Politics & Stuff

[Fulham Broadway 17,091]

I have travelled in US. Great people. beautiful landscapes. Problem is the power is in the hands of a few billionaires whose foreign policy is greedy and murderous.

[cosmicway 1,333]

My method of stopping cv:

- Martial law is declared across Europe.
- People are allowed to leave their homes escorted by military or police to do their necessary shopping, or in case of emergency go to the doctor.

If this is done early and if we show discipline, things will develop more or less as follows:

There will be some more cases of CV with people who have already contracted it and it is now in the asymptomatic stage.
Also the people who live together (spouses-parents-children) will be exposed, unavoidably.
But the virrus will have fewer and fewer chances to spread and in about one month's time it will die and the emergency measures can be relaxed.

But if we show complacency the epidemic (now pandemic) may grow exponentially.
The decision in the UK to hold football matches with spectators was foolish and very dangerous.

 

[Fernando 6,533]

Yeah things are kicking into high gear now that who officially declare a pandemic. 

Trump stop all flights from Europe. 

I guess it's a matter of time when Europe suspend the leagues for the season. 

[manpe 10,861]

And to think the Chinese could have easily stopped this virus shit had they decided to act on warnings instead of covering up and hoping it goes away. 

[NikkiCFC 8,121]

  On 12/03/2020 at 02:20, Fernando said:

Yeah things are kicking into high gear now that who officially declare a pandemic. 

Trump stop all flights from Europe. 

I guess it's a matter of time when Europe suspend the leagues for the season. 

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https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/nba-suspends-season-coronavirus-2020-1203531530/

 

NBA Suspends Season Due to Coronavirus Pandemic

NBA just did it 

 

[Fulham Broadway 17,091]

Meanwhile the rich jet off to their protective bunkers...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/disease-dodging-worried-wealthy-jet-off-to-disaster-bunkers

[11Drogba 2,000]

 

[11Drogba 2,000]

 

[Supermonkey92 1,428]

It's a shame vesper left this thread just as I joined. She was a passionate heartbeat of it.

Anyway, for all those looking to do what they can with Corona on the prowl, I would heartily recommend vitamin C & D. Both are vital for the immune system and those in the northern hemisphere struggle to get enough vitamin D in the winter months. Vitamin C was actually used in the SARS outbreak a few years ago and was found to improve survival rates for those that developed pneumonia like complications. It might sound silly for such a standard vitamin but China are actually midway through a study to see its effects on Corona its reputation is that good.

So go nuts on vitamin C you cant overdose on it.

400mg of Vitamin D a day will help too.

A strong immune system should keep Corona as a throat virus that is defeated before it travels to the lungs

Sent from my SM-G973F using Tapatalk

[11Drogba 2,000]

 

[chippy 342]

  On 07/03/2020 at 14:36, Vesper said:

Of all the OECD countries, the only nation with LOWER upward social mobility than the US is the UK. In other words, the odds are vastly stacked against the average American when it comes to moving from the lowest quintile (the lowest 20%) to the highest quintile (the highest 20%).

It is so ironic to hear a Trump fan reference immigrant vigour as a form of strength for the nation (which I do agree with) when the entire foundational modus operandi of the Trumpian (and much of the Little Englander mindset that was so crucial to Leave passing) is literally the full-throated projection of raw xenophobia and the scapegoating of those very same immigrants. Make no mistake, Trump and his ilk no long traffic in dog whistles, they use a clarion call to exacerbate and stoke fear and hatred of the other, just like any other timpot racist and white nationalist crank has done before. The main difference is that Trump has the world's largest bully pulpit with which to amplify his ghastly projections of division, hatred, and fear.

You also make a huge assumption, one that happens to be fundamental wrong, that I am in some way advocating for a Corbyn or bust style of Labour leadership. I think he is just as flawed at taproot level as the Blairites were, just coming from a vastly different paradigm of ineffectual leadership.

I complete dismiss your version of the so-called left/right paradigm itself. I also SERIOUSLY call into question your positing that you are any sort of actual Labour supporter as you are attempting to defend two creatures (Trump and BoJo) who are LITERALLY THE ANTITHESIS of what Labour has stood for over the entire breadth and span of its history, the days of Blairite domination included. Those two (and their systemic controllers) are the textbook definition of oligarchic rule, they enable and lead on the utter stripping away of protective rights for all but a few at the very top, the smashing of collective bargaining and protections for the unions and the labour movement in general, and the never-ending grinding down and diminution (with its extinction being the end goal) of any meaningful social welfare state and safety net.

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I know you've now left this part of the forum, but there's a few points I want to answer.

You don't believe I've been a Labour supporter. Did you not take any notice of the general election, which saw huge numbers of people who'd only ever voted Labour vote for the Tories. 

I was never a strong Labour supporter but they were the only party I:d ever voted for in an election. 

As for me being a Trump and Boris fan/supporter.

Not really! More of a case of Boris being a lesser evil than the extreme, intolerant, dangerous, sinister far left that has taken over Labour. I am now anti Momentum, Woke, SJW's, BLM and now the growing number of extremists in the Trans movement cab be added to that list.

 

[NikkiCFC 8,121]

Looking at comment section seems like everyone likes Barnie and nobody likes Biden but yet Joe got more votes. How do you explain this?

[manpe 10,861]

  On 16/03/2020 at 18:59, NikkiCFC said:

Looking at comment section seems like everyone likes Bernie and nobody likes Biden but yet Joe got more votes. How do you explain this?

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Biden is pushed by big corps.

[chippy 342]

  On 11/03/2020 at 20:06, Fulham Broadway said:

Obscene that just 3 US citizens have the same wealth as 175 million  of their fellow citizens added together.

Obscene that the US has killed 30 million people in other countries since WW2 

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Bill Gates does lots of great things with his money and will be leaving the vast majority of his fortune to educational charities across the world.

So long as they pay their taxes, i personally don't give a toss how much money someone has made or what they do with it! And I say that as someone's who's never had more than a few grand in my bank account.

 

 

 

[Supermonkey92 1,428]

Loads of talk over what socialism actually is over the past few years.

Here's a good talk on the political philosophy;

Sent from my SM-G973F using Tapatalk

[Vesper 29,406]

  On 21/03/2020 at 14:08, Supermonkey92 said:

Loads of talk over what socialism actually is over the past few years.

Here's a good talk on the political philosophy;
 

 

Sent from my SM-G973F using Tapatalk
 

 

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I know I said I am done on this thread, but ffs

Koch Brothers, etc etc (and foreign powers too) funded RW agitprop from the neocon Heritage Foundation????? The same lot who have caused so, so much of the incredible dysfunction and wealth inequality, massive, disastrous deregulation schemes, horrid empric wars that have killed millions and stolen trillions for the US coffers, the absolute surge in anti-science thinking, climate change denialism, Intelligent Design, anti-evolution far right wing Christian claptrap, carrying water for big tobacco, and subtle if not outright pro-racial stratification stances, etc., etc., etc., etc. that helped to drag the US down ever since the Reagan administration???

SMDH

 

The Heritage Foundation

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Heritage_Foundation

Founded in 1973, The Heritage Foundation is a right-wing think tank. Its stated mission is to formulate and promote public policies based on the principles of "free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense."^[1] It is widely considered one of the world's most influential public policy research institutes. The Foundation wields considerable influence in Washington DC, and enjoyed particular prominence during the Reagan administration. Its initial funding was provided by Joseph Coors, of the Coors beer empire, and Richard Mellon Scaife, heir of the Mellon industrial and banking fortune. Its founders include Paul Weyrich and Mickey Edwards. The Foundation maintains strong ties with the London Institute of Economic Affairs and the Mont Pelerin Society.

The Heritage Foundation is an "associate" member of the State Policy Network, a web of right-wing “think tanks” in every state across the country.^[2

Wiki

Charles Koch is the right-wing billionaire owner of Koch Industries. As one of the richest people in the world, he is a key funders of the right-wing infrastructure, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network (SPN). In SourceWatch, key articles on Charles Koch and his late brother David include: Koch Brothers, Americans for Prosperity, Stand Together Chamber of Commerce, Stand Together, Koch Family Foundations, Koch Universities, and I360.   Ties to the Koch Brothers The Heritage Foundation has received funding from organizations with connections to the Koch brothers. In 2012, the Heritage Foundation received $650,000 from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, which was one of the Koch Family Foundations before it closed in 2013. The Lambe Foundation contributed at least $4.8 million to the Heritage Foundation between 1998 and 2012. In recent years, the Heritage Foundation has also received funding from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, including $53,300 in 2010 and $69,850 in 2012. The Koch brothers have donated millions of dollars to Donors Trust through the Knowledge and Progress Fund, and possibly other vehicles. Activities The Heritage Foundation concerns itself with many issues in over 30 subject areas, including both domestic and foreign policy, from health care to arms control.[3] It regularly publishes comprehensive articles, papers, and journals developing and expressing conservative positions in these subject areas. Heritage research staff are organized into three research institutes: The Institute for Economic Freedom and Opportunity, The Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity, and The Kathryn and Shelby Collum Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy.[3] The Heritage Foundation launched a news site, "The Daily Signal", on June 3, 2014. According to its website, the site will provide "policy and political news as well as conservative commentary and policy analysis" and aims to be "accurate, fair and trustworthy."[4] The Washington Post reported the site started with an annual budget of $1 million and a staff of 12, most "drawn from news organizations with conservative leanings" including The Washington Times, the National Review, Fox News, and the Washington Examiner.[5] The informational web site www.policyexperts.org is a "service of The Heritage Foundation," listing many of the world's leading conservative-leaning public policy experts. Additionally, for many years, its scholarly, quarterly publication, Policy Review, was widely viewed as one of the world's leading conservative public policy journals. Documents written by or referencing this person or organization are contained in the Anti-Environmental Archive, launched by Greenpeace on Earth Day, 2015. The archive contains 3,500 documents, some 27,000 pages, covering 350 organizations and individuals. The current archive includes mainly documents collected in the late 1980s through the early 2000s by The Clearinghouse on Environmental Advocacy and Research (CLEAR), an organization that tracked the rise of the so called "Wise Use" movement in the 1990s during the Clinton presidency. Access the index to the Anti-Environmental Archives here.   News and Controversies Ties to the Tobacco Industry A 2019 report by The Guardian states: "the Heritage Foundation has historical and current ties to the tobacco industry." Heritage has taken positions favorable to the industry, such as opposition to raising tobacco taxes and regulations on vaping. In 2018, a Heritage scholar testified to the FDA in a manner favorable to the industries interests. Altria is a financial supporter of the Heritage Foundation.[6] Heritage Foundation Called Out for Blocking Action on Climate Change In July of 2016, nineteen U.S. Senators delivered a series of speeches denouncing climate change denial from 32 organizations with links to fossil-fuel interests, including the Heritage Foundation.[7] Sen. Whitehouse (RI-D), who led the effort to expose "the web of denial" said in his remarks on the floor that the purpose was to, "shine a little light on the web of climate denial and spotlight the bad actors in the web, who are polluting our American discourse with phony climate denial. This web of denial, formed over decades, has been built and provisioned by the deep-pocketed Koch brothers, by ExxonMobil, by Peabody coal, and by other fossil fuel interests. It is a grim shadow over our democracy in that it includes an electioneering effort that spends hundreds of millions of dollars in a single election cycle and threatens any Republican who steps up to address the global threat of climate change., it is long past time we shed some light on the perpetrators of this web of denial and expose their filthy grip on our political process. It is a disgrace, and our grandchildren will look back at this as a dirty time in America’s political history because of their work.”[7] Heritage Action for America Draws Criticism The political advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, Heritage Action for America, was founded in April 2010. In an op-ed, Edwin J. Feulner and Michael A. Needham wrote that Heritage Action was formed "to spend money to push legislation […] without the obstacles faced by a nonprofit like the Heritage Foundation."[8] According to reporting by The New Republic, some former Heritage staffers feel that Heritage Action and its political work have come to drive the Heritage Foundation, rather than being subordinate to it.[9] Republicans in Congress have also criticized Heritage Action, including Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), who according to The Washington Post "has accused the group of “destroying the Republican Party” with its push to strip funding for the Affordable Care Act (ACA). “They’ve become a purely partisan group that never asks anybody’s opinion.”"[10] Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) has said, "I think Heritage Action is really hurting the foundation. […] I think they’ve lost credibility with the people that were most supportive of them.”[11] Heritage Action Pushes for Government Shutdown On October 1, 2013, the U.S. federal government shut down when Congress failed to pass a budget. A group of Republicans in the Republican-controlled House pressed for a spending bill that would have delayed the implementation of parts of the ACA, while the Democratic-majority Senate refused to pass a bill with those provisions.[12] The New York Times reported that the "the confrontation that precipitated the crisis was the outgrowth of a long-running effort to undo the law, the Affordable Care Act, since its passage in 2010 — waged by a galaxy of conservative groups" including Heritage Action for America.[13] On October 11, the Wall Street Journal credited Heritage Action's Michael Needham with playing a major role in the shutdown, stating that "Though Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is the public face of the high-risk strategy to "defund" ObamaCare, the masterminds behind it are a new generation of young conservatives, chief among them Mr. Needham."[14] The Journal added that Needham believed the House GOP strategy had not gone badly: "If conservative groups like Heritage Action hadn't raised the stakes on ObamaCare," he says, "we'd be debating on their side of the football field talking about tax increases, gun control, more spending and amnesty for illegal immigrants."[14] The political strategy included pressuring Republicans in Congress to support the defunding push through attack ads. According to the New York Times, "Heritage Action ran critical Internet advertisements in the districts of 100 Republican lawmakers who had failed to sign a letter by a North Carolina freshman, Representative Mark Meadows, urging Mr. Boehner to take up the defunding cause."[13] The shutdown ended early in the morning on October 16, 2013, when a temporary budget resolution passed both houses of Congress, with a majority of House Republicans voting against it. No significant concessions were made to those demanding changes to the ACA. According to CNN, "Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire called the House GOP tactic of tying Obamacare to the shutdown legislation "an ill-conceived strategy from the beginning, not a winning strategy.""[15] But in a discussion on Fox News on October 16, Needham seemed to hold to his commitment to repeal the ACA, saying "The reason the government is shut down is Obamacare is unfair, it's unaffordable, it's unworkable, every single day there's more evidence of that coming out. House Republicans have remained strong in saying we are not going to let this bill go forward."[16] However, he also conceded that repeal would not be politically possible for years: "Well, everybody understands that we're not going to be able to repeal this law until 2017. And that we have to win the Senate and win the White House."[17] Many of those involved in the push to use a government shutdown to defund the ACA/Obamacare had ties to the Koch brothers,[18] including Tea Party Patriots, Freedomworks and former Attorney General Edwin Meese III, who also sits on the board of the Koch-funded Mercatus Center and was formerly on the board of the Heritage Foundation.[13] After Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed on October 8 that the Kochs were behind the shutdown, Koch Industries sent a letter to Capitol Hill. The letter is focused on the corporation, stating that "Koch has not taken a position on the legislative tactic of tying the continuing resolution [for temporary government funding] to defunding Obamacare nor have we lobbied on legislation provisions defunding Obamacare."[19] Positions and Policies In its four-decade history, the Heritage Foundation has had significant effect on U.S. domestic and foreign policy. According to The Atlantic, "Heritage has shaped American public policy in major ways, from Reagan’s missile-defense initiative to Clinton’s welfare reform: Both originated as Heritage proposals. So, too, did the idea of a universal health-care system based on a mandate that individuals buy insurance. Though Heritage subsequently abandoned it, the individual mandate famously became the basis of health-care reforms proposed by Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama."[24] Inventing, then Opposing, the Individual Healthcare Mandate The idea of an individual mandate to buy health insurance originated at the Heritage Foundation[25], and was outlined in a 1989 paper by Heritage scholar Stuart Butler.[26] In debates about health care reform in the 1990s, prominent Republicans, including House Minority Leader Newt Gingrich, expressed support for plans based on an individual mandate.[25] However, since the passage of the 2010 Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), according to The New York Times, Heritage "has taken pains to distance itself from its past support of an individual mandate: it wrote a court amicus brief noting its change of heart, and Mr. Butler wrote an op-ed article in USA Today this month headlined “Don’t blame Heritage for ‘ObamaCare’ mandate.”"[27] In 2013, Heritage Action for America sent Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on a "Defund Obamacare Town Hall Tour."[28] Fighting Immigration Reform As a response to the earned citizenship provisions of the comprehensive immigration reform bill under debate in the U.S. Senate as of May 2013, Robert Rector, a Heritage research fellow, and Jason Richwine, policy analyst, released a special report on immigration entitled "The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer". The co-authors estimated that the cost of offering a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants (part of a plan by a bipartisan group of senators to overhaul the immigration system), would create a “lifetime fiscal deficit” for the government of $6.3 trillion. This cost estimate was based on several big assumptions (that the majority of immigrants formerly in the country illegally will eventually use government programs for low-income Americans, for example) and was rejected by many conservatives.[29] The report was highly criticized by both the left and the right, with prominent conservatives speaking out against it.[29] Haley Barbour, a Republican leader and former governor of Mississippi, called the report a "political document" and stated, "This gigantic cost figure that the Heritage Foundation puts out is actually the cost over 50 years. If you put the 50-year cost of anything in front of the public, it is going to be a huge number."[29] Even anti-tax activist Grover Norquist denounced the study, claiming the cost estimate was "wildly overblown."[29] Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform spoke out against the report, aruging that the underlying analysis only focused on costs while ignoring all the benefits of the immigration bill.[30] The study was further discredited when the Washington Post brought to light that co-author, Jason Richwine, had argued in his Harvard doctoral thesis, "IQ and Immigration Policy," that Hispanic immigrants have lower IQ's than white Americans and that the U.S. would ameliorate problems by only selecting high-IQ immigrants.[31] Amid the controversy, Richwine, resigned from the Heritage Foundation.[32] Despite criticism, Heritage President Jim DeMint stood by the controversial study saying, "There’s no doubt that these numbers are real.”[33] Funding The Heritage Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. In its annual report, it states that "we rely on the financial contributions of the general public: individuals, foundations and corporations. We accept no government funds and perform no contract work."[43] The Heritage Foundation has received funding from organizations with connections to the Koch brothers. In 2012, the Heritage Foundation received $650,000 from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, which was one of the Koch Family Foundations before it closed in 2013. The Lambe Foundation contributed at least $4.8 million to the Heritage Foundation between 1998 and 2012. According to an investigation in The Guardian, the Heritage Foundation has accepted donations from Marlboro cigarette manufacture's parent company Altria "in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2016." The Heritage Foundation "has historical and current ties to the tobacco industry, and has fought tobacco tax increases and regulations on vaping." It has taken positions favorable to the tobacco industry as recently as 2018. In 2004, Altria and Heritage Foundation worked together "to encourage journalists to question the science of secondhand smoke."[44] In recent years, the Heritage Foundation has also received funding from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, including $53,300 in 2010 and $69,850 in 2012. The Koch brothers have donated millions of dollars to Donors Trust through the Knowledge and Progress Fund. Between 2001 and 2010, the Foundation received $3.38 million from the conservative Bradley Foundation.[45] With a "long history of receiving large donations from overseas," Heritage continued to rake in a minimum of several hundred thousand dollars from Taiwan and South Korea each year through the 1990s, according to Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.[46] In the autumn of 1988, the South Korean National Assembly uncovered a document revealing that Korean intelligence secretly gave $2.2 million to the Heritage Foundation during the early 1980s. In turn, Heritage established an Asian Studies Center.[47][48][49] There was also a connection between Heritage and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon (founder of the "Moonies" as well as of the Washington Times). This first appeared in a 1975 congressional investigation on the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) activities in the US. The report noted, "In 1975, Ed Feulner ... was introduced to KCIA station chief Kim Yung Hwan by Neil Salonen and Dan Feffernan of the Freedom Leadership foundation". Salonen was head of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church in the United States. The Freedom Leadership Foundation (FLF), a political arm of Moon's Unification network, was linked to the World Anti-Communist League.[47][48] In Heritage officials "categorically deny" the accusation that the organization received money from Korean intelligence. In 1995, Heritage's annual report did include a $400,000 grant from the Samsung, a Korean company. The Wall Street Journal also reported that between 1993 and 1996, heritage received almost $1 million from the Korea Foundation, which reportedly "serves as a direct conduit of money from the South Korean government."[46]     How One Conservative Think Tank Is Stocking Trump’s Government By placing its people throughout the administration, the Heritage Foundation has succeeded in furthering its right-wing agenda. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/magazine/trump-government-heritage-foundation-think-tank.html On the day after Thanksgiving in 2016, Ed Corrigan, then the vice president for policy promotion at the Heritage Foundation, was summoned to Trump Tower in New York to join the senior leadership team of the Trump transition. From inside the building where the climactic personnel decisions of “The Apprentice” were once taped, Corrigan oversaw the staffing of 10 different domestic agencies. Donald Trump, the former reality-TV star, was now the president-elect of the United States, and he had an administration to fill. The job of staffing the government is the first, and in many ways defining, challenge faced by every president. As the size of the government has grown to accommodate the nation’s economy, frequent military interventions and increasingly complex geopolitical obligations, so have the scale and gravity of the task. In 1933, there were just over 200 presidential appointees in the executive and legislative branches. At the end of the Barack Obama’s second term, there were 4,100. Filling enough of these jobs in time to get the government off the ground on Jan. 20 is difficult in the best of circumstances, which is to say when the president-elect has some sort of pre-existing political infrastructure to draw upon. Even Ronald Reagan, who, like Trump, campaigned as a Washington outsider, relied on both his inner circle from the California Statehouse and a kitchen cabinet of mostly self-made millionaires who helped finance his political rise. Trump would be coming to the White House with little more than the remnants of a campaign staff that included his daughter and son-in-law, a contestant from his reality-TV show and his longtime bodyguard. What is more, in the days after his election, Donald Trump replaced the head of his preliminary transition operation, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, with Vice President-elect Mike Pence and purged Christie’s allies from the team, throwing away months’ worth of their work recruiting and vetting personnel; a senior Trump aide, Stephen K. Bannon, made a show of gleefully dumping binders filled with résumés into the trash. The Trump team may not have been prepared to staff the government, but the Heritage Foundation was. In the summer of 2014, a year before Trump even declared his candidacy, the right-wing think tank had started assembling a 3,000-name searchable database of trusted movement conservatives from around the country who were eager to serve in a post-Obama government. The initiative was called the Project to Restore America, a dog-whistle appeal to the so-called silent majority that foreshadowed Trump’s own campaign slogan. In some ways, Trump and Heritage were an unlikely match. Trump had no personal connection to the think tank and had fared poorly on a “Presidential Platform Review” from its sister lobbying shop, Heritage Action for America, which essentially concluded that he wasn’t even a conservative. (“Despite his rhetoric, Trump’s history suggests a reluctance to engage in debates over protecting civil society from the imposition of left-wing values,” it read in part.) After Trump mocked John McCain’s P.O.W. experience in Vietnam, Heritage Action’s chief executive, Michael Needham, called the candidate “a clown” on Fox News and said “he needs to be out of the race.” Trump claimed to want to shake up the Washington establishment. The Heritage Foundation is a Washington institution. Its large, stately headquarters sits just a few blocks from Capitol Hill. And yet Heritage and Trump were uniquely positioned to help each other. Much like Trump’s, Heritage’s constituency is equal parts donor class and populist base. Its $80 million annual budget depends on six-figure donations from rich Republicans like Rebekah Mercer, whose family foundation has reportedly given Heritage $500,000 a year since 2013. But it also relies on a network of 500,000 small donors, Heritage “members” whom it bombards with millions of pieces of direct mail every year. The Heritage Foundation is a marketing company, a branding agency — it sells its own Heritage neckties, embroidered with miniature versions of its Liberty Bell logo — and a policy shop rolled into one. But above all, Heritage is a networking group. It has spent decades fashioning itself into the hub of a constellation of conservative individuals and organizations united by their opposition to government regulations — from taxes to gun control to environmental protections — and socially progressive causes like same-sex marriage. Today it is clear that for all the chaos and churn of the current administration, Heritage has achieved a huge strategic victory. Those who worked on the project estimate that hundreds of the people the think tank put forward landed jobs, in just about every government agency. Heritage’s recommendations included some of the most prominent members of Trump’s cabinet: Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos (whose in-laws endowed Heritage’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society), Mick Mulvaney, Rick Perry, Jeff Sessions and many more. Dozens of Heritage employees and alumni also joined the Trump administration — at last count 66 of them, according to Heritage, with two more still awaiting Senate confirmation. It is a kind of critical mass that Heritage had been working toward for nearly a half-century. “Feulner’s first law is people are policy,” Ed Feulner, Heritage’s founder and former president, told me recently. Feulner was the head of domestic policy for the Trump transition, charting the direction of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and several other agencies. We met late on a Friday afternoon, in a sitting room at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, a private social club founded by a group of Treasury Department officials during the Civil War. At his feet as we spoke sat a small box of table cards for a dinner he was hosting at the club that evening for the newly appointed director of Trump’s National Economic Council, the television personality Larry Kudlow — another name on Heritage’s Project to Restore America list. Now 76, ruddy, white-haired and content, almost jovial, Feulner founded Heritage decades ago as an ambitious young legislative aide with a radical dream built on a simple concept. As he put it, sinking deeper into his club chair: 'First, you have to have the right people.' Heritage was born in the spring of 1971 in the basement cafeteria of the United States Capitol. Feulner had just turned 30 and was working for Representative Philip Crane, an Illinois Republican who had written a book, “The Democrat’s Dilemma: How the Liberal Left Captured the Democratic Party,” arguing that left-wing radicals inspired by the Fabian Society, a socialist group in Britain, were secretly trying to turn America into a socialist state via the Democratic Party. As an undergraduate at Regis College, Feulner had been drawn to an emerging conservative movement that saw as its enemy not only Democrats but also moderate Republicans who threatened to do to their party what they believed the Fabians had done to the Democrats. In 1964, as a graduate student at the Wharton School, he organized a campus group to support the insurgent presidential candidacy of his political hero, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Over breakfast at the Capitol, Feulner and another Hill aide, 28-year-old Paul M. Weyrich — later credited with coining the phrase “moral majority” — commiserated over a recent study from the American Enterprise Institute, an established conservative think tank, about a proposed supersonic transport plane. The report could have helped buttress their argument that the government should continue to fund the plane as part of its effort to win the Cold War, but A.E.I. had withheld it until after the Senate voted on the issue so as not to bias the debate. This was, to their thinking, the wrong approach. What if they could create a new sort of think tank, one that would actively seek to cultivate and influence politicians, and in the process advance the cause of movement conservatism? Soon after, they made their pitch to Joseph Coors, the highly motivated Colorado beer baron who would later, at the suggestion of the Reagan White House aide and future National Rifle Association president Oliver North, wire $65,000 to a Swiss bank account to buy a cargo plane for Nicaraguan rebels. Coors had come to Washington in search of a conservative institution in which to invest. The meeting was held in the office of the irreverent ex-newspaperman and Nixon aide Lyn Nofziger. Weyrich had heard that Coors was also considering investing in A.E.I., which gave Nofziger the idea for “a little artifice,” as the official history of the Heritage Foundation describes it. Before Coors arrived, Nofziger sprinkled some cigar ashes on a thick American Enterprise Institute study resting on his bookshelf. When Coors asked about A.E.I., he took the book off-the-shelf and blew off the ashes. “A.E.I.?” he asked. “That’s what they’re good for — collecting dust.” Coors invested $260,000 in the new venture, and within a few years, Heritage had taken its place at the center of the growing conservative counterestablishment. Its initial fund-raising success foreshadowed the rise of the Republican donor class as a political force: Another early and generous giver was the banking and oil heir Richard Mellon Scaife, who went on to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in conservative media outlets and nonprofit organizations that, among other projects, targeted the Clintons during the 1990s. (Heritage trustees used to joke that Coors gave six-packs; Scaife gave cases.) Feulner packaged his fledgling think tank’s ideology into five basic principles: free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional values and a strong national defense. They would guide Heritage’s agenda, which would be set by Feulner and his senior leadership team. Feulner also anticipated the danger of his new think tank’s being dismissed as a tool of rich Republicans. To build a Heritage member base that would assert the foundation’s anti-establishment identity, he turned to Richard Viguerie, the conservative marketing pioneer known for his high-quality mailing list and his uniquely apocalyptic warnings of imminent national collapse. Think tanks are sometimes referred to as universities without students, suggesting intellectual diversity within a general philosophical orientation. Heritage, by contrast, was strictly results-oriented. Feulner once likened his strategy to Procter & Gamble’s approach to Crest toothpaste: “They sell it and resell it every day by keeping the product fresh in the consumer’s mind.” One way to promote Heritage’s brand was to inundate Congress with an unending barrage of bite-size “backgrounders”; another was by networking. Heritage hosted weekend retreats for lawmakers, study groups for young congressional staffers and semester-long internships for college students, complete with Heritage housing. In its early years, Heritage took up numerous political battles: It published papers advocating making Social Security voluntary, argued against giving striking workers access to food stamps and warned parents about the danger posed by the advancement of “secular humanism” in public schools. To Feulner, they were all worthy fights, but they were just a prelude to what Heritage’s official history calls “the Big Gamble” — its decision to invest in the presidential candidacy of the 68-year-old Ronald Reagan. Feulner saw something in Reagan long before he became president. “We had met with him when he was governor in California; we had visited his ranch and seen copies of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek with marginal notes in the book,” Feulner told me. “So we knew that he was one of us.” In the run-up to the 1980 election, Heritage spent $250,000 to assemble a comprehensive guidebook for conservative rule that it called “Mandate for Leadership” and aggressively marketed it to members of Reagan’s transition team, in particular Edwin Meese, who was Reagan’s chief of staff in California and later became his attorney general in Washington. The big gamble paid off: Meese told me that Reagan asked that the 1,093-page document be distributed at his first cabinet meeting. Reagan also turned to Heritage and Feulner to help staff and organize his administration. An enduring, mutually beneficial friendship was born. Meese wrote a letter on White House stationery stating that members of Heritage’s President’s Club — at the time, donors of $1,000 or more — would “provide a vital communications link between policymakers and those key people who made possible Reagan’s victory,” as Sidney Blumenthal reported in his 1986 book “The Rise of the Counter-Establishment.” The relationship worked both ways. When Reagan’s second term ended, Meese joined Heritage as its first Ronald Reagan Fellow in Public Policy, with an annual salary of more than $400,000. Now 86, he remains at the think tank as distinguished fellow emeritus of the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. Reagan’s image is everywhere at Heritage, the informal poses and settings — on a horse, on a putting green, relaxing at his ranch — suggesting less a political actor than a beloved family member. But Heritage had its complaints about Reagan at the time. On the first anniversary of his presidency, the think tank issued a report characterizing his tenure as a disappointment to conservatives. Heritage laid much of the blame on personnel who were insufficiently committed to the president’s agenda. “They were looking for competent people,” Nofziger, who had gone on to become a key political strategist for Reagan, later recalled. “I tried to explain to them that the first thing you do is get loyal people, and competence is a bonus.” Over the following decades, Feulner continued to pursue his dream of turning the counterestablishment into the establishment. The prospects had perhaps never looked bleaker than they did in 2012, when Obama was easily elected to his second term. Having just turned 70, Feulner decided that it was time to retire. At that moment in conservative history, it was not difficult for him to see where the future of the think tank lay: the Tea Party. Heritage had helped organize and underwrite the anti-tax, anti-government — and, most of all, anti-Obama — movement, even creating a lobbying organization, Heritage Action, to help harness the energy it unleashed. snip (a LONG article, much more at the link)

[Supermonkey92 1,428]

I should just point out that Ed Feser is an independent philosopher that doesnt work for or have any ties to the heritage foundation. He was invited to present a paper on the political philosophy of socialism. As such any problems to do with the heritage foundation or any other background parties have precisely nothing to say about whether his presentation has any good points or not.



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