Evil Geniuses suggests that a modern-day Rip van Winkle who had fallen asleep in the 1970s and awoken in the 1990s would be aghast at the country's relapse into another Gilded Age. Andersen proposes that the lengthy retreat into nostalgia was a reaction to the economic changes of the '80s and '90s, "a kind of national cultural self-medication". Politics, in turn, became "fights over which parts of the past should or shouldn't and can or can't be recycled or restored." A 1998 proposal was written by the American Petroleum Institute to promote scientific uncertainty on climate change, followed by a 2002 memo by Frank Luntz that encouraged increasing climate-change-denial propaganda and recommended using climate change rather than global warming. The early vision of the Federalist Society has been realized, with many federal judges and a majority of the Supreme Court members having been Federalist Society members. Right-wing money spent on universities, think tanks, and the legal profession is a long-term investment toward influencing ideology and public policies. Lobbying expenditures have more than doubled since 1998, with 95 of the 100 top-spending groups representing business interests. Republican candidates found the Club for Growth the largest source for campaign money. Antitrust efforts have been extinguished and industries have become concentrated in oligopolies. Excessively large and powerful companies are relieved of the pressure of competing on price. In the 1980s, American companies averaged 18% markup over costs; in 2020, the average markup is 67%. America is in a vicious cycle in which enormous economic inequality buys political leverage which increases the inequality enabling them to buy even more political power. The result is a class war in which, Warren Buffett said, "it's my class, the rich class, that's making war". All developed countries confronted similar economic challenges from the '70s through the '90s, such as slower economic growth, machines replacing workers, and cheaper manufacturing in poorer countries. Part 4 examines the differences in how countries responded to those economic challenges which resulted in very different levels of economic inequality between the U.S. and other highly developed nations. On the Gini index which provides a standard measure of inequality, America today is the most unequal of rich countries, ranking a bit lower than Haiti and a bit higher than Uruguay. Within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an organization of the world's most developed countries, only Turkey, Mexico, Costa Rica, Chile, and