A Response To Paul Rosenberg's Essays!

by: Cugel

Mon Dec 21, 2009 at 15:33

Like most of Paul’s articles these are very thought provoking. But there’s more to be said. It’s certainly true that right-wing organizations have out-organized us, but they have a lot more money and that’s really what it comes down to. We certainly need better organizing, but we have to face reality. And the reality is encouraging as well as depressing, because there ARE serious cracks in the armor of our enemies and serious divisions among them that cannot be papered over.

Michael Thomsky explains all this very well in the New York Reivew of Books:

With respect to the Tea Parties and especially the summer’s town-hall meetings, a key corporate titan appears to be Koch Industries of Wichita, Kansas. Fred Koch (pronounced “coke”) founded the company in 1940 as an oil business but it has expanded into natural gas, pharmaceuticals, fertilizer, and many other areas. He helped create the John Birch Society in the late 1950s and died in 1967. His two sons who run the business now, David and Charles, have foundations that donate millions to conservative and libertarian causes and groups, including notably the Cato Institute. One Koch-funded group used to be called Citizens for a Sound Economy. It became Americans for Prosperity (AFP) in 2003, a group that has advocated limited government and opposed climate change legislation. Earlier this year, Americans for Prosperity launched a Web site called Patients United Now, which ran frightening television ads opposing health care reform (showing, for example, a Canadian woman who supposedly couldn’t get treatment for a brain tumor in her native country). . . . The AFP helped distribute signs and talking points at a town-hall event hosted by Virginia Congressman Tom Perriello. . . .

This dovetails very nicely with corporate lobbying groups whenever there is a need to block progressive reforms:

It isn’t just conservative (c)4 groups that backed the town halls. America’s Health Insurance Plans, or AHIP, is the enormous lobbying organization for private health insurance companies headed by Karen Ignagni, who makes frequent television appearances discussing health care. According to ThinkProgress’s Lee Fang, AHIP mobilized 50,000 of its employees to attend town-hall meetings and otherwise lobby against the inclusion of a public health insurance option in the reform. AHIP’s effort was coordinated by Democracy Data & Communications (DDC), which has helped various corporate clients set up front groups. DDC is headed by B.R. McConnon, who was once an employee of the Koch-funded Citizens for a Sound Economy.

This one-two punch is what’s really effective. Normally, business and conservative groups are subsumed into the Republican party. However, in 2008 something new happened that hadn’t happened since 1965: an actual “liberal” Democrat took office with the intention of enacting some progressive legislation — and he was popular!

You see the immediate result. The instant that Obama tried to operate within the institutional framework that existed up till 2008 he found himself fighting an unprecedented coalition of business groups who refused to be bought off, and right-wing political activists like Grover Norquist.