www.thornwalker.com/ditch/anyday_notes.htm

Our Walter Karp table of contents
TOC for Neff's essay


 

NOTES

1. He did not make the same mistake about government employment:

Military pork barrel spreads special privilege far beyond the confines of the arms contractors; it directly creates at least two million industrial jobs, every holder of which is all too dependent for his well-being on the well-being of the party oligarchs and the success of their corrupt policies. By virtue of the military budget, a large number of ordinary citizens have been given a direct stake in corrupt power. (IE+, p. 270)


2. "The Presidency '76: The Morning Line," Libertarian Forum, February 1976, p. 1.


3. Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency 1972-1976 (New York: New American Library, 1977), p. 34. Challenging the seating of delegations on the grounds of racial discrimination had been a defining feature of the 1972 convention.


4. "And further complicating the picture on the Democratic side was a party decision to rule out winner-take-all primaries and permit proportional allocation of delegates according to primary results — a system that seemed all but certain to inhibit any one candidate from getting the required majority of national-convention delegates, and assuring a brokered convention." Witcover, p. 35.


5. "Who's Behind .....?" Libertarian Forum, June 1976, p. 2.


6. Murray N. Rothbard, "Economics & Politics: The Carter Administration" (Guilford, Conn.: Jeffrey Norton Publishers, Inc., 1977), Audio Forum Sound Seminars, Tape #970.


7. The story is told in Steven M. Gillon, Democrat's Dilemma: Walter F. Mondale and the Liberal Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 256-59. It is to be remembered that when the oligarchy had finally achieved its object — control of the party's presidential nomination — Walter Mondale, Hubert Humphrey's protégé, was the first beneficiary of their success. See especially BA, pp. 216-18, for Karp's summary of the real dilemma of the Democrats.

The greatest flaw in LUS is that Karp provides no account of the 1984 election. Clearly, if the party oligarchy deliberately lost the 1972 election and then destroyed its own president in 1977-81 for the sole purpose of nominating someone like Mondale, readers should have been given the story of how the party got behind Mondale to defeat Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson, his two rivals. Surely, the climax of "the most important untold story of our time" (see letter) should have been included, with details of the machinations the oligarchs undertook, both in behalf of Mondale's campaign and in their own reelection efforts.


8. "When a Republican wanted to run for Jackson's seat in 1976, Senator Jesse Helms, moneyman of the Republican Right, refused to give him a penny to challenge 'Scoop,' traditional New Deal liberal. Another short course in the 'political spectrum.'" (LUS, p. 70) For a glimpse of the personal, political, or financial considerations that might go into a candidate's not getting money from his party organization, I refer the reader to Robert A. Caro's portrait of Lyndon Johnson's work on the Congressional Campaign Committee in the 1940 elections in The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), pp. 627-64.


9. LUS, p. 59. Karp is quoting Paul Laxalt of Nevada, "Governor Reagan's man in the Senate."


10. "Can the press tell the truth?" Harper's, January 1985, p. 50.


11. The reader interested in this subject should acquaint himself with Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage Books, 1971). Particularly of interest is their criticism of Daniel P. Moynihan's "disintegration of black families" thesis in his famous study, "The Negro Family." They offer their own account in chapter 8, "Migration and the Rise of Disorder in the Cities," pp. 222-58.


12. It is the first essay in BA, and there is titled "The two Americas."