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CITY SCAPER

Millions of trees were destroyed to make room for the apartment buildings lining city blocks. It is easy to forget that the inside dwellers are a part of the natural world. The drive for power and wealth is out of balance with protecting the environment.

  Small Beginnings, Unimaginable Consequences

Friends seem surprised by the Trump administration’s move toward a Fascist regime. I remember a college history professor saying that when our country goes, it will embrace socialism for the wealthy—Fascism, not Communism. He lectured that an oligarchy of capitalists would manage the country, receiving the benefits of your tax dollars. This was never so clear as when I read that 400 million dollars on the Government Procurement list was for armored Teslas—the ugly cyber ones no one wants to buy. Because of public uproar, the item on the list was renamed armored electric vehicles, making it easier to pass unnoticed.

  After years of preparation, the coup attempt on January 6th, 2021, continues today. It began during the Civil Rights movement in the ‘60s. What we see today is a result of intense planning. Though I rarely discuss books, there are two that explain the direction our country is going in. Whether you are right or left leaning, these books are informative. Both are worthy of Book Club discussions. The following are Amazon descriptions of the book. I guarantee you will look at the political changes of today in a new light. During Trump’s first election, I heard him say, “Don’t you just love the uneducated.” Don’t be one of them. Please read the books before they, too, are banned.

  Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean

The movement started as a little-known program at the University of Virginia. It expanded to think tanks designed to take over the education system, the presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, and the media. Because there aren’t enough people in the top tier, they lured the religious right and uneducated to be their voting block. The book came out in 2018 but was recently updated with a foreword.  

  ABOUT DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS

Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Finalist for the National Book Award
The Nation‘s “Most Valuable Book”
“[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.”—The Atlantic
“This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If you’re worried about what all this means for America’s future, you should be.”—NPR
An explosive exposé of the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution.

“Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. However, billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.

  In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last-gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.

  Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy.

  Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. With Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.”

  The second recommendation is The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by journalist Jeff Sharlet. It was published in 2008. It inspired a NETFLIX documentary, though it doesn’t tell the whole story. I met members of The Family whose college children worked for them as waiters, housekeepers, and groundkeepers to gain access to power. The group teaches autocratic leaders that their power and wealth are proof of being anointed by God and that they are free from worry about following God’s commandments. They are guaranteed access to heaven no matter what they do.

“Of all the important studies of the American right, The Family is undoubtedly the most eloquent. It is also quite possibly the most terrifying.”  — Thomas Frank, New York Times bestselling author of What's the Matter with Kansas? 

“The book investigates the political power of The Family or The Fellowship, a secretive fundamentalist Christian association led by Douglas Coe. Sharlet says that Coe preaches a leadership model and a personal commitment to Jesus Christ comparable to the blind devotion that Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot demanded from their followers.

One year after the book's initial publication, the sex scandals of prominent members of the Family, Nevada Senator John Ensign and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, as well as accusations that the Family was illegally subsidizing the rent of members of Congress and involved in the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which would have imposed the death penalty for homosexuality in Uganda, thrust the notoriously secretive organization into the national spotlight.

They insist they're just a group of friends, yet they funnel millions of dollars through tax-free corporations. They claim to disdain politics, but congressmen of both parties describe them as the most influential religious organization in Washington. They say they're not Christians but simply believers.

Behind the scenes at every National Prayer Breakfast since 1953 has been the Family, an elite network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful. Their goal is "Jesus plus nothing." Their method is backroom diplomacy. The Family is the startling story of how their faith—part free-market fundamentalism, part imperial ambition—has come to be interwoven with the affairs of nations around the world .________________________________________________________________________________________________

City-Scaper is a 24 by 20 framed acrylic painting on canvas. It is available for $780, shipped free in the continental U.S. You can purchase online at https://www.eichingerfineart.com/workszoom/1353405/city-scaper#/ 

 Questions?  Contact me at [email protected] 

  Please comment on this blog. I know it is long. But your thoughts are important to share. 

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The Water Factor has several themes besides the corporate takeover of water. It also explores what it takes to make an activist.  It  is an International Firebird Book Award winner for best dystopian novel and a Literary Titan Gold Award recipient for best thriller. The novel is available in ebook, paperback, and audio formats. It can be purchased on AMAZON, Barnes and Noble, Annie Bloom Books, and Powell Books Online at and as an audiobook on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes. Ask your bookstore to order a copy from Ingram. Please leave a review.

Mark your calendar 

Location: Annie Bloom's Books 

Date: Thursday, March 13th - 7 pm
Address: 7834 SW Capital Hwy, Portland, Oregon 97219

Annie Bloom's Books welcomes Portland author Marilynne Eichinger for a reading from The Water Factor: A Rightfully Mine Novel.