The Koch Brothers' Brand of "Anarcho-Tolalitarianism"

A must read from The Nation:

Eric Alterman | September 9, 2010

 

Jane Mayer's New Yorker profile of Charles and David Koch reveals a decades-long investment of many hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve a single goal. The billionaire oilmen sought to "bring about social change" to advance what Charles Koch calls their "radical philosophy." To make this happen, they've adopted a "vertically and horizontally integrated" strategy "from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action."

How radical? When, in 1980, David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket—a race he also funded—his platform called for the abolition of Social Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control, all personal and corporate income taxes and much else. A worried William F. Buckley Jr. called it "Anarcho-Totalitarianism."

What the Kochs were doing, as Mayer astutely notes, is implementing the strategy originally laid out by Lewis Powell's now infamous 1971 memo to the director of the US Chamber of Commerce, by which the political culture of the United States would be transformed on behalf of individuals and corporations of great wealth. The primary obstacle Powell identified was not the remnants of the late-'60s antiwar and civil rights movements, which were both in the process of disintegration. Rather, they sought to undermine the "respectable elements of society" and replace them with people like themselves. . .  .

The rest here.