people to name the key minds that have shaped America’s burst of radical right-wing attacks on working conditions, consumer rights and public services, and they will typically mention figures like free market-champion Milton Friedman, libertarian guru Ayn Rand, and laissez-faire economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.

James McGill Buchanan is a name you will rarely hear unless you’ve taken several classes in economics. And if the Tennessee-born Nobel laureate were alive today, it would suit him just fine that most well-informed journalists, liberal politicians, and even many economics students have little understanding of his work.

The reason? Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that even young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly). If Americans really knew what Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is manifesting under their noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a transformation most would not even want to imagine, much less accept.

That is a dangerous blind spot, MacLean argues in a meticulously researched book, Democracy in Chains, a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. While Americans grapple with Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency, we may be missing the key to changes that are taking place far beyond the level of mere politics. Once these changes are locked into place, there may be no going back.

An Unlocked Door in Virginia

MacLean’s book reads like an intellectual detective story. In 2010, she moved to North Carolina, where a Tea Party-dominated Republican Party got control of both houses of the state legislature and began pushing through a radical program to suppress voter rights, decimate public services, and slash taxes on the wealthy that shocked a state long a beacon of southern moderation. Up to this point, the figure of James Buchanan flickered in her peripheral vision, but as she began to study his work closely, the events in North Carolina and also Wisconsin, where Governor Scott Walker was leading assaults on collective bargaining rights, shifted her focus.

Could it be that this relatively obscure economist’s distinctive thought was being put forcefully into action in real time?

MacLean could not gain access to Buchanan’s papers to test her hypothesis until after his death in January 2013. That year, just as the government was being shut down by Ted Cruz & Co., she traveled to George Mason University in Virginia, where the economist’s papers lay willy-nilly across the offices of a building now abandoned by the Koch-funded faculty to a new, fancier center in Arlington.

MacLean was stunned. The archive of the man who had sought to stay under the radar had been left totally unsorted and unguarded. The historian plunged in, and she read through boxes and drawers full of papers that included personal correspondence between Buchanan and billionaire industrialist Charles Koch. That’s when she had an amazing realization: here was the intellectual linchpin of a stealth revolution currently in progress.

A Theory of Property Supremacy

Buchanan, a 1940 graduate of Middle Tennessee State University who later attended the University of Chicago for graduate study, started out as a conventional public finance economist. But he grew frustrated by the way in which economic theorists ignored the political process.

Buchanan began working on a description of power that started out as a critique of how institutions functioned in the relatively liberal 1950s and ‘60s, a time when economist John Maynard Keynes’s ideas about the need for government intervention in markets to protect people from flaws so clearly demonstrated in the Great Depression held sway. Buchanan, MacLean notes, was incensed at what he saw as a move toward socialism and deeply suspicious of any form of state action that channels resources to the public. Why should the increasingly powerful federal government be able to force the wealthy to pay for goods and programs that served ordinary citizens and the poor?

In thinking about how people make political decisions and choices, Buchanan concluded that you could only understand them as individuals seeking personal advantage. In an interview cited by MacLean, the economist observed that in the 1950s Americans commonly assumed that elected officials wanted to act in the public interest. Buchanan vehemently disagreed — that was a belief he wanted, as he put it, to “tear down.” His ideas developed into a theory that came to be known as “public choice.”

Buchanan’s view of human nature was distinctly dismal. Adam Smith saw human beings as self-interested and hungry for personal power and material comfort, but he also acknowledged social instincts like compassion and fairness. Buchanan, in contrast, insisted that people were primarily driven by venal self-interest. Crediting people with altruism or a desire to serve others was “romantic” fantasy: politicians and government workers were out for themselves, and so, for that matter, were teachers, doctors, and civil rights activists. They wanted to control others and wrest away their resources: “Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves,” he wrote in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty.

Does that sound like your kindergarten teacher? It did to Buchanan.

The people who needed protection were property owners, and their rights could only be secured though constitutional limits to prevent the majority of voters from encroaching on them, an idea Buchanan lays out in works like Property as a Guarantor of Liberty (1993). MacLean observes that Buchanan saw society as a cutthroat realm of makers (entrepreneurs) constantly under siege by takers (everybody else) His own language was often more stark, warning the alleged “prey” of “parasites” and “predators” out to fleece them.

In 1965 the economist launched a center dedicated to his theories at the University of Virginia, which later relocated to George Mason University. MacLean describes how he trained thinkers to push back against the Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate America’s public schools and to challenge the constitutional perspectives and federal policy that enabled it. She notes that he took care to use economic and political precepts, rather than overtly racial arguments, to make his case, which nonetheless gave cover to racists who knew that spelling out their prejudices would alienate the country.

All the while, a ghost hovered in the background — that of John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, senator and seventh vice president of the United States.

Calhoun was an intellectual and political powerhouse in the South from the 1820s until his death in 1850, expending his formidable energy to defend slavery. Calhoun, called the “Marx of the Master Class” by historian Richard Hofstadter, saw himself and his fellow southern oligarchs as victims of the majority. Therefore, as MacLean explains, he sought to create “constitutional gadgets” to constrict the operations of government.

Economists Tyler Cowen and Alexander Tabarrok, both of George Mason University, have noted the two men’s affinities, heralding Calhoun “a precursor of modern public choice theory” who “anticipates” Buchanan’s thinking. MacLean observes that both focused on how democracy constrains property owners and aimed for ways to restrict the latitude of voters. She argues that unlike even the most property-friendly founders Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, Buchanan wanted a private governing elite of corporate power that was wholly released from public accountability.

Suppressing voting, changing legislative processes so that a normal majority could no longer prevail, sowing public distrust of government institutions— all these were tactics toward the goal. But the Holy Grail was the Constitution: alter it and you could increase and secure the power of the wealthy in a way that no politician could ever challenge.

Gravy Train to Oligarchy

MacLean explains that Virginia’s white elite and the pro-corporate president of the University of Virginia, Colgate Darden, who had married into the DuPont family, found Buchanan’s ideas to be spot on. In nurturing a new intelligentsia to commit to his values, Buchanan stated that he needed a “gravy train,” and with backers like Charles Koch and conservative foundations like the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts, others hopped aboard. Money, Buchanan knew, can be a persuasive tool in academia. His circle of influence began to widen.

MacLean observes that the Virginia school, as Buchanan’s brand of economic and political thinking is known, is a kind of cousin to the better-known, market-oriented Chicago and Austrian schools — proponents of all three were members of the Mont Pelerin Society, an international neoliberal organization which included Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. But the Virginia school’s focus and career missions were distinct. In an interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), MacLean described Friedman and Buchanan as yin and yang:

“Friedman was this genial, personable character who loved to be in the limelight and made a sunny case for the free market and the freedom to choose and so forth. Buchanan was the dark side of this: he thought, ok, fine, they can make a case for the free market, but everybody knows that free markets have externalities and other problems. So he wanted to keep people from believing that government could be the alternative to those problems.”

The Virginia school also differs from other economic schools in a marked reliance on abstract theory rather than mathematics or empirical evidence. That a Nobel Prize was awarded in 1986 to an economist who so determinedly bucked the academic trends of his day was nothing short of stunning, MacLean observes. But, then, it was the peak of the Reagan era, an administration several Buchanan students joined.

Buchanan’s school focused on public choice theory, later adding constitutional economics and the new field of law and economics to its core research and advocacy. The economist saw that his vision would never come to fruition by focusing on who rules. It was much better to focus on the rules themselves, and that required a “constitutional revolution.”

MacLean describes how the economist developed a grand project to train operatives to staff institutions funded by like-minded tycoons, most significantly Charles Koch, who became interested in his work in the ‘70s and sought the economist’s input in promoting “Austrian economics” in the U.S. and in advising the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

Koch, whose mission was to save capitalists like himself from democracy, found the ultimate theoretical tool in the work of the southern economist. The historian writes that Koch preferred Buchanan to Milton Friedman and his “Chicago boys” because, she says, quoting a libertarian insider, they wanted “to make government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root.”

With Koch’s money and enthusiasm, Buchanan’s academic school evolved into something much bigger. By the 1990s, Koch realized that Buchanan’s ideas — transmitted through stealth and deliberate deception, as MacLean amply documents — could help take government down through incremental assaults that the media would hardly notice. The tycoon knew that the project was extremely radical, even a “revolution” in governance, but he talked like a conservative to make his plans sound more palatable.

MacLean details how partnered with Koch, Buchanan’s outpost at George Mason University was able to connect libertarian economists with right-wing political actors and supporters of corporations like Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank, and General Motors. Together they could push economic ideas to the public through media, promote new curricula for economics education, and court politicians in nearby Washington, D.C.

At the 1997 fiftieth anniversary of the Mont Pelerin Society, MacLean recounts that Buchanan and his associate Henry Manne, a founding theorist of libertarian economic approaches to law, focused on such affronts to capitalists as environmentalism and public health and welfare, expressing eagerness to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare as well as kill public education because it tended to foster community values. Feminism had to go, too: the scholars considered it a socialist project.

The Oligarchic Revolution Unfolds

Buchanan’s ideas began to have huge impact, especially in America and in Britain. In his home country, the economist was deeply involved in efforts to cut taxes on the wealthy in 1970s and 1980s and he advised proponents of Reagan Revolution in their quest to unleash markets and posit government as the “problem” rather than the “solution.” The Koch-funded Virginia school coached scholars, lawyers, politicians, and business people to apply stark right-wing perspectives on everything from deficits to taxes to school privatization. In Britain, Buchanan’s work helped to inspire the public sector reforms of Margaret Thatcher and her political progeny.

To put the success into perspective, MacLean points to the fact that Henry Manne, whom Buchanan was instrumental in hiring, created legal programs for law professors and federal judges which could boast that by 1990 two of every five sitting federal judges had participated. “40 percent of the U.S. federal judiciary,” writes MacLean, “had been treated to a Koch-backed curriculum.”

MacLean illustrates that in South America, Buchanan was able to first truly set his ideas in motion by helping a bare-knuckles dictatorship ensure the permanence of much of the radical transformation it inflicted on a country that had been a beacon of social progress. The historian emphasizes that Buchanan’s role in the disastrous Pinochet government of Chile has been underestimated partly because unlike Milton Friedman, who advertised his activities, Buchanan had the shrewdness to keep his involvement quiet. With his guidance, the military junta deployed public choice economics in the creation of a new constitution, which required balanced budgets and thereby prevented the government from spending to meet public needs. Supermajorities would be required for any changes of substance, leaving the public little recourse to challenge programs like the privatization of social security.

The dictator’s human rights abuses and pillage of the country’s resources did not seem to bother Buchanan, MacLean argues, so long as the wealthy got their way. “Despotism may be the only organizational alternative to the political structure that we observe,” the economist had written in The Limits of Liberty. If you have been wondering about the end result of the Virginia school philosophy, well, the economist helpfully spelled it out.

A World of Slaves

Most Americans haven’t seen what’s coming.

MacLean notes that when the Kochs’ control of the GOP kicked into high gear after the financial crisis of 2007-08, many were so stunned by the “shock-and-awe” tactics of shutting down government, destroying labor unions, and rolling back services that meet citizens’ basic necessities that few realized that many leading the charge had been trained in economics at Virginia institutions, especially George Mason University. Wasn’t it just a new, particularly vicious wave of partisan politics?

It wasn’t. MacLean convincingly illustrates that it was something far more disturbing.

MacLean is not the only scholar to sound the alarm that the country is experiencing a hostile takeover that is well on its way to radically, and perhaps permanently, altering the society. Peter Temin, former head of the MIT economics department, INET grantee, and author of The Vanishing Middle Class, as well as economist Gordon Lafer of the University of Oregon and author of The One Percent Solution, have provided eye-opening analyses of where America is headed and why. MacLean adds another dimension to this dystopian big picture, acquainting us with what has been overlooked in the capitalist right wing’s playbook.

She observes, for example, that many liberals have missed the point of strategies like privatization. Efforts to “reform” public education and Social Security are not just about a preference for the private sector over the public sector, she argues. You can wrap your head around those, even if you don’t agree. Instead, MacLean contends, the goal of these strategies is to radically alter power relations, weakening pro-public forces and enhancing the lobbying power and commitment of the corporations that take over public services and resources, thus advancing the plans to dismantle democracy and make way for a return to oligarchy. The majority will be held captive so that the wealthy can finally be free to do as they please, no matter how destructive.

MacLean argues that despite the rhetoric of Virginia school acolytes, shrinking big government is not really the point. The oligarchs require a government with tremendous new powers so that they can bypass the will of the people. This, as MacLean points out, requires greatly expanding police powers “to control the resultant popular anger.” The spreading use of pre-emption by GOP-controlled state legislatures to suppress local progressive victories such as living wage ordinances is another example of the right’s aggressive use of state power.

Could these right-wing capitalists allow private companies to fill prisons with helpless citizens—or, more profitable still, right-less undocumented immigrants? They could, and have. Might they engineer a retirement crisis by moving Americans to inadequate 401(k)s? Done. Take away the rights of consumers and workers to bring grievances to court by making them sign forced arbitration agreements? Check. Gut public education to the point where ordinary people have such bleak prospects that they have no energy to fight back? Getting it done.

Would they even refuse children clean water? Actually, yes.

MacLean notes that in Flint, Michigan, Americans got a taste of what the emerging oligarchy will look like — it tastes like poisoned water. There, the Koch-funded Mackinac Center pushed for legislation that would allow the governor to take control of communities facing emergency and put unelected managers in charge. In Flint, one such manager switched the city’s water supply to a polluted river, but the Mackinac Center’s lobbyists ensured that the law was fortified by protections against lawsuits that poisoned inhabitants might bring. Tens of thousands of children were exposed to lead, a substance known to cause serious health problems including brain damage.

Tyler Cowen has provided an economic justification for this kind of brutality, stating that where it is difficult to get clean water, private companies should take over and make people pay for it. “This includes giving them the right to cut off people who don’t—or can’t—pay their bills,” the economist explains.

To many this sounds grotesquely inhumane, but it is a way of thinking that has deep roots in America. In Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative (2005), Buchanan considers the charge of heartlessness made against the kind of classic liberal that he took himself to be. MacLean interprets his discussion to mean that people who “failed to foresee and save money for their future needs” are to be treated, as Buchanan put it, “as subordinate members of the species, akin to…animals who are dependent.’”

Do you have your education, health care, and retirement personally funded against all possible exigencies? Then that means you.

Buchanan was not a dystopian novelist. He was a Nobel Laureate whose sinister logic exerts vast influence over America’s trajectory. It is no wonder that Cowen, on his popular blog Marginal Revolution, does not mention Buchanan on a list of underrated influential libertarian thinkers, though elsewhere on the blog, he expresses admiration for several of Buchanan’s contributions and acknowledges that the southern economist “thought more consistently in terms of ‘rules of the games’ than perhaps any other economist.”

The rules of the game are now clear.

Research like MacLean’s provides hope that toxic ideas like Buchanan’s may finally begin to face public scrutiny. Yet at this very moment, the Kochs’ State Policy Network and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that connects corporate agents to conservative lawmakers to produce legislation, are involved in projects that the Trump-obsessed media hardly notices, like pumping money into state judicial races. Their aim is to stack the legal deck against Americans in ways that MacLean argues may have even bigger effects than Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court ruling which unleashed unlimited corporate spending on American politics. The goal is to create a judiciary that will interpret the Constitution in favor of corporations and the wealthy in ways that Buchanan would have heartily approved.

“The United States is now at one of those historic forks in the road whose outcome will prove as fateful as those of the 1860s, the 1930s, and the 1960s,” writes MacLean. “To value liberty for the wealthy minority above all else and enshrine it in the nation’s governing rules, as Calhoun and Buchanan both called for and the Koch network is achieving, play by play, is to consent to an oligarchy in all but the outer husk of representative form.”

Nobody can say we weren’t warned.