How did we get here?

[valleyrogue]

29. Two years: 1971 and 1973.

The radical right had been around a long time before that, but those two years are extremely important.

1971 was the year of the Powell Memo, the blueprint for rich/corporate interests to take more resources away from everybody else, using convoluted logic to that end. It was a response to the movements of the 1960s, which in turn were a repudiation of the shitty 1950s and its straitjacket ideas.

So we had the blueprint, but it was political operatives, the late Paul Weyrich and the recently deceased Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., with funding from Joseph Coors, that really started the ball rolling with the founding of the Heritage Foundation. It laid the groundwork for a host of right-wing "think tanks" (propaganda organizations) and other organizations financed by the likes of Charles and David Koch, the Bradley Foundation, and other foundations bankrolled by billionaires who want to loot from the rest of us and keep "their" money from being touched by taxes or regulations. The pathological selfishness and greed lies at the root of so-called "conservatism," which doesn't actually exist as a political concept anymore but is used as a way to obfuscate what these people are really about.. These organizations use all kinds of convoluted "arguments" in order to protect and preserve the privileges of the very rich. That is all they have ever been about.

The Reagan Administration's refusal to renew the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 accelerated this pathway toward fascism because broadcast media outlets, including talk radio, were no longer required to present opposing points of view. This is why Rush Limbaugh, a nobody from Sacramento, became famous overnight with his slanted political monologues. Allowing Rupert Murdoch to own American media made it even worse despite the objections of people like Senator Ted Kennedy.

We are paying a heavy price now for all this. ALL of it is motivated by pathological selfishness and greed.