The Power Broker Quotes

Hospitality has always been a potent political weapon. Moses used it like a master. Coupled with his overpowering personality, a buffet often did as much for a proposal as a bribe.

If the end doesn't justify the means, what does? (Robert Moses)

Jesus didn’t seem very interested in exposing symptomatic sinners—tax collectors, drunkards, prostitutes, etc. Instead Jesus challenged the guardians of systemic sin—the power brokers of religion and politics.

The power brokers of factory farming know that their business model depends on consumers not being able to see (or hear about) what they do.

You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. (Robert Moses)

Periclean Greeks employed the term idiotis, without any connotation of stupidity or subnormality, to mean simply 'a person indifferent to public affairs.' Obviously, there is something wanting in the apolitical personality. But we have also come to suspect the idiocy of politicization—of the professional pol and power broker. The two idiocies make a perfect match, with the apathy of the first permitting the depredations of the second.

...his success in public relations had been due primarily to his masterful utilization of a single public relations technique: identifying himself with a popular cause. This technique was especially advantageous to him because his philosophy--that accomplishment, Getting Things Done, is the only thing that matters, that the end justifies any means, however ruthless--might not be universally popular. By keeping the public eye focused on the cause, the end, the ultimate benefit to be obtained, the technique kept the public eye from focusing on the methods by which the method was to be obtained.

Science, knowledge, logic and brilliance might be useful tools but they didn’t build highways or civil service systems. Power built highways and civil service systems. Power was what dreams needed, not power in the hand of the dreamer himself necessarily but power put behind the dreamer’s dream by the man who it to put there, power that he termed “executive support”.

Maybe individual people seem irrational because they aren’t really individuals! Each one of us is a little nation-state, doing our best to settle disputes and broker compromises between the squabbling voices that drive us.

Perceptions of the modern masons ranged from their being a group of harmless old men who liked to play dress-up... all the way to an underground cabal of power brokers who ran the world. the truth, no doubt, was somewhere in the middle.

My brother always says that real power is not brokered in public.

Nothing he has ever done has been tainted by legality [Robert Moses quoting an anecdote about himself].

Yes, there was racism, but there was also classism. You’re a high-powered corporate attorney. You’ve spent most of your life reviewing contracts, brokering deals, talking on the phone. That’s what you’re good at, that’s what made you rich and what allowed you to hire a plumber to fix your toilet, which allowed you to keep talking on the phone. The more work you do, the more money you make, the more peons you hire to free you up to make more money. That’s the way the world works. But one day it doesn’t. No one needs a contract reviewed or a deal brokered. What it does need is toilets fixed. And suddenly that peon is your teacher, maybe even your boss. For some, this was scarier than the living dead.

Hitler had made it to the chancellery in a brokered deal that conservative elites agreed to only because they were convinced they could hold him in check and make use of him for their own political aims. They underestimated his cunning and overestimated his base of support, which had been the very reason they had felt they needed him in the first place. At the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent in the country's last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign. The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was 'to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy.

To some, the temporal triumph of the Christian community in the world is a sign of God's favor and the essential righteousness of the Christian position. The irony of the matter, though, is that whenever the Christian community gains worldly power, it nearly always looses its capacity to be the critic of the power and influence it so readily brokers.

The spirit of Caiaphas lives on in every century of religious bureaucrats who confidently condemn good people who have broken bad religious laws. Always for a good reason of course: for the good of the temple, for the good of the church. How many sincere people have been banished from the Christian community by religious power brokers as numb in spirit as Caiaphas!

The powerful questions of life produce a dynamic dualism, which interplay creates the operatic structure that we must operate. Can the flesh and spirit coexist? Can inner despair and renewed optimism reside under the same roof? Can we harness humankind’s wretchedness in order to broker its salvation? Should all people seek out perfection or work to accept their fallibility? Should I eschew pain or embrace suffering? Do I cave into the meaningless of my life or actively rebel against the patent absurdity of human existence?

Someday, let us sit on this bench and reflect on the gratitude of man." Down in the audience, the ministers of the empire of Moses glanced at one another and nodded their heads. RM was right as usual, they whispered. Couldn't people see what he had done? Why weren't they grateful?

As much as the constitutionality of the state emphasizes the spreading of social and economic equality and scientific temper, it does not, however, explicitly talk about the unequal stakes inherited by the traditional power brokers. The reconciliation of the horrid past that manifests into the present remains unacknowledged. As a result, the question of reparation and inherited privilege does not feature in the discussions of dominant-caste people. This lack of historical accountability creates a group of self-declared nationalists, religionists, supremacists and merit holders that parade around as pundits proffering distorted versions of Indian society.

But, in the fight of his later career, what is most interesting is that when he realized that, because of the handicap of his religion, his brilliance and idealism would not take him to the top in the world of Yale, he made, within Yale, a world of his own, and a world, moreover, in which, in collegiate terms, he had power and influence.

Homosexuality was banned by the Taliban and considered taboo among adults, but it was not uncommon for Afghan men of means to commit a form of sexual abuse known as dacha bazi, or boy play. Afghan military officers, warlords, and other power brokers proclaimed their status by keeping tea boys or other adolescent male servants as sex slaves.

Dad had said that when this country got hit it would be a surprise to all but the real power brokers. I had a hard time believing his conspiracy theories but not anymore.

Among the tastemakers and power brokers and intellectual agenda setters of late-twentieth-century America, orthodox Christianity was completely déclassé.

What does it mean when individuals can no longer be embarrassed or shamed?

She had a cheerful countenance, and that sometimes disguised her habit of looking on the world with what she called “detached malevolence.

It makes me sick to think about what I and so many girls and women had to do to survive in China. I wish it had all never happened, and that I never had to talk about it again. But I want everyone to know the shocking truth about human trafficking. If the Chinese government would end its heartless policy of sending refugees back to North Korea, then the brokers would lose all their power to exploit and enslave these women. But of course if North Korea wasn’t such a hell on earth, there wouldn’t be a need for the women to flee in the first place. •

(Democracy: a brilliant invention, that Penbury wished he had thought of, whereby citizens could voice their political will on pieces of paper, which actually gave them little or no choice, that were then deposited in a sealed box which, when opened elsewhere, were emptied onto the nearest fire and ignored while the politicians brokered real power between themselves. Genius.)

Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange. (Viking has my full blessing to use that as a blurb.)

The Shadow Brokers leak was by far the most damaging in U.S. intelligence history. If Snowden leaked the PowerPoint bullet points, the Shadow Brokers handed our enemies the actual bullets: the code.

He never addressed it as infidelity. To Jordan Belfort and his men, sex with a Blue Chip was a reflex of sorts – a kind of spasm or procedure or 'niche-service', useful as a form of stress relief; as the girls were never regarded as fully human, there were no problems. There were, the brokers felt, certain liberties to which men of power were entitled.

Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island. Aldrich, a multimillionaire, a card-playing partner of J. Pierpont Morgan, the father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was the ultimate Washington power broker. “I’m just a president,” Roosevelt once told the journalist Lincoln Steffens, “and he has seen lots of presidents.

Napoleon represented the last battle of revolutionary terror against the bourgeois society which had been proclaimed by this same Revolution, and against its policy. Napoleon, of course, already discerned the essence of the modern state; he understood that it is based on the unhampered development of bourgeois society, on the free movement of private interest, etc. He decided to recognise and protect this basis. He was no terrorist with his head in the clouds. Yet at the same time he still regarded the state as an end in itself and civil life only as a treasurer and his subordinate which must have no will of its own. He perfected the Terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution. He fed the egoism of the French nation to complete satiety but demanded also the sacrifice of bourgeois business, enjoyments, wealth, etc., whenever this was required by the political aim of conquest. If he despotically suppressed the liberalism of bourgeois society — the political idealism of its daily practice — he showed no more consideration for its essential material interests, trade and industry, whenever they conflicted with his political interests. His scorn of industrial hommes d'affaires was the complement to his scorn of ideologists. In his home policy, too, he combated bourgeois society as the opponent of the state which in his own person he still held to be an absolute aim in itself. Thus he declared in the State Council that he would not suffer the owner of extensive estates to cultivate them or not as he pleased. Thus, too, he conceived the plan of subordinating trade to the state by appropriation of roulage [road haulage]. French businessmen took steps to anticipate the event that first shook Napoleon’s power. Paris exchange- brokers forced him by means of an artificially created famine to delay the opening of the Russian campaign by nearly two months and thus to launch it too late in the year.

THE BUTCHER AND THE DIETITIAN A good friend of mine recently forwarded me a YouTube video entitled The Butcher vs. the Dietitian, a two-minute cartoon that effectively and succinctly highlighted the major difference between a broker and a legal fiduciary. The video made the glaringly obvious point that when you walk into a butcher shop, you are always encouraged to buy meat. Ask a butcher what’s for dinner, and the answer is always “Meat!” But a dietitian, on the other hand, will advise you to eat what’s best for your health. She has no interest in selling you meat if fish is better for you. Brokers are butchers, while fiduciaries are dietitians. They have no “dog in the race” to sell you a specific product or fund. This simple distinction gives you a position of power! Insiders know the difference.

Blackmail was paid by the tenant or farmer to a “superior” who might be a powerful reiver, or even an outlaw, and in return the reiver not only left him alone, but was also obliged to protect him from other raiders and to recover his goods if they were carried off. It reached the proportions of a major industry, with the blackmailers employing collectors and enforcers (known as brokers), and even something like accountants.

On one side was Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s right-hand man since the Revolution and the architect of the hated whiskey tax. Hamilton came from humble beginnings in the Caribbean but had pulled himself up by the proverbial bootstraps to quickly gain acceptance among the elite power brokers of New York finance. During the Revolution, he was assigned to Washington’s staff and impressed the general, quickly becoming one of Washington’s most trusted advisers. After the war, he was appointed as the first treasury secretary at the age of thirty-two. From that lofty perch he championed industry and big finance and wrote the whiskey tax to promote the advancement of larger, more established distilleries on the East Coast, to the detriment of smaller frontier distilleries. His grave today rests in his adopted city of New York, in a cemetery at the top of Wall Street.

The data we generate just by living—or just by letting ourselves be surveilled while living—would enrich private enterprise and impoverish our private existence in equal measure. If government surveillance was having the effect of turning the citizen into a subject, at the mercy of state power, then corporate surveillance was turning the consumer into a product, which corporations sold to other corporations, data brokers, and advertisers.

One of the hardest lessons to learn in academic life—and for me one of the most disconcerting—is the speed with which a radical insurgency can become orthodoxy. In just a few years a generation of students championing a dangerous new idea are elevated by an initial success into professorships. From these positions of influence they form a powerful network of academic power brokers, which they use to ensure the continuation of the revolution.

Jesus appears to have had no interest in one of the world's great, abiding illusions—justice. At various times, Jesus was dragged before the agents of justice—Caiaphas (the high priest), the Sanhedrin, Pontius Pilate (Jesus made little distinction between religious power brokers and secular ones). One of the most noble systems of justice ever devised responded to Jesus by torturing him to death. Worldly attempts at justice always involve the strong imposing their wills upon the weak. In crying for justice, the weak are usually demanding power to work their wills upon the strong. Perhaps that's why, in world history, Jesus is usually on the losing side. After the world's revolutions, it's often difficult to tell the vanquished from the victors, morally speaking. People in power tend to act the same, despite why they got there. All of which explains why Jesus never got along well with potentates, religious or otherwise.

We don’t do this because we can win. We don’t do this because nobody else will. We don’t do this because it’s the right thing to do. We do it because: Fuck them. Fuck people who use their power to dick over whoever they can get away with dicking over. It doesn’t matter if that guy’s a high school teacher, or a Wall Street broker, or a cop, or a demon inside the shell of a store brand Iggy Pop. You have to punch him in the face because he deserves to be punched in the fucking face. End of story.

To the enormous majority of persons who risk themselves in literature, not even the smallest measure of success can fall. They had better take to some other profession as quickly as may be, they are only making a sure thing of disappointment, only crowding the narrow gates of fortune and fame. Yet there are others to whom success, though easily within their reach, does not seem a thing to be grasped at. Of two such, the pathetic story may be read, in the Memoir of A Scotch Probationer, Mr. Thomas Davidson, who died young, an unplaced Minister of the United Presbyterian Church, in 1869. He died young, unaccepted by the world, unheard of, uncomplaining, soon after writing his latest song on the first grey hairs of the lady whom he loved. And she, Miss Alison Dunlop, died also, a year ago, leaving a little work newly published, Anent Old Edinburgh, in which is briefly told the story of her life. There can hardly be a true tale more brave and honourable, for those two were eminently qualified to shine, with a clear and modest radiance, in letters. Both had a touch of poetry, Mr. Davidson left a few genuine poems, both had humour, knowledge, patience, industry, and literary conscientiousness. No success came to them, they did not even seek it, though it was easily within the reach of their powers. Yet none can call them failures, leaving, as they did, the fragrance of honourable and uncomplaining lives, and such brief records of these as to delight, and console and encourage us all. They bequeath to us the spectacle of a real triumph far beyond the petty gains of money or of applause, the spectacle of lives made happy by literature, unvexed by notoriety, unfretted by envy. What we call success could never have yielded them so much, for the ways of authorship are dusty and stony, and the stones are only too handy for throwing at the few that, deservedly or undeservedly, make a name, and therewith about one-tenth of the wealth which is ungrudged to physicians, or barristers, or stock-brokers, or dentists, or electricians. If literature and occupation with letters were not its own reward, truly they who seem to succeed might envy those who fail. It is not wealth that they win, as fortunate men in other professions count wealth; it is not rank nor fashion that come to their call nor come to call on them. Their success is to be let dwell with their own fancies, or with the imaginations of others far greater than themselves; their success is this living in fantasy, a little remote from the hubbub and the contests of the world. At the best they will be vexed by curious eyes and idle tongues, at the best they will die not rich in this world’s goods, yet not unconsoled by the friendships which they win among men and women whose faces they will never see. They may well be content, and thrice content, with their lot, yet it is not a lot which should provoke envy, nor be coveted by ambition.

In the course of her letter writing, she’d learned a few things about the subtle peculiarities of the South’s power brokers. The Mississippi Sovereigns, like most other rebel groups, preferred to be addressed as Brothers; letters to Mr. Sharif, the director of Camp Patience, were exclusively read and acted upon by his secretary, but could never be addressed to his secretary; the Free Southern State government in Atlanta had a perfect record of responding to every letter, but no sooner than two years after the fact. She learned which methods of attack worked and which didn’t. Any familial relation between appellant and recipient, no matter how tenuous, was to be ruthlessly exploited; pictures of dead relatives or horrific war wounds never did any good, although the refugees in possession of such images invariably demanded they be sent anyway; a direct offer of bribery was more likely than not to elicit an insulted response, but an offer to make a donation to a cause of the recipient’s choosing got the same message across more tactfully. It was, in the end, hopeless work, the letters almost always doomed to fail. But for the refugees who paid or begged Martina to write these pleadings on their behalf, hopelessness was no impediment to hope.

Before the Tower, history was riddled with stories about humanity defying the status quo. Regimes would come and go, nations would be united and then divided, treaties would be brokered and broken… The list went on and on, each generation inventing new ways to seize power, fight power, restructure power. The goal was always the same: change what you didn’t like into something you did. Before the End and the Tower, humanity fought against tyranny, battled their oppressors, and their tales and deeds became noteworthy enough to survive despite the history we lost—kept alive by people who didn’t seem to want to fight anything anymore.

The city in which the shaping by his hand is most evident is New York, Titan of cities, collosal synthesis of urban hope and urban despair. It has become a cliché by the mid-twentieth century to say that New York was "ungovernable," and this meant, since the powers of government in the city had largely devolved on its mayor, that no mayor could govern it, could hope to do more than merely stay afloat in the maelstrom that had engulfed the vast metropolis. In such a context, the cliché was valid. No mayor shaped New York; no mayor—not even La Guardia—left upon its roiling surface more than the faintest of lasting imprints. But Robert Moses shaped New York.

Hitler had made it to the chancellery in a brokered deal that conservative elites agreed to only because they were convinced they could hold him in check and make use of him for their own political aims. They underestimated his cunning and overestimated his base of support, which had been the very reason they had felt they needed him in the first place. At the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent of the vote in the country’s last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign. The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was “to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy.

A 1997 study of the consumer product design firm IDEO found that most of the company’s biggest successes originated as “combinations of existing knowledge from disparate industries.” IDEO’s designers created a top-selling water bottle, for example, by mixing a standard water carafe with the leak-proof nozzle of a shampoo container. The power of combining old ideas in new ways also extends to finance, where the prices of stock derivatives are calculated by mixing formulas originally developed to describe the motion of dust particles with gambling techniques. Modern bike helmets exist because a designer wondered if he could take a boat’s hull, which can withstand nearly any collision, and design it in the shape of a hat. It even reaches to parenting, where one of the most popular baby books—Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946—combined Freudian psychotherapy with traditional child-rearing techniques. “A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. “They’ve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.” Within sociology, these middlemen are often referred to as idea or innovation brokers. In one study published in 2004, a sociologist named Ronald Burt studied 673 managers at a large electronics company and found that ideas that were most consistently ranked as “creative” came from people who were particularly talented at taking concepts from one division of the company and explaining them to employees in other departments. “People connected across groups are more familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving,” Burt wrote. “The between-group brokers are more likely to express ideas, less likely to have ideas dismissed, and more likely to have ideas evaluated as valuable.” They were more credible when they made suggestions, Burt said, because they could say which ideas had already succeeded somewhere else.

Mad world, mad kings, mad composition! John, to stop Arthur’s title in the whole, Hath willingly departed with a part; And France, whose armour conscience buckled on, Whom zeal and charity brought to the field As God’s own soldier, rounded in the ear With that same purpose-changer, that sly devil, That broker that still breaks the pate of faith, That daily break-vow, he that wins of all, Of kings, of beggars, old men, young men, maids,— Who having no external thing to lose But the word ‘maid’, cheats the poor maid of that— That smooth-faced gentleman, tickling commodity; Commodity, the bias of the world, The world who of itself is peisèd well, Made to run even upon even ground, Till this advantage, this vile-drawing bias, This sway of motion, this commodity, Makes it take head from all indifferency, 580 From all direction, purpose, course, intent; And this same bias, this commodity, This bawd, this broker, this all-changing word, Clapped on the outward eye of fickle France, Hath drawn him from his own determined aid, From a resolved and honourable war, To a most base and vile-concluded peace. And why rail I on this commodity? But for because he hath not wooed me yet— Not that I have the power to clutch my hand When his fair angels would salute my palm, But for my hand, as unattempted yet, Like a poor beggar raileth on the rich. Well, whiles I am a beggar I will rail, And say there is no sin but to be rich, And being rich, my virtue then shall be To say there is no vice but beggary. Since kings break faith upon commodity, Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee.

He goes on to contrast his country-bumpkin client with the city-slickers who are trying to frame him, and draws an explicit contrast between the morality of the country and the lawlessness of the city: the kind of crime (patricide) that Roscius is accused of doesn’t fit with a rural lifestyle. ‘Every type of crime doesn’t come from every type of life. Luxury is created in the city. Of necessity, luxury creates avarice. From avarice, recklessness bursts out. And from that comes every type of crime and wickedness. But the country life – which you call uncultured – teaches thrift, conscientiousness and justice.’ Cicero, we should remember, loved Rome; the politics, the law courts, the power-brokers, the back-stabbers, he was born to rise through them all. But he knew perfectly well that a jury of Romans might well see the city/country divide rather differently, and he played to the crowd accordingly.

When the time comes, & I hope it comes soon, to bury this era of moral rot & the defiling of our communal, social, & democratic norms, the perfect epitaph for the gravestone of this age of unreason should be Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley's already infamous quote: "I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing... as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.” Grassley's vision of America, quite frankly, is one I do not recognize. I thought the heart of this great nation was not limited to the ranks of the plutocrats who are whisked through life in chauffeured cars & private jets, whose often inherited riches are passed along to children, many of whom no sacrifice or service is asked. I do not begrudge wealth, but it must come with a humility that money never is completely free of luck. And more importantly, wealth can never be a measure of worth. I have seen the waitress working the overnight shift at a diner to give her children a better life, & yes maybe even take them to a movie once in awhile - and in her, I see America. I have seen the public school teachers spending extra time with students who need help & who get no extra pay for their efforts, & in them I see America. I have seen parents sitting around kitchen tables with stacks of pressing bills & wondering if they can afford a Christmas gift for their children, & in them I see America. I have seen the young diplomat in a distant foreign capital & the young soldier in a battlefield foxhole, & in them I see America. I have seen the brilliant graduates of the best law schools who forgo the riches of a corporate firm for the often thankless slog of a district attorney or public defender's office, & in them I see America. I have seen the librarian reshelving books, the firefighter, police officer, & paramedic in service in trying times, the social worker helping the elderly & infirm, the youth sports coaches, the PTA presidents, & in them I see America. I have seen the immigrants working a cash register at a gas station or trimming hedges in the frost of an early fall morning, or driving a cab through rush hour traffic to make better lives for their families, & in them I see America. I have seen the science students unlocking the mysteries of life late at night in university laboratories for little or no pay, & in them I see America. I have seen the families struggling with a cancer diagnosis, or dementia in a parent or spouse. Amid the struggles of mortality & dignity, in them I see America. These, & so many other Americans, have every bit as much claim to a government working for them as the lobbyists & moneyed classes. And yet, the power brokers in Washington today seem deaf to these voices. It is a national disgrace of historic proportions. And finally, what is so wrong about those who must worry about the cost of a drink with friends, or a date, or a little entertainment, to rephrase Senator Grassley's demeaning phrasings? Those who can't afford not to worry about food, shelter, healthcare, education for their children, & all the other costs of modern life, surely they too deserve to be able to spend some of their “darn pennies” on the simple joys of life. Never mind that almost every reputable economist has called this tax bill a sham of handouts for the rich at the expense of the vast majority of Americans & the future economic health of this nation. Never mind that it is filled with loopholes written by lobbyists. Never mind that the wealthiest already speak with the loudest voices in Washington, & always have. Grassley’s comments open a window to the soul of the current national Republican Party & it it is not pretty. This is not a view of America that I think President Ronald Reagan let alone President Dwight Eisenhower or Teddy Roosevelt would have recognized. This is unadulterated cynicism & a version of top-down class warfare run amok. ~Facebook 12/4/17

Hitler had made it to the chancellery in a brokered deal that conservative elites agreed to only because they were convinced they could hold him in check and make use of him for their own political aims. They underestimated his cunning and overestimated his base of support, which had been the very reason they had felt they needed him in the first place. At the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent of the vote in the country’s last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign. The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was “to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy.” By the time they recognized their fatal miscalculation, it was too late. Hitler had risen as an outside agitator, a cult figure enamored of pageantry and rallies with parades of people carrying torches that an observer said looked like “rivers of fire.” Hitler saw himself as the voice of the Volk, of their grievances and fears, especially those in the rural districts, as a god-chosen savior, running on instinct. He had never held elected office before.

The language of mysticism and spiritual experience cuts a wide swath through the world’s religious traditions, and it presents an alternative theology, that of connection and intimacy. In Christian tradition, Jesus speaks this language when he claims, “The Father and I are one” (John 10: 30), and when he breathes on his followers and fills them with God’s Spirit (20: 22); it appears in the testimony of the apostle Paul, who converts during a mystical encounter with Christ on a road; and it fills the effusive poetry of John the Evangelist, whose vision of God is nothing short of one in which the whole of creation is absorbed into love. When the Bible is read from the perspective of divine nearness, it becomes clear that most prophets, poets, and preachers are particularly worried about religious institutions and practices that perpetuate the gap between God and humanity, making the divine unapproachable or cordoned off behind cadres of priestly mediators, whose interest is in exercising their own power as brokers of salvation. The biblical narrative is that of a God who comes close, compelled by a burning desire to make heaven on earth and occupy human hearts.

Roosevelt wouldn't interfere even when he found out that Moses was discouraging Negroes from using many of his state parks. Underlying Moses' strikingly strict policing for cleanliness in his parks was, Frances Perkins realized with "shock," deep distaste for the public that was using them. "He doesn't love the people," she was to say. "It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people... He'd denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. 'I'll get them! I'll teach them!' ... He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just The Public. It's a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons -- just to make it a better public." Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low -- too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently "dirty," there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses' beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas. And Negroes were discouraged from using "white" beach areas -- the best beaches -- by a system Shapiro calls "flagging"; the handful of Negro lifeguards [...] were all stationed at distant, least developed beaches. Moses was convinced that Negroes did not like cold water; the temperature at the pool at Jones Beach was deliberately icy to keep Negroes out. When Negro civic groups from the hot New York City slums began to complain about this treatment, Roosevelt ordered an investigation and an aide confirmed that "Bob Moses is seeking to discourage large Negro parties from picnicking at Jones Beach, attempting to divert them to some other of the state parks." Roosevelt gingerly raised the matter with Moses, who denied the charge violently -- and the Governor never raised the matter again.

WE ARE THE ONLY TRUE MEDIUMS We the carriers of memory We the conductors and receivers We the stars and suns on earth We the databases of consciousness We the un-system, we the rhythm We the message We the book that’s being written Read spoken and translated Connected across generations with everything living Like planets and seashells in an infinite spiral Where you can’t isolate nothing Where the text is an experience Where borders can’t even be drawn Where lines can’t be drawn because the spiral lasts forever Where the concepts of borders, scripts, divisions, mine, yours The isolation of orthodox science fails Falls We are the true countries We the quantum ur-power stations of nature We the most perfect, most developed technology on Earth Before taxes and birth certificates of fictions This text are the bodies of your ∞ being This text is your body We the transmitters We the books of life The living song Transferrable Open Non-privatizable We the hearts of the earth We the pulse and beat and the harmony of bodies Against the cogs of antediluvian wheels We the trans-national We the divided We the displaced The self-deported and driven further Erased but devious Pagans deported on sunlight and wind Unrealized partisans Wet from the struggle and the fear of lies Of revolutions Whose rotation’s Currency is blood The wealth of nations we are The treasures The brokers of sources of inexhaustible energies Unbuyable Non-privatizable Immortal Because alive We the transmitters We the books of life The living song Transmittable Open Non-privatizable

I see over and beyond all these national wars, new "empires," and whatever else lies in the foreground. What I am concerned with — for I see it preparing itself slowly and hesitatingly — is the United Europe. It was the only real work, the one impulse in the souls, of all the broad-minded and deep-thinking men of this century — this reparation of a new synthesis, and the tentative effort to anticipate the future of "the European." Only in their weaker moments, or when they grew old, did they fall back again into the national narrowness of the "Fatherlanders" — then they were once more "patriots." I am thinking of men like Napoleon, Heinrich Heine, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Schopenhauer. Perhaps Richard Wagner likewise belongs to their number, concerning whom, as a successful type of German obscurity, nothing can be said without some such "perhaps." But to the help of such minds as feel the need of a new unity there comes a great explanatory economic fact: the small States of Europe — I refer to all our present kingdoms and "empires" — will in a short time become economically untenable, owing to the mad, uncontrolled struggle for the possession of local and international trade. Money is even now compelling European nations to amalgamate into one Power. In order, however, that Europe may enter into the battle for the mastery of the world with good prospects of victory (it is easy to perceive against whom this battle will be waged), she must probably "come to an understanding" with England. The English colonies are needed for this struggle, just as much as modern Germany, to play her new role of broker and middleman, requires the colonial possessions of Holland. For no one any longer believes that England alone is strong enough to continue to act her old part for fifty years more; the impossibility of shutting out homines novi from the government will ruin her, and her continual change of political parties is a fatal obstacle to the carrying out of any tasks which require to be spread out over a long period of time. A man must to-day be a soldier first and foremost that he may not afterwards lose his credit as a merchant. Enough; here, as in other matters, the coming century will be found following in the footsteps of Napoleon — the first man, and the man of greatest initiative and advanced views, of modern times. For the tasks of the next century, the methods of popular representation and parliaments are the most inappropriate imaginable.

riots began occurring in the cities of one million or more people. It was started by people, backed by Evans, who claimed the rich and powerful financed Governor Massey’s win, and that the election results were all falsified by a vast right-wing conspiracy of power brokers. Some groups swarmed the various state capitol buildings and began to trash them, breaking statues, destroying offices, and even beating up some of the legislators and their staff. In other locations, cops attempted to stop the rioters, only to be accused of police brutality. Unionized workers brought production to a halt at factories, while others blocked a few ports to keep anything from coming in or going out. Evans was pleased with how everything was turning out so far.

Nietzsche may have been accurately describing the feeble pietism that surrounded him, the saccharine portraits of Jesus from childhood, but he could not have been more incorrect in his analysis that as a religion of the “sick soul,” the preaching of Christ was simply a message of resignation to the powers and principalities. On the contrary, it was the most radical renunciation of the herd mentality that keeps us addicted to the power brokers of this age.

Humanity degenerating into one huge interconnected endlessly fragmenting fleshy sub-Reddit of weird fetishes and fucking doge memes, with the government periodically digging for information they can flog to advertisers and overseas power brokers to kill time and boost the coffers between illegal wars and cumming toxic jizz into the atmosphere.

Icahn’s first experience with a Wall Street boom-to-bust cycle was certainly a disappointment, but it also taught him two lessons he never forgot. First, no one makes money playing the market. A small investor dabbling in stocks is always vulnerable to bigger, more powerful forces that time after time will wipe him out.   Second, if he was going to emerge as a dominant force, he needed more than a broker’s training. He had to gain expertise in a market niche overlooked by the hordes of brokers content to sit by the phone and take orders. His study of empiricism had taught him that “there is a strategy behind everything,” and now he had to determine what that strategy was.

As had happened with several previous decentralized systems, this one had naturally tended toward greater centralization because of the efficiency made possible by specialization. This looked, increasingly, like Napster giving way to iTunes. In that case, the old power brokers—the record labels—were destroyed, but they were mostly just replaced by a new set of power players.

it is the height of incoherence to argue that solar could survive a day on the free market. It costs more — lots more — to generate power from sunshine than it does from fossil fuels. And this will remain the case even if states promote and “invest” in solar, as Dooley’s outlier of a Tea Party group is lobbying them to do. It would remain the case even if utilities were as competitive as curb brokers. Groups like this just help the larger anti-fossil fuel, anti-prosperity environmental movement.

harting the rise of Lehman Brothers, one of Wall Street's greatest investment banking houses, essentially traces the gradual emergence of a powerful, industrial United States. Beginning as cotton brokers in an agricultural society, the first Lehmans to arrive in America helped finance the Confederacy during the Civil War, and then turned to Wall Street to dabble in commodities well into the 1900s.

You are a very beautiful girl, Rosita,” he said. “Thank you, senor” Rosita answered.

Those with the most basic skills have become the new power brokers in society – carpenters, plumbers, and anyone with any experience in medicine or farming are now the leaders, while those who were educated in the modern technology have become redundant. They’ve had to start learning the old skills that previously were replaced by machines run on fossil fuels.

Later in the evening, Michael spoke highly of Denis Healey’s efforts to maintain party unity during Michael’s brief tenure as leader. Denis had as much love for the party as he did, Michael emphasised and Healey even went out of his way after the 1983 defeat to say that Michael should not be saddled with all the blame.Healey and Michael certainly had their differences, but they worked well together, agreeing to approach Brezhnev and broker a deal that would ease tensions concerning the Cruise missiles in Britain and in other parts of Europe. Michael and Denis were concerned about an escalating Russian response. How to stop this super power competition? “We were protesting about it,” Michael said. “We talked to Brezhnev. We said, ‘What about a zero option? To have no new Cruise missiles on either side of Europe?’” The Tory government claimed the Russians rebuffed Foot and Healey and that “we’d made fools of ourselves,” Michael said. Douglas Hurd in the Foreign Office ridiculed the zero option proposal. “Two weeks later, Reagan came out and used the exact phrase, ‘Why not a zero option?’ The Foreign Office then changed its tune. We had a quite sensible foreign policy,” Michael added, “and we were treated as innocents who did not know what was happening in the bloody world.

around, but most of the

wealthiest

When the Bible is read from the perspective of divine nearness, it becomes clear that most prophets, poets, and preachers are particularly worried about religious institutions and practices that perpetuate the gap between God and humanity, making the divine unapproachable or cordoned off behind cadres of priestly mediators, whose interest is in exercising their own power as brokers of salvation. The biblical narrative is that of a God who comes close, compelled by a burning desire to make heaven on earth and occupy human hearts.

fell victim to the very same bureaucratic and political mess that many other intractable policy problems have fallen victim to with the Washington, DC, power brokers; leadership obsessed with the accumulation of power and influence and less concerned with basic problem-solving. Problem-solving

I asked the well-known conservative thinker and publisher Alfred S. Regnery, who had just given a book talk on the importance of limiting the size of government, what he made of the fact that three-quarters of employees doing the work of the federal government are now contractors and that the federal budget for services increases by the day. He was taken aback. It was immediately apparent that the subject was not on his radar.

Collectively, these clans made up the clan-state, in which there is little separation of the clan—with its political and economic agendas—from the state: The same people with the same agenda undertaking the same activities constitute the clan and the relevant state authorities. The clan-state is democracy-challenged: It lacks visibility, accountability, and means of representation for those under its control. The only real counter to a clan's influence comes from a competitor clan, as when one clan sics law enforcement and prosecutorial authorities on a rival one.

The study by energy consultants EnerNex was commissioned by the city’s Local Agency Formation Commission and states the city doesn’t need to contract with an outside company and could easily administer CleanPowerSF through the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. The often-fractured Board of Supervisors has coalesced around the program, known as community choice aggregation, or CCA, and continued to push for some iteration of it even after the PUC commission last year refused to set rates and bring in Shell Energy North America to be the city’s power broker for at least five years.

Perhaps it had nothing to do with the Taliban and everything to do with perverse incentives created by rapid and uneven development in a tribal society whose economic, social, and agricultural systems have been wrecked by decades of war. No external aid is neutral: a sudden influx of foreign assistance creates a contracting bonanza, benefiting some at others’ expense, and in turn provoking conflict. Likewise, it creates spoils over which local power brokers fight for personal gain, to the detriment of the wider community, and can contribute to a sense of entitlement on the part of locals. Access to foreigners, who have lots of money and firepower but little time or inclination to gain an understanding of local dynamics, can give district power brokers incredibly lucrative opportunities for corruption. A tsunami of illicit cash washes over the society, provoking abuse, raising expectations but then disappointing them, and empowering local armed groups, who pose as clean and incorruptible, defenders of the disenfranchised, at least till they themselves gain access to sources of corruption.14

God, put me in the midst of power brokers, decision makers, change agents, thought leaders, missionaries and individuals who are seeking to make this world a better place.

Inclusion is an intention or policy of including people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized, such as those who are disabled or non-neurotypical, or racial and sexual minorities. Inclusion, like diversity, is a step in a better direction, but often is problematic. Though well-intentioned, inclusion presumes there is a group that is in power that has the ability to “bring in” others with less power. This is often a white normative group, so this approach becomes white centering. It uplifts the white power-holders and power-brokers as the ones at the center of the narrative who get to pick and choose who they “include,” while they get rewarded for being “inclusive.” An analogy for why inclusion is problematic is when we say, “Invite us to the table.” Who owns the table? Who sets the rules, manner and way things happen at the table? Contrast this to a model where the disadvantaged people create, set and furnish their own table.

He might love to read, but he was certainly no "greasy grind.

We discovered a chain-reaction effect. Those individuals with the highest levels of amyloid deposits in the frontal regions of the brain had the most severe loss of deep sleep and, as a knock-on consequence, failed to successfully consolidate those new memories. Overnight forgetting, rather than remembering, had taken place. The disruption of deep NREM sleep was therefore a hidden middleman brokering the bad deal between amyloid and memory impairment in Alzheimer’s disease. A missing link.

The power broker in your life is the voice that no one ever hears. How well you revisit the tone and content of your private voice is what determines the quality of your life. It is the master storyteller, and the stories we tell ourselves are our reality. For instance, how do you speak to yourself when you make a mistake that upsets you? Would you speak that way to a dear friend when they’ve made a mistake? If not, you have work to do. Trust me, we all have work to do.

If you are a power broker or have reached a certain level of prominence in our society, you should be using your influence and platform to champion public service and advocacy efforts in your community.

When I graduated from college, I sought out the cheapest rooms or apartments I could find. One of these put me next to a freeway interchange in Oakland California. The experience of living there, biking everywhere and reading the book The Power Broker by Robert Caro, changed my life and made me appreciate all the issues associated with transportation. I saw exactly how and why the freeway interchange gutted my neighborhood and how the main obstacle and danger to bicycling in urban areas was cars and drivers. This was the early 1990s when many people were waking up to these same issues. I participated in some of the first Critical Mass rides in San Francisco and the East Bay and started giving them my transportation cartoons for flyers and posters. I also discovered the (now defunct) “Auto-Free Times” and Alliance for a Paving Moratorium in Arcata, California and started sending them cartoons as well. By 1994 it had become a major theme in my work. (2015 interview with Microcosm Publishing)

Q: Is there a book from your reading that has been particularly inspirational to you? The Power Broker by Robert Caro is the most inspirational book I've ever read on the subject of transportation and urban planning …but I lived in New York City and knew many of the places and people he was talking about. I'm not sure if it would be as inspirational to others. The book won a Pulitzer Prize when it came out in the 1970s. Caro was a newspaper reporter who wanted to write a book about political power– how it was obtained and wielded and what role agencies played in government. In describing the life of Robert Moses, a highway builder, unelected state bureaucrat and creator of the modern “highway department,” Caro was able to describe (in a microcosm) the transportation and political history of America. Another great book is Ivan Illich's “Energy and Equity.” That one is a quick read. (2015 interview with Microcosm Publishing)

If you are a power broker and have reached a certain level of prominence in our society, you should be using your influence and platform to champion public service and advocacy efforts in your community.

was hard to tell how lasting these trends would be. I told myself it was the nature of democracies—including America’s—to swing between periods of progressive change and conservative retrenchment. In fact, what was striking was how easily Klaus would have fit in with the Republican Senate caucus back home, just as I could readily picture Erdogan as a local power broker on the Chicago City Council. Whether this was a source of comfort or concern, I couldn’t decide.

There is some power in sourcing food with a strict ethical code, especially if it’s supporting alternative systems with fewer brokers and middlemen. The problem is figuring out which purveyors are worth the time.

Henry VI’s regime (1450–61): Henry VI’s inadequacy is widely held to have been the primary cause of the political upheavals of the mid-fifteenth century. To assess how this affected the south-west it is necessary, first, to give a brief regional review introducing the major figures; then, to consider the realities of governance, patronage, and landholding in Somerset, Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall. It is only after surveys of the county elites that a regional overview can be undertaken, which summarises the notable aspects, and evaluates those features that were truly ‘regional’ in nature by relating shire and provincial perspectives to national politics and governance (p. 149). In summary, it seems that the dukes of Somerset could not only depend on the cooperation of those directly associated with them (such as the Caraunts), but could also rely on the support of others indirectly through secondary patrons such as Stourton and Hungerford. So, including Stourton-Hungerford clients as indirect connections, analysis of shire positions indicates the extent to which the Beauforts’ influence probably pervaded Somerset political society. Beaufort associates had regularly fulfilled local offices since the 1420s, and of the sheriffs’ terms between 1437 and 1450, almost half were undertaken by Beaufort clients. In comparison, between 1450 and 1461, over a third of sheriffs’ terms were served by Beaufort clients (p. 155). As discussed regarding Devon, during the earl of Devon’s long minority, leading Devon gentry–Sir William Bonville and his clientele–involved themselves in Courtenay dependants’ affairs; hence, on his majority, the young earl lacked local support. The relationship between the earl and Bonville became poisoned after Sir William was designated steward of duchy estates in the county in 1437. This challenge to his authority enraged the earl to resort to violence (p. 174). In the south-west, if the Beauforts provided a Lancastrian focus in the eastern counties, then the duchy of Cornwall provided another further west, where [Lord] Bonville also provided a specifically Yorkist focus (pp. 186–7). Therefore, by a combination of estates, royal offices, and prince’s council membership, [James Butler, Earl of] Wiltshire might have become a provincial magnate–and a national power-broker–if he had had a longer period of time in which to establish himself (p. 188).

Edward IV’s policy of ‘Regional Governance’ (1461–71): During Edward IV’s first reign, Somerset politics was still influenced by the Stourton and Hungerford affinities which may have sought the patronage of Edward’s courtier, Humphrey Stafford. He was the only son of the Beaufort-Stourton client William Stafford by Katherine Chideock, and it was because of his Chideock inheritance (principally focussed in Somerset, Dorset, and Wiltshire) that he was destined to be a leading member of the Somerset gentry. In the later 1450s, Stafford may have been associated with the earl of Wiltshire whose first wife was his cousin (pp. 192–3). The Bonville-FitzWaryn alliance had dominated Devon politics throughout the 1440s and 1450s (see Chapter 5) but on Bonville’s death in 1461, his sole heir was his infant great-granddaughter, Cecily. Naturally, a child could not provide adequate leadership to the Bonville-FitzWaryn connection. Moreover, Bonville’s allies, Lord FitzWaryn and Sir Philip Courtenay, were also both entering their sixties (both were deceased before 1470), and similarly could not provide the dynamic direction that was required. Into this leadership void, stepped Lord Stafford (p. 207). …[Humphrey, Lord] Stafford [of Southwick] became a crucial national–regional power-broker–one of the pillars upon which rested the pediment of Yorkist government (p. 210). It seems clear that Lord Stafford’s land-holding, office-holding, and clientele suggest that he acted as a political core for the south-west region. Stafford’s inheritances already made him a significant figure in Somerset and Dorset but, favoured by Edward IV, he was granted extensive lands forfeited by Lancastrians throughout the south-west, such as the estates of the earldom of Devon. In addition to his own properties, Stafford was showered with many offices in Somerset and Dorset, as well as other positions of immense significance in the region–in particular, his endowment with the most important duchy of Cornwall offices ensured that he dominated Cornwall (p. 221). It seems quite understandable to find that, as a figure of local, regional, and national importance, Lord Stafford’s associations were regional in nature: he was connected to major figures from each county… (pp. 221–2).

Hitler had made it to the chancellery in a brokered deal that conservative elites agreed to only because they were convinced they could hold him in check and make use of him for their own political aims. They underestimated his cunning and overestimated his base of support, which had been the very reason they had felt they needed him in the first place. At the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent of the vote in the country’s last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign. The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was “to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy.” By the time they recognized their fatal miscalculation, it was too late. Hitler had risen as an outside agitator, a cult figure enamored of pageantry and rallies with parades of people carrying torches that an observer said looked like “rivers of fire.” Hitler saw himself as the voice of the Volk, of their grievances and fears, especially those in the rural districts, as a god-chosen savior, running on instinct. He had never held elected office before. As soon as he was sworn in as chancellor, the Nazis unfurled their swastikas, a Sanskrit symbol linking them to their Aryan “roots,” and began to close in on

In fact, the Federal Reserve was helpless only because it wanted to be. Had it been determined to do something, it could for example have asked Congress for authority to halt trading on margin by granting the Board the power to set margin requirements. Margins were not low in 1929; a residue of caution had caused most brokers to require customers to put up in cash 45 to 50 per cent of the value of the stocks they were buying. However, this was all the cash numerous of their customers had.

The Sermon on the Mount crystallizes what Jesus gave to his disciples as the new way of life, the kingdom way of life in a world surrounded by the power brokers of empire.

In democratic America, supposedly, ultimate power rests in the voters, and the man for whom the majority of them cast their votes is the repository of that power. But Wagner knew better. The spectators may have thought he had a choice in dealing with Moses. He knew that he did not. Why, when Moses pushed the appointment blank across his desk, did the Mayor say not a word? Possibly because there was nothing to say. Power had spoken.

For these Silicon Valley power brokers, there was an absurdity to the old-school Bitcoiners who crowed to each other about being the leaders of a new global movement and getting rich in the process. The convention center happened to be hosting the Big Wow! ComicFest at the same time as the Bitcoin conference, and it was sometimes hard to tell who among the long-haired nerds were there for the comics and who for the virtual currency.

But Cohn—a Jewish anti-Semite, a gay homophobe, and a debt-laden power broker—was often not what he seemed.13

6.​Pay your brokers well: the power of good advice

Mussolini lacked one last guarantee of his survival: international legitimation and economic aid. In 1926, J. P. Morgan partner Thomas Lamont, another Fascist proselytizer, brokered a $100 million loan from the American government to the regime. Implicitly sanctioning Mussolini’s power grab, the act started a century of US support for right-wing authoritarian leaders.21

He’s right, of course. I knew it even with the fight kicking around in my belly and that anger bubbling in the back of my throat. I couldn’t take Gus alone, much less four of him. But fucking Randall—he should know that’s not the point. We don’t do this because we can win. We don’t do this because nobody else will. We don’t do this because it’s the right thing to do, or it’s the only thing we can do. We do it because: Fuck them. Fuck people who use their power to dick over whoever they can get away with dicking over. It doesn’t matter if that guy’s a high school teacher, or a Wall Street broker, or a cop, or a demon inside the shell of a store-brand Iggy Pop. You have to punch him in the face because he deserves to be punched in the fucking face. End of story.

The eyewitness who saw the recent H-bomb test said that it was as if he were watching the end of the world. Indeed. And who in the world is empowered to initiate the events that would lead to that? Ultimately some individual man. For a current example of such a man, a Kansas City haberdasher who came to that power by way of the usually irrelevant office of vice president, brokered, in his case, by hacks in the back rooms of a Democratic convention. Or the other current example, a former Russian Orthodox seminarian who went on to the religious, racial, ethnic, and political murder of as yet uncounted millions of his own people. Moreover, one can imagine the present state of the world if the sophisticated scientists of Germany had been the first to develop an atomic bomb and thus put it into the hands of Adolf Hitler. But in all the ages to come, in all the countries that will acquire or develop these weapons, who knows what tyrants or fools or incompetents, what heartless egotists of minuscule and reckless intelligence, might come to power and gain control of these weapons?

A stubborn eccentric who has spent most of his life waiting and planning for his ascension, even at the cost of his relationships with his own sons, the former Prince of Wales is not only far less popular than his predecessor and his successor, he has also been a thorn in the side of the institution. Despite the fact he’s well-liked by world leaders and global power figures, during the life of his mother, he was never fully embraced by power brokers within the system, the Palace operators and partisans with links to the British establishment, including the government. When he was Prince of Wales, some senior Buckingham Palace aides had expressed to me and others that they felt the then next in line didn’t quite have the moxie or vision for the family’s next chapter. Perhaps they were right.

He [Robert Moses] built parks and playgrounds with a lavish hand, but they were parks and playgrounds for the rich and comfortable...Recreation facilities for the poor he doled out like a miser.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

Estate-Planning Checklist (for each of you) • Up-to-date will • Healthcare proxy • Power of attorney • Living will • HIPAA form •  List of what you are bequeathing • Legacy requests •  Where your important documents are kept • What assets you have • Where your accounts are located • Account numbers, PINs, and passwords •  Names of trusted people who know where your car keys, house keys, and safe deposit box keys are kept • Important names and contact information: ○ Attorney/financial adviser/CPA ○ Insurance broker ○ Healthcare providers ○ Estate attorney ○ Bank name and branch office location ○ Safe deposit box location and number

The Colorado Basin, then, is a few years away from permanent drought, and it will have to make do with whatever nature decrees the flow shall be. If the shortages were to be shared equally among the basin states, then things might not be so bad for Arizona. But this will obviously not be the case; there is that fateful clause stipulating that California shall always receive its full 4.4-million-acre-foot entitlement before Phoenix and Tucson receive a single drop. What began as an Olympian division of one river’s waters emerged, after fifty years of brokering, tinkering, and fine-tuning according to the dictates of political reality, as an ultimate testament to the West’s cardinal law: that water flows toward power and money.

It was a civics lesson which cities across the northern tier of the country would all learn in similar fashion. Dzink and his Polish supporters had, in good American fashion, convinced their elected representatives of the justice of their cause, only to have the federal government countermand their efforts with a combination of black intelligence operations directed against American citizens and overwhelming military force. The government’s actions in the Sojourner Truth case would also establish a precedent in both housing and racial matters for the post-war period. Whenever blacks claimed discrimination, they could be sure of the federal government’s concern. Whenever the Catholic ethnics would claim that their neighborhoods were being targeted for destruction, they were written off as racists suffering from paranoid delusion. No matter how much clout the ethnics could muster locally, it could always be countered by some judge, appealing to higher moral principles. The same was true of Poles in Detroit, where “vested powers might have considered Polish Detroiters and neighborhood brokers expendable.” One year later when the worst race riot in the history of the country broke out in Detroit, the Poles again were blamed, but with the experience of Sojourner Truth behind them, Detroit’s residents were skeptical. “After the street battles of 1943,” Capeci writes, “Conant Gardens residents remembered ‘something funny’ about the 1942 housing controversy, something phoney that seemed to come from outside the neighborhood.” Residents of Chicago would soon notice the same thing.