And never stopped!



In 1920, Sinclair, Marland, and other oilmen helped finance the successful presidential bid of Warren Harding. One oilman from Oklahoma told a friend that Harding’s nomination had cost him and his interests $1 million. But with Harding in the White House, a historian noted, “the oil men licked their chops.” Sinclair funneled, through the cover of a bogus company, more than $200,000 to the new secretary of the interior, Albert B. Fall; another oilman had his son deliver to the secretary $100,000 in a black bag. In exchange, the secretary allowed the barons to tap the navy’s invaluable strategic oil reserves. Sinclair received an exclusive lease to a reserve in Wyoming, which, because of the shape of a sandstone rock near it, was known as Teapot Dome. The head of Standard Oil warned a former Harding campaign aide, “I understand the Interior Department is just about to close a contract to lease Teapot Dome, and all through the industry it smells….I do feel that you should tell the President that it smells.”

Try Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton’s actions when Jefferson tied Aaron Burr.

No

Jackson

Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton

Franklin Pierce Was a tool.

Grant’s administration was one as the Gilded Age.

https://open.substack.com/pub/...=post&utm_medium=web

How the Corporate Takeover of American Politics Began | Robert Reich

https://youtu.be/bbbgfnpJN9w?si=r47iNAuVA9DuFc_H

Today is the anniversary of the worst memo in history
Robert Reich
Aug 23, 2025

Excerpt:

Today marks the start of the slide that ended in the catastrophe of Trump.

On August 23, 1971, fewer than two months before he was nominated to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Lewis F. Powell, Jr. wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

It was titled “Attack On American Free Enterprise System” and it outlined ways in which corporate America should defend and counter attack against "disquieting voices” — environmentalists, consumer advocates, and labor unions. Powell warned that their voices were growing louder and their influence was gaining in the halls of Congress.

I remember the time very well.