Why The Right Is In Control

[Addison Miles]

Very simply, rightwingers control the mechanisms of power and communication.

There may well be a majority of Americans who disapprove of Bush and the rightwing agenda, but the analogy is clear: rightwingers are the drivers, everyone else is a passenger. It only takes one pilot to control the fate of hundreds of passengers. Likewise, between the mainstream media, talk radio, and the three branches of government, rightwingers are dragging us all along on their reckless ride.

Until progressives and other rational Americans learn to wrest control of the tools of power and communication, nothing will change.

Addison Miles

[DBoon]

1. Decline of Union Power

In college I had a professor (Stanley Aronowitz) who believed the rightward shift of US politics was a direct result of the gradual disintegration of the union movement in this country. The Democratic Party was the functional equivalent of European labor/social democratic parties, in that it relied on union numbers and strength for its power.

I'd link this to the tendency of liberal Democrats to lose touch with non-minority working class voters

[WhoCountsTheVotes]

2. Yes, and you can thank a lot of Democrats for that too

When Reagan fired the air traffic controllers, business got the message load and clear - you can illegally fire workers for organizing, and you won't get into trouble.

Lots of it happened under Clinton too, who did little to stop it.

[bleedingheart]

3. the unions have been victimized by the right because people

have fallen for the lies of the right regarding them.

While nothing is completely without any corruption, the good of the unions far outweigh any bad.

I also think this is a case of "we didn't know how good we had it"...

The prosperous nation we live in today was in part due to the unions who helped to raise a significant number of people to the middle class.

[lindashaw]

4. Well, they don't control me. I have gotten the list of Johnson

County, Texas, Precinct 4, Democrat primary voters going back to 1996. I am going to be their best friend from now until November of next year. It's not much, but it's something I can do.

[Muckle37]

5. Right wing control

While I agree that getting one's voice out is critical to having an effect on the world, I don't think that democrats, anymore than republicans, should wrest control of the tools of power and communication. That sounds too dictatorial to me. In order to grow a movement, people have to willingly want to join. In a free market, if you put the best ideas out there, people will find them. It should not be about having the most control over the media. There are so many outlets nowadays for information, people are free to listen, watch, or read just about any opinion across the entire spectrum of ideas.

[Addison Miles]

6. May I respectfully point out the problem with your statement?

"In a free market, if you put the best ideas out there, people will find them."

Precisely the problem: when one group controls the mechanism that allows someone to "put the best ideas out there", then only one set of ideas is getting heard.

[T Wolf]

8. welcome, but

I think you are a bit (or way) too naive.

The control the repukes have is total. And rather than argue the issue about the importance of controlling communication, just acknowlege this one point:

Almost 70% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein personally directed the attacks on 9/1//01.

Where do you think they got that idea?

That one item speaks volumes.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

10. There are many outlets but many people don't have computers

and you would be surprised at the number of Americans that DO NOT have cable.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

7. This is HOW they did it..take notes:

Think tanks are HOW they have waged a culture war that took over the public conversation. Tax exempt money to organizations cloaked as charity.


Academic Sector Organizations and Programs


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National Think Tanks and Advocacy Groups


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Media Groups


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Legal Organizations


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State and Regional Think Tanks and Advocacy Groups


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Religious Sector Organizations


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Philanthropic Institutions and Networks
National Think Tanks
and Advocacy Groups
From a report by NCRP

No set of institutions has done more to set the national policy agenda than some of the heavily-funded think tanks and advocacy groups listed here. All are focused on national budget and policy priorities and are especially well funded. Over the 1992-1994 period, the foundations profiled in this report poured close to $80 million into these organizations, $64 million of which was invested in multi-issue policy institutions with a major focus on shaping national domestic policy and $15.2 million of which was granted to policy research and advocacy organizations focused on national security and foreign policy issues. Much of this grant money was concentrated in just a handful of institutions.

http://www.mediatransparency.org/national_think_tanks.htm

SEARCH | ISSUES | MOVEMENT | RESOURCES | ABOUT | CONTACT US | HELP USWashington Post
Oct 3, 2002

Robertson Charity Wins 'Faith-Based' Grant

Today, Operation Blessing International, a Virginia Beach charity created by Robertson, is to get $500,000 in the first wave of grants to be distributed under the faith-based initiative, which gives federal money to religious organizations that provide social services...


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Washington Post
Sep. 15, 2002

GOP Using Faith Initiative to Woo Voters
Office's Officials Have Appeared With Republican Candidates in Tight Races

Republicans are using the prospect of federal grants from the Bush administration's "faith- based initiative" to boost support for GOP candidates, especially among black voters in states and districts with tight congressional races this fall.

http://www.mediatransparency.org/faithbased_watch.htm


SEARCH | ISSUES | MOVEMENT | RESOURCES | ABOUT | CONTACT US | HELP USConsortiumnews.com
Robert Parry
May 6, 2002

David Brock & the Watergate Legacy

David Brock’s tell-all Blinded by the Right parallels another account by a young man who came to Washington and found a home in Republican circles. That confessional book was Blind Ambition by Richard Nixon’s White House counsel John Dean, who described how his drive to succeed led him to join the crimes of Watergate.

http://www.mediatransparency.org/arkansas_project.htm

Antitrust Law & Economics Review:

JUDICIAL SEMINARS:
ECONOMICS, ACADEMIA, AND CORPORATE MONEY IN AMERICA

(good description of the ethical problems for judges in re the Law & Economics movement)


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June 30, 2000
Washington Post
Judges' Free Trips Go Unreported

Federal judges took more than a dozen expense-paid trips to seminars put on by conservative groups but failed to disclose the resort trips on their annual financial reports, as required by federal ethics laws.


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Search the database for grants that have the word "judge" in them -- efforts by the right to "educate" state & federal judges.
Law & Economics

Law & Economics is a movement funded and led by the conservative philanthropies described in this report.


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$30 million to "Law and Economics" | $25 million to the U of Chicago | $3.5 million to "educate" state and federal judges
American Prospect, Feb 2001
The Chicago Acid Bath
The Impoverished Logic of "Law and Economics"

Read about the cruel, market-serving, people-denying legal theory called “Law & Economics,” funded by the conservative philanthropies, that is helping to transform American law by elevating the idea of “wealth-maximization” to the goal of the law.

Read the report. | TripsForJudges.org documents the "education" of federal and state judges with an interactive, searchable database of judge's trips.


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Academic Sector Organizations & Programs

Law & Economics funding

From a report by NCRP

Much of the grant money going to top academic institutions supported the establishment
http://www.mediatransparency.org/law_and_economics.htm


Goal of school choice movement is to break up unions
BY ROB LEVINE
Guest Columnist

In "With school choice, every child can win" (March 1), the Heritage Foundation's Jennifer Garrett fails to mention that the real goals of the school choice movement are the breakup of one of the last two unionized sectors of U.S. society: public primary and secondary education, and the conversion to private profit of some of the $300 billion spent in the U.S. each year on public primary and secondary education.

She also fails to mention that most of the school choice movement is led and funded by a small group of wealthy conservative philanthropies. In short, Garrett paints a misleading and partisan picture both of the school choice movement and the "evidence" purporting to show that choice students do better academically.

The orchestrator and prime funder of this movement has been the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee. The Bradley Foundation makes annual grants of more than $40 million, and is obsessed with school choice and school vouchers.

It's no coincidence the largest voucher "experiment" in the nation is taking place in Bradley's hometown. In fact, the Bradley Foundation and its philanthropic brethren paid for almost every source that positively referenced school choice in Garrett's column.

Her institution, the Heritage Foundation, is the No. 1 recipient of conservative philanthropy money, having received at least $39 million since 1985 — $12 million from the Bradley Foundation alone. Howard Fuller, referenced in Garrett's article as being from the "Black Alliance for Education Options" (BAEO), is also head of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University – BAEO's parent organization, which has received more than $1 million from the Bradley Foundation
http://www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/news/opinion/3117372.htm

SEARCH | ISSUES | MOVEMENT | RESOURCES | ABOUT | CONTACT US | HELP US$7.4 million to the Federalist Society
$39 million to the Heritage Foundation

Village Voice
James Ridgeway
June 19, 2002

A Small Cartel of Conservative Lawyers Rewrites the American Rule

Court Jousters


Behind the Bush Administration's attack on civil rights in the name of war lurks the network of attorneys crafting laws for a new America.

Their hodgepodge of rules and statutes either now or soon will remake the nation, providing local police with sweeping federal authority, pushing the military and CIA directly
http://www.mediatransparency.org/court_watch.htm

Fear of All Sums
By PAUL KRUGMAN


t is difficult to get a man to understand something," wrote Upton Sinclair, "when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." To make sense of what passes for debate over Social Security reform, one must realize that advocates of privatization — of replacing the current system, at least in part, with a system of personal accounts — are determined not to understand basic arithmetic. Otherwise they would have to admit that such accounts would weaken, not strengthen, the system's finances.

Social Security as we know it is a system in which each generation's payroll taxes are mainly used to support the previous generation's retirement. If contributions from younger workers go into personal accounts instead, the problem should be obvious: who will pay benefits to today's retirees and older workers? It's just arithmetic: 2-1=1. So privatization creates a financial hole that must be filled by slashing benefits, providing large financial transfers from the rest of the government or both.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/21/opinion/21KRUG.html


CONSERVATIVE FOUNDATIONS PREVAIL IN SHAPING PUBLIC POLICIES
New Report Documents Public Policy Impact of 12 Core Foundations

Washington, D.C. -- With limited resources but a strong political vision, conservative foundations are playing a major role in shaping public policy priorities according to a new study by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) titled Moving a Public Policy Agenda: the Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations.

From 1992 to 1994, twelve conservative foundations studied by NCRP -- including the Bradley, Scaife and Olin foundations -- controlled assets of $1.1 billion and awarded $300 million in grants. While the size of their grantmaking programs may pale in comparison to some of the nation's largest foundations, conservative funders have unmatched success in advocating for their right-wing political agenda. NCRP found several factors contributing to this success:

First, they departed from grantmaking norms in the philanthropic sector by funding extremely aggressive and ideological institutions routinely committed to influencing budget and policy priorities. Two-thirds of their grant dollars -- $210 million out of $300 million total -- went to organizations and programs pursuing policy agendas based on the privatization of government services, deep reductions in federal anti-poverty spending, industrial deregulation, and the transfer of responsibility for social welfare to state and local government and the charitable sector.

Second, at a time when foundation and corporate leaders are increasingly committing their resources locally, the conservative foundations maintained an unusually strong focus on national public policy institutions. These investments have exacerbated resource disparities between multi-issue public policy institutions on the left and right sides of the political spectrum. The top five conservative multi-issue public policy groups in the NCRP study including Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and Citizens for a Sound Economy operated on $77 million in combined revenues in 1995 compared to $18.6 million of their eight political equivalents on the left.

Third, the conservative foundations demonstrated a preference for the marketing of ideas in their grantmaking. The majority of grantees in NCRP's study have developed sophisticated and effective media outreach strategies. For example, the fifth largest grantee in the study, Citizens for a Sound Economy, produced more than 130 policy papers, conducted 50 different advertising campaigns, appeared on 175 radio and television news shows, placed 235 op-ed articles, and received coverage in more than 4,000 news articles in 1995 alone. CSE's marketing and media efforts are the norm rather than exception among the conservative grantees. In the absence of similar efforts by liberal organizations and funders, communications campaigns like these have contributed to the current climate where right- wing ideas, sometimes based on inaccurate information, go unchallenged.

http://www.ncrp.org/reports/moving.htm


So what do we do...we spend our time talking BLUE STATES VERSUS RED states, munching on conspiracies and ruminating over Clinton's sex stories, Ann Coulter and never rally confonting the TRUTH! If people on this board spent one tenth of the time they spend bitching using it rather to understand the THIRTY YEAR MOVEMENT that took place, we'd be in year two of our OWN THIRTY year movement. Education, PATIENCE ( this isn't the lottery) oraganization and following THEIR map is the key. No one addresses the USEFUL ways to overcome this movement better than Arianna Huffington who has been inside the belly of the beast! Go to her site and get HER BOOK.
http://www.ariannaonline.com

[RuB]

9. Lower voter turnout

Flood the media (through right wing radio and simple minded cable tv talk shows) with issues that inflame and energize your base and tell them if they don't vote the evildoers will win and you have elections that leave Democrats scratching their heads in wonder.

[jiacinto]

11. I agree with you

We need to develop a media strategy.

[Muckle37]

13. right wing control

Some thoughtful responses, but I have to take issue with a few things and get some facts straight. First, I think it is downright silly to say that the right wing controls the media. In the past month, Newsweek and/or Time had the headline on the cover -- "Bush's $87 billion mess" as well as "Mission NOT Accomplished -- How Bush misjudged the Iraq post-war." These are mainstream magazines completely coming down on Bush. And the NY Times is consistently left-leaning in its editorials, and has endorsed every Democratic candidate for President since Eisenhower. And Dan Rather is completely pro-left, even speaking at a Democratic fundraiser in 2001. So I'm not sure where people get the idea that all media is somehow right wing exremism. There are plenty of democratic-leaning news shows and publications. There just isn't much of an audience for extremist positions (e.g. socialism, DavidDuke-ism) that some people want to see. But I don't want to win a following just by having the biggest speakers and the loudest screamers. Why would that be any more fair or just than the right wing having control of the media? If you decry the right's tactics, then be prinicpled about it and say they are wrong no matter who uses them. But don't say the right wing uses unfair tactics while at the same time salivating at the chance to do the exact same thing if given the chance. A higher road is the path to righteousness.

p.s. To those of you with the Vonnegut quote about angels and the mafia -- I love Vonnegut and have read many of his books multiple times, but you can't attribute the mafia's success to organization alone. You also have to factor in their willingness to kill and commit crimes in order to succeed. Even if organized along the same lines, angels would not be prepared to do that.

[K-W]

12. The Right is in control because the elite want them to be,

It is a backlash against the fear of the established power structure that developed in the 60's and 70's. Ant it wont calm down until we can effectively combat thier latest strategies and forms of control.

[Liberator_Rev]

14. The alliance of the Rich with the Religious Right

The Rich have made a deal with the leaders of the 'Religious Right' :
"You lead your sheep into the Republican Party and we'll make it worth your while."
We believe the answer is to get the message out to Christians that they are being misled, and if they want to follow Christ, they should become "Liberals Like Christ" :
http://www.LiberalsLikeChrist.Org/Christlike


See why we say followers of Christ (as opposed to 'Christians')
belong in the Liberal ranks of the Democratic Party.

[QC]

15. The fragmentation of the Left doesn't help matters.

What will it take to make us drop our factionalism and concentrate on our real enemy?