@enhydra lutris I don't understand why the people from this non-profit should be ashamed. They have little to do with what Congress does.

anything, and haven't read or watched anything particularly cool of late, so I'll post an e-mail I got from Win Without War yestidday:

Did you hear the exciting news from Spain?

Spain just cancelled a $10.6 million arms sale to Saudi Arabia! And since Spain is the fourth largest arms supplier to the horrific Saudi-led coalition war in Yemen, throwing this wrench into an already paid-for years-old arms sale is a big deal [1].

Antiwar activists everywhere are celebrating this invigorating news. So let’s ride this global momentum by blocking a U.S. bomb sale too!

Luckily, Win Without War activists are already pushing the Senate to block U.S. bombs to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. More than 12,000 activists have already written their Senators and we need you to join them. If we can turn up the heat and demand our Senators oppose Trump’s proposed arms sales to Saudi Arabia and U.A.E, we have a real chance at disarming the war in Yemen too.

Take 30 seconds to demand your senators block Trump’s planned arms sale to Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. >>

Thank you,

Amy Frame

___________________________________________________

The Senate kept funding brutal war in Yemen. Don’t let them sell more bombs, too. Sign now >>

I'm ashamed.

Last week, Senate leadership blocked a vote on Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy’s amendment to stop supporting the Saudi-led coalition’s war crimes in Yemen.

There’s no excuse for this political maneuvering. This month alone, the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen — aided by the United States — bombed and killed over 60 Yemeni children in two separate airstrikes. It’s absolutely heartbreaking.

But when I need hope, I turn to activists like you. Win Without War members made hundreds of calls in just 48 hours in support of Sen. Murphy’s amendment. Now, we’ve got to keep that grassroots power going full throttle — because we have another chance to seriously upend United States support for this brutal war.

Trump wants to sell billions more in weapons to Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. — the same bombs that these countries are using to murder Yemeni civilians.

We can’t let that happen. We need to jump on the momentum from Sen. Murphy’s amendment to let our senators know they aren’t off the hook to end U.S. support of the war in Yemen.

Look — we shouldn’t even need to pressure our senators on this arms sale. Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E are deliberately bombing weddings, hospitals, and schools in Yemen. It’s a no-brainer: Cancel the sale.

But let’s follow the money for a minute. U.S. defense mega-corporation Lockheed Martin manufactured the bomb that hit a school bus and murdered 40 kids in Yemen. Lockheed Martin was also the top campaign contributor to Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, who helped block Sen. Murphy’s amendment to cut off support for the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen.

Appalled yet? That’s not even remarkable. Massive campaign contributions from the war lobby are normal. And it’s no coincidence that arms sales to proven human rights violators like the Saudi and U.A.E. governments keep sailing right through Congress.

Not this time. Not if we have anything to say about it.

Sens. Feinstein and Harris represent you — not deep-pocketed defense lobbyists. And they need to hear it.

Can you take 30 seconds to demand your senators stop enabling the brutal bombing of Yemeni civilians and block Trump’s planned arms sale to Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E?

Act Now

Thank you for working for peace,

Amy, Erica, Cassandra, and the Win Without War team

---

[1] The Washington Post, "Spain cancels bombs sale to Saudi Arabia amid Yemen concerns"

Win Without War is a project of the Center for International Policy.
1 Thomas Circle NW, Suite 700, Washington, DC 20005
(202) 232-3317 | info@winwithoutwar.org

@ggersh If "each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves," then what is liberty?

Asking b/c every libertarian I ever knew was very pro-liberty (by their own definition of course).

this outta not help any at all, but it delves
into how the Kochs are taking over amerika in
their own way

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.

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/meet-the-economist-behin...

Meet the Economist Behind the One Percent’s Stealth Takeover of America
By Lynn Parramore

MAY 30, 2018 | HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT | INSTITUTIONS, POLICY & POLITICS

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.

@CroneWit @CroneWit CW! So great to "see" you again!

I can watch Murdoch on Roku's Acorn channel -- Brit, Aussie, some Canadian shows, 4.$99/mo, new shows each Monday.