There is ironic twist for republicans, many who lean libertarian, talking about freedom and how Americans are losing their freedoms to big government statism. If that is true isn't it also true that republicans are losing their freedom to the whims and wishes of the monied?
Americans like to think of themselves as individuals, but if right wing media and corporate think tanks, organizations paid for by big money that obviously do not operate outside the box of a free market, anti-government framework provide the talking points, how individual can you be? Are you not simply parroting the wishes of the sponsors? Sponsors whose goals are often anti-democratic. (see quotes below)
Given the bifurcated view of politics in modern America and the American worship of the concept of individual freedom, who is freer? The voter managed by money or the voter managed by a sense the state is there for a reason. Is this an unfair phrased question? You tell me given the information in this post.
"The Republican National Committee effort is also playing catch-up among allies on the right. The political and philanthropic network overseen by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialists, has financed a separate voter data initiative, known as Themis, which has been up and running for more than four years, and, with its sister company i360, employs about 50 people." http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/technology/republicans-are-wooing-the-wired.html
"An Arlington, Va.-based conservative group, whose existence until now was unknown to almost everyone in politics, raised and spent $250 million in 2012 to shape political and policy debate nationwide.... The group, Freedom Partners, and its president, Marc Short, serve as an outlet for the ideas and funds of the mysterious Koch brothers, cutting checks as large as $63 million to groups promoting conservative causes, according to an IRS document to be filed shortly." Behind the Curtain Exclusive: The Koch brothers? secret bank - POLITICO.com
i360 | The Data is the Difference
The Case for Real, Up-to-Date Political Data | i-360
Para Bellum Labs | Data Engineering to Win Elections
Generation Opportunity
"Finding talent has been harder than finding money. The party has provided about $17 million, a substantial amount, to spend from October 2013 through November 2014, and Data Trust, which is privately held, has a comparable budget. (Themis had about $10 million in revenue in 2012, according to its tax returns; Catalist takes in subscriber fees of $5 million to $9 million a year, it says, and devotes more than $6 million to new research and development.) But Mr. Barkett says he has hired only about 14 people for the Republican National Committee and 12 at Data Trust, half the number he hopes to have by spring." NYT Link above
A book that outlines the changes. "The rise of conservative politics in postwar America is one of the great puzzles of American political history. For much of the period that followed the end of World War II, conservative ideas about the primacy of the free market, and the dangers of too-powerful labor unions, government regulation, and an activist, interventionist state seemed to have been thoroughly rejected by most intellectual and political elites. Scholars and politicians alike dismissed those who adhered to such faiths as a "radical right," for whom to quote the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter politics "becomes an arena into which the wildest fancies are projected, the most paranoid suspicions, the most absurd superstitions, the most bizarre apocalyptic fantasies." How, then, did such ideas move from their marginal position in the middle years of the twentieth century to become the reigning politics of the country by the century's end?" Kim Phillips-Fein ('Invisible Hands')
"Corporatism reappeared in the 1960s in such places as the British union movement, the American business group known as the Round Table and its imitative Canadian equivalent, the Business Council on National Issues. The last two can claim to have set much of their countries' contemporary economic and social agendas. The banding together of citizens into interest groups becomes corporatist, that is to say dangerous, only when the interest group loses its specific focus and seeks to override the democratic system. In the case of the British unions and the North American business councils, their every intervention into public affairs has been intended to undermine the democratic participation of individual citizens." p472 'Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West' John Ralston Saul
"The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy." Alex Carey
Americans like to think of themselves as individuals, but if right wing media and corporate think tanks, organizations paid for by big money that obviously do not operate outside the box of a free market, anti-government framework provide the talking points, how individual can you be? Are you not simply parroting the wishes of the sponsors? Sponsors whose goals are often anti-democratic. (see quotes below)
Given the bifurcated view of politics in modern America and the American worship of the concept of individual freedom, who is freer? The voter managed by money or the voter managed by a sense the state is there for a reason. Is this an unfair phrased question? You tell me given the information in this post.
"The Republican National Committee effort is also playing catch-up among allies on the right. The political and philanthropic network overseen by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialists, has financed a separate voter data initiative, known as Themis, which has been up and running for more than four years, and, with its sister company i360, employs about 50 people." http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/technology/republicans-are-wooing-the-wired.html
"An Arlington, Va.-based conservative group, whose existence until now was unknown to almost everyone in politics, raised and spent $250 million in 2012 to shape political and policy debate nationwide.... The group, Freedom Partners, and its president, Marc Short, serve as an outlet for the ideas and funds of the mysterious Koch brothers, cutting checks as large as $63 million to groups promoting conservative causes, according to an IRS document to be filed shortly." Behind the Curtain Exclusive: The Koch brothers? secret bank - POLITICO.com
i360 | The Data is the Difference
The Case for Real, Up-to-Date Political Data | i-360
Para Bellum Labs | Data Engineering to Win Elections
Generation Opportunity
"Finding talent has been harder than finding money. The party has provided about $17 million, a substantial amount, to spend from October 2013 through November 2014, and Data Trust, which is privately held, has a comparable budget. (Themis had about $10 million in revenue in 2012, according to its tax returns; Catalist takes in subscriber fees of $5 million to $9 million a year, it says, and devotes more than $6 million to new research and development.) But Mr. Barkett says he has hired only about 14 people for the Republican National Committee and 12 at Data Trust, half the number he hopes to have by spring." NYT Link above
A book that outlines the changes. "The rise of conservative politics in postwar America is one of the great puzzles of American political history. For much of the period that followed the end of World War II, conservative ideas about the primacy of the free market, and the dangers of too-powerful labor unions, government regulation, and an activist, interventionist state seemed to have been thoroughly rejected by most intellectual and political elites. Scholars and politicians alike dismissed those who adhered to such faiths as a "radical right," for whom to quote the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter politics "becomes an arena into which the wildest fancies are projected, the most paranoid suspicions, the most absurd superstitions, the most bizarre apocalyptic fantasies." How, then, did such ideas move from their marginal position in the middle years of the twentieth century to become the reigning politics of the country by the century's end?" Kim Phillips-Fein ('Invisible Hands')
"Corporatism reappeared in the 1960s in such places as the British union movement, the American business group known as the Round Table and its imitative Canadian equivalent, the Business Council on National Issues. The last two can claim to have set much of their countries' contemporary economic and social agendas. The banding together of citizens into interest groups becomes corporatist, that is to say dangerous, only when the interest group loses its specific focus and seeks to override the democratic system. In the case of the British unions and the North American business councils, their every intervention into public affairs has been intended to undermine the democratic participation of individual citizens." p472 'Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West' John Ralston Saul
"The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy." Alex Carey
