TBR News March 9, 2020

The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. March 9, 2020:“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the
election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.
Commentary for March 9 2020 :”
• Europe told to act now as coronavirus locks down north Italy, markets plunge
• Italy’s prime minister promised “massive shock therapy” to beat the coronavirus and urged Europe to act decisively after markets plunged and his country sealed off much of its wealthy industrial north.
• What you need to know right now No hugs, handshakes at U.S. churches
• Trump’s focus on coronavirus numbers could backfire, health experts say
• Airlines to suspend all flights due to coronavirus
• Under fire over virus, Japan’s Abe may seek emergency declaration
• Apple sells fewer than 500,000 smartphones in China in February amid coronavirus
• Wall Street plunges 7% amid fears of global recession triggered by coronavirus – business live
• Coronavirus in the US: should we expect closures and shutdowns?
• New York attorney general to televangelist: stop touting product as coronavirus cure
• Lack of paid leave will leave millions of US workers vulnerable to coronavirus
• Millions of Italians flee to Sicily because of coronavirus; dozens reported sick
• Terror stalks New York as two new coronavirus cases identified
• Sales of postage stamps plummets due to possible coronavirus infections
• Touted ‘Blessed Jesus Coronavirus Protection Creame’; proven to be face cream and peanut butter mix
• Florida Keys are to be totaslly evacuated because case of suspected corona virus seen in Key West
• Feral pigs believed now to be carriers of dread corona virus Arkansas governor says.
• Six coronavirus victims are know to have died in India in past ten days! Country to be quarantined
• Dead monkey, drssed in clownsuit, found in Chicago library restroom might have died of coronavirus health director claims
• Special ‘Fellatio Masks’ with zippers in front are to be issued to Nevada streetwalkers
• Evangelical leader claims Antichrist is alive in China and started coronavirus to conquer the world.

The Table of Contents
• The Brutal Tragedy of Idlib: Why the U.S. Should Stay out of Syria and Dump NATO
• Death is in the Air!
• Ecomonic elite in the United States
• The Season of Evil
• Encyclopedia of American Loons

The Brutal Tragedy of Idlib: Why the U.S. Should Stay out of Syria and Dump NATO
Washington should encourage the peaceful conclusion of conflicts such as Syria. But maintaining peace at home should remain America’s highest objective.
March 7, 2020
by Doug Bandow
The National Interest
Syria is attempting to bring its civil war to a bloody end near the northwest city of Idlib. Syrian forces have clashed with Turkey, which invaded its neighbor and created a secure, jihadist-controlled enclave. Russia backed Damascus’ offensive, as Ankara urged NATO to deploy Patriot missiles. The Trump administration faces pressure from war-happy legislators such as Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is campaigning to impose a no-fly zone in an ongoing civil war.
The United States should stay out of the explosive confrontation. Instead of getting more involved in a civil war now in its tenth year, the Trump administration should bring home America’s troops now illegally occupying Syrian oil fields. And Washington should turn the transatlantic alliance over to the Europeans, ensuring that Americans stay out of any Turkish conflict with Syria and Russia—especially one created by Ankara’s aggression against its neighbor.
Syria dissolved into civil war nearly a decade ago. However, the Assad government has been gradually extending its control over once rebel-held lands. The process is not easy: the regime has been badly weakened by years of fighting and opposition has revived in some areas, such as Daraa, a trigger for the initial civil war. Nevertheless, Damascus recently launched an offensive to reclaim Idlib, a major city swollen with refugees who fled fighting elsewhere in Syria.
Idlib is an extraordinary tragedy, the last insurgent controlled region, in contrast to other areas under Kurdish, Turkish, and American control. With Turkish support the insurgents, including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, formerly Jibhat al-Nusra, and other radical Islamist groups, cut the major M5 highway. The al-Qaeda-linked al-Sham eventually gained control of the city and environs.
Turkey, committed to the overthrow of Syrian president Bashir al-Assad, supported the opposition and warned Damascus off from advancing on Idlib. As part of a cease-fire negotiated through Russia Turkey established a dozen military observation posts and later added additional deployments intended to act as tripwires to discourage Syrian military advance. However, the ceasefire ultimately failed and Damascus recently began large-scale operations against Idlib. Syrian armed action always seemed inevitable: after all, multiple governments in Ankara employed brutal military force against Kurdish separatists.
Damascus quickly made progress, recovering control of the M5. But the fighting displaced hundreds of thousands of Syrians, many of whom headed for Turkey. Most seriously, Syrian or Russian airstrikes (blamed on the first, more likely by the second) killed thirty-three Turkish soldiers. Moscow claimed that the latter were operating with “terrorists” and “terrorist fighting units,” meaning insurgents, which Ankara denied. However, wrote Joseph Trevithick of The Drive: “Turkey, together with its local partners, has been attacking regime ground and air forces for weeks now, including with armed drones, as it seeks to stem the offense in Idlib. The Turkish government has stepped up deliveries of heavier weaponry, including armored vehicles and howitzers, to various Syrian militant groups opposed to Assad, as well.”
Turkey launched retaliatory attacks on Syrian military positions and threatened broader military action to establish a “safe zone.” Ankara already has twice acted, utilizing allied insurgents, to drive Syrian Kurds from the border. Turkey even threatened to attack U.S. personnel operating with Kurdish militias against Islamic State forces.
With the potential for a full-scale armed confrontation and even war between Turkey and Syria backed by Russia, Ankara, a NATO member, called on its allies, including America, for consultations and support. Despite Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s sustained campaign to tyrannize his people and separate his country from the West, the allies so far have lined up behind him.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced “full solidarity” with Ankara and said the allies were “constantly looking into what more they can do to provide further support for Turkey.” The alliance denounced “indiscriminate airstrikes by the Syrian regime and Russia.”
So far, NATO’s aid means enhancing NATO reconnaissance missions over the border area and considering deployment of Patriot air defense missiles. However, Greece blocked the issuance of a statement backing Ankara. But if hostilities explode Turkey likely will call on NATO to invoke Article 5, which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all.
Of course, the alliance will act seriously only if Washington agrees. Thus far, the Trump administration has encouraged Ankara. For instance, the State Department declared: “We stand by our NATO ally Turkey and continue to call for an immediate end to this despicable offensive by the Assad regime, Russia, and Iranian-backed forces. We are looking at options on how we can best support Turkey in this crisis.” Washington’s UN Ambassador Kelly Craft said “the United States’ commitment to our NATO ally, Turkey, will not waver. Turkey has our full support to respond in self-defense.”
So far few specifics have been offered. Pentagon spokesman Alyssa Farah explained: “We are exploring ways the United States can work together with Turkey and the international community.” Ideas include increased information sharing, logistical aid, and other forms of non-combat support, as well as maintaining equipment readiness. The special envoy on ISIS, James Jeffrey, recently opined that the president said his administration might provide ammunition.
Washington’s ivory tower warriors, who have pushed for U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war for a decade, have returned to their traditional panacea, a no-fly zone. Argued Graham, who rarely has found a war he did not want others to fight: “The world is sitting on its hands and watching the destruction of Idlib by Assad, Iran, and the Russians. This is one of the greatest humanitarian disasters in decades and the brutal aggression of Assad supported by Iran and Russia needs to come to an end.”
Of course, there is much in the world which “should” happen. But only rarely does that justify war. The United States has the strongest military on earth, leading many policymakers to assume that every problem is solvable by bombing, invading, and/or occupying other nations. Yet America’s experience over the last two decades with endless war, often conducted with a humanitarian gloss, has been a little short
Global social engineering, attempting to overcome history, culture, religion, ethnicity, geography, and more, has a wretched record. Conflicts most often turn out worse than predicted. The Iraq war triggered sectarian slaughter, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, spawned al-Qaeda-in-Iraq which became ISIS, and enhanced Iran’s influence.
Washington’s carte blanche to Saudi Arabia enabled the latter’s horrific aggression against Yemen, which has aided al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, long the most virulent affiliate of the national organization which staged 9/11. And the Obama administration’s insistence that al-Assad be removed from office discouraged negotiation by both Damascus, which saw little reason to talk, and its critics, who expected U.S. support for its maximalist demands.
Washington’s simultaneous attempt to oust Assad, support “moderate” insurgents, defeat ISIS, exclude Iran from Syria, minimize Russian influence, simultaneously ally with Kurdish militias and accommodate Turkish interests, proved to be a fantasy. To jump into Idlib would be to risk everything for much less.
Indeed, DC fantasies still live. Graham argued: “I am confident if the world, led by the United States, pushed back against Iran, Russia, and Assad that they would stand down, paving the way for political negotiations to end this war in Syria.” Such a vision suggests that the senator has been ingesting LSD or an equivalent. “The world” spent ten years urging an end to the Syrian civil war, without effect. Most of “the world” is quite willing to leave such crises to America.
The problem with a no-fly zone, and any other military measures which Turkey’s advocates might offer, is that it means shooting at Russians. Over Syria Moscow’s forces dominate the air and, contra Lindsey Graham, are not likely to back away because he and “the world” want the Russians to do so. Moscow has allied with Damascus for decades, starting during the Cold War. Putin proved that he is perfectly able and willing to play a robust game of geopolitical chicken.
Washington to risk war with Russia over Syria would be a little short of insane. Damascus does not matter and never has much mattered for U.S. security. Syria never gave the Soviet Union an adequate base to challenge American influence in the region and eventually abandoned even military confrontation with Israel. Attempting to turn Syria into a battleground with Iran is merely another step in a counterproductive strategy that has worsened regional tensions and will fail so long as Damascus welcomes Tehran’s support.
Syria remains a humanitarian tragedy, but the worst of the decade-long civil war is over. The best, most humane, outcome is to end the fighting. However, Turkey, by bolstering the insurgency—and threatening to intervene more directly—is lengthening the conflict and the corresponding hardship. That is in keeping with Ankara’s murderous intervention against Syrian Kurdish forces. Ironically, Turkey is justifying its efforts to protect the radical forces which dominate Idlib as an attempt to forestall future “radicalization.”
Proposals to intervene on Turkey’s behalf offer a stark reminder of the problem of NATO, an organization created in a different time and circumstance. During the Cold War the transatlantic alliance was used to forestall Soviet aggression against Europe, a continent for which Americans shed significant blood to liberate in World War II. Since the collapse of the USSR, the alliance has had no serious purpose, since Europe is well able to protect its own members and surrounding territory. The expansion of NATO has proved to be highly destabilizing, encouraging the Putin government to act against Georgia and Ukraine, preventing their inclusion in the alliance already abutting Russia.
Ankara already has acted in ways that warrant its departure, voluntary or other, from NATO. Erdogan has systematically dismantled Turkish democracy and established authoritarian rule. Among the victims have been American citizens. He shifted the country in a more Islamist direction and forged a more cooperative relationship with Russia, despite the current strife over Idlib, even purchasing S-400 air defense missiles. Alliance defenders take solace in his current difficulty with Moscow, but that merely underscores Erdogan’s faithlessness. He can be trusted only to use the alliance to his advantage. He certainly could not be trusted to combat Russia, the only conceivable threat for NATO to guard against, if Moscow attacked another NATO state. On top of that, Erdogan has weaponized Syrian refugees, unleashing them on Europe when seeking concessions and support.
Worse, though, has been Ankara’s role in Syria. The Erdogan government took an aggressive stance against the Assad government and nearly ended up at war with Russia after downing a Russian Sukhoi SU-24 fighter (allied fighters killed the pilot). Turkey originally facilitated the transit of Islamic State fighters into Syria. There are credible allegations that the Erdogan family profited from commerce with ISIS. Moreover, Turkey carried war against its own Kurdish population across the border, invading Syria and attacking that nation’s Kurdish population, putting American military personnel at risk.
In Idlib, Turkish aggressiveness, seizing Syrian territory, and allying with radical Islamists antagonistic toward America, risks triggering war with not only Syria but Russia. Nothing in that conflict warrants Washington backing Ankara, let alone standing behind Turkey against Moscow. Presumably none of the parties wants a new conflict. Full-scale war seems inconceivable because the costs would be so high while the stakes are so low.
But there already have been clashes between U.S. troops and Russian mercenaries and American and Russian forces engaged in a stand-off over Syrian oil illegally seized by the United States. Moreover, there were proposals for Washington to intervene in the Russo-Georgia war and later impose a no-fly zone over all of Syria, made applicable to Moscow as well. In these ways American officials have demonstrated an extraordinary recklessness which, if acted on in the midst of a real military confrontation, could have horrific consequences.
It long has been evident that the best course to advance American security is to withdraw from Syria. The ongoing crisis involving Turkey, Syria, and Russia only reinforces that judgment. But it does more. It highlights the danger of continued U.S. entanglement in NATO, with American policy held hostage by irresponsible “allies” such as Turkey. Washington should encourage the peaceful conclusion of conflicts such as Syria. But maintaining peace at home should remain America’s highest objective.

Death is in the Air!
March 2. 2020
by Pat McCann
A new disease is treading softly on the tail of the dread coronovisus that has killed over twenty people world-wide and is, thanks to a stellar global media, terrifying legions of the feeble-minded into pant-wetting terror.
The new disease recently appeared for the first time in New Orleans when 15 year old Armando Ruiz was using a public lavatory to sneak a smoke. He lit a match and the entire wall of the building behind him smashed down into the main hall of the church behind the lavatory, killing thirty people attending a mixed-race same-sex wedding
A team of New Orleans police and scientists from the Weasel Hole Science Institute were able to identify not only the roasted remains of Ruiz but also to discover that he suffered from TF Disease. When word of this got out, there was mass panic in New Orleans that soon was reported, world-wide, in the media.
Armando Ruiz’s suffering from TF Disease is now feared to spread the horrifying disese across the entire globe.
Scientists have explained that TF Disease, in its fully developed form, is also known as Terminal Flatulence and those who suffer from it cannot be around any open flame or fly on commercial aircraft
This disease is believed to have originated in the Halls of the United States Congress during the second Bush Administration and expanded outwards to every part of the planet
Human flatulence, not carbon emissions, is probably the major factor in weather change and is certainly responsible for killing trees in national forests, chickens, bees, small animals, asthma victims and occasional slow cripples.

Ecomonic elite in the United States

The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
Four Theoretical Traditions
Each of the four theoretical traditions we are addressing has produced a body of literature much too vast to review in detail here. We can only allude to a few central pieces of work in each tradition. And we must acknowledge that a particular scholar’s work does not always fall neatly into a single category. Some scholars work across – or independently of – our theoretical categories, embracing multiple influences and complex processes of policy making. Here we focus on ideal types of theory, for the purpose of outlining certain distinctive predictions that those types of theory tend to make. Given the nature of our data, we focus on the societal sources of influence that these theories posit, rather than on the mechanisms of influence that they discuss.
Majoritarian Electoral Democracy. Theories of majoritarian electoral democracy, as
positive or empirical theories, attribute U.S. government policies chiefly to the collective will of average citizens, who are seen as empowered by democratic elections. Such thinking goes back at least to Tocqueville, who (during the Jacksonian era) saw American majorities as “omnipotent” – particularly at the state level – and worried about “tyranny of the majority.” It is encapsulated in Abraham Lincoln’s reference to government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” and was labeled by Robert Dahl “populistic democracy.” An important modern incarnation of this tradition is found in rational choice theories of electoral democracy, in which vote-seeking parties or candidates in a two-party system tend to converge at the mid-point of citizens’ policy preferences. If preferences are jointly singlepeaked so that they can be arrayed along a single dimension, the “median voter theorem” – posited verbally by Harold Hotelling, proved by Duncan Black, and popularized by Anthony Downs in his Economic Theory of Democracy – states that two vote-seeking parties will both take the same position, at the center of the distribution of voters’ most-preferred positions.
Under the relevant assumptions, public policy that fits the preferences of the median voter is not only the empirically-predicted equilibrium result of two-party electoral competition; as the “Condorcet winner” it also has the normative property of being the “most democratic” policy, in the sense that it would be preferred to any alternative policy in head-to-head majority-rule voting by all citizens.
Subsequent “chaos” results by social choice theorists, starting with Kenneth Arrow, have indicated that the median voter prediction follows logically only for unidimensional politics. If citizens’ preference orderings are not unidimensional and are sufficiently diverse, majority rulehence also two-party electoral competition – might not lead to any equilibrium outcome at all.
It is important to note, however, that what might theoretically happen will not necessarily ever happen in practice. Real-world outcomes depend upon how institutions are organized and how preferences are actually configured.
Despite the “chaos” results, and despite many criticisms of the median-voter theorem as simplistic and empirically inapplicable or wrong,5 a good many scholars – probably more economists than political scientists among them – still cling to the idea that the policy preferences of the median voter tend to drive policy outputs from the U.S. political system. A fair amount of empirical evidence has been adduced – by Alan Monroe; Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro; Robert Erikson, Michael MacKuen, and James Stimson (authors of the very influential Macro Polity); and others – that seems to support the notion that the median voter determines the results of much or most policy making. This evidence indicates that U.S. federal government policy is consistent with majority preferences roughly two-thirds of the time; that public policy changes in the same direction as collective preferences a similar two thirds of the time; that the liberalism or conservatism of citizens is closely associated with the liberalism or conservatism of policy across states; and that fluctuations in the liberal or conservative “mood” of the public are strongly associated with changes in the liberalism or conservatism of policy in all three branches of government.
The fly in the ointment is that none of this evidence allows for, or explicitly assesses, the impact of such variables as the preferences of wealthy individuals, or the preferences and actions of organized interest groups, which may independently influence public policy while perhaps being positively associated with public opinion – thereby producing a spurious statistical relationship between opinion and policy.
Recent research by Larry Bartels and by one of the present authors (Gilens), which
explicitly brings the preferences of “affluent” Americans into the analysis along with the
preferences of those lower in the income distribution, indicates that the apparent connectionbetween public policy and the preferences of the average citizen may indeed be largely or entirely spurious.
The “electoral reward and punishment” version of democratic control through elections – in which voters retrospectively judge how well the results of government policy have satisfied their basic interests and values, and politicians enact policies in anticipation of judgments that they expect will later be made by what V.O. Key, Jr., called “latent” public opinion – might be thought to offer a different prediction: that policy will tend to satisfy citizens’ underlying needs and values, rather than corresponding with their current policy preferences.8 We cannot test this prediction because we do not have – and cannot easily imagine how to obtain – good data on individuals’ deep, underlying interests or values, as opposed to their expressed policy preferences. But the evidence that collective policy preferences are generally rather stable over time suggests that expressed collective policy preferences may not often diverge markedly from subsequently manifested “latent” preferences. They may do so only under special circumstances, such as economic recessions or disastrous wars. If so, the electoral-reward-and-punishment type of democratic theory, too, predicts that most of the time public policy will respond to the current policy preferences of the average citizen.
Economic Elite Domination. A quite different theoretical tradition argues that U.S.
policy making is dominated by individuals who have substantial economic resources, i.e. high levels of income and/or wealth – including, but not limited to, ownership of business firms.
Not all “elite theories” share this focus. Some emphasize social status or institutional
position – such as the occupancy of key managerial roles in corporations, or top-level positions in political parties, in the executive, legislative, or judicial branches of government, or in the highest ranks of the military. Some elite theories postulate an amalgam of elites, defined by combinations of social status, economic resources, and institutional positions, who achieve a degree of unity through common backgrounds, coinciding interests, and social interactions.
For example, C. Wright Mills’ important book, The Power Elite, offers a rather nuanced account of how U.S. social, economic, political, and military elites have historically alternated in different configurations of dominance. Mills noted that his elites derived in substantial proportions from the upper classes, including the very rich and corporate executives, but their elite status was not defined by their wealth.10 Our focus here is on theories that emphasize the policy-making importance of economic elites.
Analyses of U.S. politics centered on economic elites go back at least to Charles Beard, who maintained that a chief aim of the framers of the U.S. Constitution was to protect private property, favoring the economic interests of wealthy merchants and plantation owners rather than the interests of the then-majority small farmers, laborers, and craft workers. A landmark work in this tradition is G. William Domhoff’s detailed account of how elites (working through foundations, think-tanks, and an “opinion-shaping apparatus,” as well as through the lobbyists and politicians they finance) may dominate key issues in U.S. policy making despite the existence of democratic elections. Philip A. Burch has exhaustively chronicled the economic backgrounds of federal government officials through American history. Thomas Ferguson’s analysis of the political importance of “major investors” might be seen as a theory of economic elites. Most recently, Jeffrey Winters has posited a comparative theory of “Oligarchy,” in which the wealthiest citizens – even in a “civil oligarchy” like the United States – dominate policy concerning crucial issues of wealth- and income-protection.Our third and fourth theoretical traditions posit that public policy generally reflects the outcome of struggle among organized interest groups and business firms.
Majoritarian Pluralism. The roots of what we can characterize as theories of
“majoritarian” interest group pluralism go back to James Madison’s Federalist Paper #10, which analyzed politics in terms of “factions” — a somewhat fuzzy concept that apparently encompassed political parties and even popular majorities, as well as what we would today consider organized interest groups, business firms, and industrial sectors. Madison argued that struggles among the diverse factions that would be found in an extensive republic would lead to policies more or less representative of the needs and interests of the citizenry as a whole – or at least would tend to defeat “tyrannical” policies, including the much-feared issuance of inflationary paper money that might cater to local majority factions of farmer-debtors but be costly to merchant creditors.
In the twentieth century, Arthur Bentley’s The Process of Government and then David Truman’s monumental The Governmental Process put groups at the center of political analysis, laying out a detailed picture of how organized interest groups might get their way. Truman offered a comprehensive and still-interesting catalogue of lobbying techniques and other methods of group influence. He also added an ingenious gloss to Madison that tends to increase both the plausibility and the normative appeal of majoritarian interest group pluralism: the assertion that all interests have at least a minimum of influence in group-dominated policy making, because policy makers must (in order to avoid subsequent punishment) heed all “potential” groups that would form if their interests were trampled upon.
Robert Dahl’s analysis of New Haven city politics was Madisonian or Truman-like in its insistence that many (all?) diverse interests were represented, though Dahl focused as much on active members of the general public as on organized groups. Dahl’s analyses of American politics in terms of “polyarchy” or “pluralist democracy” also come close to our ideal type of majoritarian pluralist theory, since they imply that the wants or needs of the average citizen tend to be reasonably well served by the outcomes of interest group struggle. Several contemporary analysts of interest group politics likewise appear to accept (atleast implicitly) a picture of group struggle that results in more or less majoritarian results.
A major challenge to majoritarian pluralist theories, however, is posed by Mancur
Olson’s argument that collective action by large, dispersed sets of individuals with individually small but collectively large interests tends to be prevented by the “free rider” problem. Barring special circumstances (selective incentives, byproducts, coercion), individuals who would benefit from collective action may have no incentive to personally form or join an organized group. If everyone thinks this way and lets George do it, the job is not likely to get done. This reasoning suggests that Truman’s “potential groups” may in fact be unlikely to form, even if millions ofpeoples’ interests are neglected or harmed by government. Aware of the collective action problem, officials may feel free to ignore much of the population and act against the interests of the average citizen.
Biased Pluralism. Olson’s argument points toward an important variant line of thinking within the pluralist tradition: theories of “biased” pluralism, which posit struggles among an unrepresentative universe of interest groups – characterized by E.E. Schattschneider as a heavenly chorus with an “upper-class accent,” and more recently dubbed by Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry Brady an “unheavenly chorus.” Theories of biased pluralism generally argue that both the thrust of interest group conflict and the public policies that result tend to tilt toward the wishes of corporations and business and professional associations.
Schattschneider suggested that policy outcomes vary with the “scope of conflict”: for
example, that business-oriented interest groups tend to prevail over ordinary citizens when the scope is narrow and visibility is low. Grant McConnell added the idea that the actual “constituencies” of policy implementers can consist of powerful groups. George Stigler (articulating what some economists have scorned as “Chicago Marxism”) analyzed the politics of regulation in terms of biased pluralism: the capture of regulators by the regulated. Charles Lindblom outlined a number of ways – including the “privileged position” of business – in which business firms and their associations influence public policy. Thomas Ferguson has posited an “investment theory” of politics in which “major investors” – especially representatives of particular industrial sectors – fund political parties in order to get policies that suit their economic interests. Fred Block’s “neo-Polanyian” analysis emphasizes groups. Jacob Hacker’s and Paul Pierson’s analysis of “winner-take-all-politics,” which emphasizes the power of the finance industry, can be seen as a recent contribution to the literature of biased pluralism.18
Marxist and neo-Marxist theories of the capitalist state hold that economic classes – and particularly the bourgeoisie, the owners of the means of production — dominate policy making and cause the state to serve their material interests. As the Communist Manifesto put it, “The bourgeoisie has…conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” We cannot precisely test the predictions of such theories, because we lack good measures of policy preferences by economic class. (In Marxist theory, neither income nor wealth accurately signals class position.) We can note, however, that certain “instrumentalist” Marxist theories, including the important version put forth by Ralph Miliband, make predictions resembling those of theories of Biased Pluralism: that interest groups and corporations representing “large scale business” tend to prevail As to empirical evidence concerning interest groups, it is well established that organized groups regularly lobby and fraternize with public officials; move through revolving doors between public and private employment; provide self-serving information to officials; draft legislation; and spend a great deal of money on election campaigns. Moreover, in harmony with theories of biased pluralism, the evidence clearly indicates that most U.S. interest groups and lobbyists represent business firms or professionals. Relatively few represent the poor or even the economic interests of ordinary workers, particularly now that the U.S. labor movement has become so weak.
But do interest groups actually influence policy? Numerous case studies have detailed
instances in which all but the most dedicated skeptic is likely to perceive interest group influence at work. A leading classic remains Schattschneider’s analysis of the 1928 enactment of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, an astounding orgy of pork-barrel politics.23 Still, many quantitatively oriented political scientists seem to ignore or dismiss such non-quantitative evidence. There have also been some efforts (particularly during the Cold War era, when unflattering depictions of U.S. politics may have been thought unpatriotic) to demonstrate that interest groups have no influence on policy at all. Raymond Bauer, Ithiel Pool, and Lewis Anthony Dexter argued that business had little or no effect on the renewal of reciprocal trade authority. Lester Milbrath, having conducted interviews with lobbyists and members of Congress, rated lobbyists’ influence as very low. More recently, Fred McChesney has made the ingenious argument that campaign contributions from interest groups may not represent quid pro quo bribery attempts by groups, but instead result from extortion by politicians who threaten to harm the groups’ interests.
Very few studies have offered quantitative evidence concerning the impact of interest groups based on a number of different public policies. Important exceptions include the work of Mark Smith and that of Frank Baumgartner, Jeffrey Berry, Marie Hojnacki, David Kimball, and Beth Leech.25 Mark Smith examined 2,364 “business unity” issues – over a period of four decades – on which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (arguably a reasonable proxy for business groups as a whole, on this particular set of issues where most businesses agreed) took a public stand for or against. He then calculated six measures of the Chamber’s annual rate of “success” at getting the action or inaction it favored from Congress. The Chamber’s average success rate in terms of proportion of bills enacted or defeated appears to have been fairly high,but Smith did not argue that such success necessarily demonstrates influence. (A batting-average approach to influence would have to assume that stand-taking is unrelated to expectations of success. Further, in order to gauge business’s independent impact and avoid spurious results, data on stands taken by other actors would need to be included as well.) Instead, Smith devoted most of his effort to analyzing the over-time correlates of high or low success, such as variations in the public “mood” and in the partisan composition of Congress.
Frank Baumgartner and his colleagues, in their meticulous examination of 98 cases of congressional policy making in which interest groups were active, investigated whether the magnitude of group resources that were deployed was related to outcomes across those cases. In their multivariate analyses, Baumgartner et al. found a modest tendency for policy outcomes to favor the side that enjoyed greater resources (PAC contributions, lobbying expenditures, membership size, etc.).
Prior to the availability of the data set that we analyze here, no one we are aware of has succeeded at assessing interest group influence over a comprehensive set of issues, while taking into account the impact of either the public at large or economic elites – let alone analyzing all three types of potential influences simultaneously.
Testing Theoretical Predictions
What makes possible an empirical effort of this sort is the existence of a unique data set, compiled over many years by one of us (Gilens) for a different but related purpose: for
estimating the influence upon public policy of “affluent” citizens, poor citizens, and those in the middle of the income distribution.
Gilens and a small army of research assistants29 gathered data on a large, diverse set of policy cases: 1,779 instances between 1981 and 2002 in which a national survey of the general public asked a favor/oppose question about a proposed policy change. A total of 1,923 cases met four criteria: dichotomous pro/con responses, specificity about policy, relevance to federal government decisions, and categorical rather than conditional phrasing. Of those 1,923 original cases, 1,779 cases also met the criteria of providing income breakdowns for respondents, not involving a Constitutional amendment or a Supreme Court ruling (which might entail a quite different policy making process), and involving a clear, as opposed to partial or ambiguous, actual presence or absence of policy change. These 1,779 cases do not constitute a sample from the universe of all possible policy alternatives (this is hardly conceivable), but we see them as particularly relevant to assessing the public’s influence on policy. The included policies are not restricted to the narrow Washington “policy agenda.” At the same time – since they were seen as worth asking poll questions about – they tend to concern matters of relatively high salience, about which it is plausible that average citizens may have real opinions and may exert some political influence.
For each case, Gilens used the original survey data to assess responses by income level.
In order to cope with varying income categories across surveys, he employed a quadratic logistic regression technique to estimate the opinions of respondents at the 10th income percentile (quite poor), the 50th percentile (median), and the 90th percentile (fairly affluent).
Here we use these policy preference data to measure – imperfectly, but, we believe,
satisfactorily – two independent variables posited as major influences upon policy making in the theoretical traditions discussed above. Policy preferences at the 50th income percentile – that is, the preferences of the medianincome survey respondent – work quite well as measures of the preferences of the average citizen (or, more precisely, the median non-institutionalized adult American), which are central to theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy. In all cases in which the relationship between income and preferences is monotonic, and in all cases in which there is no systematic relationship at all between the two, the preferences of the median-income respondent are identical to those of the median-preference respondent. In the remaining cases the two are very close to each other.
We believe that the preferences of “affluent” Americans at the 90th income percentile can usefully be taken as proxies for the opinions of wealthy or very-high-income Americans, and can be used to test the central predictions of Economic Elite theories. To be sure, people at the 90th income percentile are neither very rich nor very elite; in 2012 dollars, Gilens’ “affluent” respondents received only about $146,000 in annual household income. To the extent that their policy preferences differ from those of average-income citizens, however, we would argue that there are likely to be similar but bigger differences between average-income citizens and the truly wealthy.
Some evidence for this proposition comes from the 2011 Cooperative Congressional
Election Study. Based on 13 policy preference questions asked on this survey, the preferences of the top 2% of income earners (a group that might be thought “truly wealthy”) are much more highly correlated with the preferences of the top 10% of earners than with the preferences of the average survey respondent (r=.91 vs. .69). Thus, the views of our moderately high-income “affluent” respondents appear to capture useful information about the views of the truly wealthy.
In any case, the imprecision that results from use of our “affluent” proxy is likely to
produce underestimates of the impact of economic elites on policy making. If we find
substantial effects upon policy even when using this imperfect measure, therefore, it will be reasonable to infer that the impact upon policy of truly wealthy citizens is still greater.
In order to measure interest group preferences and actions, we would ideally like to use an index of the sort that Baumgartner and his colleagues developed for their ninety-eight policy issues: an index assessing the total resources brought to bear by all major interest groups that took one side or the other on each of our 1,779 issues. But it is not feasible to construct such an index for all our cases; this would require roughly twenty times as much work as did the major effort made by the Baumgartner research team on their cases. Fortunately, however, Baumgartner et al. found that a simple proxy for their index – the number of reputedly “powerful” interest groups (from among groups appearing over the years in Fortune magazine’s “Power 25” lists) that favored a given policy change, minus the number that opposed it – correlated quite substantially in their cases with the full interest group index (r=0.73).
Gilens, using a modified version of this simple count of the number of “powerful”
interest groups favoring (minus those opposing) each proposed policy change, developed a measure of Net Interest Group Alignment. To the set of groups on the “Power 25” lists (which seemed to neglect certain major business interests) he added ten key industries that had reported the highest lobbying expenditures. (For the final list of included industries and interest groups, see Appendix 1.) For each of the 1,779 instances of proposed policy change, Gilens and his assistants drew upon multiple sources to code all engaged interest groups as “strongly favorable,” “somewhat favorable,” “somewhat unfavorable,” or “strongly unfavorable” to the change. He then combined the numbers of groups on each side of a given issue, weighting “somewhat” favorable or somewhat unfavorable positions at half the magnitude of “strongly” favorable or strongly unfavorable positions. In order to allow for the likelihood of diminishing returns as the net number of groups on a given side increases (an increase from 10 to 11 groups likely matters less than a jump from 1 to 2 does), he took the logarithms of the number of pro groups and the number of con groups before subtracting. Thus:
Net Interest Group Alignment = ln(# Strongly Favor + [0.5 * # Somewhat Favor] + 1) – ln(# Strongly Oppose + [0.5 * # Somewhat Oppose] + 1).
Below we also report results for comparable group alignment indices that were computed separately for the mass-based and for the business-oriented sets of groups listed in Appendix 1.
Our dependent variable is a measure of whether or not the policy change proposed in
each survey question was actually adopted, within four years after the question was asked. (It turns out that most of the action occurred within two years). Of course there was nothing easy about measuring the presence or absence of policy change for each of 1,779 different cases; Gilens and his research assistants spent many hours poring over news accounts, government data, Congressional Quarterly publications, academic papers and the like.
In order to test among our theoretical traditions, we begin by considering all organized interest groups together, not distinguishing between mass-based and business-oriented groups.
Within a single statistical model, we estimate the independent impact upon our dependent variable (policy change) of each of three independent variables: the average citizen’s policy preferences (preferences at the 50th income percentile); the policy preferences of economic elites (measured by policy preferences at the 90th income percentile); and the stands of interest groups (the Net Interest Group Alignment Index).
Later, in order to distinguish clearly between Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased
Pluralism, we will use two separate measures of net interest group alignment, one involving only mass-based interest groups and the other limited to business and professional groups. The main hypotheses of interest, summarized in Table 1, follow fairly straightforwardly from our discussion of our four ideal types of theory.
In their pure form, theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy (for example, rational models of electoral competition that include no societal actors other than average citizens), predict that the influence upon policy of average citizens is positive, significant, and substantial, while the influence of other actors is not.
Theories of Economic Elite Domination predict positive, significant, and substantial
influence upon policy by economic elites. Most such theories allow for some (though not much) independent influence by average citizens, e.g. on non-economic, social issues. Many also allow for some independent influence by business interest groups – and therefore probably by interest groups taken as a whole – though their emphasis is on wealthy individuals. In general, theories of interest group pluralism predict that only organized interest groups will have positive, significant, and substantial effects upon public policy. Influence proceeds from groups, not from wealthy (or other) individuals. Depending upon the type of pluralist theory, average citizens may or may not be well represented through organized groups, but they do not have a great deal of independent influence on their own.
Theories of Majoritarian Pluralism predict that the stands of organized interest groups, all taken together, rather faithfully represent (that is, are positively and substantially correlated with) the preferences of average citizens. But since most political influence proceeds through groups, a multivariate analysis that includes both interest group alignments and citizens’ preferences should show far more independent influence by the groups than the citizens. Truman’s idea of “potential groups” does, however, leave room for some direct influence by average citizens.
Theories of Biased Pluralism, too, see organized interest groups as having much more influence than average citizens or individual economic elites. But they predict that businessoriented groups play the major role.
Recognizing the complexity of the political world, we must also acknowledge the
possibility that more than one of these theoretical traditions has some truth to it:
that several – even all – of our sets of actors may have substantial, positive, independent
influence on public policy. And we must consider the null hypothesis that none of these
theoretical traditions correctly describes even part of what goes on in American politics,
Influence upon Policy of Average Citizens, Economic Elites, and Interest Groups
Before we proceed further, it is important to note that even if one of our predictor
variables is found (when controlling for the others) to have no independent impact on policy at all, it does not follow that the actors whose preferences are reflected by that variable – average citizens, economic elites, or organized interest groups of one sort or another – always “lose” in policy decisions. Policy making is not necessarily a zero-sum game among these actors. When one set of actors wins, others may win as well, if their preferences are positively correlated with each other.
It turns out, in fact, that the preferences of average citizens are positively and fairly
highly correlated, across issues, with the preferences of economic elites (see Table 2.) Rather often, average citizens and affluent citizens (our proxy for economic elites) want the same things from government. This bivariate correlation affects how we should interpret our later multivariate findings in terms of “winners” and “losers.” It also suggests a reason why serious scholars might keep adhering to both the Majoritarian Electoral Democracy and the Economic Elite Domination theoretical traditions, even if one of them may be dead wrong in terms of causal impact. Ordinary citizens, for example, might often be observed to “win” (that is, to get their preferred policy outcomes) even if they had no independent effect whatsoever on policy making, if elites (with whom they often agree) actually prevail.
But net interest group stands are not substantially correlated with the preferences of
average citizens. Taking all interest groups together, the index of net interest group alignment correlates only a non-significant .04 with average citizens’ preferences! (See Table 2.) This casts grave doubt on David Truman’s and others’ argument that organized interest groups tend to do a good job of representing the population as a whole. Indeed, as Table 2 indicates, even the net alignments of the groups we have categorized as “mass-based” correlate with average citizens’ preferences only at the very modest (though statistically significant) level of .12. Some particular U.S. membership organizations – especially the AARP and labor unions – do tend to favor the same policies as average citizens. But other membership groups take stands that are unrelated (pro-life and pro-choice groups) or negatively related (gun owners) to what the average American wants.40 Some membership groups may reflect the views of corporate backers or their most affluent constituents. Others focus on issues on which the public is fairly evenly divided. Whatever the reasons, all mass-based groups taken together simply do not add up, in aggregate, to good representatives of the citizenry as a whole. Business-oriented groups do even worse, with a modest negative over-all correlation of -.10. Nor do we find an association between the preferences of economic elites and the alignments of either mass-based or business oriented groups. The latter finding, which surprised us, may reflect profit-making motives among businesses as contrasted with broader ideological views among elite individuals. For example, economic elites tend to prefer lower levels of government spending on practically everything, while business groups and specific industries frequently lobby for spending in areas from which they stand to gain. Thus pharmaceutical, hospital, insurance, and medical organizations have lobbied for more spending on health care; defense contractors for weapons systems; the American Farm Bureau for agricultural subsidies, and so on.
Initial tests of influences on policy making. The first three columns of Table 3 report
bivariate results, in which each of three independent variables (taking all interest groups
together, for now) is modeled separately as the sole predictor of policy change. Just as previous literature suggests, each of three broad theoretical traditions – Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic Elite Domination, and interest group pluralism – seems to gain support. When taken separately, each independent variable – the preferences of average citizens, the preferences of economic elites, and the net alignments of organized interest groups – is strongly, positively, and quite significantly related to policy change. Little wonder that each theoretical tradition has its strong adherents.
But the picture changes markedly when all three independent variables are included in the multivariate Model 4 and tested against each other. The estimated impact of average
citizens’ preferences drops precipitously, to a non-significant, near-zero level. Clearly the
median citizen or “median voter” at the heart of theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy does not do well when put up against economic elites and organized interest groups. The chief predictions of pure theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy can be decisively rejected. Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all.
By contrast, economic elites are estimated to have a quite substantial, highly significant, independent impact on policy. This does not mean that theories of Economic Elite Domination are wholly upheld, since our results indicate that individual elites must share their policy influence with organized interest groups. Still, economic elites stand out as quite influential – more so than any other set of actors studied here – in the making of U.S. public policy. Similarly, organized interest groups (all taken together, for now) are found to have substantial independent influence on policy. Again, the predictions of pure theories of interest group pluralism are not wholly upheld, since organized interest groups must share influence with economically elite individuals. But interest group alignments are estimated to have a large, positive, highly significant impact upon public policy.
These results suggest that reality is best captured by mixed theories in which both
individual economic elites and organized interest groups (including corporations, largely owned and controlled by wealthy elites) play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence.
The rather low explanatory power of all three independent variables taken together (with an R-squared of just .074 in Model 4) may partly result from the limitations of our proxy measures, particularly with respect to economic elites (since our “affluent” proxy is admittedly imperfect) and perhaps with respect to interest groups (since only a small fraction of politically active groups are included in our measure). Again, the implication of these limitations in our data is that interest groups and economic elites actually wield more policy influence than our estimates indicate. But it is also possible that there may exist important explanatory factors outside the three theoretical traditions addressed in this analysis. Or there may be a great deal of idiosyncrasy in policy outputs, or variation across kinds of issues, that would be difficult for any general model to capture. With our present data we cannot tell.
The precise magnitudes of the coefficients reported in Table 3 are difficult to interpret because of our logit transformation of independent variables. A helpful way to assess the relative influence of each set of actors is to compare how the predicted probability of policy change alters when moving from one point to another on their distributions of policy dispositions, while holding other actors’ preferences constant at their neutral points (50 percent favorable for average citizens and for economic elites, and a net interest group alignment score of 0.) These changing probabilities, based on the coefficients in table 2, are line-graphed in Figure 1 along with bar graphs of the underlying preference distributions.
Clearly, when one holds constant net interest group alignments and the preferences of affluent Americans, it makes very little difference what the general public thinks. The
probability of policy change is nearly the same (around 0.3) whether a tiny minority or a large majority of average citizens favor a proposed policy change
By contrast – again with other actors held constant – a proposed policy change with low support among economically elite Americans (one-out-of-five in favor) is adopted only about 18 percent of the time, while a proposed change with high support (four-out-of-five in favor) is adopted about 45 percent of the time. Similarly, when support for policy change is low among interest groups (with five groups strongly opposed and none in favor) the probability of that policy change occurring is only .16, but the probability rises to .47 when interest groups are strongly favorable
When both interest groups and affluent Americans oppose a policy it has an even lower likelihood of being adopted (these proposed policies consist primarily of tax increases.) At the other extreme, high levels of support among both interest groups and affluent Americans increases the probability of adopting a policy change, but a strong status quo bias remains evident. Policies with strong support (as defined above) among both groups are only adopted about 56 percent of the time (strongly favored policies in our data set that failed include proposed cuts in taxes, increases in tax exemptions, increased educational spending for K-12, college support, and proposals during the Clinton administration to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare).
Majoritarian Electoral Democracy. What are we to make of findings that seem to go
against volumes of persuasive theorizing and much quantitative research, by asserting that the average citizen or the “median voter” has little or no independent influence on public policy? As noted, our evidence does not indicate that in U.S. policy making the average citizen always loses out. Since the preferences of ordinary citizens tend to be positively correlated with the preferences of economic elites, ordinary citizens often win the policies they want, even if they are more or less coincidental beneficiaries rather than causes of the victory. There is not necessarily any contradiction at all between our findings and past bivariate findings of a roughly two-thirds correspondence between actual policy and the wishes of the general public, or of a close correspondence between the liberal/conservative “mood” of the public and changes in policy making.42 Our main point concerns causal inference: if interpreted in terms of actual causal impact, the prior findings appear to be largely or wholly spurious.
Further, the issues about which economic elites and ordinary citizens disagree reflect
important matters, including many aspects of trade restrictions, tax policy, corporate regulation, abortion, and school prayer, so that the resulting political losses by ordinary citizens are not trivial. Moreover, we must remember that in our analyses the preferences of the affluent are serving as proxies for those of truly wealthy Americans, who may well have more political clout than the affluent, and who tend to have policy preferences that differ more markedly from those of the average citizens. Thus even rather slight measured differences between preferences of the affluent and the median citizen may signal situations in which economic elites want something quite different from most Americans and generally get their way.
A final point: even in a bivariate, descriptive sense, our evidence indicates that the
responsiveness of the U.S. political system when the general public wants government action is severely limited. Because of the impediments to majority rule that were deliberately built into the U.S. political system – federalism, separation of powers, bicameralism – together with further impediments due to anti-majoritarian congressional rules and procedures, the system has a substantial status quo bias. Thus when popular majorities favor the status quo, opposing a given policy change, they are likely to get their way; but when a majority – even a very large majority – of the public favors change, it is not likely to get what it wants. In our 1,779 policy cases, narrow pro-change majorities of the public got the policy changes they wanted only about 30% of the time. More strikingly, even overwhelmingly large pro-change majorities, with 80% of the public favoring a policy change, got that change only about 43% of the time. In any case, normative advocates of populistic democracy may not be enthusiastic about democracy by coincidence, in which ordinary citizens get what they want from government only
when they happen to agree with elites or interest groups that are really calling the shots. When push comes to shove, actual influence matters.
Economic Elites. Economic Elite Domination theories do rather well in our analysis,
even though our findings probably understate the political influence of elites. Our measure of the preferences of wealthy or elite Americans – though useful, and the best we could generate for a large set of policy cases – is probably less consistent with the relevant preferences than are our measures of the views of ordinary citizens or the alignments of engaged interest groups. Yet we found substantial estimated effects even when using this imperfect measure. The real-world impact of elites upon public policy may be still greater. What we cannot do with these data is distinguish definitively among different versions of elite theories. We cannot be sure whether we are capturing the political influence of the wealthiest Americans (the top 1% of wealth-holders? the top 1/10th of 1%?), or, conceivably, the less affluent but more numerous citizens around the 90th income percentile whose preferences are directly gauged by our measure.
In any case, we need to reiterate that our data concern economic elites. Income and
wealth tend to be positively correlated with other dimensions of elite status, such as high social standing and the occupancy of high-level institutional positions, but they are not the same thing.
We cannot say anything directly about the non-economic aspects of certain elite theories,especially those that emphasize actors who may not be highly paid, such as public officials and political party activists.
Organized Interest Groups. Our findings of substantial influence by interest groups is
particularly striking because little or no previous research has been able to estimate the extent of group influence while controlling for the preferences of other key non-governmental actors. Our evidence clearly indicates that – controlling for the influence of both the average citizen and economic elites – organized interest groups have a very substantial independent impact upon public policy. Theories of interest group pluralism gain a strong measure of empirical support. Here, too, the imperfections of our measure of interest group alignment (though probably less severe than in the case of economically elite individuals) suggest, a fortiori, that the actual influence of organized groups may be even greater than we have found. If we had data on theactivity of the thousands of groups not included in our net interest group alignment measure, we might find many cases in which a group (perhaps unopposed by any other groups) got its way.
This might be particularly true of narrow issues like special tax breaks or subsidies aimed at just one or two business firms, which are underrepresented in our set of relatively high-salience policies. (Our data set includes only policies thought to be important enough for a national opinion survey to ask a question about it.)
An important feature of interest group influence is that it is often deployed against
proposed policy changes. On the 1,357 proposed policy changes for which at least one interest group was coded as favoring or opposing change, in only 36% of the cases did most groups favor change, while in 55% of the cases most groups opposed change. (The remaining cases involved equal numbers for and against.)
Distinguishing between Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism. Can we say
anything further about whether processes of interest group influence more closely resemble Truman-like, broadly representative Majoritarian Pluralism, or Schattschneider-style “Biased” Pluralism, in which business interests, professional associations, and corporations play the dominant part?
We have already reported several findings that cast serious doubt upon Majoritarian
Pluralism. If the net results of interest group struggle were to help average citizens get their way – with organized groups perhaps representing citizens more effectively than politically inattentive Americans could do for themselves – we would expect that the net alignment of interest groups would be positively and strongly correlated with the policy preferences of the average citizen. But we know from Table 2 that they are not in fact significantly correlated at all. Interest group alignments are almost totally unrelated to the preferences of average citizens.
Moreover, there is no indication that officials’ anticipation of reactions from “potential groups” brings policies in line with what citizens want.44 Empirical support for Majoritarian Pluralism looks very shaky, indeed. We also know that the composition of the U.S. interest group universe is heavily tilted toward corporations and business and professional associations.This fact certainly points toward Biased rather than Majoritarian Pluralism.
To go a step further, theories of Majoritarian Pluralism predict relatively more
independent influence upon policy by mass-based interest groups than do theories of Biased Pluralism. It may be useful, therefore, to distinguish between mass-based and business-oriented interest groups and to investigate how much policy influence each group actually has.
Accordingly, we computed separate net-interest-group-alignment indices for businessoriented and for mass-based groups (see Appendix 1 for lists of each) and included both of them in a new multivariate analysis, along with the preferences of average citizens and economic elites – dropping our previous measure of the net alignment of all interest groups.
The results of this analysis are given in Table 4. Clearly the predictions of Biased
Pluralism theories fare substantially better than those of Majoritarian Pluralism theories. The influence coefficients for both mass-based and business-oriented interest groups are positive and highly significant statistically, but the coefficient for business groups is nearly twice as large as that for the mass groups. Moreover, when we restricted this same analysis to the smaller set of issues upon which both types of groups took positions – that is, when we considered only cases in which business-based and mass-based interest groups were directly engaged with each other – the contrast between the estimated impact of the two types of groups was even greater.
The advantage of business-oriented groups in shaping policy outcomes reflects their
numerical advantage within the interest group universe in Washington, and also the infrequency with which business groups are found simultaneously on both sides of a proposed policy change.47 Both these factors (numerical dominance and relative cohesion) play a part in the much stronger correlation of the overall interest group alignment index with business groups than with mass-oriented groups (.96 vs. .47, table 2). The importance of business groups’ numerical advantage is also revealed when we rescale our measures of business and mass-oriented interest group alignments to reflect the differing number of groups in each of these categories. Using this rescaled measure, a parallel analysis to that in table 4 shows that on a group-for-group basis the average individual business group and the average mass-oriented group appears to be about equally influential. The greater total influence of business groups in our analysis results chiefly from the fact that more of them are generally engaged on each issue (roughly twice as many, on average), not that a single business-oriented group has more clout on average than a single massbased group.
Taken as a whole, then, our evidence strongly indicates that theories of Biased Pluralism are more descriptive of political reality than are theories of Majoritarian Pluralism. It is simply not the case that a host of diverse, broadly based interest groups take policy stands – and bring about actual policies – that reflect what the general public wants. Interest groups as a whole donot seek the same policies as average citizens do. “Potential groups” do not fill the gap. Relatively few mass-based interest groups are active, they do not (in the aggregate) represent the public very well, and they have less collective impact on policy than do business-oriented groups – whose stands tend to be negatively related to the preferences of average citizens. These business groups are far more numerous and active; they spend much more money; and they tend to get their way.
When the alignments of business-oriented and mass-based interest groups are included separately in a multivariate model, average citizens’ preferences continue to have essentially zero estimated impact upon policy change, while economic elites are still estimated to have a very large, positive, independent impact.
American Democracy?
Each of our four theoretical traditions (Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic
Elite Domination, Majoritarian Interest Group Pluralism, and Biased Pluralism) emphasizes different sets of actors as critical in determining U.S. policy outcomes, and each tradition has engendered a large empirical literature that seems to show a particular set of actors to be highly influential. Yet nearly all the empirical evidence has been essentially bivariate. Until very recently it has not been possible to test these theories against each other in a systematic, quantitative fashion.
By directly pitting the predictions of ideal-type theories against each other within a single statistical model (using a unique data set that includes imperfect but useful measures of the key independent variables for nearly two thousand policy issues), we have been able to produce some striking findings. One is the nearly total failure of “median voter” and other Majoritarian Electoral Democracy theories. When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
The failure of theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy is all the more striking
because it goes against the likely effects of the limitations of our data. The preferences of
ordinary citizens were measured more directly than our other independent variables, yet they are estimated to have the least effect.
Nor do organized interest groups substitute for direct citizen influence, by embodying
citizens’ will and ensuring that their wishes prevail in the fashion postulated by theories of Majoritarian Pluralism. Interest groups do have substantial independent impacts on policy, and a few groups (particularly labor unions) represent average citizens’ views reasonably well. But the interest group system as a whole does not. Over-all, net interest group alignments are not significantly related to the preferences of average citizens. The net alignments of the most influential, business oriented groups are negatively related to the average citizen’s wishes. So existing interest groups do not serve effectively as transmission belts for the wishes of the populace as a whole. “Potential groups” do not take up the slack, either, since average citizens’preferences have little or no independent impact on policy after existing groups’ stands are controlled for.
Furthermore, the preferences of economic elites (as measured by our proxy, the
preferences of “affluent” citizens) have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do. To be sure, this does not mean that ordinary citizens always lose out; they fairly often get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically elite citizens who wield the actual influence.
Of course our findings speak most directly to the “first face” of power: the ability of
actors to shape policy outcomes on contested issues. But they also reflect – to some degree, at least – the “second face” of power: the ability to shape the agenda of issues that policy makers consider. The set of policy alternatives that we analyze is considerably broader than the set discussed seriously by policy makers or brought to a vote in Congress, and our alternatives are (on average) more popular among the general public than among interest groups. Thus the fate of these policies can reflect policy makers’ refusing to consider them rather than considering but rejecting them. (From our data we cannot distinguish between the two.) Our results speak less clearly to the “third face” of power: the ability of elites to shape the public’s preferences. 49 We know that interest groups and policy makers themselves often devote considerable effort to shaping opinion. If they are successful, this might help explain the high correlation we find
between elite and mass preferences. But it cannot have greatly inflated our estimate of average citizens’ influence on policy making, which is near zero.
What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute
troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
A possible objection to populistic democracy is that average citizens are inattentive to politics and ignorant about public policy; why should we worry if their poorly informed
preferences do not influence policy making? Perhaps economic elites and interest group leaders enjoy greater policy expertise than the average citizen does. Perhaps they know better which policies will benefit everyone, and perhaps they seek the common good, rather than selfish ends, when deciding which policies to support.
But we tend to doubt it. We believe instead that – collectively – ordinary citizens
generally know their own values and interests pretty well, and that their expressed policy
preferences are worthy of respect.50 Moreover, we are not so sure about the informational
advantages of elites. Yes, detailed policy knowledge tends to rise with income and status.
Surely wealthy Americans and corporate executives tend to know a lot about tax and regulatory policies that directly affect them. But how much do they know about the human impact of Social Security, Medicare, Food Stamps, or unemployment insurance, none of which is likely to be crucial to their own well-being? Most important, we see no reason to think that informational expertise is always accompanied by an inclination to transcend one’s own interests or a determination to work for the common good.
All in all, we believe that the public is likely to be a more certain guardian of its own
interests than any feasible alternative.
Leaving aside the difficult issue of divergent interests and motives, we would urge that the superior wisdom of economic elites or organized interest groups should not simply beassumed. It should be put to empirical test. New empirical research will be needed to pin down precisely who knows how much, and what, about which public policies.
Our findings also point toward the need to learn more about exactly which economic
elites (the “merely affluent”? the top 1%? the top 0.01%?) have how much impact upon public policy, and to what ends they wield their influence. Similar questions arise about the precise extent of influence of particular sets of organized interest groups. And we need to know more about the policy preferences and the political influence of various actors not considered here, including political party activists, government officials, and other non-economic elites. We hope that our work will encourage further exploration of these issues.
Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of
majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.

30
Appendix 1.
Business- and Mass-Based Interest Groups Included in Net Group Alignment Indices
Business and professional groups
Airlines
American Bankers Association
American Council of Life Insurance
American Farm Bureau Federation
American Hospital Association
American Medical Association
Association of Trial Lawyers
Automobile companies
Chamber of Commerce
Computer software and hardware
Credit Union National Association
Defense contractors
Electric companies
Health Insurance Association
Independent Insurance Agents of America
Motion Picture Association of America
National Association of Broadcasters
National Association of Home Builders
National Association of Manufacturers
National Association of Realtors
National Beer Wholesalers Association
National Federation of Independent Business
National Restaurant Association
Oil Companies
Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers
Recording Industry Association
Securities and investment companies
Telephone companies
Tobacco companies
Mass-based groups
AARP
AFL-CIO
American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees
American Israel Public Affairs Committee
American Legion
Christian Coalition
International Brotherhood of Teamsters
National Rifle Association
National Right to Life Committee
United Auto Workers union
Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S.
Not coded as either business or mass-based
National Education Association (includes a mass base of teachers but also university professors)
National Governors’ Association (affected by interest groups rather than acting as an independent group)
Universities (unclear status as businesses or nonprofits)

The Season of Evil
by Gregory Douglas

Preface
This is in essence a work of fiction, but the usual disclaimers notwithstanding, many of the horrific incidents related herein are based entirely on factual occurrences.
None of the characters or the events in this telling are invented and at the same time, none are real. And certainly, none of the participants could be considered by any stretch of the imagination to be either noble, self-sacrificing, honest, pure of motive or in any way socially acceptable to anything other than a hungry crocodile, a professional politician or a tax collector.
In fact, the main characters are complex, very often unpleasant, destructive and occasionally, very entertaining.
To those who would say that the majority of humanity has nothing in common with the characters depicted herein, the response is that mirrors only depict the ugly, evil and deformed things that peer into them
There are no heroes here, only different shapes and degrees of villains and if there is a moral to this tale it might well be found in a sentence by Jonathan Swift, a brilliant and misanthropic Irish cleric who wrote in his ‘Gulliver’s Travels,”
“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most odious race of little pernicious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
Swift was often unkind in his observations but certainly not inaccuratre.

Frienze, Italy
July 2018-August 2019

Chapter 111
The rear terrace was lit by several tall lamps and was deserted and shadowed when Chuck and Alex walked outside through one of the tall French doors.
The sky was partially overcast and there was a fragmented view of the moon over the lake.
The night was still warm but the humidity had lessened and they leaned against the stone balustrade that overlooked the eastern lawn.
“That was quite an evening, Alex, don’t you think? We can call it the night you discovered what an important person you are. There you were, acting like a prince of the blood, chatting up the Pope’s ambassador, concluding multi-million deals and, incidentally, pocketing a cool million. Just think, Alex, about where you were last year at this time. Up in sophisticated Duluth, the Athens of the North, impressing the entire town with your skills and beauty.”
“That’s enough of that, Chuck. I was less than no one in Duluth and you know it. Alex the Living Skeleton or Alex the Roadkill Boy is more like it. I don’t know why you didn’t puke when you carried me into the house the first time. Just like a bride! I did smell bad, didn’t I?”
“I didn’t pay any attention, Alex. And it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference.”
There was silence for a moment and Alex coughed.
“Well…no one ever did that for me before and I will never forget it either. I did OK tonight, didn’t I?”
“You came into your own, Alex. Your sainted mother should have been here.”
Alex punched Chuck, and not gently, in the side.
“Christ, rat child, why did you do that?” he said, catching his breath.
“I hate my mother, you shit, and if she was here, I’d snuff her so fast no one could stop me! Sorry I whacked you but don’t ever talk about that whoring bitch to me again. Now I really mean that. You can beat my ass, you can call me a rat child and whatever you want but do not mention that thing to me again. OK?”
“Jesus, kid, I had no idea….”
“Well, now you do. Do you know what I envy about Claude?”
“His beautiful muscles?”
“You got that right, but I really envy him because he turned his Ma into charcoal and he was only twelve. I wish I had his guts.”
“Or the opportunity.”
“That too. By the time I decided how much I hated her, she was gone. Forget it. Hey, if this deal goes down, I get a million dollars! You know, I was just fooling around but it worked. Pretty good pay for nothing.”
“If I hadn’t agreed, you would have nothing, and don’t forget it.”
“You want a cut?”
“Hell no. It’s yours, Alex. Buy a car with it.”
“I don’t want a car.”
“Every young man wants a car for the mating ritual.”
“I have money now and who needs a car. And I don’t care about the mating game. That’s for fat people with pimples. Now I can pay for my own things and not have to sponge off of you. Which I really hate…. Hey, who’re down at the other end there?”
There was a small clot of people walking into the light from the lamp at the far end of the terrace.
“It’s Gwen by the dress and it looks like Claude too. They have someone else with them….”
“Shit, it’s old Lars! That’s who it is!”
And he stuck his fingers in his mouth and produced an undignified but piercing whistle.
“Alex, show some class, why not?”
“Well, they heard me. They might as well come to us. I’m tired as hell.”
The others began walking towards them, laughing and talking loudly as they came.
Alex watched them coming, silhouetted against the light behind them.
“Chuck, maybe we can get old Claudie to take Gwen off my hands. I mean it doesn’t seem right to boff my new mom. Or maybe I can whisper in her ear that you really love her and she should come to see you more often.”
It was Chuck’s turn to smack Alex hard on the shoulder.
“Ow!”
“Don’t do that, you brain-dead punk, or I’ll toss you down the staircase.”
“Well, if you do that, make sure we have some nice music like tonight. Hey Gwen, it looks like you got fireflies in your hair!”
“My crown, Alex. It’s the diamonds in my crown.”
“Tiara, dear,” Chuck said,“ it’s a tiara, not a crown.”
“Oh shut up, Chuck. Mr. Perfect has to ruin a tender moment with my son.”
“Mr. Perfect spent most of the dinner keeping you from eating your food with your fingers, as I recall. Hello, Lars. Have a nice flight down.?”
Lars was wearing a sweatshirt with the words, ‘I Love My Mother’on it and was now clean-shaven.
“Hi, Chuck! It was a huge plane and I was the only passenger.”
And they shook hands very solemnly.
“You missed a great barbecue, Lars. We had clowns and a merry-go-round and little Alex here jumped naked out of a big cake.”
“Did you do that, Alex?”
Alex was laughing.
“No, Lars, I did not.”
Lars was as slow and literal as ever.
“What do you guys have on? Some kind of a merit badge like the Boy Scouts?”
He pointed to the decorations.
Alex looked down and lifted the badge.
“No, Lars. I had my first sexual experience with a cat, and old Dad here gave me a medal for trying.”
“I don’t believe you, Alex. Cats are much too small to have sex with. They don’t like it either.”
And everyone howled with laughter.
Lars proceeded to discuss his reasons for not wishing to remain in Minnesota. The housekeeper and her husband were not right in the head. They prayed loudly and often in the house and slept in the fireplace. He found them weird and the woman had found one of his erotic magazines when cleaning up and screeched for hours about sin and damnation. Chuck said he would fire them the next day and get sane people instead but Lars decided that he did not like living with strangers and missed his friends after only a few days. There was the question of his participating in living with his friends as opposed to obsessive television viewing and he told them with some pride that he had left all the pornographic tapes behind and was now going to take up carpentry. Or perhaps pounding things out of wrought iron. Chuck hastily came down on the side of carpentry.
As there was no room in the family wing for him, it was decided to give him the entire top floor of an old building his grandfather had once stored art in. Since there were no young ladies anywhere on the estate, Chuck felt that if Lars stayed on the grounds and built things, there was a good chance that the local population would not make an appearance outside the gates with torches and sharp weapons, wishing dialog with Lars concerning their daughters.
It was now getting quite late and as everyone was tired, the group walked back into the house and into the rotunda. Lars went off to his new quarters and his suitcases followed him and the others walked through the dimly lit entrance hall towards the staircase.
The butler and Mr. Mikkelson, chief of security, were standing by the front door as they came in.
Chuck nodded to them as he went up the stairs but Alex walked over to both of them, smiling as usual.
“Gentlemen?”
“Mr. Mikkelson is chief of our security here, Mr. Alex. You wanted to speak with him about the incident earlier?”
“Oh yes. That should not have happened, sir, but considering all the people coming in, I can understand it. Please tighten up security and speak to the people at the gate so it doesn’t happen again. Oh yes, and did they arrest Mr. McKnight?”
“Yes sir,” said the dour security man, “yes they did. Right now he’s in the city jail charged with trespass and attempted battery. We had to take him to a hospital and have his ribs taped. Two of them were broken, it seems.”
Alex smiled.
“He fell down, didn’t he? Well, Frederick, we want to thank you for all your help tonight. I am sure we could never have pulled it off without you and the staff. Could you give them our thanks?”
“Why of course, sir, and thank you for your thoughts.”
“My pleasure, Frederick. Please excuse me, gentlemen. I am very tired and I am going to bed now. Good night.”
They both responded simultaneously.
“Good evening, sir!”
As Alex started up the steps behind the others, the butler turned to his companion.
“Mr. Rush is a truly decent person, George. It’s a pleasure to work for him.”
“Doesn’t look much like the old man but he’s tall enough.”
“Oh no, I was thinking of Mr. Alex Rush. He’s just like his great grandfather but without the bad temper. It’s gentlemen like Mr. Alex that make service a pleasure. Well, I think I will be retiring now, George. Good evening.”
“Good night, Fred. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

There was a man in a dark suit on the landing, standing impassively by the door to the family quarters. He was wearing some kind of device stuck in his ear like the Secret Service and he nodded to Chuck as he walked past. Alex stopped.
“Are you security?”
“Yes sir, I am.”
“Do you stand out here all night?”
“Yes sir, I do. Until seven.”
Alex looked through the open door and then walked through it into the corridor leading to the bedrooms and picked up an armchair. It did not match the rest of the furniture and he suspected that in the past some security people had used it to sit on during the long watches of the night. Someone had obviously put in inside when the new owners had arrived. He picked it up and carried it out.
“Here, sir, let me help you with that,” said the man but Alex set it down and stood back.
“That’s OK, I’m not crippled. I don’t think anyone would mind if you had the chance to sit down if you wanted to. You shouldn’t have to stand up all night. Do you get a break?”
The security man permitted himself a small smile.
“We do sir. There are three breaks during the shift and if I need to take off, I can call someone up here. Thank you for the chair, sir.”
“My name is Alex, not sir. You are…?”
“Joseph Bartka, sir.”
“Well, Joseph Bartka, have a nice night.”
“Thank you very much sir…Alex.”
Alex had made another friend.”

Continued…..
This is also an e-book, available from Amazon:

Encyclopedia of American Loons

Leslie Manookian

The Greater Good is an antivaccine documentary (and illustrative example of the pernicious genre medical propaganda film) that made its rounds in the expected circles, and were promoted by the usual group of conspiracy theorists and anti-science advocates (such as Joe Mercola and Barbara Loe Fisher). They even tried to push it on public schools.
The basic set-up is familiar, and the agenda clear.
Present some tragic stories of “vaccine injuries” to manipulatively appeal to the viewers’ emotions, without too much discussion of details to ensure that it is impossible to verify or falsify (at least one of the central stories has been demolished in court, thus giving the interviewees even more room to recruit the viewer’s empathy in their attempt to build a conspiracy theory targeted at Big Pharma, the courts, all of medicine, science and the need to evaluate evidence carefully; the other cases present no evidence whatsoever that vaccines are actually to blame for the tragic events beyond correlations that do not really seem even to be genuine correlations). Nor does it, of course, mention how vaccines prevented uncountable tragedies by eradicating small-pox and polio, since that doesn’t really fit the chosen narrative.
Create a manufactroversy by pitting a few real experts against a panel of pseudoscientists and conspiracy theorists, then editing he results to fit the desired narrative.
Then dismiss the real experts (but trying to make it seem like everything is fair and “balanced”) and plump for the conspiracy theories and the pseudoscience the “documentary” had built up to accepting all along.
The pseudoscientistst and conspiracy theorists presented as experts include:
Bob Sears, who has now firmly endorsed the anti-vaccine movement, and whose misinformation about medical issues targeted at parents is a serious cause for concern given his celebrity status. In the documentary, he primarily runs a blatantly dishonest toxins gambit and tries to claim, against better knowledge and judgment, that vaccines haven’t been sufficiently well studied for safety (This is false, and Sears knows it; he’s lying.)
Larry Palevsky, who writes articles for anti-vaccine sites and promotes and recommends a wide array of quackery and faith healing, including “acupuncture and Chinese Medicine, chiropractic, osteopathy, cranial-sacral therapy, environmental medicine, homeopathy, and essential oils, along with natural healing modalities such as aromatherapy, yoga, Reiki, meditation, reflexology, and mindfulness.” In the documentary, Palevsky pushes the toxins gambit for all its worth, since it’s a more effective means for scaring people without background in chemistry or medicine than being accurate or truthful; he even tries the breathtakingly intellectually dishonest “the vaccines didn’t save us”gambit.
• John Green III, another anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist.
• Christopher Shaw, a currently legendary, Canadian anti-vaccine crank responsible for several of the garbage “studies” frequently cited by the antivaccine movement.
• Barbara Loe Fisher, the granddame of the anti-vaccine movement herself.
There are also a couple of lawyers (such as Kevin Conway), bent on misrepresenting the role of the vaccine court. It is also worth noting, if anyone had any doubts about what kind of “documentary” this is, that the end credits state that “this film was vetted by Dr. Lawrence D. Rosen, MD, FAAP and Dr. Yehuda Shoenfeld, MD, FRCP for scientific and medical accuracy,” which is more or less like consulting whale.to. Dr. Rosen is an “integrative” pediatrician who is chair-elect of the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Complementary and Integrative Medicine and staunchly anti-vaccine; indeed, he seems to still think that thimerosal causes autism (though he is notoriously vague), which is an idea approximately as well-refuted as flat earth). You can read more about Dr. Shoenfeld here.
The producer, Leslie Manookian (formerly Leslie Manookian Bradshaw), is – apparently – a homeopath, which means she is about as ridiculous as you can get in the realm of pseudoscience (though she had the whereabouts not to list those qualifications on the filmmaker bio page), and has previously been active in the comment sections of vaccine-related blog posts. (She also used to list mercola.com, Mothering Magazine and the anti-vaccine website NVIC at the top of her list of vaccine information sources). After the “documentary”, Manookian has apparently become something of a mainstay at pseudoscience and anti-vaccine conferences, such as Freedomfest, and has been associated with the Weston A. Price foundation, a quack organization if there ever was one. In 2015, Manookian and the foundation’s Kim Hartke managed to get a piece of anti-vaccine propaganda posted as press release on CNBC’s Globe Newswire, consisting primarily of the old antivaxx shedding myth disguised as “news”. (It is discussed here).
Diagnosis: Apparently an influential figure in the antivaccine movement, Manookian is a crank through and through. Dangerous.

Wayne Madsen

Wayne Madsen is a deranged conspiracy theorist whose work is published on the blog Wayne Madsen Report and occasionally picked up by major media outlets out to make fools of themselves – most famously, perhaps, the Observer in 2013 (discussed here) – and even more often by disreputable outlets that don’t really care. Madsen is also a frequent contributor to the Alex Jones show.
Trutherism
More than anything, Madsen is associated with 9/11 conspiracy theories, and he has even self-published a book according to which the attacks were planned and carried out as a joint Israel–Saudi Arabia venture, with the blessing of the US, as a “false flag” operation. In particular, according to Madsen, the 9/11 attacks were “an operation carried out by Mossad, Saudi intelligence, … and elements of the CIA.” The book was the culmination of a decade’s worth of deranged ruminations: Madsen first made some waves with truther nonsense in 2003, when claiming to have uncovered information in a classified congressional report that he said contained information linking the September 11 attacks to the government of Saudi Arabia and the Bush administration through. Even the Saudi Foreign Minister eventually got annoyed with him.
Cynthia McKinney appears to be a fan of Madsen’s work on 9/11, despite the fact that Madsen has pushed conspiracy theories involving her, too.
Israel and Mossad
Conspiracies involving Israel and Mossad are staples in Madsen’s writing. In addition to causing 9/11, Mossad was responsible for assassinating hundreds of Iraqi scientists after the invasion in 2003 (published in The Palestine Telegraph), and in 2005, Madsen claimed that “an unidentified former CIA agent” had informed him that the USS Cole was hit by a Popeye cruise missile launched from an Israeli Dolphin-class submarine, making that, too, a false flag operation (unidentified former CIA agents are common sources of information among deranged people writing in CAPSLOCK on the Internet). Unnamed sources also informed him, in 2010, that Blackwater was conducting false-flag operations in Pakistan, blaming it on the Taliban (in an article published in Pakistan Daily). Moreover, “Israel reportedly has plans to relocate thousands of Kurdish Jews from Israel, including expatriates from Kurdish Iran, to the Iraqi cities of Mosul and Nineveh under the guise of religious pilgrimages to ancient Jewish religious shrines,” says Madsen, the operative word being “reportedly”. That one was picked up by a number of Middle Eastern junk conspiracy magazines newspapers, too.
In 2008 Madsen suggested, in an ArabNews article, that Mossad was behind the criminal prosecution of governor Eliot Spitzer. In particular, Madsen claimed that the prostitution firm that entangled Spitzer in a call girl ring, was as a Mossad front, and that Spitzer was actually outed by Russian-Israeli gangsters angry at Spitzer’s crack down on Wall Street malfeasance. And just to make sure, Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik was an Israeli agent who murdered 77 people on behalf of Tel Aviv.
In general, Mossad (and AIPAC) control the CNN, and – more generally – that “the Israeli lobby owns the Congress, media, Hollywood, Wall Street, both political parties and the White House.”
Obama
Madsen is a birther. In 2008, Madsen reported that unnamed “GOP dirty tricks operatives” had found a Kenyan birth certificate registering the birth of Barack Obama, Jr. on August 4, 1961. Madsen’s claims were duly picked up by the WND.
But not only is Obama a Kenyan – he is also gay. Indeed, claims about Obama’s visits to the bath house and how Obama used basketball pickup games to pick up men, popular on wingnut sites during Obama’s presidency, often originated with Madsen. According to Madsen, Obama has long worn “clear nail polish” and frequented Chicago bathhouses, and during his presidency “White House S&M ring order[ed] special videos from Abu Ghraib;” the White House would also, on Obama’s order, ensure that President Bush’s “feces and urine are classified top secret” and “captured” from special toilets and “flown back from Europe,” which tells you much more about what fantasies run through Madsen’s mind than it does about Obama. Apparently, Obama had homosexual trysts in particular with Representative Artur Davis, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Senate majority leader Bill Frist.
And not only was Obama a Kenyan and gay; he was also a Saudi mole – Madsen was one of the main promoters of that idea, widely popular in certain circles and endorsed, for instance, by Trump’s advisor Roger Stone, who calls Madsen his “friend”.
In 2012, Madsen self-published a book, Manufacturing a President, arguing that Obama was a creation of the CIA, even though he is a Saudi mole and the CIA is controlled by Mossad. The world is a strange place.
A few other claims
Madsen has promoted a dizzying array of conspiracies and wild claims also beyond those mentioned above. A couple of examples:
In 2002, The Guardian picked up Madsen’s claim that the US Navy had aided in an attempted overthrow of Hugo Chavez, his sources being the usual one. The claims actually made it to the US Senate, making a fool of Sen. Christopher Dodd.
In 2005, Madsen asserted that the US was secretly running the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (in a hearing in DRC). Local newspapers (conspiracy rags, mostly) ran with the story, with New African claiming that Madsen’s testimony “was so revealing that the mainstream Western media … have refused to print it,” which is even more evidence for there being a conspiracy. So it goes.
And in 2009, Madsen claimed that unidentified Mexican and Indonesian journalists had been told by unidentified UN World Health Organization officials and scientists that the 2009 H1N1 strain of swine flu virus appeared to be the product of U.S. military sponsored gene splicing (it doesn’t appear that way, not even remotely). Madsen knows a remarkable number of unidentified people who just happen to overhear or be told extremely secret information. The story was picked up by several questionable media outlets, including Russia Today.
Diagnosis: Utterly deranged nutter with a mind unclouded by facts, evidence or reason, who at least lets his bigotry shine through rather clearly in his ravings about world politics. The scary thing is that Madsen appears also to have a lot of influence among those whose agendas would be well served if Madsen’s conspiracy theories were true, which is apparently a substantial number of people, media outlets and politicians.