Reply #19: The Heritage Foundation: A Wretched Hive of Scum and Villiany

[LongTomH]

The Heritage Foundation was one of the 'Think Tanks' established decades ago to destroy the gains that the middle and working classes made after FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society. Bill Moyers said it eloquently in his speech and article: This is the Fight of Our Lives:

I know, I know: this sounds very much like a call for class war. But the class war was declared a generation ago, in a powerful paperback polemic by William Simon, who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury. He called on the financial and business class, in effect, to take back the power and privileges they had lost in the depression and new deal. They got the message, and soon they began a stealthy class war against the rest of society and the principles of our democracy. They set out to trash the social contract, to cut their workforces and wages, to scour the globe in search of cheap labor, and to shred the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business Week put it bluntly at the time: "Some people will obviously have to do with less....it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."

The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand." This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us.

To create the intellectual framework for this takeover of public policy they funded conservative think tanks -- The Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute -- that churned out study after study advocating their agenda.

Now, almost any time TV noise, er, news networks need someone to comment on any story, they invite someone from one of these right wing Think Tanks. Naomi Klein nailed the beautifully: "People paid to think by the makers of tanks." They dominate the public discourse, even in discussion of the future. Most futurist conferences will include speakers from these Think Tanks; frequently, a right wing 'institute' will sponsor the event. Do a Google on "Heritage Foundation" AND nanotechnology - see how many hits you get.