True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 94: Koch'd Up (Part I)
Aired: 2020-08-28
Duration: 01:12:31


=== Mr. Mercantile's Podcast Revelations (09:19) ===

[00:00:00]  Welcome to Kato Radio.
[00:00:03]  I am your host, Mr. Mercantile.
[00:00:08]  I am joined here by my lady slave, Lady L, she's called.
[00:00:14]  Hello, so nice to see you again.
[00:00:17]  They call her the woman in green because she's such a dedicated fan of those green, greenbacks.
[00:00:23]  And they call me the man with the golden fun because it's such fun to hear me talk about the return to the gold standard.
[00:00:32]  Does Kato have a podcasting arm?
[00:00:35]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it does.
[00:00:37]  Really?
[00:00:38]  It's actually, yeah, it's huge.
[00:00:39]  Yeah.
[00:00:40]  Come town's on it.
[00:00:42]  No.
[00:00:43]  Come Town is a Kato.
[00:00:44]  No, a lot of people don't know this.
[00:00:45]  Come Town's a Cato podcast.
[00:00:47]  I mean, that makes sense.
[00:00:48]  They don't take advertising dollars.
[00:00:50]  They do take advertising.
[00:00:51]  Oh, wait, that's right.
[00:00:52]  They do take advantage.
[00:00:53]  Yes, they do.
[00:00:54]  I believe even on their Patreon episodes, which is how I knew it was a Cato podcast.
[00:00:59]  Yeah, I'm absolutely, everything is a podcast now.
[00:01:04]  I mean, yeah.
[00:01:05]  I guess they have all those.
[00:01:08]  I mean, every libertarian media outlet has its own podcast.
[00:01:13]  Is there a federalist podcast?
[00:01:16]  100% has to be.
[00:01:17]  I think Molly Hemingway might do it.
[00:01:20]  You should listen to that.
[00:01:22]  Liz, there are, I don't know if you remember, but for our maps episode, I listened to a literal pedophile podcast.
[00:01:29]  So, like, there's no, everything, it's so easy for other people, apparently, to be able to do it.
[00:01:35]  You know what we call that?
[00:01:36]  What?
[00:01:37]  That's the free market, baby.
[00:01:39]  Yeah, it's a well, yeah.
[00:01:40]  Of course, when I said a pedophile podcast, I was, of course, referring to the Reason Magazine podcast.
[00:01:45]  No, but I'm just saying podcasting free market.
[00:01:47]  You can get whatever you need out there.
[00:01:49]  The market will decide.
[00:01:52]  It is true.
[00:01:52]  Like, whenever I try, because I don't download any of these, like, Stitcher, whatever apps.
[00:01:57]  I don't know how to work.
[00:01:58]  Hey, not an app girl.
[00:02:00]  That phrase I learned recently.
[00:02:01]  Full entree.
[00:02:03]  Yeah.
[00:02:03]  That user interface thing, not a big fan of it.
[00:02:06]  Where do I press search?
[00:02:08]  That's all I care about.
[00:02:10]  How do I subscribe?
[00:02:11]  I'm going to get you one of those phones that's just like, you know, it's like for children or for old people, and it's like home or Liz, like the only two buttons you can call.
[00:02:20]  And the other one is like, podcast.
[00:02:24]  I saw a phone advertised in a magazine once that was just a Wikipedia phone.
[00:02:30]  Like all it did.
[00:02:31]  It was like a tablet that all it could do was go to Wikipedia.
[00:02:34]  That's bad.
[00:02:35]  It was like 200 bucks.
[00:02:40]  Classic, classic scam.
[00:02:43]  By the way, this podcast is sponsored by Wikipone, the Wikipedia telephone.
[00:02:50]  If your dad is really interested in World War II, your mother is really interested in World War I, or your cousin's interested in exploring a sexuality.
[00:02:58]  Wikipedia podcast has everything from the Ardennes Forest to whatever happened in World War I to whatever kind of sexualities people are getting into these days.
[00:03:09]  You can figure out pretty much anything on there.
[00:03:11]  That's why the Vanguard project of mass editing Wikipedia is so important.
[00:03:18]  You just got to get in there.
[00:03:19]  I will say one time a guy did edit my Wikipedia to put a fatter picture of me on when I was 16, which I thought was very rude.
[00:03:27]  Wait, didn't they also put a nickname that you said wasn't yours?
[00:03:31]  Yeah, hold on.
[00:03:31]  This is actually, this was pissing me off.
[00:03:33]  It was someone.
[00:03:34]  I think we mentioned it on the podcast.
[00:03:36]  We've talked nicknames before.
[00:03:38]  Mr. Fireworks.
[00:03:41]  That's not.
[00:03:43]  Who calls you that?
[00:03:44]  He's got a citation.
[00:03:45]  Wait.
[00:03:47]  It's a Retro Not episode.
[00:03:50]  Did I call you that?
[00:03:52]  Did I call me that?
[00:03:54]  I was all ready to get mad about this, but I guess it literally is citing me.
[00:03:57]  They do call me Mr. Fireworks.
[00:03:59]  That's why I was so confused that they knew.
[00:04:02]  This is incredible.
[00:04:05]  Well, this is the thing.
[00:04:06]  Any future employer I have, like DOD, any of those guys, are going to be like, do people really call you Mr. Bean?
[00:04:12]  When no, like I've said on this podcast before, only one guy has ever called me Mr. Bean.
[00:04:16]  It was really just.
[00:04:17]  But now that we've said it on the podcast, they're going to keep citing it on Wikipedia as evidence that you've been called Mr. Bean.
[00:04:23]  They could do the double citation.
[00:04:25]  Yeah, they could do what's the brackets one and then also brackets like seven or something.
[00:04:30]  This podcast is sponsored by the podcast Citations Needed.
[00:04:58]  Why don't you start us off?
[00:05:00]  Okay.
[00:05:00]  Okay, well, I was just trying before you interrupted me.
[00:05:02]  Hey, Liz.
[00:05:04]  Hey, cool.
[00:05:05]  Don't cut that, by the way.
[00:05:06]  Don't cut that.
[00:05:07]  You see the kind of shit I get on the show.
[00:05:10]  Brace is so mean to me.
[00:05:12]  Whoa, whoa.
[00:05:15]  I want to set the stage for our listeners right here.
[00:05:17]  Liz right now is in a beautiful, I assume, well-lit room.
[00:05:22]  Sunlight, well, really, actually, really terrible, smoky air behind her.
[00:05:27]  Lights on everywhere.
[00:05:29]  And do you know where Brace is sitting?
[00:05:32]  Brace is in a pitch black room.
[00:05:34]  Right.
[00:05:34]  That is correct.
[00:05:35]  That is correct.
[00:05:36]  A hovel.
[00:05:38]  Whoa, whoa.
[00:05:39]  Hey.
[00:05:40]  The room.
[00:05:40]  It's the same room.
[00:05:41]  It's just there's no lights on.
[00:05:45]  So listeners may have noticed a high-pitched whine whenever I tried to speak in the past two episodes.
[00:05:52]  That was not just his regular voice.
[00:05:54]  Oh, fuck you.
[00:05:55]  Fuck you.
[00:05:56]  Listeners, I will give you another peek behind the curtain.
[00:05:59]  I will give you another peek behind the curtain.
[00:06:01]  I was going to say, I was going to say right there, and no, that wasn't Liz.
[00:06:05]  It was a different high-pitched whine.
[00:06:07]  I was going to say, someone got there first.
[00:06:11]  Wow.
[00:06:11]  This is.
[00:06:12]  Yeah, the tables have turned on old Mr. Fireworks.
[00:06:16]  Perhaps there's a new lady fireworks in the house.
[00:06:20]  So you may have.
[00:06:22]  Put the gun down.
[00:06:24]  Okay.
[00:06:25]  So you may have noticed that whining noise and been like, damn, that sounds a lot like Liz.
[00:06:31]  Let's see if that one works.
[00:06:33]  That doesn't work.
[00:06:34]  But we'll let the listeners judge.
[00:06:37]  But it was actually, we couldn't figure it out.
[00:06:40]  And our producer was like, oh, maybe it's your computer.
[00:06:43]  And yes, I do pirate a lot of DVDs off my computer, but not generally while we're recording.
[00:06:51]  And we try a lot of stuff.
[00:06:53]  You've got to shut down LimeWire.
[00:06:55]  It is 7.40 right now.
[00:06:58]  We were trying to record at 7 p.m.
[00:07:00]  It took us a long time to figure out what it was until Young Chomsky told me, hey, turn the lights off.
[00:07:08]  I turned the lights off and guess what happened?
[00:07:11]  No, no high pitch.
[00:07:12]  Whining stops.
[00:07:13]  And I'll tell you what, in my personal life, usually when I turn the lights off, the whining starts.
[00:07:19]  And sorry, I really preempted myself on that.
[00:07:25]  I don't really know what to say next.
[00:07:26]  Anyways, so I've had my lights on every single time we've recorded an episode in this room since this podcast began.
[00:07:33]  I mean, this is not a sustainable solution.
[00:07:35]  This is, no, this is miserable because, frankly, I like to read books in the background.
[00:07:42]  I do sort of Tai Lopez speed reading thing when we record usually.
[00:07:46]  And so in the past three weeks, essentially since the DHS list thing, my lights have been making a whining noise.
[00:07:57]  Now, am I being gang stocked?
[00:07:59]  Regular stocked?
[00:08:01]  Or triple stocked?
[00:08:02]  Which is a special kind of stocking you get to when you, well, it's a Mr. Fireworks kind of thing.
[00:08:07]  I don't know, but I'll tell you this.
[00:08:09]  I'm making a gigantic sacrifice because I usually sort of mess with my fingers or play with a gun when we do this.
[00:08:18]  And now I have to look at the notes and Liz's voice so I don't interrupt.
[00:08:25]  All right, all right, all right.
[00:08:26]  Well, anyway, hello, welcome.
[00:08:28]  This is Truanon, your week's True Anon.
[00:08:31]  Uh-huh.
[00:08:31]  I'm going to start recording now, or excuse me, timing it now too.
[00:08:34]  So that 40-minute intro I just did doesn't count.
[00:08:37]  I'm Liz.
[00:08:39]  My name is Brace.
[00:08:40]  We are joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:08:42]  And this, just like Liz said, but I'm saying better, is true Anon.
[00:08:47]  Man, it's going to be one of those episodes, isn't it?
[00:08:49]  That's right.
[00:08:50]  Listen, you made me, I will say this.
[00:08:52]  I will say this.
[00:08:53]  Liz, how many pages of notes do we have for this episode?
[00:08:58]  Like 40 pages.
[00:09:01]  You know, I'm supposed to be, I'm supposed to be relaxing at home, thinking about whatever we talk about in the show.
[00:09:10]  I can't remember.
[00:09:11]  But instead, instead, I have to read about the Koch brothers.

=== Post Office Problems (15:09) ===

[00:09:19]  Yeah, well, sorry about that.
[00:09:23]  It's all right, baby.
[00:09:24]  Let's just get into it.
[00:09:26]  Yeah, so before we get into those guys, basically, we actually have 40 pages of notes only on the post office.
[00:09:35]  Yes.
[00:09:36]  Because everyone's favorite institution, the post office, is in the news.
[00:09:42]  So Liz made me, who am I supposed to be an independent artisan, a small craftsman, do help her rather, do 40 pages of fucking notes on the post office.
[00:09:55]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:55]  Our buddies at the post office are back in the news.
[00:09:58]  Now, that's kind of odd considering it's a pretty uncontrover.
[00:10:03]  It should be a pretty uncontroversial institution of ours.
[00:10:08]  But a lot of people are making, you know, there's all these protests over various cuts that supposedly that the Trump administration is attempting.
[00:10:21]  Various people filing lawsuits, various states filing lawsuits, trying to stop some of the reforms that are happening with the post office.
[00:10:30]  But sort of like how we always kind of focus on this podcast, the recent developments with the post office in the news, including like seeing every single person on Instagram posting about like save the post office, which is interesting, don't actually begin or end with the Trump administration, right?
[00:10:52]  Like this is a crisis that has been long brewing and actually been going on for a long time.
[00:10:59]  Well, ever since Benjamin Franklin, who being from like whatever, the 1700s, I assume was pretty racist, started the post office, which obviously it follows would also probably be pretty racist.
[00:11:11]  It's been racked with problems.
[00:11:13]  They had the pony thing.
[00:11:14]  They had for some reason the sleet, wind, and snow thing.
[00:11:17]  That sounds very, I don't like that.
[00:11:20]  But I was, I found out quite a lot about that fucking post office during this.
[00:11:25]  And unfortunately, took probably too many notes on the post office specifically because that's not all we're talking about.
[00:11:33]  No, no, we have bigger fish to fry, but the post office is a great entry point there.
[00:11:37]  So one of the things about the post office and its like recent troubles is you hear a lot in the news about how the post office is unprofitable, how it needs to be reformed.
[00:11:48]  There's always editorials by various ghoulish looking elder men in papers like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and New York Daily News and the Washington Post about how the USPS is bankrupt, how they need to restructure, we need cost cutting.
[00:12:11]  And basically, that's not entirely true.
[00:12:16]  Yeah, so a little history, recent history on the post office.
[00:12:19]  The post office, I guess, used to be a cabinet position, which I didn't know, till about 1970 when there was a giant postal strike, which was illegal and a wildcat strike.
[00:12:29]  It started in New York.
[00:12:30]  It fucking apparently sucked ass to be a postal worker in New York.
[00:12:34]  I actually am not sure about that because from my understanding, people I've met from New York like to complain a lot.
[00:12:40]  So it could have been just a normal job that they just wanted to talk about.
[00:12:44]  But they went on this giant wildcat strike because their pay didn't get raised or rather it only got raised 4% while Congress raised their own pay by about 50%.
[00:12:52]  Now the late 60s, early 70s were rack with inflation.
[00:12:57]  And so their money was going less and less.
[00:12:59]  Their turnover rate was something like 23%.
[00:13:01]  And they went on a, I believe, the largest wildcat strike in the country's history, certainly the largest in the federal government's history.
[00:13:08]  And what Congress did was they actually made the post office its own sort of public entity, right?
[00:13:16]  And like to be run like a corporation.
[00:13:18]  Now, postal workers are still not allowed to strike, but their union was able to have more bargaining, was able, was given more bargaining power.
[00:13:27]  And it was actually a pretty good job to have until things start getting a little shitty.
[00:13:34]  I mean, it's still not a bad job, but the post office itself has faced some hard times, particularly, I want to focus on this in 2006.
[00:13:43]  Yeah, so 2006, this is, I think a lot of people probably know about this if they've been following the news with the post office because it's been back brought, it's been, you know, really drilled down.
[00:13:56]  Yeah, resurrected by House Democrats in particular.
[00:14:00]  But in 2006, during the Bush administration, Congress passed a bill that basically requires USPS to pre-fund all of its retirement benefits.
[00:14:13]  Not just all of its retirement benefits for that year, but actually for 75 years in advance.
[00:14:19]  Which is psycho.
[00:14:22]  Yeah, this is the only, I believe it's the only company required to do so legally.
[00:14:28]  And its competitors, which we'll get into in a second, the fact that it has competitors even in the first place, its competitors are legally required not to do that.
[00:14:37]  Yeah, I mean, the thing about funding your pension 75 years in advance is that the post office went from making a pretty big profit, I guess you could call it every year.
[00:14:47]  They made money every year.
[00:14:48]  It was more than solvent.
[00:14:50]  Into within two years was like billions of dollars in the red.
[00:14:54]  And it's kind of continued to stay in the red ever since.
[00:14:57]  Even though for the past six years, if they didn't have this insane 2006 law, they would have turned a profit every single year.
[00:15:06]  Yeah, a good way to think of it is basically it amounts to, I think it was Dean Baker who put it, the economist Dean Baker, is that it basically amounts to about an 8% tax that they're legally required to pay that other competitors are legally required not to.
[00:15:23]  And so if you think about that in the context of just like any other, I mean, imagine like any other business being in that position while their competitors weren't in that position.
[00:15:35]  And then people being like, well, wait a second, why aren't they turning a profit?
[00:15:38]  I mean, it's ridiculous.
[00:15:39]  It's totally ridiculous.
[00:15:40]  There's just like another little fine point is that another kind of like weird nail in the coffin with it was that the bill required USPS to invest those retiree bonds or retiree funds exclusively in government bonds, which is, you know, a safe and good idea, but also basically guarantees like zero return on their retirement benefits.
[00:16:06]  So it's basically like, you know, or it's retirement funds, you know, so like literally like no other company would be doing this.
[00:16:14]  Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's pretty incredible.
[00:16:17]  Like it's, I can't stress enough how strange it is, but it's not really like that weird that they did it because the post office has been, I don't know if I'm using this word correctly because to be completely honest with you, Liz, please don't listen to this part.
[00:16:31]  I only know this word from Dungeons and Dragons from when I was 12.
[00:16:34]  What?
[00:16:34]  A bug.
[00:16:35]  So it's a someone put that in the Wikipedia.
[00:16:38]  That's a role-playing game you play like when you don't have a lot of friends.
[00:16:42]  And sometimes you write the adventures by yourself and then also play them by yourself too and just make the roles for every character.
[00:16:49]  That's cute.
[00:16:51]  But anyways, anyways, that's just like a theoretical thing.
[00:16:56]  So for instance, the thing is the post office has been in the crosshairs of some of the sickest fucking individuals in this country's very sick individual filled history, basically since certainly since the 1970s and since libertarianism got arise.
[00:17:12]  And a couple of those guys who have really taken a dislike to the post office are David and Charles Koch.
[00:17:18]  And they have basically declared all-out war against the post office.
[00:17:23]  Now, it's not just the post office they hate.
[00:17:24]  We'll get more into this later.
[00:17:25]  They hate the EPA.
[00:17:26]  They hate, I mean, literally they hate every single part of the government, which I do too, but for good reasons.
[00:17:34]  They essentially vowed to destroy it via privatizing it.
[00:17:39]  Well, a good question to ask is why do they want to privatize the post office?
[00:17:44]  Because I think sometimes people hear this and they think like, oh, of course they want to privatize it because business.
[00:17:50]  And they don't kind of like think through the next steps.
[00:17:53]  And there's like a couple of things to know about the post office that are really important.
[00:17:59]  So yes, there's business opportunities in terms of like, you know, you know, with private firms, UPS, FedEx, there's a massive global logistics market, you know, not outside of those two firms, UPS and FedEx.
[00:18:15]  There are like global logistics companies that stand to make a lot of money taking on some of those contracts.
[00:18:22]  And, you know, it would also open up a lot of opportunity, as we've talked about on this podcast, for private equity consultants, right?
[00:18:30]  You've got Deloitte and McKinsey, you know, basically foaming at the mouth to get in there to restructure an aka sell off and then make, you know, a ton of consultant money and bonuses on that opportunity.
[00:18:46]  But one thing that doesn't go talked about with the post office that's really key is that it is a massive, it owns a massive real estate portfolio by virtue of literally being the post office.
[00:18:58]  Like, think about it.
[00:18:59]  Like the post office has been around for so long.
[00:19:03]  These are not just, you know, key real estate properties in literally every town in America that have been, but also in many cases, like historical properties with that that come with a great price tag.
[00:19:21]  So Liz sent me an article by some real sick fucking weirdo about this very thing.
[00:19:30]  Basically saying that the post office needs to start redeveloping its properties.
[00:19:34]  And the man was clearly, I could tell by the stench of urine and pedophilia about him, a Yimby.
[00:19:42]  And one of his main things was that, well, look, the post office is in all these, you know, beautiful real estate in Manhattan.
[00:19:50]  Wow, it's it's prime time for private public partnerships.
[00:19:54]  We can get some tall high-rise buildings on top of them.
[00:19:58]  We can sell off a couple of them because, I mean, they have truly an astounding amount of property.
[00:20:03]  I mean, they have post offices pretty much everywhere.
[00:20:06]  Yeah, it's a, I think the Huffington Post estimates about 8,600 properties totaling about that it owns, totaling about 320 million square feet of interior space with about 500 acres of vacant land.
[00:20:22]  So it's a really incredible portfolio.
[00:20:25]  That's just talking about what they own, not what they lease.
[00:20:29]  Most of that, which is owned, like we said, is in every town, but it's prime downtown real estate in every single town and city in America.
[00:20:37]  It is like, it's hard to overstate the value of this real estate portfolio.
[00:20:44]  You know, pretty much none of it is in wilderness areas.
[00:20:46]  It is prime for development, like you said, condos or whatever the fuck these real estate vultures want to get into.
[00:20:54]  So, you know, that there's been a couple people that have estimated it, you know, again, these like salivating vultures probably that have interned at reason when they were 12 years old at about $105 billion.
[00:21:09]  So that's what stands to be.
[00:21:12]  I mean, that's what we're really talking about here is the property portfolio.
[00:21:15]  $105 billion.
[00:21:18]  Well, I think in one way, but I do think it's also an ideological project for a lot of people as well.
[00:21:23]  Yes, and we're going to definitely get into that for sure.
[00:21:26]  But I think that it is important to really drive home some of the stuff with the real estate because it really does not get remarked on in the mainstream media.
[00:21:37]  Like, I really don't see a lot of people talking about this, mostly because it would, I mean, you know, it's not as exciting or ritzy as just suggesting that it's only singularly Trump that's after, you know, putting in his own cronies or whatever.
[00:21:55]  But, you know, in actuality, like everyone's hands are all over this, Democrats and Republicans alike, because they're all, and they're all also friends to the fire industries and the real estate developers.
[00:22:08]  Well, I mean, just in California, I mean, the real estate lobby is by far the biggest lobby in the state.
[00:22:14]  Yeah.
[00:22:14]  You know, and it's, and Democrats, like in a lot of, you know, I will say Republicans have certainly been much more forceful with a lot of this stuff.
[00:22:25]  But in pretty much every Democrat run, like big city, which is most big cities, I mean, the real estate lobby is by far one of the most powerful lobbies there is.
[00:22:34]  And the post office is, of course, itself legally barred from lobbying.
[00:22:38]  Yes.
[00:22:38]  Isn't that fun?
[00:22:40]  And one of my favorite quotes by Audrey Lorde is, lobbying is the language of the unheard.
[00:22:47]  Absolutely.
[00:22:48]  I want you guys to meditate on that.
[00:22:49]  Well, we should come back to that because that actually basically is United States law.
[00:23:11]  I mean, so one thing is that the, you know, the post office.
[00:23:14]  So basically after 2006, Congress passes this bill.
[00:23:18]  It should be noted that I think it was passed with a voice vote during a lame duck Congress.
[00:23:22]  The Senate, yeah, the Senate didn't even vote on it, basically.
[00:23:26]  They basically just said, oh, no, no problem.
[00:23:28]  And it went right through from what I understand.
[00:23:32]  So importantly, a certain senator isn't on record voting for that bill.
[00:23:37]  But basically, after 2006, what I'm getting at is the post office, you know, faced with these incredible, you know, these incredible losses due to having to pre-fund 75 years of retirement benefits, were looking at restructuring.
[00:23:56]  And in 2011, they basically contracted out, you know, with a real estate holding company looking at selling off some of their properties, sub-leasing out some of their properties to kind of to generate income, right?
[00:24:15]  So there's one company that they used to work with, CBRE, which is basically, I think it's the biggest commercial real estate company.
[00:24:24]  I think it's actually in the world, if not just the United States.
[00:24:27]  It's a massive, massive firm.

=== Richard Bloom's Postal Scandal (14:53) ===

[00:24:29]  That's right, baby.
[00:24:30]  Yes.
[00:24:31]  I used the intern there.
[00:24:32]  Yeah, CB Richard Ellis is its full name, but we'll just say CBRE.
[00:24:36]  So this contract with CVRE was basically rife with controversy.
[00:24:40]  The inspector general of the post office issued like several critical reports over the years basically recommending to terminate the contract.
[00:24:51]  They awarded it in the first place because, like I said, they were being forced to increase the revenues by selling off a bunch of these properties.
[00:25:00]  And so they're in lease negotiations on like 24,000 properties.
[00:25:05]  Like we said, a lot of them being historic.
[00:25:07]  That's going to be key in a second.
[00:25:09]  Now, one of the biggest areas where they were looking at selling off properties was like Brace said, in California, which is a huge real estate market, right?
[00:25:18]  A total coincidence.
[00:25:20]  A total coincidence, as we'll see, because the CEO of the CBRE at the time was Richard Bloom, who no one knows who that is, but he is actually the husband of California Senator Diane Feinstein, who's fucking lucky, Liz.
[00:25:37]  Yeah, she's in the Senate when that bill in Congress passed, right?
[00:25:43]  But, you know, I'm not suggesting, we're not alleging anything other than a very interesting coincidence.
[00:25:52]  However, others have alleged that some improper conduct happened with not just the CBRE contract and Bloom's involvement, but also possibly with Feinstein.
[00:26:08]  There's a book called Going Postal, which is not the one by Friend of the Pod, Mark Ames, but one by an investigative journalist named Peter Byrne, which basically details how Richard Bloom. again, the husband of California Senator Diane Feinstein, was selling post offices at bargain prices to his friends through this CBRE contract, even to his own business partners while overcharging the USPS on invoices and services.
[00:26:38]  Total class act.
[00:26:39]  I mean, just like basically every government agency, it is essentially like a way for politicians and their friends to make money on the side, it seems like.
[00:26:49]  Yeah, it's just a ransacking.
[00:26:51]  Totally.
[00:26:51]  You know, it's just, you know, it's like what the IMF said about why they needed Macron in France, because France has the still longest standing social safety net in the EU.
[00:27:03]  It hasn't been, they've had a really hard time letting these kind of like neoliberal vultures in to eat at it like they haven't in other countries.
[00:27:10]  And so Macron was in there to help out his friends with some contracts.
[00:27:16]  Well, Liz, the way you're making this sound, baby, is that these are just a bunch of greedy people doing what greedy people always do.
[00:27:23]  But I feel like it might be something more.
[00:27:27]  Yeah, I mean, that's the thing.
[00:27:28]  So, you know, it's not just that this is typical Washington business or typical, like typical asshole businessman ransacking anything.
[00:27:40]  Like, like Brace said or teased at the beginning of this episode, there's actually a much larger ideological project underway here.
[00:27:50]  And that means that we actually now need to talk about the Koch brothers, which we've been resisting on this podcast.
[00:27:56]  One, because it's actually not 2011 when it was quite fashionable.
[00:28:02]  We are, I mean, all joking aside, like I, like, I do take money from them.
[00:28:08]  Yes.
[00:28:09]  And three, because Liz is actually a Koch sister.
[00:28:14]  No, I think the thing with the Koch brothers is that probably everybody, certainly everybody our age.
[00:28:20]  I'm sure many people younger too.
[00:28:22]  I mean, everyone knows who the fuck they are, but like, it's just one of those things where you like, you hear people talk about it and you're like, yeah, I know, they're like some rich bad guys.
[00:28:30]  Like, they're living in the world.
[00:28:30]  Yeah, you kind of like to know shit.
[00:28:33]  Because like, I mean, just speaking for myself, like, for a guy like me, I hate every rich person.
[00:28:39]  And like, I hate every big businessman.
[00:28:42]  And so it's like, okay, yeah, they're scumbags.
[00:28:44]  Well, fuck.
[00:28:45]  I think Barack Obama's a scumbag.
[00:28:47]  I think fucking Richard Bloom's a scumbag.
[00:28:49]  I think they're all scumbags.
[00:28:50]  But what the Cokes are doing is that they're carrying out a project that a guy like Bloom, a guy like Obama, well, maybe a guy like Obama, but a guy like regular sort of businessmen, you know, vultures, whatever, they don't really have the temerity or the will to do.
[00:29:08]  Because from what I'm getting from everything we've been reading is that, and I did know this, but like now this is very much reinforced, is that there has been over the past, I don't know, well,
[00:29:22]  really over the past 70 years, but concertedly over the past 40, 50 years, a really, really in-depth, strong, well-funded plot to essentially overturn the United States of America.
[00:29:38]  Yeah, I don't think there's any way to talk about it other than as a revolutionary project.
[00:29:44]  Absolutely not.
[00:29:45]  And to be clear, like my number one goal is to overturn the government of the United States of America.
[00:29:51]  So this is a bit of professional jealousy you hear in my figures.
[00:29:55]  Because the thing is, these guys are actually doing it.
[00:29:59]  And they're completing what, I don't know, you always hear people talk about the long march to the institutions.
[00:30:04]  Well, they actually, these guys are smarter.
[00:30:06]  They just bought the institutions.
[00:30:09]  And which we'll get into in a sec.
[00:30:11]  But like, it is, it is, it is, I can't say enough.
[00:30:14]  Like, this is, this is a, essentially, like a seditionary, I guess, movement or seditionist movement that has agents in basically every layer of society.
[00:30:30]  Yeah, it is hard to overstate.
[00:30:32]  I keep saying that, but like, you know, I guess we should, just for the sake of the podcast, start with the post office, but we should go, we're going to have to talk about everything here.
[00:30:43]  But the Koch brothers, you know, before we get into their own psychoses and their own ideological hobby horses, I mean, it's true that they have been obsessed with the post office for a long time.
[00:30:59]  So before we start really getting into them, I do want to have one more little post office coke connection here.
[00:31:04]  I mean, there are many, and we will get into them, I guess, slightly more, but in kind of a zoomed out way, is that in the year 1980, which was the greatest year of my life because I wasn't born yet, David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party platform.
[00:31:19]  Obviously, classic populist in the, you know, in the FDR sort of vein.
[00:31:26]  That same year, the Libertarian Party, which at this point he was the largest funder of, or he and his brother were largest funded of, added the abolition of the post office into their party platform.
[00:31:37]  By the way, their party.
[00:31:39]  They're an abolitionist, by the way.
[00:31:40]  We should be completely.
[00:31:41]  It is the most abolitionist party platform I've ever read in my entire life.
[00:31:45]  They want to abolish government agencies I've never even heard of.
[00:31:48]  They want to abolish everything.
[00:31:50]  I mean, there is one part in that platform where they're like, yeah, pollution should be legal.
[00:31:56]  Like, they want to destroy OSHA.
[00:32:00]  They're like, NLRB, what a bunch of bulls.
[00:32:02]  They won't go as far to say, like, totally abolish the NLRB, but they're like, we really need to.
[00:32:06]  Actually, I think they do.
[00:32:08]  They say that we need to abolish the NLR.
[00:32:10]  They do say we need to abolish the police, which I thought was very funny.
[00:32:13]  I am mixing that up with a Cato Institute policy recommendation guide that I also read, which had many things in common with this Libertarian Party platform, as you might imagine.
[00:32:24]  But the Kokes, so a little background on the Cokes.
[00:32:27]  There are four Koch brothers.
[00:32:28]  For our purposes, we're really dealing with just David and Charles Koch.
[00:32:33]  David, who's now passed away, by the way, as of last year.
[00:32:35]  Yes.
[00:32:36]  He did die.
[00:32:36]  He broke his, he was trying to remove his own rib so he could suck his own dick.
[00:32:40]  Unfortunately, like many amateur surgeons out there, myself excluded from this, he did die during that surgery.
[00:32:47]  See, that's the problem with libertarians.
[00:32:48]  He could have used some health insurance.
[00:32:50]  He was almost at the dream, and he couldn't do it.
[00:32:55]  So they're descended from this real piece of shit named Fred Koch.
[00:33:00]  And Fred Koch got his start, much like I did.
[00:33:04]  Well, he actually, he really got his start stealing this idea.
[00:33:09]  This was a little too complicated for me to really get into, but he kind of might have snoinked this idea for some kind of thing process called cracking, which he then sold to the Soviet Union.
[00:33:20]  He went over there in the 1930s and worked as an oil man there, was paid pretty well and came back and a virulent anti-communist.
[00:33:29]  And then with that in mind, partners with this guy named William Rhodes Davis, who is Abwehr agent C80.
[00:33:36]  And now, Abwehr is German intelligence.
[00:33:39]  Rather, I should be specific.
[00:33:41]  The Nazi military intelligence.
[00:33:45]  I believe it actually might have been technically naval intelligence, but it was really one of the main intelligence agencies of the German military.
[00:33:54]  He wasn't a spy, but he was more like an agent of influence.
[00:33:58]  Fred Koch partners with him, goes to Hamburg, and with the personal approval of when Adolf Hitler constructs a refinery, which fueled the German war effort.
[00:34:08]  I mean, this was a major refinery.
[00:34:10]  And all the fellas out there probably know the German, the German army had quite a few problems with oil.
[00:34:16]  I mean, that's why they tried to go down to the Caucasus, even though they kind of fucked that up by going to Stalingrad, blah, blah.
[00:34:22]  To be honest with you, maybe it's a good thing that he did it because they got a little overconfident with the oil, managed to drive those things all the way down to the Caucasus.
[00:34:29]  Bam, ran out of gas.
[00:34:30]  You're fucked.
[00:34:31]  Anyways, so he makes a shit ton more money from that.
[00:34:36]  Starts this large oil company and fucks a woman and has four horrible sons.
[00:34:42]  I don't know.
[00:34:43]  Taylor's old this time.
[00:34:44]  Who gives a shit?
[00:34:45]  Hope she's dead too.
[00:34:46]  Who fucking cares?
[00:34:47]  Someday all these people will be.
[00:34:49]  Great.
[00:34:51]  He also starts a little organization called the John Birch Society.
[00:34:58]  Now, for those of you who don't know, the John Birch Society is one of the weirdest fucking, actually, you know what?
[00:35:05]  Honestly.
[00:35:05]  We're lifetime members.
[00:35:07]  It's among the least weird anti-communist societies in American history.
[00:35:12]  But all that insane right-wing, like really crazy conspiracy stuff, a lot of that had its genesis.
[00:35:18]  in the Birch Society.
[00:35:22]  Fred Koch really instills anti-communist values into his kids.
[00:35:25]  He is sort of, he is a libertarian, but like not so smart as his sons.
[00:35:30]  However, his sons do begin attending these things called the Freedom Schools.
[00:35:35]  Now, the Freedom Schools were basically, you know, fans of sort of communist history will remember, you know, there used to be party schools for the Communist Party.
[00:35:44]  You'd go up to upstate New York or whatever for six months.
[00:35:46]  They would teach you about what work means and stuff.
[00:35:50]  I don't know what they taught there, but you know, the ideological things.
[00:35:53]  Well, these were essentially right-wing versions of that.
[00:35:58]  And they were started by a guy named Robert Lefebvre.
[00:36:02]  Robert Lefebvre was a DJ.
[00:36:05]  Lefebvre.
[00:36:06]  No, it's Lefebvre.
[00:36:07]  It's Lefebvre.
[00:36:08]  Is it?
[00:36:08]  I thought it was Lefebvre too, because I know a guy with the last name Lefebvre, but it's Lefebvre.
[00:36:12]  Terrible.
[00:36:13]  Terrible pronunciation.
[00:36:14]  Actually, I will say the author of the article said he said it's pronounced Lefebvre.
[00:36:19]  So you know my thoughts on name pronunciations.
[00:36:24]  Whatever they say goes.
[00:36:26]  Something I thought was really interesting about this guy and that he sort of has in common with other sort of people we've talked about, specifically on the Spider Network series, the most recent installments we just did, was that he was for a period of life of his life a follower of the I am movement, started by a guy named Guy Ballard and his wife, who went by daddy and mama Ballard.
[00:36:48]  They're otherwise known as the Great White Brotherhood or the spiritual hierarchy on earth.
[00:36:52]  However, magic users out there will be thrilled to know that it refers to white magic, not white skin.
[00:36:58]  Anyways, karmic law prevents these people.
[00:37:03]  Guy Ballard is the first of the Ascended Masters.
[00:37:07]  And Karmic Law prevents him from actually walking the earth in his regular form.
[00:37:11]  He has to take the form of a guy like Guy Ballard.
[00:37:15]  This is from, and I'm sorry, you'll have to forgive me on this.
[00:37:18]  We got to get into this magic a little bit here.
[00:37:21]  This is, by the way, this is the man who taught Charles and David Koch everything they know.
[00:37:27]  This is the guy who got them their start.
[00:37:28]  This is from a book called The Farther Shores of Politics, The American Political Fringe Today by George Thayer.
[00:37:35]  If I am to understand it correctly, the basis for I am, as it is known for short, stemmed from a vision Guy Ballard had on Mount Shasta.
[00:37:41]  There he met St. Germain, who gave Ballard a cup full of liquid from the universal supply, omnipotent life itself.
[00:37:47]  This liquid enabled Ballard's spirit to withdraw from his physical body.
[00:37:50]  Then Saint Germain took Ballard in his new state, wrapped in a sheet of flame, and traveled around the world, in one instance to visit Ballard's past incarnations as a great musician in southern France, an ancient Egyptian priest.
[00:38:01]  The most important trip, however, was to the Royal Teton Mountain, where Saint Germain kept the records of the entire world.
[00:38:07]  A stone was touched, the rocks parted, huge bronze doors swung open, and there inside were large rooms filled with gold and silver.
[00:38:14]  In Rome Room was a large golden disc with seven points on it, through which poured the great cosmic beings, powerful currents of force received only by the great illuminated or the ascended masters of light.
[00:38:26]  In another room were the records of the world written on golden sheets.
[00:38:31]  So this guy's a fucking nutcase.
[00:38:35]  But I do want to say I think something's really strange is two things.
[00:38:40]  First of all, Julian Assange was part of a cult called the Great White Brotherhood in the 70s in Australia, led by an ascended master named Ann Hamilton Byrne, who was an LSD freak and an adherent of the teachings of Helena Bovatsky, who inspired the Tool Society.
[00:38:56]  Second, Miguel Serrano, who I talked about in a couple of the Spider Network series, received his instructions to fight for the Nazi Party on the astral plane from a, quote, an ascended master in the mountains of Chile.
[00:39:10]  Anyways, so these freedom schools rather are, they have everything from Holocaust deniers to guys who just think the Holocaust might not have happened.

=== Masonic University's Ideological Arms (16:01) ===

[00:39:22]  You know, they don't fully deny it.
[00:39:26]  But Charles and David Koch begin to come into contact with libertarian ideals.
[00:39:31]  Charles especially really takes to them and they start scheming.
[00:39:35]  Eventually, Charles leaves the John Birch Society, in fact, over his opposition to the Vietnam War.
[00:39:41]  Fred Koch, however, did support the Birches for the rest of his life.
[00:39:47]  And Charles really became, I think, one of the leading lights of libertarianism in this country.
[00:39:54]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:39:56]  We should probably say, too, that, you know, when we're talking about the Kokes and their ideology, we should also mention, like, you know, what is commonly called the Coctopus, like, really is like a massive, massive organization.
[00:40:13]  So these two, the two brothers, I mean, it's really the two brothers that we're focusing on, but, you know, they're getting most of their profits, right, from its oil, gas, refining, fracking, mass fertilizers, forest products, mass commodity speculation, oil derivatives, like just shitbag, top-tier capitalist scum shit, right?
[00:40:36]  Yeah, it's everything like an evil company does, they do.
[00:40:40]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:40:42]  What happens next is where it gets really complicated because from there, they funnel basically all of their profits into all these different arms through which they carry out their political and what we're going to talk about basically their ideological project.
[00:41:00]  So they've got, you know, there's different sort of foundations at the head of it.
[00:41:05]  You talk about the Charles Koch Foundation, the Koch Family Philanthropy Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, maybe you've heard of Freedom Partners, all these bullshit names, right?
[00:41:14]  And those quote-unquote philanthropic organizations then funnel those profits down through other arms.
[00:41:23]  So you've got the think tank arms, which are the people in charge of writing every single public policy recommendation in Washington, D.C. You've got Cato, perhaps you've heard of them, Heritage Foundation, Institute for Humane Studies, CIE, Manhattan Institute, Mercatus Center, more on them in a second, the NCPA, AIE.
[00:41:45]  These are all Coke industry, right?
[00:41:49]  Yeah.
[00:41:49]  Not only do you have then the think tanks, but you've got on the other, you know, like imagine an octopus, right?
[00:41:55]  Now we've got another tentacle.
[00:41:57]  Now you've got what you could call the AstroTurf organizations, which really start pumping up as we've covered on this podcast with the Tea Party.
[00:42:07]  And actually, you know, Friends of the Pod, Mark Ames, and Yasha Levine did a lot of great work reporting the Koch's influence on Tea Party AstroTurf protests in the mid-aughts during the Obama administration.
[00:42:22]  And they got a lot of shit for it at the time.
[00:42:24]  And then there was a bunch of meaculpas from some journalists.
[00:42:30]  Funny enough, a lot of those journalists who might be also listening to this podcast right now also took Coke money at one point, but that's okay.
[00:42:39]  So you got the AstroTurf orgs, things like the NRA, Americans for Prosperity, the National Right to Life, the fucking Federalist Society.
[00:42:47]  We've talked about them a lot.
[00:42:48]  Freedom Works.
[00:42:50]  Yeah.
[00:42:51]  You know, all these kinds of organizations have these generic names: Generation Opportunity, American Commitment, National Review Institute.
[00:43:00]  Like they just, you know, Europa.
[00:43:02]  Yeah, I mean.
[00:43:05]  So then you got another tentacle, right?
[00:43:06]  Then you've got the lobbyist arms.
[00:43:08]  And these especially are accountants, tax attorneys, and lawyers, all everyone's favorite.
[00:43:15]  And this is where you get an organization called ALEC, which I think we'll get into maybe a little, if we've got time, a little more in depth, as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is a big power player here.
[00:43:27]  Then you've got the congressional collaborators and all the money they funnel into congressional campaigns, not just in Congress, but we should talk about state legislatures, mayors, governors, and even like fucking dog catchers, right?
[00:43:41]  I mean, I mean, famously, like, just to give an example, in this town, I believe it was called Wakeford School District.
[00:43:49]  This is a school district, and I think it was North Carolina.
[00:43:52]  I watched a documentary on it kind of a long time ago.
[00:43:55]  So forgive me if I'm a little hazy.
[00:43:57]  The Cokes got involved in the school board race there because their whole thing was that busing or what you might call integration of schools, especially in this case, was actually an infringement on the rights.
[00:44:11]  I mean, in fact, to the Cokes, public schools to begin with are sort of an ideological abomination.
[00:44:19]  But this documentary, I believe Koch Brothers Exposed did a really wonderful job of showing they actually just cribbed the same exact language from George Wallace around school choice, around busing, around this forced, as they call it, forced integration, and recycled it decades and decades later.
[00:44:39]  And in fact, this has become sort of like a big movement.
[00:44:42]  We see this in the charter school thing too, is this sort of desegregation or rather resegregation of schools.
[00:44:50]  And the Cokes, who, you know, you think these guys love freedom, have been absolutely helping lead the charge on that.
[00:44:55]  They funded these school board candidates to the tunes of like hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[00:45:01]  Yeah, I mean, the, yeah, we should get into this, maybe this is like gonna have this episode's gonna have to go long, but we should get into the school choice thing because that's a really important part of their ideological project.
[00:45:16]  But so, yeah, you've got these congressional and legal and excuse me, political collaborators.
[00:45:21]  You know, you've got, you know, big names, of course, everyone knows Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, et cetera.
[00:45:26]  But like Scott Walker.
[00:45:28]  Yeah, Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, don't forget.
[00:45:33]  And, you know, if you thought them funding the Tea Party under Obama was bad, just wait until you see what happens when Q people start getting Coke money.
[00:45:41]  If that, in case that's not already happening, I would say, I would say that Q people don't need to because I think you can really draw a straight line from a lot of the sort of nuttier Tea Party stuff, of which there was a lot.
[00:45:53]  Straight to the Q, straight to the Q people.
[00:45:55]  I mean, a lot of the sort of more like conspiratorial thinking Tea Partiers, definitely, I mean, same exact demographic, but I mean, probably a lot of the same people that were involved in that movement back then.
[00:46:08]  Absolutely.
[00:46:10]  But you'll see them popping up more and more in actual, like in government positions when they're backed by the Koch brothers.
[00:46:17]  Well, Koch brother, I guess.
[00:46:19]  It's so weird that he's dead.
[00:46:21]  But he's alive in spirit and in funding.
[00:46:25]  And then, you know, another arm, of course, is the law and the amount of money, not just in lobbyists that's poured in, but also in actually, you know, courting justices, talking, nominating justices, federal society, and working on that entire project.
[00:46:42]  And then the final kind of pillar, or there's, I guess, two more pillars, really, two more arms.
[00:46:48]  You've got the media and their shills.
[00:46:50]  You've got massive publications and journalists that they work with and, you know, so many things.
[00:46:57]  And you've got academia.
[00:46:59]  And the money in academia is remarkable.
[00:47:04]  It really cannot be overstated, like how much Coke money has poured into primarily economics departments, but it's rapidly and has rapidly expanded across other social sciences departments.
[00:47:22]  You know, the most obvious glaring case is with George Mason University.
[00:47:27]  Now, George Mason University is, of course, known as a kind of libertarian university, but it should be like, to be clear, George Mason University is a public university.
[00:47:38]  It is public Virginia University.
[00:47:43]  Like it is not a private university, right?
[00:47:45]  But at George Mason alone, over $150 million that we know of was donated between 2005 and 2015.
[00:47:54]  And just in 2018, there's a huge scandal because basically after Antonin Scalia's death, of course, who was again a great friend to the Cokes, a friend of the pod as well, also tried to suck his own dick and died.
[00:48:09]  I kind of actually do think that there was something funny with a mistress.
[00:48:13]  And that's like why he died.
[00:48:14]  Yeah, I have a whole theory about it.
[00:48:15]  It's funny because they're smothered, right?
[00:48:17]  Yeah, there was no autopsy, which I find very interesting.
[00:48:20]  Anyway, that's a different podcast.
[00:48:22]  Yeah, I have theories about that.
[00:48:23]  But anyway, so George Mason University, they got in some hot water by the students and a bunch of student activist groups because in 2018, they accepted a Coke donation of 20 million or 10, excuse me, 10 million plus an anonymous donation of 20 million in order to rename the law school the Antonin Scalia School of Law.
[00:48:46]  I want to just note too that that abbreviation is ASSOL.
[00:48:53]  Oh, that's incredible.
[00:48:55]  Which I feel like someone should have seen that coming.
[00:48:57]  It's literally the law school is named Asshole.
[00:49:02]  Let me ask you this.
[00:49:03]  And I'm not trying to get into any, you know, ethnicity talk here.
[00:49:07]  What kind of name is Antonin?
[00:49:11]  Italian.
[00:49:12]  No?
[00:49:13]  Anthony's Italian, Tony.
[00:49:16]  I don't know if he went by Tony.
[00:49:18]  Anyways, Shakespeare is trying to do Italy.
[00:49:20]  It's a bunch of bullshit.
[00:49:22]  Someone's really got to look into that guy.
[00:49:25]  Anyway, so allegedly, all this money was earmarked, quote, formally for quote scholarships, right?
[00:49:33]  But there were like massive student protests about taking this money, you know, like quite large.
[00:49:40]  And the George Mason University provost, S. David Wu, claimed that the entire 30 million was for scholarships, nothing else, no strings attached.
[00:49:50]  And yet, student activists filed a FOIA suit, which very cutely is called a V FOIA suit in Virginia because it's the state of Virginia.
[00:49:59]  No jokes, Briece.
[00:50:01]  Okay, look, can I just make one real quick?
[00:50:03]  No.
[00:50:04]  The real V FOIA I got to file is I think that like probably 70% of girls don't know where the P comes from.
[00:50:12]  Okay.
[00:50:14]  Because I've asked and a lot just like kind of stumble.
[00:50:16]  I'm like, they're like, oh, you don't know?
[00:50:18]  I'm like, no, you don't either.
[00:50:20]  All right.
[00:50:21]  Anyway, so as a result of this V FOIA suit, they obtained emails detailing that actually there were very rigorous negotiations between the school and the Kokes brothers.
[00:50:32]  Classic.
[00:50:33]  Including a very overwhelming role by the Federalist Society itself, including stipulations of how designated representatives would have input into hiring decisions at the university.
[00:50:46]  So basically saying, we're giving you this money, but we're going to tell you who's being hired at your university.
[00:50:52]  And they agreed to it, right?
[00:50:54]  Well, that's the thing with, I think, a lot of economics departments sort of across the country.
[00:50:59]  What the Kokes do and what other groups like the Koch brothers do, but really the Koch brothers are really good at this, is they start like centers at schools.
[00:51:07]  Like there's the Hoover Institute at Stanford.
[00:51:09]  Right.
[00:51:09]  And, you know, they have all George Mason.
[00:51:12]  Yeah.
[00:51:12]  George Mason.
[00:51:13]  Exactly.
[00:51:15]  And they start running departments.
[00:51:17]  Like, they will actually fund professors because these guys, like, they're not just funding top-level shit.
[00:51:21]  They're funding like mid-level and lower-level shit too.
[00:51:24]  And so what you have is, you know, people talk a lot, again, like about the long march, the institutions.
[00:51:30]  Well, like, they buy the institution and they put all their guys in there.
[00:51:33]  And what they have is a incredibly fringe economic ideology that is becoming more and more mainstream, which we're getting, I'm getting mad at myself.
[00:51:42]  Sorry, go on.
[00:51:44]  Well, no, I mean, it's just, it's, you know, and this isn't going away.
[00:51:48]  Like just, I think it was just yesterday, Naked Capitalism reported on Tufts University accepting another public policy, like you say, public policy center being established at Tufts University by the Koch brothers.
[00:52:05]  And the thing is, is that all these universities are so hard up now because of COVID.
[00:52:11]  And they've got decline, even more declining, you know, profits, however we want to call it.
[00:52:17]  They're even more privatized and held to investors.
[00:52:20]  They're even more tied up in, you know, God knows what in the stock market and all this stuff.
[00:52:27]  And so there's only going to be more and more opportunity for these vultures to come in.
[00:52:31]  And like you said, there's a real ideological project at work here.
[00:52:35]  It's not just, oh, where we can put our money and, oh, we're going to funnel it to the academies.
[00:52:39]  Like, no, There's a reason why what you learn in the academies is what you learn in the academies, right?
[00:52:46]  I mean, economics degrees or studying economics rather is an ideological project.
[00:52:51]  It's not like a scientific project in a lot of instances.
[00:52:54]  At these places, yeah.
[00:52:55]  As a Marxist, I would disagree with that.
[00:52:57]  But that's what I'm saying.
[00:52:59]  Like economics departments are filled with that kind of shit.
[00:53:03]  Well, you know, there was that book, Democracy in Chains, by Nancy and McLean from Duke that came out a couple years ago.
[00:53:09]  Maybe it was longer than a couple of years ago.
[00:53:10]  I can't remember.
[00:53:11]  But that really detailed a lot of the kind of ideological thrust of the academic takeover.
[00:53:18]  And, or not just, excuse me, not just the takeover of what they're teaching, but actually the drive to privatize schools.
[00:53:25]  And, you know, she really details the very close relationship between Buchanan, who wasn't really talked about very much, but who is very much an American titan in the kind of neoliberal.
[00:53:42]  No, James Buchanan.
[00:53:45]  Okay.
[00:53:45]  Neoliberal or libertarian, radical liberal.
[00:53:51]  You know, a lot of these things get fuzzy for me, depending on what we're talking about.
[00:53:56]  Revolution that takes place in America.
[00:53:57]  We talk a lot about UChicago and the, you know, the hardy boys over at UChicago who, you know, as we've talked about, went all throughout South America ravaging it.
[00:54:09]  But, you know, Buchanan at Virginia, at George Mason, was another big center of this.
[00:54:17]  And he, and this is what McLean finds out is when she's going through all this correspondence that her and Charlie, that him and Charles Koch, excuse me, that Buchanan and Charles Koch had a real close working relationship.
[00:54:30]  And Buchanan is, um, I mean, he's a, when we talk about fringe, he's a fringe.
[00:54:39]  He sees the world even more dystopian than Adam Smith.
[00:54:42]  I think at one point he said, each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves, that that is the, the human drive.
[00:54:50]  Is that true?
[00:54:52]  That's what Buchanan thinks.
[00:54:53]  That the world is just makers and takers.
[00:54:56]  God damn.
[00:54:57]  I am definitely a taker then.
[00:54:58]  Wow.
[00:55:00]  Yeah.
[00:55:01]  But so, you know, his big, You know, gift to the political discourse was basically what we call choice theory, public choice theory, which has come to be known as very benign thanks to a lot of the ideological work by the foundations like that the Koch brothers run, right?

=== Drive to Privatize Education (10:28) ===

[00:55:23]  And this whole idea of, oh, choice isn't bad.
[00:55:26]  Everyone wants choice, right?
[00:55:28]  Public choice.
[00:55:29]  You're going to hear it with the post office just as much.
[00:55:31]  Wouldn't you like the choice with the post office and FedEx?
[00:55:35]  Wouldn't you like the choice?
[00:55:36]  Well, this comes out of the drive to privatize education.
[00:55:41]  Yeah, so you hear, you know, you hear this stuff, you know, disseminated through the discourse all the time.
[00:55:48]  But the drive to privatize education is actually a much deeper attack and actually is fueled by a much more, like a much deeper drive that Buchanan and Charles Koch had, which is that it really was attacking a feature of democracy that enables an educated citizenry, right?
[00:56:14]  So there's sort of two prongs here: at the, you know, at the higher level, right?
[00:56:20]  When we're talking about introducing private education into colleges and universities, you know, public education, free education, free college education allows students to focus on, you know, not just on their education, but other things like public involvement, development of ideas, you know, public consciousness, political activity.
[00:56:45]  These are all things that, you know, free college basically enabled students to participate in.
[00:56:54]  Well, one thing I would say too is that when you have to take out a bunch of debt for college or really for anything, that creates like this link between you and it inspires like a sort of like mental bond between you and the people you're indebted to.
[00:57:11]  Absolutely.
[00:57:11]  So you'll find people a lot less willing to take economic, political, social risks if they actually, you know, if they have huge credit card debt or anything like that.
[00:57:21]  People think it's the obvious, but like just from my experience, for instance, you know, with the factory, you know, people have this, they're trained to feel indebted to somebody they owe debt to.
[00:57:34]  And like it creates this like bond between them and the economic system.
[00:57:39]  Absolutely.
[00:57:40]  And then, and, you know, to be clear, Buchanan and Koch are explicit about that being the project.
[00:57:46]  Because at this time, you know, Buchanan moves to George Mason in 1965.
[00:57:52]  You know, at this time, there are massive demonstrations going on all throughout the country on college campuses, right?
[00:57:59]  There are, there's massive social upheaval with the civil rights movement.
[00:58:03]  There was just, you know, one of Buchanan's explicit projects is overturning and challenging Brown versus Board of Education.
[00:58:11]  Why?
[00:58:11]  Because that lays the groundwork to re-segregate schools based on, and that's where the intellectual fundament of school choice theory lies, right?
[00:58:23]  I mean, there's a reason these people are so fucking obsessed with schools because like, yeah, like you're saying, you know, the 1970s, especially 1960s, I mean, campuses were in an uproar everywhere.
[00:58:34]  Those students were incorrect that students are the revolutionary subject because of their class position or rather because they are not part of the proletariat.
[00:58:42]  Fucking impossible.
[00:58:43]  You know, you just end up getting, anyways, I can get into that another time.
[00:58:47]  I will say, if the Progressive Labor Party had succeeded in taking over the SDS at the 69 Convention, we would be speaking Vietnamese right now, which I think would be a good thing.
[00:58:59]  Anyways, but a lot of this, this was really in the air with these libertarians back then.
[00:59:06]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:59:07]  I mean, this, and, you know, you brought up the, you know, this create that, you know, being indebted creates a kind of mental bond.
[00:59:15]  You know, privatizing the universities and introducing that in was not just a way of getting them bound to some financial entity.
[00:59:24]  And, you know, like we said at the beginning of the show, it's not just greedy people being like, oh, we can make money off of student loans and or, you know, private universities charging crazy tuitions.
[00:59:37]  That's, you know, that is part of it, of course.
[00:59:40]  It always is, right?
[00:59:41]  But tied up in that project is also then you create, you, you, you create an environment or change an environment that is no longer safe for any kind of explicit political activity against their larger capitalist project.
[00:59:57]  Because now you are indebted to your future career, your future career aspirations, which are tied to you getting a paycheck, which you need in order to pay off your school debt.
[01:00:06]  Or now you are tied to the safety of your family, which is sacrificed to put you through into college and is paying all of your bills while you're there, right?
[01:00:16]  So creating these lines of indebtedness is an explicit.
[01:00:21]  And, you know, look, there's the correspondence that proves this.
[01:00:24]  I mean, when I say it's explicit, I mean, it's explicit, right?
[01:00:27]  And on the lower level, you know, I do want to mention that when we talk about the charter school and the public and the public choice theory project in terms of lower education, that Buchanan, you know, is explicit as well, that this is a project towards disenfranchisement.
[01:00:46]  As you privatize and basically undo desegregation of public schools, what you do is you, it's not just that you're continuing to then produce new forms of mass inequality, but also creating a mechanism that will institutionally reproduce mass inequality on a scale that,
[01:01:15]  you know, I mean, we've seen, I mean, just fucking look at it.
[01:01:18]  We've seen it.
[01:01:20]  It's done.
[01:01:20]  Yeah.
[01:01:21]  They've done it.
[01:01:22]  I will say, like, all this stuff we're talking about, they won.
[01:01:26]  Like, we're going to get more into this.
[01:01:28]  I think we're going to do two episodes on this.
[01:01:29]  I think we're going to get more into this then.
[01:01:31]  But, like, these ideas are not fringe.
[01:01:34]  They are not ideas that a few cranks who read too much Ayn Rand have.
[01:01:37]  Yeah, this isn't like blue-faced silver guy that we all dunk on.
[01:01:41]  Like, no.
[01:01:43]  You know, this is the ruling ideology.
[01:01:46]  So, like, I think a good sort of comparison is this.
[01:01:50]  It's like, you know, you think of like the, you know, maybe some of our listeners won't see this, but every year, or I guess every whatever, how many years, every four years, there's a convention for the Libertarian Party.
[01:02:01]  Yeah, every four years.
[01:02:02]  And it is filled with freaks, whack jobs, nut jobs, loon jobs.
[01:02:09]  And strangely enough, none of them have jobs.
[01:02:12]  Very true.
[01:02:13]  You know, there's that fucking freak who wears the shoe on his head.
[01:02:15]  I can't remember his fucking name.
[01:02:17]  Shoot guy.
[01:02:18]  Yeah, that freak.
[01:02:20]  There's like freaks who got their dicks out.
[01:02:21]  There's guys with their shirts off.
[01:02:24]  And you're like, look at these wackadoodles.
[01:02:26]  They'll never accomplish anything.
[01:02:27]  Well, that's a fucking sideshow, baby.
[01:02:29]  Like, that is like, if we're talking about political movement comparisons, like the DSA or whatever, any socialist movement is actually more comparable to that than it is to the real libertarian movement, which actually has, I mean, this, this, this octopus, by the way, we can say octopus, first of all, I'm Jewish.
[01:02:45]  Second of all, they're not, which feel like that's very strange for rich people not to be, but, you know, we can talk about this after.
[01:02:52]  It's, it's, it's, um, like, they're, they're winning.
[01:02:56]  They're everywhere.
[01:02:57]  Their ideas are more accepted, I think, than most people can even fathom.
[01:03:26]  I do want to kind of end on this.
[01:03:28]  It has been just over, I think just by about four days, 49 years since the Powell memo was put forth into this world.
[01:03:39]  And this thing has really been like, there was a, I believe there was the, what is it, the Dmitrov letter that the British forged after World War I to sort of show that communists were fomenting revolution in Britain.
[01:03:52]  It was obvious, it was, it was fake, but it was like a forged letter by British intelligence to show that Georgi Dmitrov, the head of the Communist International, was instructing British workers to sabotage the British economy.
[01:04:05]  God willing, he had been doing that.
[01:04:07]  He was not.
[01:04:09]  But this is like if the Dmitrov letter was real, and then they actually did it too.
[01:04:15]  So who is this fucking guy?
[01:04:17]  Well, so we should say, I think it's even more apt to call it a manifesto because that's how politically powerful this is.
[01:04:24]  So this is, you know, Lewis Franklin Powell Jr.
[01:04:28]  He was, he wrote this on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce.
[01:04:33]  He, you know, I think it was like two years later, he was nominated for the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon.
[01:04:38]  So this is, you know, he's a big time lawyer.
[01:04:41]  This is, he's a big, big deal guy in American politics.
[01:04:45]  Or excuse me, two months before he was nominated to the Supreme Court by Nixon.
[01:04:49]  So even more big deal.
[01:04:52]  But he wrote this in 1971.
[01:04:54]  Basically, the Chamber of Commerce was looking around, like we've mentioned, 60s through the late 60s, early 70s, just complete chaos in the streets in America in a way that I don't think millennials truly understand.
[01:05:11]  Way more insane than it is right now.
[01:05:14]  Oh, magnet.
[01:05:16]  I mean, like not even comparable, really.
[01:05:18]  Not comparable at all whatsoever in any way.
[01:05:21]  Plus, everyone looked cool.
[01:05:23]  Yeah, plus it had been, yeah, I mean, yeah, no, not comparable at all.
[01:05:28]  But anyway, so, you know, the kind of like business objectives or business, you know, businessmen, capitalists, you know, ideology was losing steam and they felt like they weren't, you know, it's 1971 and they were looking down at a future and they're the Chamber of Commerce and these capitalists and saying, what the hell do we do?

=== Revolutionary Manifesto for Action (03:09) ===

[01:05:52]  We're unpopular.
[01:05:53]  How do we fix this?
[01:05:55]  And what you basically have is what you can call a revolutionary manifesto or as it may be a counter-revolutionary manifesto.
[01:06:04]  You can make the argument.
[01:06:07]  So I'm just going to read from a couple points that I think, you know, are important to kind of hammer in.
[01:06:15]  The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society, from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.
[01:06:28]  In most of these groups, the movement against the system, and they would be talking of themselves as the system, again, as capitalists, is participated in only by minorities.
[01:06:38]  Yet these often are the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking.
[01:06:45]  The campuses from which much of the criticism emanates are supported by one, tax funds generated largely from American business and two, contributions from capital funds controlled or generated by American business.
[01:06:56]  Most of the media, including the national TV systems, are owned and theoretically controlled by corporations which depend on profits and the enterprise system to survive.
[01:07:06]  What specifically should be done?
[01:07:09]  The first essential, a prerequisite to any effective action, is for businessmen to confront this problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management.
[01:07:19]  The day is long past when the chief executive officer of a major corporation discharges his responsibility by maintaining a satisfactory growth of profits with due regard to corporations' public and social responsibilities.
[01:07:32]  If our system is to survive, top management must be equally concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself.
[01:07:40]  This involves far more than an increased emphasis on quote public relations or quote governmental affairs.
[01:07:49]  Strength lies in organization, in careful, long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.
[01:08:10]  Wow.
[01:08:12]  Fantastic.
[01:08:13]  Yeah, it's a really long manifesto, right?
[01:08:17]  He basically says, he lays out all, you know, we'll link to it.
[01:08:22]  He lays out all these different arenas of which businesses need to reassert themselves.
[01:08:27]  He lays out the media.
[01:08:28]  He lays out academia.
[01:08:30]  He lays out public policy.
[01:08:32]  He lays out the legal realm.
[01:08:35]  He talks about how they need to reinstitute, share, reinvigorate shareholders as rights-holding citizens, basically, of corporations.
[01:08:45]  We'll get into how that has basically, I mean, that is just how people think now, right?
[01:08:52]  And this memo manifesto really is credited with inspiring the founding of the Heritage, of Cato, of the Manhattan Institute.

=== Laying Out Arenas (02:00) ===

[01:09:02]  And you've got people like the Koch brothers, but others as well, reading this and saying, you're right, we need to unite.
[01:09:10]  We need to create a vast network.
[01:09:12]  We're looking at a decades-long project of waging a war on the American people to get what we want done, to complete our revolution.
[01:09:25]  What do we need to do?
[01:09:27]  And they fucking did it.
[01:09:28]  The only part about libertarianism I like is the fact that they want to legalize cocaine.
[01:09:53]  Okay.
[01:09:55]  I'll tell you what, I've read none of this.
[01:09:57]  You know, Liz, baby, you always talk about the bad parts about it.
[01:10:00]  What about the good parts?
[01:10:04]  I don't know any good parts.
[01:10:06]  Well, we could end the war on drugs in one fell swoop.
[01:10:09]  My friend Buck 50 could go, I think actually he's dead.
[01:10:14]  But very, I can't remember any other Coke dealers.
[01:10:17]  It's been a long time since I've done Coke.
[01:10:18]  Those guys could all go straight, get legal, set up pharmacies.
[01:10:22]  I will say one thing in the Libertarian Party platform I really liked was like, we got to do away with the concept of licensing doctors.
[01:10:30]  Oh, yeah, yeah.
[01:10:31]  That's a huge thing.
[01:10:32]  Well, we'll get into, so we've got more to go here.
[01:10:36]  We bit off way more than we could chew.
[01:10:38]  And there's so much to get into, not just with, there's more to talk about with the Cokes, although, you know, we really want to get into what is the kind of larger ideological project and real like war that has been waged.
[01:10:54]  Because the thing is, is that we're going to talk about some stuff, but you're going to listen to it and you're going to say, wait a second, that's just how I think about the world.

=== Everyone Talks About Foster Wallace (01:27) ===

[01:11:03]  Yeah.
[01:11:03]  Like there's, you know, everyone talks about that, like, you know, Foster Wallace, whatever, you know, the fish that can't understand it swimming in water.
[01:11:12]  But like, good.
[01:11:14]  But like, it's totally true, right?
[01:11:18]  Mao, to be clear, Mao also has a pretty well-known quote about fish, water, and the people.
[01:11:26]  Okay, we'll go with David Foster Wallace, the sexist guy writer.
[01:11:32]  The guy in your MFA.
[01:11:35]  No, but so, you know, it's really important that people kind of understand, this is something that we talk about a lot, or we have talked about in the past at least,
[01:11:47]  is that like so much of what we think of reality and what we think of as how things are or how things should be or how things operate is the product of a very long-standing and successful ideological project waged by a handful of people.
[01:12:08]  In other words, you've been scientified.
[01:12:12]  Yeah, man.
[01:12:12]  The right understands Grumshi more than the left does.
[01:12:15]  We'll just leave it at that.
[01:12:17]  So we have more to come.
[01:12:18]  We'll be back later this week, part two.
[01:12:23]  And until then, I'm Liz.
[01:12:25]  My name is Brace.
[01:12:26]  We are joined by producer Hyung Chomsky, and we will see you next time.