Libertarian Insider Claims That CATO Harassment Scandal Is “Harvey Weinstein On Steroids”

3 Comments

1. Jonnie Candito

2. Tentacle Porn at the Kochtapus? Say it ain’t so!.

3. Reducing the sexual harassment by Ed Crane, at Cato, to a cut and dry equasion, based on rule/policy/law breaking and settlements, isn’t going to change anything, because it eliminates the humanity that eventualized the harassment. I’m still contemplating the ‘me too’ attacks on Ed Crane; women were not the same people then (when Ed founded Cato) as they are now. The legacy of abuse is not going to die willingly, women lived with the expectation back then, and now, that if we didn’t put out we would be killed, first humiliated and disgraced, in the most awkward manner conceivable, and then killed in the most gruesome manner, every option was a nightmare, we just knew to shut up and go along with the game plan, and even then if we fucked up in any way death was a likely eventuality, rage and battery along with rape were our normal expectations in a day, that was the work world, any one who says otherwise is lying so that answers the question, for all of the people who are wondering how Harvey Weinstein got so many women to procure for him, and how he got so many actresses to put out: the alternative was macabre, and all men were Harvey. This was true at Cato, I was threatened frequently, it’s just what men did, maybe it made them feel in control, maybe the ‘put-out pecking order’ made it l possible, with a sort of “that’s too bad for her,” attitude by all women toward one and other. Since there was no alternative way that women were treated we didn’t know anything else. Ed threatened to kill me more than once, he had others threaten me; men were always in a frothing rage, a ‘you wronged me and I will make you pay’ vitriol.’ They were all lewd, angry, and threatening, all of the time. Murray Rothbard was nice to me but vicious on the subject of Ed; women understood that ‘niceness’ was for the moment and could turn into rape when you were alone with a man, in fact you would be told that you were asking for it; the women at Cato were mostly screetchingly vicious, as if that was their proud post, they really enjoyed it. Mary Ann, the beautiful vixen art director of Ed’s magazines, worked in the office next to mine, separated by an open sliding glass window, and she never talked to me once in two years, because she outranked me. She was the most beautiful woman at Cato, she wore Gloria Vanderbilt type jeans to work. Ed commented on how beautiful she was constantly, “Now that’s the way a woman should look in jeans!” She was married, and she was determined to conquer Ed with her ‘womanly wiles,’ it was so, ‘Biblical,’ that it would send me into laughing fits, which made her angry so she told Ed that I had persecuted her for being Jewish, “Oh, Ed, if only Nancy were not so unkind and so angry at the Jews, she thinks we killed Jesus “. Maybe Christians think that, but I am Tibetan Buddhist, and I have not got a lot of familiarity with what Christians and Jews did or do. But Ed believed her, Ed believe any lie that anyone would come up with, because Ed was addicted to his own Adrenalin and he lived to be pissed off about something, anything, and everything. I thought that Mary Ann was horrible, but she was in reality just like every other female going up the ranks in any ad agency or publishing company. I was so happy not to be one of them, I felt like my days were filled with sunshine and they lived in an angry fog. Now such anti feminist behavior, or the sort evidenced by every female at Cato, (including Patti, the token lesbian) would get the perpetrator ostracized; but back then it was the only way, all day every day. Men constantly offered women to other men, constantly talked about raping women, and always threatened to murder the ones who were ‘trouble,’ it was particularly obnoxious at Cato because all of the men had female underlings who they vacillated between subjecting to longwinded hours of mansplaining or short busts of verbal abuse. I remember every second of it vividly, as if in slow motion when you know you are going to die: Oddly; Ed did accidentally injure me once, with no intention of or even knowledge that I was all but fatally injured, not even for years after, I didn’t tell anyone, but it was so near a deadly injury that I experienced it as if ED had deliberately set out to kill me, the sense of being killed is overwhelming, it puts you in a thirty year emotional coma. I remember feeling like I was standing in front of an oncoming train, regaining consciousness the next day and being amazed and dumbfounded that I was still alive. I can still hear the deafening oncoming train noise, but now it doesn’t bother me, then it was mind numbing, death was knocking at my door, breathing down my neck for several years after that, due to complications. I healed, and after thirty years my emotions were restored to ‘normal’ as well. It was such a high impact experience for me, for him it was just another dalliance, filled with kindness and consideration, he was certainly about that. He had no idea that for me it nearly ended in death. I told Ed about what happened, thirty years later, but I don’t think that he was listening. At the time he mocked me, for acting strangely. I thought it was oddly rude, but he probably did that to all women. (I had an infected IUD implant, complete with peritonitis; stupidly following his lead, I made the wrong move in the sack and all hell broke lose inside of me, I nearly hemorrhaged to death internally; passing out from the pain that I did not foresee living through it. (I liked Ed so much that I was just happy to be with him, death and other rude interlopers be damned). When I came to I realized that I had to get out of there before becoming the dead girl in his bed who ruined his life. I fled, he probably thought I was angry; for certain he felt irritated. Back then men laughed if anything dangerous or life threatening happened to women and women had no recourse at all, plus all of the other women got in on the game to make things worse, as if somehow they could spare themselves by packing all of the abuse on to a specific victim. It will be like that for another fifty years, but eventually sexually subjugating women will go the way of putting thumb ring tethers on them.
   I think that people need to see as much ‘thinking’ from smart women, on any forum, regarding any issue, as can be made available. Ed was a product of women being silent on every subject, particularly on their own interests, which were invariably shut down by men.
   Melinda, is a long time detractor of Ed Crane, she blocked me and ended her comment with ‘have a nice life,’ I’m guessing that’s her way of saying fuck you: Here is how the correspondence went (not well, she hates Ed Crane, I don’t) I think she only wants input from people who can work themselves up into a frothing righteous indignation aimed at Ed specifically. Why not just hate everyone, I mean the ideal libertarian of her esteem does not exist. Melinda is upset that she shares a gene pool with Ed Crane, (so do I) I don’t mind sharing genes with either of them.
   Melinda Pillsbury-Foster wrote: Freedom is not about extracting money from the Kochs for lining one’s own nest. Freedom is about individual rights, living honorably, and operating in a real free market, volitionally and never using deceit, violence or coercion in your dealings with others. None of those values are evident in what you have written, which is obviously intensely personal for you.
   The women you complain about who were offering Crane sexual favors were there because that was the value they had to offer. In many cases, likely the only value. Crane selected them as part of the culture which best suited him.
   Crane, as creator of the toxic culture you describe, is responsible. He had all the power, all access to funds, and all of the control. It was all about him, him, him. Money and sex for him. Power and money are strong motivators, but people of conscience adhere to different values, ones which also tell their story about the individual.
   Crane destroyed the lives and stole the money, time and creativity of the thousands of good people, honestly committed to freedom, who worked, became disillusioned, and left the Libertarian Party. The Kochs enabled Crane for their own corporate agenda. That agenda included oil, the right to pollute without consequence, and profit from their evasions and lies.. They are also traitors to the vision for individual rights and a free market which moved good people to become active.
   If I could I would revoke Crane’s right to use DNA originating from my family line, the Reasoners, I would.
   Set up and altar to Crane, if you like. That is your right. But attempts to justify his cooperative relationship to sideline the Freedom Movement through the Kochs are both outrageous and funny.
   Glad you evaded the grasping hands aimed at your trust fund. Have a nice life.
   I Replied:
   “Personal” is such an understatement, even if ‘the personal is political,’ I never experienced anything even remotely libertarian at Cato, I’m still looking for the manifestation of Libertarian ideals in their publications…
   Regarding the recent article in Politico, slurring Ed Crane: Did you invite Ed to speak his mind, while we are all here, I would like to know where Ed stands on the issues. I’m sure he would just pelt us with 1950’s type platitudes. But, I would like to point out that Ed, although a pickled frat boy, is also an extremely intelligent person surrounded by a bunch of usurpers to the thrown (people whose primary interest in CATO is getting at Charles money) it is no small task to keep people focused on the issues at hand when a billion dollars might waft through the room at any given moment. Ed seemed completely undistracted by the money, in fact he seemed as if his heart was elsewhere, maybe running a race for someone. Also, the back biting at CATO was so horrific that I really do not know how anyone could or why anyone would come to work sober there. Well, one more thing, Crane is so shy that it took him two years to get up the nerve to talk to me, and my office was several doors down the hall from his, next to Murray Rothbard. Ed never actually worked up the guts to give it a go, I had to proposition him in the elevator at a Christmas party, I had to demand that he take me home with him, he ignored my request until we got to his car, and then all he said was, ‘get in if you are coming.’ He didn’t open the door for me, I should have left at that sign of jockedness. When we got to his apartment he milled around for a while, I thought he wanted me to leave, when I headed for the door he grabbed my hand and rather aggressively, in a timid way, took me into the bedroom and commenced to kiss my eyelids for what seemed like a blissful eternity, the entire evening unfolded like that, (I used to dance ballet, Ed as a partner was superior to dancing with Nureyev, if you can imagine it, in your wildest dreams) it was such a vignette of heaven that no words can describe it.
   Cato was so competitive, because there was a monthly meeting in which Ed would talk about how much money everyone was being paid, in front of each other, it drove people crazy, and one of the manifestations of that craziness is that everyone was always looking for a cat to kick, naturally it was the non-libertarians who got kicked to the curb, and berated as idiots whenever Ed was in ear shot. He didn’t want Charles to pass by whatever office the dressing down was being broadcast from, so, Ed fired the recipient of the abuse. I had to actually work very hard at getting fired from CATO, because I was not the sort of person who wanted to have ‘quit,’ on my resume, certainly not, 0h-no-no-no, not when I could wear the badge of superiority that being fired afforded me, (I have a strange ego attachment to being smarter than anyone around me which manifests itself in basking in being treated like an idiot, don’t ask me why, but I lingered on at CATO for months basking in the smug superiority that they were just dumb enough to fire me, I was there long past being productive of any actual work, mainly I would show up and smoke Krakatoa’s (Cato had no windows): Try it, the next time the men in the room start trading sexploits or mansplaining calculus to you, (knowing full well that you actually have a PhD, which requires work rather than pontification), simply light up a Krakatoa! Ed was finding it very difficult, if not impossible, to part with my ‘high cheek bones’. I did an internship at CPSR, a Stanford think tank; the most prestigious think tank in the world, after cato canned me. And yet I only rubbed Ed’s face in it once, because that’s just how gracious I am, not very. Sadly for him autistic women are highly intelligent in almost any given area, except for sex; we never marry and we have no clue of how to have a relationship; (sorry Ed, if I could have worn a ‘danger: clueless female ahead’ sign I would have.) I will always feel really bad about what I put him through, I never intended for it to be anything at all, frankly, he was drop dead gorgeous, it was 1979, and I was drunk as a skunk. That was the plan, which isn’t any plan at all. I was not going to go back to work after I decided to be ‘friends’ with Ed, but it didn’t work out that he wanted to be friends with me; and since I had no way to see him again except by staying employed at CATO, I stayed, That was not such a good idea either, finally it dawned on me that we were never going to be friends and I may as well get fired. At least I would have that feather in my cap. Well, yes, it was so unfair to Ed, but life is not fair is it?
   I want to mention that cato was a bastion of brutal horrific rapes, because, Ed found the retelling of them by the various perpetrators (Ed’s Lts.) to be very entertaining, rape was interpreted as the road to job security by David Thoreau, who brutally anally raped his secretary in order to regal Ed with the details; she described the encounter to the entire office who were on edge, vigilant / sympathetic, but since it was the end of the decade (1979), no one did a damn thing about it and ‘no one gave a damn,’ to quote Andy Saunders, the art director. Ed didn’t fire rapists, he fired anyone who tried to steal a piece of his Koch pie, anyone who back stabbed him or tried to sucker Charles out of something by skipping Ed’s chain of command. I viewed his power as strong leadership; everyone at Cato had a vision of toppling Ed and taking over, I really admired him for never letting Cato be derailed. The brutality of the rapes was much overshadowed by the viciousness of the backstabbing by aggressive competitors for Koch cash. Ed was a huggable gentle snockered pussycat, the most he ever did in the way of harassment was to greet woman with ‘hello beautiful.’ The Politico story mentions that Ed advocated breast implants; and was reported as a harasser for it, oops, that might have something to do with me: I got implants while I was at Cato, in order to get Ed’s attention, I even trotted over to his apartment (we were neighbors) and whipped off my blouse, all he ever said about it was, ‘that’s much better,’ (I looked like a boy; the before and after was remarkable) the musical ‘Hair’ was popular then, one of the songs was about a dancer who gets implants (me), implants were a theme at Cato for a while, reinforced by the media and popular publications, in fact, as I recall, the topic of implants was a subject from which no one was very far: The implantee would not have it any other way. Times have changed thank god. Here I am, (see attached) pictured sporting my brand spanking new implants (left), and two pics of me taken the year after I worked at Cato, by people who kidnapped me for my trust fund (they didn’t get it). The women who worked close to Ed, the receptionist, and office manager where professionals, the office manager’s primary purpose was to provide Ed with phone sex, the receptionist’s job was to display her amazing curves on Ed’s casting couch, I was the only female employee (including the 70 year old editor) who was not in the casting couch line up, because that is where they wanted to be. I did too, but I was very shy, and so was Ed, too shy to ask, he didn’t talk to me at all for the first two years that I worked at Cato, we encountered each other every day, he remained mute (I had met him when I was 14, at UC Berkeley, he didn’t remember me) finally I jumped him in the elevator during a Christmas party (13 years later); it didn’t end well, but it was an experience so blissfully worth repeating that I asked Ed to take me with him when Cato relocated to DC: He was already madly in love with Kristina, he was always in love with her, there was nothing left but to get fired which I did. The others were willing women who were aggressive. Ed was the biggest bachelor target in town. His basic premise was that if a female was underfoot, she knew the score and where she wanted to be. Autistic women don’t, interns usually don’t, but 99.9% of the women who crossed his path were not blind to the normative behavior of the time, National Lampoon had come out with a cover depicting nude women as office furniture. If you worked in 1979, that was pretty much the status of your position. I never heard Ed say anything vulgar, but everyone else did, his name at Cato was ‘Lewd Dude,’ probably because Hustler magazine was one of Cato’s libertarian causes. Ed was the Civil Rights champion of Hustler, Hustler publishers, their wives, and staff, were always underfoot. Once Ed told the guy who I lived with, when I worked at the Cato annex, that he would break his arm if he ever wrote another derogatory article about Ed, the guy was a small elegant gay, it scared him to death: Ed was a big strong tall jock. Once when the art director had spent hours knocking on my apartment door uninvited, until my neighbors called the police, who let him in because he said, ‘It’s OK officer; she works for me,” I marched over to Ed’s apartment and rang the bell in the middle of the night, over and over, until he had to come to the door in his PJs, he said, “You are waking up my neighbors, if you don’t stop I will break your little neck,” I said fuck you and I left. I had already told Ed that the art director was making me a part of his long drug runs and I didn’t like it: Ed’s response was to tell me that I was lying. (Thanks Ed) There were several other incidents of ‘getting even with Ed,’ over the decades, all equally without merit, all typical of the times. Ed had so much sex with so many women that the fact of only one lawsuit tells the whole story: He was not the initiator. Every event, every gala, women made a beeline for Ed I would see him at these events and just be dumbfounded by how many women would line up for trysts (myself included). Whatever else he is, Ed is the most charismatic male alive. I don’t know of a minute at Cato when a female was not at Ed’s door trying to line up an encounter on the casting couch. Or in her own office contriving an excuse to get there. It was so relentless that he made a sort of bylaw rule prohibiting women from dogging him and hanging around his door, it was a serious problem. Women would accost him on any excuse. He was Adonis, and he had Charles in his pocket, to quote Kissinger, ‘money is the best aphrodisiac.’ (He protected their privacy with iron clad determination; not mine, theirs, that might have been because they convinced him that I had spilled the beans on what was going on between he and I, I never did, (I am more than making up for it now) I never actually bounced into his office, but I thought about it, when I came within range, like to ask the officer manager a question, or on any other excuse, but, Ed would invoke the ‘none female may hover here’ bylaw, and shut his door. The officer manager would give me the boot and tell me not to come back to the east wing, I would scurry down the hall to my office, plotting on how to get back to the vicinity of Ed’s. Patti, the gay paste up artist would console me, oddly Ed loved to follow me down the hall for that, probably because back then men placed a high priority on voyering girls giving each other attention: The art director called us ‘Les-ies,’ he indulged in making endless obscene comments about female on female sex, geared to entertain Ed. Back then men were all about their ‘needs.’ Screwing each other out of money was always need number one. Subjugating women, in the most derogatory manner imaginable, was need number two. Not every woman who lines up for a casting couch cattle call is willing, ‘surface’ willing perhaps; maybe for job security, the librarian looked like she would rather stay talking to me whenever Ed summoned her. She was amazingly gorgeous, She and I both worked at nights. He would say, “Come on already, I have to get home, lets wrap it up!” She would ignore him and keep talking to me until he got mad, then she would roll her eyes and trot down the hall to see what he wanted. But in fact I am pretty sure the married women, although they said they were not getting their needs met at home, really were. And the women who complained about how beautiful they were without their clothes on and how irresistible to men, might have enjoyed having something to complain about. In any event everyone was alienated by everyone else at Cato, it was a horrible atmosphere. I’m surprised that people didn’t kill each other, they certainly talked bout it a lot. Ed drew ‘hang man’ drawings of Leonard Jiggio during the board meetings, that is what I liked best about Ed.

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