Replies to post #3443 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[My Dime]

F6, speaking for George Soros...

Playing Into Their Hands
Our "war" on terror breeds terrorists, and a vicious cycle of violence


By George Soros, George Soros heads Soros Fund Management and is the founder of a global network of foundations dedicated to supporting open societies. His most recent book is "The Bubble of American Supremacy."


The Bush administration is in the habit of waging personal vendettas against those who criticize its policies, but bit by bit the evidence is accumulating that the invasion of Iraq was among the worst blunders in U.S. history.

If the administration cannot recognize and admit its mistakes, it cannot correct its policies.

War is a false and misleading metaphor in the context of combating terrorism. The metaphor suited the purposes of the administration because it invoked our military might. But military actions require an identifiable target, preferably a state. As a result, the war on terrorism has been directed primarily against states like Afghanistan that are harboring terrorists, not at pursuing the terrorists themselves.

Imagine for a moment that Sept. 11 had been treated as a crime against humanity. We would have pursued Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan (hopefully with more success), but we would not have invaded Iraq. Nor would we today have our military struggling to perform police work in full combat gear, getting soldiers killed in the process.

This does not mean that we should not use military means to capture and bring terrorists to justice when appropriate. But to protect ourselves against terrorism, we need precautionary measures, awareness and intelligence gathering — all of which ultimately depend on the support of the populations among which terrorists operate. Declaring war on the very people we need to enlist against terrorism is a huge mistake. We are bound to create some innocent victims, and the more of them there are, the greater the resentment and the better the chances that some victims will turn into the next perpetrators.

On Sept. 11, the United States was the victim of a heinous crime, and the whole world expressed spontaneous and genuine sympathy. Since then, though we Americans are loath to admit it, the war on terrorism has claimed more innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq than were lost in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The comparison is rarely made in the U.S.: American lives are valued differently from the lives of foreigners, but the distinction is less obvious to people abroad.

The war on terrorism as pursued by the Bush administration is more likely to bring about a permanent state of war than an end to terrorism. Terrorists are invisible; therefore, they will never disappear. They will continue to provide a convenient pretext for the pursuit of American supremacy by military means. That, in turn, will continue to generate resistance, setting up a vicious circle of escalating violence.

The important thing to remember about terrorism is that it is a reflexive phenomenon. Its impact and development depend on the actions and reactions of the victims. If the victims react by turning into perpetrators, terrorism triumphs in the sense of engendering more and more violence. That is what the fanatically militant Islamists who perpetrated the Sept. 11 attacks must have hoped to achieve. By allowing a "war" on terrorism to become our principal preoccupation, we are playing straight into the terrorists' hands: They — not we — are setting our priorities.

The United States is the most powerful country on Earth. While it cannot impose its will on the world, nothing much can be done in the way of international cooperation without its leadership or at least active participation.

The United States has a greater degree of discretion in deciding the shape of the world than anybody else. Other countries don't have a choice: They must respond to U.S. policy. This imposes a unique responsibility on the United States: Our nation must concern itself with the well-being of the world. The United States is the only country that can take the lead in addressing problems that require collective action: preserving peace, assuring economic progress, protecting the environment and so on. Fighting terrorism and controlling weapons of mass destruction also fall into this category.

By using the war on terror as a pretext for asserting our military supremacy, we are embarking on an escalating spiral of terrorist/ counterterrorist violence. If instead we were to set an example of cooperative behavior, we could not only alleviate poverty, misery and injustice in the world, but also gain support for defending ourselves against terrorism. We will be the greatest beneficiaries if we do so.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-soros4apr04,1,6808078.story

[F6]

Götterdämmerung

MuseLetter
No. 144 - March 2004

by Richard Heinberg

With the publication of recent books by former White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke (Against All Enemies) and former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips (American Dynasty), and with revelations from former Treasure Secretary Paul O'Neill (in The Price of Loyalty, by Ron Suskind), the current administration appears to be uncomfortably on the defensive. Attacks from the left are to be expected and can be shrugged off relatively lightly; but the defection of insiders capable of lifting the shroud of secrecy surrounding White House deals and decisions poses a real problem. Add to this the boggling revelations in Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud, and the potential for a meltdown of the still-formidable Bush political machine starts to look possible - perhaps even inevitable.

Of course, incompetence and corruption are hardly the monopoly of the Republican Party. Moreover, I hold out little hope that either the Democrats or the Greens could actually do much at this point to avert the impending collapse of the American Empire. To my mind, however, the crowd currently in charge of US policy is guilty of more than the usual levels of incompetence and corruption. I believe that the neoconservatives now in power are extraordinarily dangerous people by any historical measure. In four short years, Bush, Cheney, and company have managed to do the following:

1. Steal an election. The means by which Bush and Cheney gained office were profoundly subversive of the democratic process. Florida, under the direction of governor Jeb Bush, had illegally purged its voter rolls of thousands of eligible voters, most of them Democrats. At the time the vote count was halted by a highly politicized decision of the US Supreme Court, Bush was ahead by a mere 300 votes. Had the election been conducted legally, there is no doubt that Al Gore, who led by half a million votes nationwide, would have become president.1

2. Place criminals and human rights violators in prominent policy-making positions. As a result of former President Reagan's Contra war against Nicaragua, the United States became the first country in history to be convicted of international terrorism in a world court tribunal and to be condemned by the United Nations. Several key Reagan administration officials were indicted or tried in connection with the massive human rights violations that occurred in Central America during the Contra war. In the early months of the G. W. Bush presidency, several of these officials were given prominent new jobs: Elliott Abrams, who was convicted of lying to Congress in the Iran-Contra scandal, was appointed National Security Council (NSC) Special Advisor on Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations. John Poindexter, the mastermind behind the Iran-Contra scam (guns for hostages), had been found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and destruction of evidence; he was made Director of the Information Awareness Office (IAO), a new agency "to counter attacks on the US." John Negroponte, whom rights groups charge with covering up political killings and purging information from embassy human rights reports that implicated the military and CIA in disappearances of civilians, became US ambassador to the UN. Other criminals and purported human-rights violators appointed to high posts included Roger Noriega, John Maistro, and Otto Reich.2

3. Facilitate a terrorist attack on the US in order to consolidate political power. After spending countless hours sifting the evidence, I find the conclusion inescapable: persons within the US government had clear foreknowledge of the attacks, and efforts to prevent those attacks were systematically thwarted on orders from higher levels. Moreover, the collapse of the three buildings in New York has been inadequately explained. Many warnings had been received by the US government that a terrorist attack would occur in the week of September 9 - some specifying that commercial airliners would be hijacked and that the World Trade Center and Pentagon would be targeted. Then, after the hijackings occurred, no fighter jets were dispatched to intercept the airliners, despite the fact that there was plenty of time for this to have occurred, and that it is standard procedure. There are many other serious holes in the official version of the events, too numerous to discuss here. Finally, the administration has engaged in public - and largely successful - efforts to prevent or limit any serious inquiry into the 9/11 attacks (the recent public hearings of the 9/11 Commission went to great pains to avoid nearly all of the serious questions that independent researchers have been asking for many months, and members of the commission have numerous and obvious conflicts of interest). In short, lines of evidence point to foreknowledge, complicity, and cover-up at the top levels of government. These are extraordinary assertions, and they require extraordinary evidence to support them. The detailed presentation and discussion of that evidence is beyond the scope of this article; however, I have appended print and online resources. See especially David Ray Griffin's excellent book, The New Pearl Harbor (Interlink), which has just been released.3

4. Lie to the American people and the world in order to justify the illegal invasion of a sovereign nation. Again and again, the administration cited Iraq's continued possession of weapons of mass destruction as the reason for the invasion. Iraq permitted UN weapons inspectors back into the country in the waning months of 2002, but this step was deemed insufficient, so great and immediate was the threat from that country's alleged nuclear weapons and remote-controlled delivery systems. As of this writing, it is abundantly clear that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and that administration officials knew this but deliberately concocted "evidence" with which to sell the invasion to the gullible American public.4

5. Undermine the system of international law by proclaiming the validity of a policy of pre-emptive attack. We have yet to see the ultimate fallout from this brazen action. The neoconservatives in charge of American foreign policy have essentially put forward the view that the US is above international law. The Bush administration has refused to join the World Court and has undermined existing conventions on nuclear missiles. The unprovoked invasion of one sovereign nation by another (of Iraq by the US and Britain) is a direct violation of the UN Charter; indeed, it is exactly the sort of behavior the UN was established to prevent. In addition, the United States' actions with regard to prisoners held at Camp Delta at the Guantanamo Bay naval station have directly violated the Geneva Conventions: the prisoners are being held as "unlawful combatants," a term with no meaning in international law. By asserting unique rights, immunities, and privileges, the US has alienated the rest of the international community. Eventually, such behavior will cause other nations to form political and military alliances to oppose US hegemony. While the US has the military capability of defeating nearly any individual foe, it cannot subdue the rest of the world working in concert. And economically America is in a far weaker position than it is militarily: if only a few key nations were to cease supporting US trade deficits and government borrowing, the results would be catastrophic. Unilateralism sets the stage for a battle that America cannot win; indeed, it is one that the entire world is certain to lose.

6. Use weapons that kill indiscriminately - i.e., "weapons of mass destruction" - in the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq. While time has shown that Saddam Hussein did not possess banned weapons, the Americans and British did possess indiscriminately lethal and possibly illegal weapons, and proceeded to use them - as they had done in the 1991 Gulf War and (with other NATO forces) in the former Yugoslavia. The UN has sought to ban depleted uranium munitions and cluster bombs (the US has objected), and a recent UN report stated that these weapons breach several international conventions.5 Some allege that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis, and tens of thousands of American soldiers, have been sickened or killed by DU weapons, which disperse radioactive particles throughout the battlefield landscape. Each M1 tank round consists of 10 pounds of uranium 238, which vaporizes into a highly toxic aerosol upon impact. Much of Iraq is now covered with tons of the stuff. Major Doug Rokke of the US Army, who was assigned by the Army in 1990 to assess the health effects of DU ammunition, told a Palo Alto audience in April 2003 that "When I did their research, [I found out] that you can't use [DU munitions] because you can't clean up and you can't do the medical." According to Rokke, the effects of DU on American soldiers themselves have been horrific (so much for supporting our troops); but for the land and people of the nations we are "liberating," DU carries far longer-term consequences: soil and water are poisoned virtually forever. In May, 2003 a Christian Science Monitor correspondent took a Geiger counter to areas of Baghdad that had been subjected to heavy shelling by US troops and found radiation levels 1,000 to 1,900 times higher than normal. To be fair, it should be emphasized that DU munitions had been deployed prior to the advent of the Bush administration; however, these weapons' continued and expanded use (between 1,100 and 2,200 tons used during the 2003 invasion of Iraq versus 300 tons in the 1991 Gulf War and 10 tons during the bombing of Serbia in 1999) in a war fought ostensibly to prevent another nation from using banned weapons is a bitter irony.6

7. Subvert the US Constitution. Since 9/11/2001 the Bush administration, the US Justice Department, and the Congress have enacted a series of Executive Orders, regulations, and laws that have seriously undermined civil liberties and the checks and balances that are essential to the structure of democratic government. The framers of the US Constitution sought to prevent any one branch of government from accumulating excessive power. By using Executive Orders and emergency interim agency regulations as standard tools to combat terrorism, the Executive branch has chosen methods largely outside the purview of both the legislature and the judiciary. Many of these Executive Orders and agency regulations violate the US Constitution and the laws of the United States, as well as international and humanitarian law. In addition, these actions have been shrouded in a cloak of secrecy that is incompatible with democratic government. Hundreds of non-citizens have been rounded up and detained, many for months, in violation of constitutional protections, judicial authority, and INS policy. The government has repeatedly resisted requests for information regarding the detainees from loved ones, lawyers, and the press; it has denied detainees access to legal representation; and has conducted its hearings in secret, in some cases denying the very existence of such hearings. In a democracy, the actions of the government must be transparent, or our ability to vote on policies and the people who create those policies becomes meaningless. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the government's actions has been its attack on the Bill of Rights, the very cornerstone of American democracy. The War on Terror has seriously compromised the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment rights of citizens and non-citizens alike. From the USA Patriot Act's over-broad definition of domestic terrorism, to the FBI's new powers of search and surveillance, to the indefinite detention of both citizens and non-citizens without formal charges, the principles of free speech, due process, and equal protection under the law have been seriously undermined. At the time of this writing, three states and 246 cities, towns, and counties (including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago) have passed resolutions, ordinances, or ballot initiatives condemning, or refusing local cooperation with enforcement of, the Patriot Act.7

8. Undermine the US economy through unwise tax cuts and vastly increased government borrowing. The administration's evident goal is to bankrupt the US government so that social programs (including Social Security) can be entirely privatized or eliminated. However unwise (to put it charitably) that strategy may be on its own terms, the timing for its implementation could not possibly be worse. Since World War II the world has relied on the US dollar as the basis for monetary stability. Increasingly, the US has taken advantage of this situation by running up ever-larger trade deficits and more foreign-financed government debt. The current level of American debt - internal and external - is unprecedented and unsustainable, and Treasury officials made efforts in 2003 and early 2004 to gently lower the value of the dollar in relation to other currencies. However, if the dollar is devalued too much, other nations (including China) may decide to cease investing their savings in American stocks and Treasury securities; this in turn could trigger a dollar collapse. In short, the global monetary system that has maintained relative stability for the past several decades appears to be fraying. Just when the nations of the world need to invest heavily in renewable energy systems, efficiency measures, and sustainable agricultural production in order to deal with problems previously mentioned, investment capital may disappear altogether in a global financial crisis. The Bush administration's response - sweeping tax cuts and immense borrowing to fund an elective war in Iraq - greatly exacerbates the situation. The damage is by now likely irreparable. At the end of 1993, According to Al Martin, "The total national debt of the United States on a fully realized basis, inclusive of federal, state, county and local debt stood at a record $20.613 trillion (83.73% of said debt having been created from 1981-92 and from 2001 to present.) The total public and private indebtedness of the United States ended the year 2003 at $39.384 trillion. The total public and private assets of the United States ended the year 2003 at $26.134 trillion. Thus, the United States by the end of 2003 has a negative net worth of approximately $13 trillion. The total debt service[F6 -- sic; 'service' should be deleted] of the United States ended the year 2003 at 309.4% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product). These are numbers never before seen. This is a higher debt to gross domestic product ratio than [that of] any other country on earth, which still services its debt. For instance this is a higher fraction of debt service[F6 -- sic; 'service' should be deleted] to GDP than [that of] the government of Nigeria. The United States federal government, as of the end of 2003, was servicing 41.3% of total debt - the only first-world nation on the planet that services less than 100% of its debt.[F6 -- not sure what this last sentence is trying to say; maybe someone else here knows]"8 This is an extraordinary performance by any measure. In the current Bush administration we see a combination of gross incompetence, high criminality, ideological monomania, and almost limitless power - and this in the context of a time that requires the deftest and most visionary of leadership if we are to avert or at least minimize ecological and human catastrophe. It is difficult to overstate the peril inherent in such a combination. These people will not easily be unseated: if they stole one election, why not another? And if various legal battles threaten to overtake them, why would they not resort to facilitating another "terrorist" incident as justification for declaring martial law? In an interview in November, 2003 former US General Tommy Franks, who led America's campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, stated that if a WMD attack were to hit the US, the Constitution probably would not survive: "the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy."9 Was Franks giving us a heads-up on what is in store?

The Neocons and Machiavelli

The current US leaders' actions are so clearly sabotaging the very system that sustains them that an explanation is in order. What motivates these people? Is it mere thirst for wealth and power? Perhaps we can gain some insight by examining the philosophies they espouse.

Neoconservatism, the political movement to which most of the current administration belongs, is widely attributed to be the intellectual offspring of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), a Jewish scholar who fled Hitler's Germany and taught political science at the University of Chicago. According to Shadia Drury in Leo Strauss and the American Right (Griffin, 1999), Strauss advocated an essentially Machiavellian approach to governance; he believed that

-- a leader must perpetually deceive those being ruled;

-- those who lead are accountable to no overarching system of morals, only to the right of the superior to rule the inferior;

-- religion is the force that binds society together, and is therefore the tool by which the ruler can manipulate the masses (any religion will do);

-- secularism in society is to be suppressed, because it leads to critical thinking and dissent;

-- a political system can be stable only if it is united against an external threat, and that if no real threat exists, one should be manufactured.

Drury writes that, "In Strauss's view, the trouble with liberal society is that it dispenses with noble lies and pious frauds. It tries to found society on secular rational foundations."

Among Strauss's students was Paul Wolfowitz, one of the leading hawks in the Defense Department who urged the invasion of Iraq; more distant followers include Newt Gingrich, Clarence Thomas, Irving Kristol, William Bennett, John Ashcroft, and Michael Ledeen.

Ledeen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago (Griffin, 1999), is a policy advisor (via Karl Rove) to the Bush administration. His fascination with Machiavelli seems to be deep and abiding, and to be shared by his fellow neocons. "In order to achieve the most noble accomplishments," writes Ledeen, "the leader may have to 'enter into evil.' This is the chilling insight that has made Machiavelli so feared, admired, and challenging. It is why we are drawn to him still. . . ."

Machiavelli's books, The Prince and The Discourses, constituted manuals on amassing political power; they have inspired kings and tyrants including Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin. The leader, according to Machiavelli, must pretend to do good even as he is actually doing the opposite. "Everybody sees what you appear to be, few feel what you are, and those few will not dare to oppose themselves to the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them. . . . Let a prince therefore aim at conquering and maintaining the state, and the means will always be judged honourable and praised by everyone, for the vulgar is always taken by appearances. . . ." It is to Machiavelli that we owe the dictum that "the end justifies the means."

But what are the ends to which neoconservatives strive? Briefly: in foreign policy, American supremacy; in domestic policy, reactionary "values." We can get a sense of what makes these people tick by reviewing a little recent history.

The neoconservative movement began to coalesce in the 1970s amid the Supreme Count mandated legalization of abortion, court-ordered busing, rising crime rates, and the disruption of urban cores by major highway projects. Otherwise liberal wite urbanites began fleeing to the suburbs. Meanwhile in foreign affairs, the US was in a state of paralysis as a result of the Vietnam debacle. American elites were losing confidence in their own Cold War rhetoric. However, Israel, in contrast, had just trounced its enemies during a six-day war that had devastated the armies of the Arab world. Catholic and Jewish Democrats, many of them followers of Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson (who mounted three unsuccessful bids for the presidency), began entering the GOP establishment. Disagreeing with their party's positions on social issues (busing, welfare, secularism, and campus revolts) these voters were also looking for a way to regain lost US prestige. For them, Israel served as a positive example: the solution to America's foreign policy directionlessness was a turn to the right. An early intellectual leader of the movement was the Jewish former Trotskeyite New Yorker Irving Kristol, whose book Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea describes the events or the era from the neocons' perspective and gives considerable insight into their motives. Kristol founded Public Interest, one of the primary organs of the movement. Another Jewish former radical, Norman Podhoretz, founded the equally influential magazine Commentary. Podhoretz later defined neoconservatives as "liberals who had been mugged by reality." Two other neoconservative former Democrats, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had been members of "Scoop's Troops" (Jackson's cadre of young activists) during the 1970s, but jumped the Democratic ship during the Carter years. Both came to advocate a values-driven, hard-line approach to American intervention. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Ambassador to the UN under Reagan, was yet another former Democrat turned neocon hawk.

On the domestic front, the neocons learned first to speak the language of southern Democrats - a language of carefully veiled racial fears and resentments - and thus gained the entire South for the Republican Party. In some respects, this was part of a larger strategy to emphasize values as a way of motivating support among the lower and middle classes. The somewhat independent neoconservative Ben Wattenberg explained this strategy in his book, Values Matter Most: How Republicans or Democrats or a Third Party Can Win and Renew the American Way of Life (Free Press, 1995). Right-wing think tanks, funded by wealthy right-wing foundations, spent years systematically and scientifically identifying the "values" issues that would connect with the masses. In the process, they cemented important alliances with a cultural group that was itself becoming increasingly organized, activist, and powerful.

Enter the Religious Right

Strauss's belief that religion is a tool that leaders can use to manipulate the masses naturally leads one to wonder about the history and nature of the collaboration between neoconservatives and the Christian evangelical movement. Clearly, the neocon agenda is not what most people would traditionally have thought of as exemplifying the teachings of Jesus; how, then, has the philosophy of Strauss, Kristol, Podhoretz, and Wolfowitz come to achieve virtual sanctification in the eyes of tens of millions of devout American Christians? To answer this question, we must first examine developments within the more conservative US Christian churches in the past few decades.

In her essay The Despoiling of America, investigative reporter Katherine Yurica explains the origins of the now-dominant faction of the Christian Right, which she calls "dominionism," and how it has found common cause with the neoconservative movement.10 Dominionism, closely related to another Christian movement called "reconstructionism," was founded by the late R. J. Rushdoony, who also co-founded the Council for National Policy - which has been called the politburo of the American conservative movement, since it is composed of top political and business leaders who set the national agenda for the vast network of right-wing foundations, publishers, media, and universities that have schooled a whole generation in the ideology of neoconservatism, much the way the extremist Wahabbi religious schools funded by Saudi billionaires have seeded the Middle East with Islamic fundamentalism. Dominionism began to flourish in the 1970s as a politicized religious reaction to communism and secular humanism. One of its foremost spokesmen, Pat Robertson (religious broadcaster, former presidential candidate, and founder of the Christian Coalition), has for decades patiently and relentlessly put forward the dominionist view to his millions of daily TV viewers that God intends His followers to rule the world on His behalf. Yurica describes dominionism as a Machiavellian perversion of Christianity.

The original and defining text of Dominionism and Reconstructionism is Ruchdoony's 800-page Institutes of Biblical Law, (1973) a turgid exegesis of the Ten Commandments that sets forth the Biblical "case law" that derives from them. "The only true order," Rushdoony wrote, "is founded on Biblical Law. All law is religious in nature, and every non-Biblical law-order represents an anti-Christian religion." Further, "Every law-order is a state of war against the enemies of that order, and all law is a form of warfare."

Reconstructionism argues that the Bible must be the governing text for all areas of life - including government, education, law, and the arts. Reconstructionists examine contemporary issues and events in the light of a "Biblical world view" and "Biblical principles." Reconstructionist theologian David Chilton summarizes this view as follows: "The Christian goal for the world is the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics, in which every area of life is redeemed and placed under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the rule of God's law." Reconstructionists espouse the goal of world conquest or "dominion," assured that the Bible has prophesied their "inevitable victory."

Reconstructionists would replace democracy with a theocratic elite who would govern according to "Biblical Law." They would also eliminate labor unions, civil rights laws, and public schools. Women would leave the work force and return to the home. Capital punishment would be applicable to crimes such as blasphemy, heresy, adultery, and homosexuality. While not all viewers of Robertson's popular daily 700 Club television program would agree with the most extreme dominionist and reconstructionist dogmas, most have been conditioned to believe that the US is a "Christian nation" that is under attack from within by secular humanists, homosexuals, and socialists; and that George W. Bush has a mandate from God to govern America (on behalf of the Lord Jesus Christ) during these troubling times. The rise of the religious right has so shifted the American political landscape in recent years that a law, the "Constitution Restoration Act of 2004," which would have been unimaginable only a decade or two ago, is now making its way through Congress. Introduced in February, the new law would, if enacted, "acknowledge God as the sovereign source of law, liberty [and] government" in the United States. Thus, in effect, the arbitrary dictates of a "higher power" - as interpreted by a judge, policeman, bureaucrat, or president - could override existing legal precedent. Any judge who presumed to overrule "God's sovereign authority" as so interpreted could be removed from office.

All of this provides tinder for the spark of Mel Gibson's recent film The Passion of the Christ, which Roger Ebert has called "the most violent single movie I have ever seen." In my view, the film's danger is not merely its anti-Semitism (Bible scholars have pointed out that the New Testament was written several decades after the events it describes, and after the sacking of Jerusalem by Rome; evidently, in that context the Gospel authors hesitated to saddle Romans with the primary responsibility for Jesus's death, and thus settled on the Jewish aristocracy as the best available scapegoats). Richard Cohen, writing in the Washington Post, perhaps comes closer to capturing the inherent danger of this movie phenomenon when he calls The Passion "fascistic" because of its glorification of violence. Others have made light of the film's goriness: Maureen Dowd notes that The Passion "has the cartoonish violence of a Sergio Leone Western; you might even call it a spaghetti crucifixion, 'A Fistful of Nails'"; the online magazine Slate described it as "a two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie - 'The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre'"; while Steve Martin suggests it should have been called "Lethal Passion."

For the devout, however, the blood and flying flesh are sacred reminders of what our Lord endured for us. They are a measure of the wickedness of the secularists, the Muslims, the unbelievers. "See what they did to our Lord!," the well-schooled dominionist must thing[F6 -- sic 'think'] when leaving the theater. "When the time comes that we have them supine before us, we must show them no mercy!"

And so, for the next few months, until the election, we will, all of us - like it or not - be marinating in a dangerous mixture of religious fanaticism, political intrigue, economic upheaval, and unraveling scandal. The people in power (and their supporters) are not open to logic or compromise. Nevertheless, challenges to their power are arising in ever-greater number and intensity. An irresistible force is about to encounter an immovable object.

[Portions of this essay are excerpted from the forthcoming book, Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World (New Society, June 2004), by Richard Heinberg. Richard Heinberg is the author of The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New Society, 2003); he is a journalist, educator, editor, lecturer, and a Core Faculty member of New College of California, where he teaches courses on "Energy and Society" and "Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community." His essays and articles have appeared in many journals including The Futurist, Earth Island Journal, Wild Matters, Alternative Press Review, and The Sun.] (emphasis added)

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Notes

1. See Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: An Investigative Reporteer Exposes the Truth about Globalization, Corporate Cons, and High Finance Fraudsters. Pluto Press, 2002.

2. George Freimoth, The Return of Cold War 'Terrorists, Marin Interfaith Task Force on Central America newsletter, Spring 2002.

3. See also Eric Hofschmid, Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack. Endpoint Software, 2002; www.fromthewilderness.com; www.cooperativeresearch.org; www.globalresearch.ca; www.whatreallyhappened.com.

4. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Report says Iraq didn't have WMD, released January 8, 2004.

5. In January 2001, the European Parliament approved a resolution imposing a ban on the use of DU munitions while investigations were carried out into the links between DU and cancer. In August 2002, the UN published a report citing a series of international laws and conventions breached by the use of DU weapons, including: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the UN Charter; the UN Genocide Convention; the Convention Against Torture; the four Geneva Conventions of 1949; the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980; and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 which all forbid the deployment of "poison or poisoned weapons" and "arms, projectiles or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering."

6. See: www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/Rokke-Depleted-Uranium-DU21apr03.htm See also Iraq: Experts Warn of Radioactive Battlefields, by Katherine Stapp, Interpress News Service, September 12, 2003; Scott Peterson, Remains of Toxic Bullets Litter Iraq, Christian Science Monitor, May 15, 2003.

7. This paragraph is adapted from The State of Civil Liberties: One Year Later, Erosion of Civil Liberties in the Post 9/11 Era, by the Center for Constitutional Rights.

8. Scoreboard 2003, by Al Martin, accessed January 12, 2004.

9. December 5, 2003 edition, Cigar Afficionado. Reported, for example, in John O. Edwards, Gen. Franks Doubts Constitution Will Survive WMD Attack, November 1, 2003. [F6 -- see also at http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=2264367 ]

10. (www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/TheDespoilingOfAmerica.htm)

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http://www.museletter.com/archive/144.html

[easymoney101]

Right Wing Organizations

For over 20 years, People For the American Way Foundation (PFAWF) has countered the Right Wing’s efforts to roll back, or stop, social justice progress and to reshape government and society to its liking. Our research center monitors the power of right-wing groups, documenting their connections, funding, and reporting on their political influence.

Right-wing organizations come in all shapes and sizes, from think tanks to legal groups, local and national lobbying organizations, foundations and media forums. At any given moment, the Right is at work in our public school systems, courthouses, in Congress and state assemblies. At the same time, right-wing groups are reaching huge audiences through media outlets they own or influence—promoting regressive policies that seek to drive wedges between and among Americans.

These often single-issue groups have the ability to create multi-issue networks that can respond on a wide range of issues. People For the American Way Foundation’s library has files on over 800 groups and almost 300 individuals documenting their activities and providing information about their efforts to reshape society. This section presents a small portion of that information.




Accuracy in Academia
Alliance Defense Fund
American Center for Law and Justice
American Conservative Union
American Enterprise Institute
American Family Association
American Legislative Exchange Council
American Life League
Americans for Tax Reform
Bradley Foundation, Lynne and Harry
Campaign for Working Families PAC
Cato Institute
Center for the Study of Popular Culture
Christian Coalition of America
Club for Growth
Collegiate Network
Concerned Women for America
Eagle Forum
Eagle Forum Collegians
Family Research Council
Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
Focus on the Family
FRCAction
Free Congress Research and Education Foundation
Heritage Foundation
Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace
Independent Women's Forum
Institute for Justice
Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Leadership Institute
Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research
Mackinac Center for Public Policy
Madison Project
National Association of Scholars
National Center for Policy Analysis
National Right to Life Committee
National Taxpayers Union
State Policy Network
Students for Academic Freedom
Traditional Values Coalition
Young America's Foundation






Accuracy in Academia

4455 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite 330
Washington, DC 20008
www.academia.org

Founded: by Reed Irvine in 1985
Executive Director: Malcolm “Mal” Kline
Finances: $285, 643 (2002 budget)
Publications: Campus Report, a monthly newspaper
Affiliated with: Accuracy in Media


AIA's Principal Issues:
AIA’s Activities:
AIA's History:
Quotes about AIA:


AIA's Principal Issues:



Main issues: combating Title IX, multicultural education, and abortion, and fighting “liberal” ideas that are offensive to right-wing students. Asserts that many colleges and universities are openly dedicated to “indoctrinating” students with liberal or communist philosophy.

AIA seeks to expose “the exploitation of the classroom or university resources to indoctrinate students; discrimination against students, faculty or administrators based on political or academic beliefs; and campus violations of free speech.”


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AIA’s Activities:



AIA monitors and documents “[t]he use of classroom and/or university resources to indoctrinate students.” AIA’s monthly publication Campus Report focuses on “three issues: the exploitation of the classroom or university resources to indoctrinate students; discrimination against students, faculty or administrators based on political or academic beliefs; and campus violations of free speech.”

Sponsors an annual “Conservative University” conference. Recent speakers include: John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily, Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), Lori Waters of Eagle Forum and Conservative Caucus chairman Howard Phillips.

Sells books such as Ann Coulter’s Treason,Why the Left Hates America by Daniel Flynn and Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America by Kenneth Timmerman.

AIA has characterized the NAACP’s founder, W.E.B. Du Bois, as the “Father of Bad Multiculturalism.” According to AIA, “W.E.B. Du Bois is the father of the multiculturalism that is currently pervasive on American campuses. This is a multiculturalism that is…preoccupied with the negative aspects, both real and imagined, of our own culture.”

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AIA's History:
Founded by Reed Irvine to monitor college and university professors for teaching “disinformation” and “liberal” bias. The group clamed that 10,000 known Marxists teach on university campuses nationwide.

Accuracy, Fairness and Balance in Higher Education” published in 1985. According to AIA “youth are being indoctrinated” on liberal arts campuses.

AIA will investigate reports from students of seriously inaccurate information being imparted by classroom instructors—either through lectures or required reading material.

AIA will try to discuss the matter with the teacher to determine whether or not the complaint is valid and to see if the teacher would be willing to make a correction.

In cases where the professor declines this opportunity, AIA will employ other means to call the error to the attention of students and others who may be interested, including AIA supporters throughout the country.


In the eighties the group’s monitoring campaign caused widespread controversy on higher education campuses, eliciting fear and anger among academics and students.
President Reagan’s Secretary of Education, William Bennett, called Irvine’s academic watchdog group “a bad idea.”

Malcolm Kline was named AIA’s new executive director in fall 2003. He worked at the National Journalism Center for twenty years. Kline has written for: Newsmax.com, National Catholic Register, Catholic News Service, and Washington Times’s Insight magazine.

AIA’s former Executive Director was Daniel Flynn, author of Why the Left Hates America.

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Quotes about AIA:

“Accuracy in Academia plays an indispensable role in fighting the political distortions and biases that pass for knowledge on today’s college campuses. I am looking forward to being part of a campaign to challenge students to think more accurately and broad-mindedly about the fundamental issues that affect their lives.” -- Dinesh D’Souza, author and right-wing speaker

“Accuracy in Academia is reaching the leaders of tomorrow with the truth about the sexual revolution ignited in the 60s and raging today all about them. This awareness is critical to properly equipping the leaders of tomorrow. Accuracy in Academia is a lone voice carrying the message of truth and hope to a generation that seldom, if ever, is able to access the truth about America's crucial and fragile social constructs that have made us free. I am proud to stand with AIA as they relentlessly seek to provide to America's college student America's measured and true standard for a free society's smallest building block, marriage and family.” -- Judith A. Reisman, a right-wing speaker and author, published Crafting “Gay” Children: An Inquiry into the Abuse of Vulnerable Youth via Government Schooling & Mainstream Media in 2001.

“If sanity ever returns to the academic world, part of the credit will go to a small newspaper called Campus Report, which has exposed innumerable incidents of brainwashing replacing education on college campuses, storm trooper tactics being accepted and rewarded by ‘responsible’ college administrators, and academic and behavioral double standards being applied to the group to which one belongs, rather than one’s own behavior or performance.” -- Thomas Sowell, author and syndicated columnist
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Alliance Defense Fund

15333 N. Pima Road, Suite 165
Scottsdale AZ 85260
Phone: 1-800-TELL-ADF
www.alliancedefensefund.org

ADF’s Founders:

Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ

Larry Burkett, founder of Christian Financial Concepts

Rev. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family

Rev. D. James Kennedy, founder of Coral Ridge Ministries

Marlin Maddoux, President of International Christian Media

Don Wildmon, founder of American Family Association
(And 25+ other ministries)
President and General Counsel: Alan Sears
Date of founding: 1994
Finances: $15,411,093 (2001 budget)



Alliance Defense Fund’s Principal Issues:
Alliance Defense Fund’s Background:
Alan Sears’ Background:


Alliance Defense Fund’s Principal Issues:
ADF is a Christian legal firm established by more than 30 Christian ministries to help defend “family values” and work against the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union).

ADF defines itself by its ability to strategize and coordinate with lawyers all over the United States. Lawyers who sign up for their “Blackstone Legal Institute” are expected to donate 450 pro bono hours over a three year period.

ADF has coordinated over 400 lawyers, over 125 right-wing organizations, and many conservative ministries on behalf of ADF-defined Christian legal issues.

ADF has been involved with 16 “victories” before the Supreme Court, including such high profile cases as Boy Scouts of America v. Dale and Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network. ADF has had success in anti-gay cases all over the US, from Alaska to Massachusetts.

ADF has linked over 125 groups to create a combined effort to fight issues and on behalf of their views. ADF has brought together attorneys and allied legal groups to help develop a national strategy on controversial social issues, for example it has worked to develop a national strategy to “protect marriage” across the United States after Vermont's decision to legalize civil unions for gays and lesbians.

In addition to organizing lawyers and ministries, ADF also trains and recruits and provides grants to support legal cases as well as pro-bono assistance.

ADF also defends the right of Christians to “share the gospel” in workplaces and public schools, claiming that any efforts to curb proselytizing at work and school are anti-Christian.

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Alliance Defense Fund’s Background:


Unique to ADF is their collective of high-power founders, including wealthy right-wing organizations such as Dobson’s Focus on the Family and D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries.

The ADF embodies the beliefs of its founders, harnessing the efforts of a cadre of right-wing groups that have hundreds of million dollars at their disposal. All of these groups are influential members of the Right, they are pro-life and anti-gay and their ultimate goal is to see the law and government of the US enshrined with conservative Christian principles.

The relationship between ADF and it’s founders is one of mutual self-interest, the ADF has access to the resources and networking of these large organizations, meanwhile the large organizations have an endless supply of lawyers at their command.

ADF’s strength goes beyond their budget, and extends much further due to their influence with well-funded religious-right groups.

Two issues that all of the founders have in common is their work against the right to abortion and gays and lesbians. They are particularly tireless in attacking any and every attempt by gays and lesbians to have families, domestic partnership or civil unions, or be protected from discrimination in employment or housing.

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Alan Sears’ Background:


Alan Sears was the Executive Director of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography under President Ronald Reagan. Sears was also a federal prosecutor for former Secretary of Interior Don Hodel (Hodel is a former Christian Coalition President).


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American Center for Law and Justice

P.O. Box 64429
1000 Regent University Drive
Virginia Beach, VA 23467
www.aclj.org

Founder: Pat Robertson, founder of the 700 Club, Christian Coalition, Operation Blessing, Regent University
Date established: 1990
Executive Director/Chief Counsel: Jay Sekulow
Publications: Newsletter, education pamphlets, and reports.
Annual Budget: $15.9 million (2003)
Employees: 50
Media: Mr. Sekulow has been a popular guest on nationally televised news programs on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX, MSNBC, CNBC, and PBS. Sekulow is also a frequent contributor and is often quoted in articles published in USA Today, New York Times, Washington Post, and Washington Times.
Radio: “Jay Sekulow Live!” is a daily weekday radio show that is aired on over 140 radio stations in the U.S.


ACLJ’s Principal Issues:
ACLJ’s Activities:
About Jay Sekulow:
ACLJ Quotes:


ACLJ’s Principal Issues:
ACLJ is a legal advocacy group “dedicated to defending and advancing religious liberty, the sanctity of human life, and the two-parent, marriage-bound family.”

ACLJ is a strong supporter of the Federal Marriage Amendment that would ban same-sex marriage.

ACLJ has been involved with more than 30 cases before the United States Supreme Court and has been successful in many of its lawsuits.

ACLJ is a strong supporter of school vouchers and filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the 2002 Cleveland voucher case before the Supreme Court.

The ACLJ supports the funding of faith-based social services, religious proclamations in the public domain, and often equates religious expression with patriotism. [10-9-01 news release]

ACLJ strongly opposes the right to legal, safe abortion and provides legal help to pro-life protesters who harass women seeking reproductive services.

The ACLJ challenges domestic partnership benefits for city and state employees, anti-discrimination ordinances that include sexual orientation, and generally fights against the right of gays and lesbians to be parents.

The ACLJ's legal services are free.

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ACLJ’s Activities:
ACLJ gives free legal advice and counsel and maintains a national Christian Affiliate Attorney list for referrals.

Two of the Supreme Court cases argued by Sekulow have become benchmark cases in the area of religious liberty litigation. In Board of Education of Westside Community Schools v. Mergens (496 US 226), Sekulow argued the right of public school students to form Bible clubs and religious organizations on their school campuses. In Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches School District, Sekulow defended the rights of religious groups to use public school property for religious meetings after hours.

A few other examples of ACLJ cases: ACLJ defended a group of parents who drove a transsexual teacher out of her job in Minnesota, has supporting a Kmart pharmacist who refused to dispense birth control pills, and has pursued litigation over various claims that children are being told that they cannot pray on school grounds or talk about their religion.

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About Jay Sekulow:
Jay Sekulow helped draft the Defense of the Marriage Act, which passed both houses and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996. DOMA allows states to reject the legitimacy of same-sex marriage licenses awarded in other states, although, to this day no state offers marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Sekulow helped draft DOMA “at the request of several pro-family legislators, and gave expert testimony to both houses of Congress on this bill.” (Jay Sekulow, direct mail, March 1997)

The National Law Journal has named twice Sekulow one of the “100 Most Influential Lawyers” in the United States. (1994, 1997)

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ACLJ Quotes:
ACLJ Quotes:
“This great American institution [Boy Scouts of America] has come under attack from homosexual activists—who may well set their sights on your church next.” --Jay Sekulow, direct mail, March 2000

“Can you imagine, that in public schools of America today, students are being taught that homosexual conduct, which in many states is still deemed illegal, is not only a viable alternative lifestyle, but is actually equal to heterosexual relationships?” --Jay Sekulow, January 2, 1997, Danbury News-Times

“Right now we have fully functioning offices connected with our national office—which is here in Virginia Beach [on Regents University Campus]—in Washington, DC, Atlanta, Kentucky, Mobile, and Phoenix. We also have close to 600 affiliates around the country, and are on the verge of launching our first eight state chapters, with the goal of opening 50 state chapters within the next 24 months.” Executive Director Keith Fournier, Human Events, December 20, 1996




[Updated April 2004]


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American Conservative Union

1007 Cameron Street
Alexandria, VA 22314
www.conservative.org or www.cpac.org

Founders: William F. Buckley, Jr., L. Brent Bozell, Frank S. Meyer, John Chamberlain, Jameson Campaigne, Sr., John Ashbrook, Katherine St. George, and Robert E. Bauman
Chairman: David A. Keene
Established: December 1964
Finances: $4,562,084 (1998)
Board members include: Senator Jesse Helms, Grover Norquist, Morton Blackwell, and L. Brent Bozell III.
Affiliated with: American Conservative Union Foundation, American Conservative Union PAC, Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)
Publications: Battle Line, quarterly newsletter, along with reports, and legislative guides for Congress.


ACU’s Principle Issues:
ACU’s Activities:
ACU History:
Quotes about ACU:


ACU’s Principle Issues:


ACU defines itself as the nation's oldest conservative lobbying organization.

ACU is a multi-issue, umbrella organization that specializes in grassroots organizing as well as organizing and supporting conservative leadership.


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ACU’s Activities:


Publishing Congress members ratings according to ACU’s conservative standards.

Since 1974, ACU has hosted the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). CPAC is the largest conservative conference in the United States.

CPAC speakers have included: Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, Dick Armey, Jesse Helms, Tom DeLay, Trent Lott, Senator Sam Brownback, Bob Barr, Phyllis Schlafly, Beverly LaHaye, William Bennett, Ralph Reed, columnist George Will, Gary Bauer, Alan Keyes, Grover Norquist, Charlton Heston of the NRA, Condoleezza Rice, Ann Coulter, David Horowitz, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Oliver North, Rev. Lou Sheldon of Traditional Values Coalition, and many other conservative pundits, writers, and politicians.

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ACU History:


In 1974, ACU established and sponsored the first Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Reagan was a “long-time friend and ally” of ACU. In 1975, ACU asked Ronald Reagan to run for president. ACU takes credit for Reagan getting elected to the presidency in 1980, claiming they originally asked Reagan to run in 1975.

ACU and its state affiliates established one of the first independent campaigns on behalf of a presidential candidate. ACU orchestrated the campaign to elect Reagan, running hundreds of radio and newspaper ads comparing candidate Reagan to President Ford, and calling Reagan a conservative visionary and Ford a liberal.

Reagan’s victory in 1980 is credited to the ACU as the campaign that put his name in the public eye.

ACU launched "Project One Million" in 1981, seeking at least one million backers of a "Petition of Support" for Reagan's economic plan.

In 1992, the ACU Board of Directors endorsed Patrick Buchanan's presidential candidacy.

During the Clinton presidency, ACU remained a strong, vocal critic on issues such as health care. ACU’s director Donald Devine led a country-wide bus tour, called the “National Health Care Truth Tour.” Hilary Clinton herself stated that ACU’s activities were largely responsible for the defeat of the health plan proposal in 1993.

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Quotes about ACU:

“I’m grateful to David Keene and the members of the ACU from coast-to-coast for all of their help this year. The ACU has been an invaluable partner in advancing our compassionate, conservative agenda.” – President George W. Bush (ACU’s website)


[Updated September 2002]

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American Enterprise Institute

1150 Seventeenth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036
www.aei.org and www.theamericanenterprise.org (American Enterprise Magazine)

Established: 1943
President/Executive Director:Christopher DeMuth
Finances: $24.4 million (2000)
Employees: 50 resident scholars and fellows
Publications: Monthly newsletter, dozens of books and hundreds of articles and reports each year, and a glossy policy magazine, The American Enterprise.




American Enterprise Institute’s Principal Issues:


American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is a think tank for conservatives, neoconservatives, and conservative libertarians.

Areas of interest include: America’s “culture war,” domestic policy and federal spending, education reform, neoconservatism, affirmative action, welfare reform.

President George W. Bush has appointed over a dozen people from AEI to senior positions in his administration. AEI claims that this is more than any other research institution.



American Enterprise Activities:


AEI sponsors and participates in debates and lectures on many issues.

AEI scholars have testified before Congress on a variety of issues.

Several AEI scholars have written articles in favor of government censorship of the arts.

Scholar Michael Novak has argued that prayer belongs in public schools and that it doesn’t violate the establishment clause.

AEI scholars have advocated federally-funded school voucher programs.



AEI's Background and History:


Most of AEI’s Board of Directors are CEOs of major companies, including ExxonMobil, Motorola, American Express, State Farm Insurance, and Dow Chemicals.

Big donors include the top conservative foundations, including Smith-Richardson Foundation, the Olin Foundation, the Scaife Foundation, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

Corporate supporters have included: General Electric Foundation, Amoco, Kraft Foundation, Ford Motor Company Fund, General Motors Foundation, Eastman Kodak Foundation, Metropolitan Life Foundation, Proctor & Gamble Fund, Shell Companies Foundation, Chrysler Corporation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, General Mills Foundation, Pillsbury Company Foundation, Prudential Foundation, American Express Foundation, AT&T Foundation, Corning Glass Works Foundation, Morgan Guarantee Trust, Smith-Richardson Foundation, Alcoa Foundation, and PPG Industries.

Kenneth Lay, CEO of Enron, was until recently on the board of trustees of American Enterprise Institute. Other famous former trustees include Vice President Dick Cheney.



AEI Fellows and Scholars List [partial list]:


Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney

Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House

Robert Bork, failed Supreme Court nominee

David Frum, a presidential speechwriter for President Bush, contributing editor to the right-wing magazine Weekly Standard

Christina Hoff Sommers, anti-feminist crusader, author of “Who Stole Feminism? How Women Betrayed Women”

Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, a book that asserted inherent intelligence differences between the races

Ben J. Wattenberg, host of PBS weekly show “Think Tank”

[Updated September 2002]










American Family Association

P.O. Box 2440, Tupelo, MS 38803
www.afa.net

Chairman/Founder: the Rev. Donald Wildmon
Vice President: Tim Wildmon (son of Donald Wildmon)
Date of founding: 1977
Membership: AFA claims over 500,000 members.
Finances: $11.4 million (2000)
Staff: About 100 employees and five full-time lawyers.
State chapters: State Directors in 21 states. Also has smaller chapters, number unknown.
Publications: “AFA Journal,” published monthly, with a circulation of 180,000.
Radio: AFA has its own 200-station network of radio stations across the United States.
Videos: AFA has produced “Excess Access,” “It’s Not Gay,” and “Suffer the Children” Television: AFA has appeared on the following shows: “Good Morning America,” “The Today Show,” “MacNeill Lehrer Report,” “Nightline,” “The 700 Club,” “Meet the Press,” “Crossfire,” and “Focus on the Family.”
Formerly known as: National Federation for Decency
Affiliate groups: AFA Foundation, Center for Law & Policy, American Family Radio, and Agape Press


AFA’s principal issues:
AFA Activities:
Profiles on AFA Affiliates:
Other Legal Activities by AFA/CLP include:
AFA State Affiliates:
AFA Quotes:


AFA’s principal issues:
American Family Association targets the media and entertainment industry’s “attack” on “traditional family values.”

Two of the main duties that AFA assigns to itself are “promoting the centrality of God in American life” and “promoting the Christian ethic of decency.”

“Indecent” influences in American culture include: television, the separation of church and state, pornography, “the homosexual agenda,” premarital sex, legal abortion, the National Endowment for the Arts, gambling, unfiltered internet access in libraries, and the removal of school-sponsored religious worship from public schools.

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AFA Activities:


AFA produces the radio show, "AFA Report," a 30-minute feature available on about 1,200 local radio stations nationwide. AFA launched their broadcast ministry American Family Radio (AFR) in 1987. AFR has approximately 200 radio stations in 27 states across the country. According to American Family Radio, “AFR has built more stations in a shorter time than any other broadcaster in the history of broadcasting.” The AFA built their small radio empire by applying for “noncommercial educational licenses.” When the FCC refused to grant some the licenses the AFA sued the FCC in federal court arguing that to deny religious groups noncommercial broadcasting licenses violates their First Amendment and Equal Protection rights.

For over twenty years AFA’s primary activities have been organizing boycotts against sponsors of TV shows with “anti-Christian” messages and ideas.

AFA has created two websites,www.onemillionmoms.com and www.onemilliondads.com, to “help parents do something about the trash on TV” by organizing weekly on-line boycotts of offensive advertising or television shows.

Among its hundreds of boycott targets over the years are "Cheers," "The Johnny Carson Show," "Saturday Night Live," "Roseanne," "Nightline," "NYPD Blue," and “Ellen.” AFA has called for widespread boycotts of all businesses that “promote” pornography, homosexuality, or other forms of “indecency.”

A major target has been Disney and its subsidiaries. According to the group “Disney’s attack on America’s families has become so blatent, [sic] so intentional, so obvious, that American Family Association has called for a boycott of all Disney products until such time as this activity ceases.”

Other boycott targets include American Airlines for their policy of providing domestic partner benefits and K-mart for selling music that has a “parental advisory warning” sticker, even to adults.

Donald Wildmon has called for the shutdown of PBS and as a result of the AFA's campaign, many state legislatures reduced funding for public broadcasting. The AFA spearheaded the attack on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the 1980’s, using direct mail and extensive print advertising to distort the NEA's record of sponsorship of the arts.

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Profiles on AFA Affiliates:


AFA Center for Law and Policy activities (CLP):

In 1990, the AFA established the AFA Center for Law & Policy as a litigation and public policy arm of the organization.

The Center for Law & Policy (CLP) is staffed by six full-time attorneys with a network of more than 400 affiliate lawyers. The CLP states that they provide representation to Christians in courts throughout the country, and advise state and federal legislators on constitutional, political and legal issues.

The CLP has been involved in several cases where they push for religious worship and symbols in public schools as well as the removal of curriculum that doesn’t reflect “traditional family values.”

Recently AFA has spearheaded a campaign to have their “In God We Trust” posters posted in every classroom, in every school in the United States. In 2001, the Mississippi state legislature passed a law requiring that each public school classroom, auditorium and cafeteria display a “In God We Trust” poster. However, when the Mississippi state legislature did not provide any funding for the bill, AFA/CLP volunteered to be the coordinator for the project. AFA/CLP is responsible for organizing and distributing 32,000 “In God We Trust” free posters in public schools in the state of Mississippi.

AFA/CLP has encouraged other states to follow Mississippi’s example, promising that anyone who may be afraid of a lawsuit would be defended by the AFA Center for Law & Policy for free. In 2001, AFA distributed 250,000 “In God We Trust” posters nationwide.

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Other Legal Activities by AFA/CLP include:
CLP represented the anti-gay group “Take Back Maryland” when they were accused of falsifying signatures for a petition to reverse an anti-discrimination bill that protected gays and lesbians from bias discrimination in employment and housing.

AFA filed lawsuits attempting to ban the curriculum, "Impressions," from public school classrooms on the grounds that it "promotes the religion of witchcraft."

AFA sponsored a rally in support of Judge Roy Moore of Alabama who refused to remove the Ten Commandments from his courtroom.

AFA Center for Law & Policy (CLP) won a lawsuit on behalf of pro-life protesters in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, over protest signs confiscated and held by city officials.

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AFA State Affiliates:


Many of AFA’s state chapters are very active on a state and local level. Gary Glenn of AFA Michigan has become a lightening rod in the state for controversy over civil rights protections for gays and lesbians. Glenn has opposed anti-discrimination policies of several Michigan cities by asserting that if passed, public bathrooms and showers would become co-ed. After the legislation passed in several towns, Glenn organized petitions to overturn the legislation, asserting that gays and lesbians pose a “public health hazard.” Glenn also has targeted a 4th grade environmental education course, alleging that the program is “anti-human” and promotes paganism.

AFA’s California director Scott Lively, of Abiding Truth Ministries and the Pro-Family Law Center, is an anti-gay activist who has written such books as “The Pink Swastika,” which claims that “homosexuals [are] the true inventors of Nazism and the guiding force behind many Nazi atrocities.” [From the “The Pink Swastika” preface.] Lively has also written “7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child, “ and “The Poisoned Stream: “Gay” Influence in Human History.” AFA California has launched the “California Campaign to Take Back the Schools” to stop the “homosexualization of American public schools.”

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AFA Quotes:

Quotes from the Reverend Don Wildmon on behalf of AFA:

"Now the Bush Administration is opening its arms to homosexual activists who have been working diligently to overthrow the traditional views of Western Civilization regarding human sexuality, marriage and family… AFA would never support the policies of a political party which embraced the homosexual movement. Period.” (4-16-01, AFA Press Release)

“We believe the national motto incorporates the foundational belief of our culture, and its words ‘In God we trust’ are a message our children need to see in school.” (July 2001, cover story of AFA Journal)

“But the National PTA continued right along, increasingly becoming a tool to promote a left-wing philosophy instead of helping the children with their educational needs. The latest project for the National PTA is the promotion of the homosexual agenda…Stop the PTA from using your children to promote their left-wing political agenda. “AFA Journal, February 2001 Edition

From AFA staffers:

“Over the years, AFA has consistently addressed the homosexual movement's obsession with infiltrating the public school system. Its eye-opening video “It's Not Gay”, which presents a heartbreaking look at the physical and emotional consequences of the homosexual lifestyle, has been the most popular video ever produced by AFA. “ (May 2001, “Homosexuals push for control of schools”)

“Nothing disappointed the [American Family Association] more than Disney's enthusiastic embrace of [the homosexual] movement that rejects everything that is sacred to Christians about human sexuality, marriage and family.” (April 2001, “Why the Disney Boycott Shouldn't Go Away”)

From AFA state affiliates:

“The church and this nation cry out for a revival of masculine Christianity, which is to say that we church leaders need to stop being such, for lack of a better word, sissies when it comes to social and political issues. We need to spend as much time confronting perpetrators as we do comforting victims. We need to do less fretting, and more fighting for righteousness. For every motherly, feminine ministry of the church such as a Crisis Pregnancy Center or ex-gay support group, we need a battle-hardened, take-it-to-the-enemy masculine ministry like Operation Rescue (questions of civil disobedience aside). For every God-hating radical in government, academia and media we need a bold, no-nonsense, truth-telling Christian counterpart: trained, equipped and endorsed by the local church.” –Scott Lively, Director of AFA California and Abiding Truth Ministries, author of “The Pink Swastika.” (quote source: http://www.abidingtruth.com/pfrc/archives/editorials/masculinechristianity.html)

"Under homosexual activists' political agenda, our children would face a future in which traditional marriage and families have been legally devalued, while state government -- despite the severe threat it poses to personal and public health -- not only legally endorses but uses our tax dollars to subsidize deadly homosexual behavior." –Gary Glenn, Director of AFA Michigan (2-17-01 Press Release)

[Updated September 2002]
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American Legislative Exchange Council

American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)
1129 20th St. NW, Suite 500
Washington, DC 20036

Founder: Paul Weyrich, Henry Hyde, Lou Barnett, and others
Established: 1973
Executive Director: Duane Parde
Financials: $5,830,834 (2001 budget)
Employees: 28
Membership: claims 2,400 state legislators as members
Publications: ALEC Policy Forum (journal), policy papers, Task Force reports (9), Leadership Briefing (newsletter), Inside ALEC (monthly publication)


ALEC's Principal Issues:
ALEC's Activities:
ALEC's History:
ALEC Quotes:


ALEC's Principal Issues:
ALEC is a right wing public policy organization with strong ties to major corporations, trade associations and right wing politicians.

ALEC’s agenda includes rolling back civil rights, challenging government restrictions on corporate pollution, and limiting government regulations of commerce, privatizing public services, and representing the interests of the corporations that make up its supporters.

ALEC’s mission: “To promote the principles of federalism by developing and promoting policies…To enlist state legislators from all parties and members of the private sector who share ALEC’s mission…To conduct a policy making program that unites members of the public and private sector in a dynamic partnership to support research, policy development, and dissemination activities.”

ALEC claims that it is “the nation’s largest bipartisan, individual membership association of state legislators.” All of ALEC’s officers who are state legislator members are Republican.

ALEC is supported by many right-wing foundations and organizations, including but not limited to: National Rifle Association, Family Research Council, Heritage Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Milliken Foundation, DeVos Foundation, Bradley Foundation, and the Olin Foundation.

ALEC has over three hundred corporate sponsors. Some corporations and trade groups that have strong ties to ALEC include: Enron, American Nuclear Energy Council, American Petroleum Institute, Amoco, Chevron, Coors Brewing Company, Shell, Texaco, Union Pacific Railroad, Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, Phillip Morris, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, others.

ALEC has proposed that many public services be taken over by for-profit private businesses, including schools, prisons, public transportation, and social and welfare services.

One of ALEC’s central concerns is government regulations of businesses, especially regulations that protect the environment and/or public health.

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ALEC's Activities:
According to ALEC: “During the 1999-2000 legislative cycle, ALEC legislators introduced more than 3100 pieces of legislation based on our models, and more than 450 of these were enacted…In the legislative Sessions of 2000, there were more than 2150 introductions promoting ALEC policy.”

ALEC develops and creates “model” legislation and through its national political network lobbies to get it passed in state legislatures.

ALEC has 9 “Task Forces” that mirror many of the government’s departments. Commerce & Economic Development Task Force; Criminal Justice Task Force; Energy, Environment, Natural Resources & Agriculture Task Force; Tax & Fiscal Policy Task Force; Trade & Transportation Task Force; Health & Human Services Task Force; Education Task Force; Telecommunications & Information Technology Task Force; and the Federalism Task Force.

ALEC works closely with the State Policy Network, a national network of right-wing groups and foundations that push their agenda on the local and state level.

ALEC has been a strong supporter of deregulation of various industries. For example, in the 1990’s ALEC championed deregulation of the electricity industry by arguing that state’s had a monopoly over the “utility markets.” During this time Kenneth Lay of Enron was an active, outspoken member who strongly supported deregulation.

One of the issues that ALEC has had noteworthy success is education. ALEC created the first private school voucher legislation that proposed to funnel public education funds into private schools. ALEC argues that market competition will force public schools to improve or be put out of business.

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ALEC's History:
ALEC’s early years conformed to Weyrich’s vision, focusing on standard right wing causes such as opposing abortion and women’s rights and supporting school prayer.

In the 1980’s ALEC’s focus changed due to increased corporate interests and donations.

ALEC was one of President Reagan’s strongest supporters throughout the 1980’s and through its relationship with Reagan, ALEC gained notoriety. In the 80’s many of ALEC key employees were offered jobs in the Reagan administration.

In the mid-1980’s ALEC had its own political action committee, ALEC-PAC, that targeted key races that could influence partisan control over state legislatures.

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ALEC Quotes:
“Our members join for the purpose of having a seat at the table. That’s just what we do, that’s the service we offer. The organization is supported by money from the corporate sector, and, by paying to be members, corporations are allowed the opportunity to sit down at the table and discuss the issues that they have an interest in.”
-Dennis Bartlett, ALEC, 1997


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American Life League

P.O. Box 1350, Stafford, VA 22555
www.all.org

Established: 1979
President/Founder: Judie Brown
Finances: $6.9 million dollars (2000 budget)
Membership: claims 300,000 members
Formerly known as: American Life Lobby




ALL’s Principal Issues:


To end all forms of abortion without any exceptions made for the health and life of the mother, rape or incest.

ALL's work includes campaigns against the use of all contraceptives, lobbying for “abstinence-only education” and the elimination of sex education in public schools.

ALL also fights against euthanasia, fetal tissue and embryo research, and questions the use of vaccines, such as rubella, that are created from human tissue cells.

Brown has strongly criticized President George W. Bush for not supporting the Human Life Amendment and has chastised other conservative groups for giving him any support.

According to Judie Brown, “Abortion is never necessary to save a mother's life.”



ALL's Activities:
Organizes grassroots activists.

Lobbies on behalf of its issues.
Produces educational materials and publishes a weekly newsletter.

Participates in legal action

ALL has its own voting mobilization project.

Sells anti-abortion clothing, jewelry, stickers, and brochures.



Judie Brown is the grandmother of the modern anti-choice movement:
ALL’s early networking created the foundation for the outspoken anti-abortion movement in the 1980’s and the established movement as it exists now.

ALL helped to establish the “rescue movement” which made the use of aggressive tactics to disrupt reproductive health services commonplace.

These tactics, adopted and popularized by ALL, include “sidewalk counseling,” clinic blockades, and the systematic harassing and intimidation of patients, clinics and doctors.

According to Brown these activities are “free speech” and in 1994 ALL filed charges over the Freedom of Access to Clinics Act (FACE) in American Life League v. Reno. ALL lost in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.



ALL's Friends and Allies in High Places


ALL defends anti-choice activists who have been arrested for blocking clinics and has applauded the controversial work of Operation Rescue and Randall Terry.

In 1996 when Bill Bennett and Ralph Reed questioned the GOP’s absolutist anti-abortion plank, Judie Brown gathered together 11 pro-life leaders including Family Research Council’s Gary Bauer and Focus on the Family’s James Dobson to express their strong support of the Human Life Amendment and collective rejection of any exceptions for abortion.

Judie Brown is allegedly a member of the clandestine right wing organization Council for National Policy.



ALL’s History:
In 1979, Judie Brown broke from the National Right To Life Committee to form ALL.

Within less than a year of its founding, ALL had 68,000 members and was a liaison to 4,000 groups. ALL received virtually free publicity from religious-right leader Paul Weyrich with the help of right-wing direct mail specialist Richard Viguerie’s massive membership lists.

[Updated September 2002]










Americans for Tax Reform

1920 L St. NW, Suite 200
Washington DC 20036
www.atr.org

Established: ATR was founded in the mid-80s inside the Reagan White House. Norquist was tapped to head the group as an in-house operation to build support for the 1986 tax reform bill.
President/Executive Director: Grover Norquist
Finances: $1,244,171 (expenditures for 2001)
Employees: 14
High-profile staffers include: Peter Ferrara, ATR’s former general counsel and chief economist, is currently founder and President of the Virginia Chapter for the Club for Growth.
Affiliations: Americans for Tax Reform Foundation is the education and research arm of ATR. ATR is a member of the State Policy Network and of townhall.com, a right-wing Internet portal founded by the Heritage Foundation.


ATR’s Principal Issues:
ATR’s Activities:
ATR’s History and Background:
About Grover Norquist:
ATR alumni in the Bush administration:
Quotes by Grover Norquist:
Quotes about ATR:


ATR’s Principal Issues:
From ATR’s mission statement: “ATR opposes all tax increases as a matter of principle. We believe in a system in which taxes are simpler, fairer, flatter, more visible, and lower than they are today. The government’s power to control one’s life derives from its power to tax. We believe that power should be minimized… ATR serves as a national clearinghouse for the grassroots taxpayers’ movement by working with approximately 800 state and county level groups.”

ATR serves as the operational base for President Grover Norquist’s vast political operation.

ATR Foundation has received a number of grants from right wing foundations, including Olin, Scaife, Bradley, etc.

ATR is heavily funded by a number of corporate backers, with the tobacco, gambling and alcohol industries figuring most prominently in 1999. Other recent ATR funders have included Microsoft, Pfitzer, AOL Time Warner and UPS.

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ATR’s Activities:


ATR provides support to right-wing policies and candidates. In 1999, it spent $4.2 million on a television ad campaign touting the GOP tax plan.

ATR has also taken a lead in other causes dear to the GOP’s right wing, such as opposing campaign finance reform and attacking the 2000 presidential bid of Sen. John McCain.

During the 1996 elections ATR flooded 150 congressional districts with mail and phone calls which was supported by a $4.6 million donation from the Republican National Committee.

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ATR’s History and Background:
ATR was originally founded inside the Reagan White House and later became officially independent.

Norquist was a key grassroots proponent of the Contract With America and was Gingrich’s top unofficial advisor.


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About Grover Norquist:
Grover Norquist is also on the boards of the National Rifle Association of America and the American Conservative Union.

Norquist forged an early alliance with President Bush, traveling to Austin, Texas to meet with then-Governor Bush and his political advisor Karl Rove right after Bush's 1998 reelection. Norquist threw the full force of his influence behind the Bush campaign, playing a key role in defeating Sen. John McCain in the South Carolina primaries.

Norquist was a campaign staffer on the 1988, 1992, 1996 Republican Platform Committees and executive director of both the National Taxpayers' Union and the College Republicans.

Norquist writes the monthly politics column for the American Enterprise Institute magazine and used to write a monthly column for the American Spectator.

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ATR alumni in the Bush administration:
Nina Shokraii Rees, Special Assistant to the Vice President for Domestic Policy


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Quotes by Grover Norquist:
On Pat Robertson's 700 Club, Norquist said the following about the Bush Adminstration, “We is them, and they is us. When I walk through the White House, I recognize as many people as when I would walk through the Heritage Foundation.”

“My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

“I want to reduce the size of government in half as a percentage of GNP [gross national product] over the next 25 years. We want to reduce the number of people depending on government so there is more autonomy and more free citizens.”

“Every time you cut programs, you take away a person who has a vested interest in high taxes and you put him on the tax rolls and make him a taxpayer. A farmer on subsidies is part welfare bum, whereas a free-market farmer is a small businessman with a gun.”

“In the old days, George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse doorway and told children they could not come in. Today, the foes of school choice stand in the doorway and say to the grandchildren of George Wallace's victims, “You cannot get out.”
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Quotes about ATR:
Grover Norquist is “the person who I regard as the most innovative, creative, courageous and entrepreneurial leader of the anti-tax efforts and of conservative grassroots activism in America . . . He has truly made a difference and truly changed American history.”-- Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA)

“Americans for Tax Reform is a wonderful-sounding name. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a front organization for Grover Norquist’s lobbying activities.” --Former Sen. Warren Rudman (R-NH)

Norquist is “the V.I. Lenin of the anti-tax movement.”
-- Paul Gigot, Wall Street Journal columnist

“Americans for Tax Reform is a front for the Republican Party. Republicans are hiding money in this group, and that is fundamentally dishonest.” --Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity

“You can wear too many hats and [Norquist] does. He’s a whole hat store. And that’s the conflict of interest: He’s head of a non-profit. He’s a corporate lobbyist. He’s a foreign lobbyist. This gives nonprofits, which are supposed to be doing research, a bad name.” --Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity

[Updated March 2003]
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Bradley Foundation, Lynne and Harry

PO Box 510860
Milwaukee, WI 53203-0153
www.bradleyfdn.org

Established: 1942
President/CEO: Michael W. Grebe Chairman of the Board of Directors: Thomas L. Rhodes
Finances: $532 million (2002 net assets)
Grants awarded, annually: $33.3 million (2002)
Employees: 18
Publications: The Lion Letter, annual report
Formerly known as: Allen Bradley Foundation



Bradley’s Principal Issues:
Bradley Foundation activities:
List of Right-Wing Grantees:
President Bush on the Bradley Foundation:


Bradley’s Principal Issues:


Bradley is one of the largest philanthropic foundations responsible for the financial backing of the right-wing agenda for nearly twenty years.

Bradley’s philanthropy supports right-wing organizations, educational programs, as well as many non-partisan social programs and civic organizations.

The issues that Bradley supports include: private school vouchers, faith-based social services, and welfare reform.

According to Bradley, the projects sponsored by the foundation “encourage improved government, a more vital sense of citizenship, and a strong belief in personal responsibility.”

Bradley has been accused of underreporting the grant amounts that it gives to many of the right-wing organizations that it supports.


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Bradley Foundation activities:
Bradley has made right-wing inroads in academia by establishing chairmanship positions, undergraduate and graduate programs, fellowships, and whole departments at many prestigious universities including: Boston College, Boston University, Bowling Green State University, Carnegie Mellon University, Catholic University, Columbia University, Georgetown University, George Mason University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Kenyon College, Marquette University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michigan State University, New York University, Princeton University, Stanford University, University of California- Berkeley, University of California- Los Angeles, University of California- San Diego, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, University of Notre Dame, University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin, and Washington University- St. Louis.

Bradley has supported and in some cases, had to defend controversial right-wing recipients of their grants, particularly Charles Murray and David Brock.
Charles Murray—Murray, author of “The Bell Curve,” which argues that intelligence is predicated on race, and “Losing Ground,” whose thesis is that social programs should be abolished. Murray’s work was so controversial and objectionable that the right-wing Manhattan Institute, supported by Bradley and for which he worked, asked him to leave. However, the Bradley Foundation stood by him because Murray, according to former Bradley President Joyce, “is one of the foremost social thinkers in the country.” Bradley extended Murray’s $100,000 per year grant when he went to the American Enterprise Institute. [Buying a Movement]
David Brock—In 1992 Bradley contributed $11,850 to David Brock for the publication of his work, “The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story,” which attacked Hill’s credibility.

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List of Right-Wing Grantees:
Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty
Alexis de Tocqueville Institution
American Civil Rights Institute
American Civil Rights Union
American Conservative Union Foundation
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Becket Fund
Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO)
Capital Research Center
Center for Individual Rights
Center for Education Reform
Center for Public Justice
Center for the Study of Popular Culture
Children’s Educational Opportunity Foundation America
Citizens for the Preservation of Constitutional Rights
Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy
Collegiate Network
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Empire Foundation for Policy Research
Evergreen Freedom Foundation
Equal Opportunity Foundation
Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
Fellowship of Christian Athletes
Friends of Choice in Urban Schools
Free Congress Research and Education Foundation
Galen Institute
Heartland Institute
Heritage Foundation
Hudson Institute
Hoover Institute
Institute for American Values
Institute for Justice
Leadership Institute
Mackinac Center for Public Policy
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
National Association of Scholars
National Center for Policy Analysis
Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy
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President Bush on the Bradley Foundation:
“The reason that I am so happy that my friend Mike Grebe is here and Mike Joyce and others from The Bradley Foundation is because "Foundation America" must be a part of the revitalization of our communities as well. And The Bradley Foundation has always been willing to see different solutions. They have been willing to challenge the status quo. They say where we find failure, something else must occur. And the Foundation not only has been kind and generous with its donations, the Foundation also has been willing to help people think anew, and I appreciate you all coming. I am honored you're here and thanks for your good work.”

-President George W. Bush,
speaking at the Bradley Foundation-supported Holy Redeemer Institutional Church of God in Christ, Milwaukee, July 2002.

tons more*@
http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=16205&print=yes&units=all


This is just a quarter of this page.. so help yourself and look who is who and what they do..

[F6]

(PR NEWSWIRE) Independent Women's Forum Says UN Attack on Infant Formula
Is Anti-Woman

WASHINGTON, April 21[, 2005] /PRNewswire/ -- The Independent Women's Forum today
is disturbed by recent reports that the United Nations is embracing policies
that are clearly anti-woman and could ultimately lead to a ban of infant
formula throughout much of the world, setting women in the workplace back
decades.

"Infant formula is an excellent form of nutrition for infants, and an
important alternative given the reality that many women simply cannot
breastfeed due to physical conditions or workplace obligations. Infant
formula has been critical to enabling woman to achieve more in the workplace,
by creating choice and greater flexibility," said Nancy M. Pfotenhauer,
president of the Independent Women's Forum. "We are alarmed by reports that
the UN and its agencies are actively working to remove bottle-feeding as a
viable option for women around the world. Women deserve the right to decide
how to care for their infants, and the UN certainly is not in the position to
impose baseless restrictions upon new mothers."

Last month, the World Health Organization -- the UN's Geneva-based health
agency -- decided to allow a vote on a resolution that would place black
warning labels on infant formula products. The resolution, sponsored by Fiji,
Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Nepal and Palau,
claims that formula contains pathogens that can result in death.

"We intend to monitor developments over the next 2-3 weeks and to alert
women about this attack on their liberties," Nancy M. Pfotenhauer said. "We
all recognize the benefits of breast feeding, but not all women can breast
feed. This is an attack on adoptive mothers, mothers with physical conditions
that make breastfeeding hazardous, including women infected with HIV, and of
course women who are working to keep a roof over their family's heads."

The UN will be voting on the resolution at the 58th World Health Assembly
meeting in Geneva on May 16, 2005.

"We all want infants to receive the best possible nutrition, but the UN
resolution could be counter-productive both to infants and their mothers,"
said Pfotenhauer.

About Independent Women's Forum

The Independent Women's Forum was established to combat the women-as-
victim, pro-big-government ideology of radical feminism. We seek to restore,
strengthen, and extend that which promotes women's well being by advancing the
principles of self-reliance, political freedom, economic liberty, and personal
responsibility.

SOURCE Independent Women's Forum

Contact Information:
Louise Filkins of the Independent Women's Forum, [phone]

*** end of story ***

[F6]

Next Generation of Conservatives (By the Dormful)


From left, Joel Peyton, Scott Hurff, Daren Stanaway and Kenneth Cribb, interns at the conservative Heritage Foundation, in the subsidized dorm at the group's headquarters in Washington.
Katie Falkenberg for The New York Times


Intern Joel Peyton, who just graduated from Western Kentucky University, is helping to write a paper on privatized services in national parks.
Katie Falkenberg for The New York Times

By JASON DePARLE
Published: June 14, 2005

WASHINGTON, June 13 - They are young and bright and ardently right. They tack Ronald Reagan calendars on their cubicle walls and devote brown bag lunches to the free market theories of Friedrich von Hayek. They come from 51 colleges and 28 states, calling for low taxes, strong defense and dorm rooms with a view.

And let's get one thing straight: they're not here to run the copying machine.

The summer interns of the Heritage Foundation have arrived, forming an elite corps inside the capital's premier conservative research group. The 64 interns are each paid a 10-week stipend of $2,500, and about half are housed in a subsidized dorm at the group's headquarters, complete with a fitness room.

Unusual in its size (and in its walk-in closets), the program, on which Heritage spends $570,000 a year, is both a coveted spot on the young conservative circuit and an example of the care the movement takes to cultivate its young.

Scott Hurff, a senior at Wake Forest University, wanted the internship so badly that he filed three applications. Rachael Seidenschnur had set her eyes on Heritage since her youth in Little Rock, Ark., where she revived the teenage Republicans club at Central High School.

Kenneth Cribb came with family ties and a book by the conservative author Russell Kirk, which he said "sends chills up my spine." Daren Stanaway and Brian Christiansen welcomed Heritage as an escape from the liberal orthodoxies they said they experienced at Harvard and Yale.

"In the face of derogation, many intelligent young conservatives have simply responded by hiding their beliefs or going with the crowd," Ms. Stanaway wrote in an application essay. "I refuse to be one of them."

Like all Heritage applicants, she also answered a 12-item questionnaire designed to ferret out latent liberalism with questions about guns, abortion, welfare and missile defense. (If you agree with the statement that "tax increases are the most appropriate way to balance the budget," this is probably not the internship for you.)

Sitting in his supersized office atop the organization he has spent three decades building, Edwin J. Feulner, the longtime president at Heritage, cited the sign over a Heritage auditorium - "Building for the Next Generation" - as evidence of how central to his mission leadership development is.

"If we can get young people involved, they will continue to support Heritage, our idea and our causes," Mr. Feulner said. "We almost think of ourselves as a college."

Arguing that liberals dominate most campuses, Mr. Feulner said, "We've had to cultivate our alternative."

It is an alternative with few rivals. The Brookings Institution, a centrist group more than 50 years older than Heritage, has no paid interns. Neither does the Progressive Policy Institute, which promotes a centrist version of liberalism. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a premier antipoverty group, has 10 paid interns. People for the American Way, a bulwark of Beltway liberalism, has 40 - but no dorm.

"There's no question that the right wing over the last 25 years did a much better job of creating a farm system," said Ralph G. Neas, the president of People for the American Way. Like many other liberal groups, his has recently expanded its campus outreach activities in an effort to keep pace with the right.

"They invested in young people," Mr. Neas said. "We're trying to catch up."

While the prestige of Heritage is part of the appeal, so is the work, which rarely involves making coffee or copies. Joel Peyton, who just graduated from Western Kentucky University, is helping to write a paper on privatized services in national parks. That is a task for which he may be especially well suited: after spending three summers working in a Kentucky state park, he published a paper this year denouncing "the inefficiencies of a government-run park system."

When Mr. Peyton's application reached the desk of Ronald D. Utt, a Heritage senior fellow, Mr. Utt said, "Get this guy." An expert in privatization, Mr. Utt had been wanting to make the same arguments about the National Park Service, which he called "the world's largest lawn care and janitorial service."

Mr. Peyton will spend the summer outside Mr. Utt's office, helping to make the case.

Heritage has had interns, in ones and twos, ever since its founding in 1973. But it intensified its effort about 15 years ago, hiring a full-time intern coordinator. Another leap forward occurred in 1999, when a supporter, Tom Johnson, offered to donate an adjacent building. Mr. Feulner embarked on a $12 million fund-raising drive to renovate it and carved out space for 30 dorm rooms. For $10,000, donors could have their names in bronze on a dorm room door.

Dr. C. N. Papadopoulos underwrote two rooms, in honor of his mother and his mother-in-law. Dr. Papadopoulos, a Greek immigrant now in Houston, left his work as an anesthesiologist for ventures in banking and real estate, and became a Heritage donor a decade ago after a direct-mail solicitation appealed to his belief in free enterprise.

Dr. Papadopoulos said he helped finance the dorms because he wanted "these young folks to go to Washington and find out what this country is all about."

"This is the land of opportunity," Dr. Papadopoulos said, "and it always will be as long as the you don't depend on the federal government to do everything."

Katherine Rogers, a junior at Georgetown, is spending the summer in the Keith and Lois Mitchell room, on the Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Smyth floor, just upstairs from the Norma Zindahl Intern Lounge, which is adjacent to the William J. Lehrfeld Intern Center. Ms. Rogers's father is a longtime Heritage donor, and she is working in donor relations, which she thinks will be useful in her intended career as a pharmaceutical lobbyist.

"It's all about forging one-to-one relationships," Ms. Rogers said. "That's where business starts."

Among notable former Heritage interns are Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, and Thad T. Viers, elected at 24 to the South Carolina Legislature. Now a 27-year-old law student as well as a lawmaker, Mr. Viers described Heritage as a prized stop on a journey that stretched from a childhood in a single-wide trailer through college at the Citadel and into political life.

"It's always a card I have in my arsenal if anybody wants to challenge my conservative credentials," Mr. Viers said. "It's a trump card, too." Other former interns hold posts on Capitol Hill and in the White House.

Mr. Lowry theorizes that young conservatives are especially interested in the ideas undergirding their politics, often having come from liberal campuses where they have had to defend themselves. That theory finds support among the current interns, who often talk of being outnumbered by left-leaning peers.

Among the perks of the summer program is a lunch series in which interns make their way through the conservative canon. "Being raised a Christian, with family values, I want to make sure I have a solid philosophical footing," said Mr. Hurff, 21, the Wake Forest senior.

Mr. Cribb, whose uncle, T. Kenneth Cribb Jr., was a Reagan aide and a Heritage fellow, said that the internship offered a chance "to study the fundamental ideas of conservatism." Last week, speakers at Heritage events included Edwin Meese, the former attorney general, and the historian David McCullough.

Ms. Seidenschnur, 21, a senior at Washington and Lee, found herself in a political minority as early as high school as she worked in three Republican clubs.

"I was sick of being ridiculed by my teachers for being a Republican: 'Oh, here comes the Republican,' " she said. A veteran intern, she has worked on Capitol Hill (for former Senator Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas), in the White House (for the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives) and at a fund-raising organization (the National Republican Congressional Committee).

"Most of my internships were more on the campaign and active side of politics," Ms. Seidenschnur said. "I wanted to come to Heritage to see more of the intellectual side of politics and the conservative thought movement. When I analyzed my résumé, I realized that was greatly missing."

Oh, and the internship held one other appeal.

"I have a balcony," she said. "It's just magical."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/politics/14heritage.html

[F6]

Putting in a good word for the über-lobbyist

Attentive readers of "How the World Works" may recall a posting I made shortly before Christmas about bio-piracy -- a term used to describe the patenting, by corporations in the developed world, of genetic data of plants and animals indigenous to developing nations. In my posting, I quoted one Susan Finston, the executive director of the American Bioindustry Alliance, who claimed that A) there wasn't a problem, and B) even if there was, the World Trade Organization wasn't the place to discuss it.

I expressed some skepticism about Finston's statements, but looking back, I should have been nastier. My gut reaction when spokespeople for industry alliances make claims is to not trust a word they say -- and if they happen to say, as Finston did, that there is no problem, then I tend to believe, even without evidence, that something is fishy.

Well, guess what, there is a problem, and it happens to be Susan Finston. An illuminating New York Times article published just before Christmas noted that Finston had authored "opinion pieces" in the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal on the topic of patent protection.

But she identified herself merely as a "research associate" for the Institute of Policy Research, a conservative think tank based in Texas. There was no mention at all that in August she had been registered as a lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or her service as executive director of the American Bioindustry Alliance.

Even though it might be hard to summon up the requisite outrage for the business-as-usual spectacle of paid lobbyists masquerading as "research associates" or "analysts," it's still our duty to do so. And it may be one more reason to thank super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff for all he's done to expose the inner workings of the seedy intersection between industry and government. The Times started paying attention to Finston after it was revealed that Abramoff was paying stipends to "analysts" at think tanks such as the Cato Institute.

Now everyone is getting a harder look. Thanks, Jack! We owe you!

-- Andrew Leonard

[19:02 EST, Jan. 10, 2006]

Copyright ©2006 Salon Media Group, Inc.

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/index.html?blog=/tech/htww/2006/01/10/finston/index.html

[F6]

all -- the source link for 'The Apparat' is now http://www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=18

[F6]

Why some conservatives are backing Obama

Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Sunday, July 6, 2008

(07-06) 18:08 PDT Washington - -- The "Obamacans" that Sen. Barack Obama used to joke about - Republican apostates who whispered their support for his candidacy - have morphed into a new phenomenon, or syndrome, as detractors like to call it: the Obamacons.

These are conservatives who have publicly endorsed the presumptive Democratic nominee, dissidents from the brain trust of think tanks, ex-officials and policy magazines that have fueled the Republican Party since the 1960s. Scratch the surface of this elite, and one finds a profound dismay that is far more damaging to the GOP than the usual 10 percent of registered Republicans expected to switch sides during a presidential election.

"The untold story of the Bush administration is the deliberate annihilation of the Reaganite, small-government wing of the Republican Party," said Michael Greve, director of the Federalism Project at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. "A lot of people are very bitter about it."

Many conservatives and their brethren, the free-market, socially liberal libertarians, are deeply skeptical of Obama's rhetorical flirtations with free-market ideas and view his policies as orthodox liberalism. Yet one measure of their rupture with the GOP is their open disregard for Republican nominee John McCain and their now almost-wistful view of a president the Republicans tried to impeach.

"When he leaves the room, everybody thinks he just agreed with them," Greve said of Obama. "We don't know if you're really buying a pig in a poke here. It could be the second coming of the Clinton administration. If people have any confidence in that, I think a whole lot of conservatives would vote for him."

Such sentiments reflect a collapse of the "big tent" conservative coalition that Republican President Ronald Reagan forged in 1980, uniting free-market, small-government types, Christian evangelicals, cultural traditionalists and anti-communists, now called neoconservatives. The neoconservatives, whose intellectual leaders include New York Times columnist David Brooks and Weekly Standard publisher Bill Kristol, remain firmly inside the GOP and strongly back McCain, who appeals to their model of "national greatness." So do mainstream conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, which issues regular attacks against Obama's economic plans, and the traditionalist magazine National Review.

The left often lumps these factions together, but the Iraq war and President Bush's "compassionate conservatism" that led to an expansion of government have ruptured the coalition. Many conservatives are aghast at the rise in spending and debt under the Bush administration, its expansion of executive power, and what they see as a trampling of civil liberties and a taste for empire.

"I do know libertarians who think Obama is the Antichrist, that he's farther left than John Kerry, much farther left than Bill Clinton, and you'd clearly have to be insane to vote for this guy," said David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "But there are libertarians who say, 'Oh yeah? Do you think Obama will increase spending by $1 trillion, because that's what Republicans did over the past two presidential terms. So really, how much worse can he be? And there are certainly libertarians who think Obama will be better on the war and on foreign policy, on executive power and on surveillance than McCain."

Libertarians are tired of Christian evangelicals, who they believe captured the GOP under President Bush. Evangelicals, for their part, are skeptical of McCain, who in 2000 called Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson "agents of intolerance." McCain has tried to make amends, promising to stand firm on abortion and same-sex marriage, and appoint conservative Supreme Court justices, but mistrust runs deep.

Doug Kmiec is former chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, and now a constitutional law professor at Pepperdine University and a devout Catholic. Kmiec endorsed Obama earlier this year, despite his conviction that Obama "believes in a pretty progressive agenda."

Kmiec said his support deepened after meeting with Obama and other faith leaders last month, during which the busy candidate spent 2 1/2 in a freewheeling discussion with people who differed with him.

"I think he's the right person at the right time to re-establish principles of constitutional governance that have been ill-treated by the current administration, and to free us from the tar paper that we know is Iraq," Kmiec said, adding that many Republicans privately agree. "I think he's a man in the market for every good idea he can find, and he doesn't care what label it comes with."

David Friedman, the son of late conservative icon and Nobel economist Milton Friedman, has also endorsed Obama. Calling McCain a "nationalist," Friedman, an economist at Santa Clara University, thinks Obama could turn out like the liberals who deregulated New Zealand's economy.

"Of the two, Obama is less bad and at least has a chance in some ways of being good," said Friedman. Friedman likes Obama's University of Chicago advisers such as Austan Goolsbee and Cass Sunstein, who he believes are trying to forge a new leftism that incorporates free-market views. "I don't expect to agree in general with them," Friedman said, "but I certainly would be happy if the left became more libertarian, since the right seems to be less libertarian than it used to be."

Many see the Iraq war as hostile to conservative values and as a "friend of the state" - something that inherently expands the reach of the government, as Milton Friedman once described war.

"People don't understand that there has always been a small but very significant element of conservatives who have been against the war from day one and who, like me, also hate George Bush and think he's the most incompetent president in American history," said Bruce Bartlett, a supply-side economist who coined the term Obamacons. "The few people who are slavishly pro-Republican, live or die, slavishly pro-Bush like the Weekly Standard crowd, have gotten [a] lot more publicity than they deserve." [F6 note -- see e.g. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=13088854 ]

Many conservatives are looking for a Clintonesque "Sister Soulja" or "end welfare as we know it" moment from Obama, a concrete demonstration of a willingness to abandon Democratic dogma.

"The Republicans have left the libertarian baby on the doorstep, but Democrats won't open the door," said Boaz. "There are people saying Obama's a University of Chicago Democrat, and you can't spend 10 years at the University of Chicago without having some appreciation for markets. I'd like to believe that. I just don't see the rubber meeting the road."

Matt Welch, editor in chief of the libertarian Reason Magazine and author of "McCain, the Myth of a Maverick," thinks Obama's conservative support "comes as much anything else from people being exhausted with the Republican coalition, who are mad at one wing or another, and they just think it's time for them to lose. It's just, 'Look, we're out of ideas, we're exhausted, it's not working, we don't know what our principles are anymore, let's take one for the team and have a black guy be the president for a while.' "

Obama is actively trying to switch one prominent Republican to an Obamacan, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who met with both candidates last month.

E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at [e-mail].

© 2008 Hearst Communications Inc. (emphasis added)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/06/MN3T11JI0P.DTL





"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790

F6

[F6]

source link for 'The Apparat' now http://www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=18 (eom)

[F6]

source link for 'The Apparat' (with quite a few embedded links I did not pick up in my original post of same, to which this is a reply) now http://old.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=18