Don’t Let Koch Money Destroy Our Country

US elected officials, funded by the Koch brothers, are pledged to dismantle majority rule, civil rights, social services, and governmental agencies.  Help stop them now, before they succeed!

Regardless of your priorities (environment, healthcare, racial justice, etc.) or past reading, this book provides the overview that empowers more effective activism for justice:

Democracy In Chains

The Deep History of The Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America

by Nancy MacLean,  Viking, 2017

Get a quick sample:

• Search the internet for Nancy MacLean in WI May, 2018 for a 40 min. talk.
• Read Nancy MacLean, The Atlantic, “The Architect of the Radical Right” , July/Aug 2017.

How can Democracy In Chains help us prevent destruction of our democracy?

• Help us recognize and understand the deliberate efforts we must counteract for effective change.
• Help us identify the true objectives, strategies, and tactics of those who threaten our values.
• Help us inform and activate citizens on the left and right to resist the dismantling of our democracy.
• Help us form alliances and motivate others to participate.
• Help us shape our messages and communications for maximum impact.

The radical right is organized and funded to implement changes that few citizens support:

• End most government services while enlarging military and police.
• End free public education.
• End environmental protection such as regulation of toxic emissions and countering climate change.
• End collective bargaining ( unions).
• Privatize Social Security and allow companies to charge large fees to hold your retirement savings.
• End progressive tax rates and shift taxes from corporations and the wealthy to the middle and lower classes.
• Privatize prisons, end regulation of them, and end health and rehabilitation services for inmates.
• End public health services such as sanitation, water testing, disease control and health research.
• End medical insurance and services such as Medicare and the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”).
• Control what information is reported in the press and other media.
• Transform the judiciary by packing the courts with hard right judges and train judges and attorneys general in radically pro-corporate law.

What can you do?

1. Listen to MacLean’s talk.  Read about her book.  Read the book.  Tell others about it.
2. Raise awareness on social media, in blogs, and with advocacy groups.
3. Meet with fellow activists to discuss the book and apply its insights to your city and state.  Invite Spotlight Team (find our FB page) to make a presentation to a group.
4. Inform students at college and high school levels, as well as staffs of government officials.
5. Research the background of candidates before you vote-what have they stood for in the past? Find out if they are ALEC members or if they have sponsored ALEC legislation using the excellent resources of the Center for Media and Democracy.
6. Monitor local press for propagandistic articles form Koch front groups like Center of the American Experiment and Freedom Foundation of MN.  Respond with letters and/or complain to the editorial board.

Without your action…

• The ability of voters to choose our officials will continue to be undermined by voter suppression and dark money-funded misinformation campaigns, effectively destroying democracy as we know it.
• The 2020 Census and redistricting could solidify far-right, Koch-compliant officials hold on Congress.
• ALEC-affiliated legislators will continue to pass state and local laws that deny municipal governments the power to make their own policies, as we saw in Flint, MI.
• States dominated by the far-right may call for a Constitutional Convention to alter our federal constitution.  28 states have already adopted resolutions calling for such a convention.  Only 34 are needed.  (See NY Times, 8/23/16.)
• Privatization of government services and bureaucracies will continue to reduce government services, increase the cost of equivalent corporate-provided services, and eliminate quality civil service jobs.
• We will have more war of distraction.  Climate change will get worse.  Financial markets will be deregulated.  Health and safely laws will be unenforced and rolled back.  The courts will no longer function as checks on corporate power.

Democracy In Chains unmasks radical libertarianism and the forces behind it.  Based on ten years of research, this book is a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth century American self-government.

• Radical right political economist James McGill Buchanan forged his ideas about government in the 1950’s while trying to preserve white elite power in the wake of Brown v Board of Education.  In response to the widening of voting rights, he develop strategies to prevent the majority from using its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and everyone else.  He saw Americans as either “makers” (the rich) or “takers” (everyone else).
• Multibillionaire Charles Koch discovered Buchanan and his work on how to rewrite the social contract of the modern world.  Koch used his money to create a vast, relentless, multi-armed political machine to carry out a stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism.
• Buchanan and Koch knew the majority would not support their ideas.  They planned to “win” by manipulating the rules of how our government works.  “If you don’t like the outcome of public policy over the long term, don’t think about changing the rulers, think about changing the rules.”
• The goal is to corrupt our electoral process via voter suppression and similar tactics to keep young, old, poor, female and non-whites from voting so the majority’s will can’t influence our government.
• Dark money and misinformation is used at the local, state, and federal levels to “elect” those who will cut back services, civil rights, and the power of citizens to be heard and to oversee their government.
• Dark money is used to corrupt our courts via judges selected to agree with hard-right objectives, destroying checks and balances on the power of billionaires.

Democracy In Chains has been widely praised:

National Book Award finalist, Booklist: “perhaps the best explanation to date of the roots of the political divide that threatens to alter irrevocably American government.”  The Guardian: “the missing chapter…key to understanding the politics of the past [50 years]”  The Nation magazine: “Most Valuable Book” of 2017, and more.

Nancy MacLean is William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University and immediate past-President of the Labor and Working Class History Association.  Author: Behind the Mask of Chivalry:  The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, and Freedom is not Enough:  The Opening of the American Workplace.  Editor:  Scalawag: A White Southerner’s Journey through Segregation to Human Rights Activism.