By Cliff Montgomery – Mar. 7th, 2012
Only the [violent] mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
Hannah Arendt
You’ve surely seen or have heard them in the past several months: rabidly conservative ads attacking a political candidate for being “liberal” or ‘putting Obama’s agenda’ above ‘our needs’.
Such ads make an educated person ask a few questions:
1.) Why am I supposed to hate all things “liberal,” since the political definition of that word describes something–or someone–dedicated to liberty and civil rights?
2.) Who precisely is determining ‘our needs’, and why is ‘Obama’s agenda’ declared to be against those things?
Many such ads are being funded by a group which calls itself Americans for Prosperity (AFP).
AFP “is a group fronting special interests [which was] started by oil billionaire David Koch and Richard Fink (a member of the board of directors of Koch Industries),” points out SourceWatch, an Internet-based publication of The Center for Media and Democracy, a non-profit group dedicated to investigative journalism.
“AFP has been accused of funding astroturf [i.e., fake grass roots] operations but also has been fueling the ‘Tea Party’ efforts,” continues SourceWatch.
“AFP’s messages are in sync with those of other groups funded by the Koch Family Foundations and the Koch’s other special interest groups,” states SourceWatch. The far-right political groups “work against progressive or Democratic initiatives and protections for workers and the environment,” adds the investigative reporting center.
“Accordingly, AFP opposes labor unions, health care reform, stimulus spending, and cap-and-trade legislation, which is aimed at making industries pay for the air pollution that they create,” declares SourceWatch.
And this far-right group tends to spend wildly during elections.According to SourceWatch, “AFP’s budget surged from $7 million in 2007 to $40 million in 2010, an election year.”
So who funds the political misrepresentations and outright lies produced by AFP? That’s harder to determine.
“Though it’s clearly involved in trying to influence elections,” points out OpenSecrets, a watchdog group which reports on the influence of money in U.S. politics, “AFP is shielded from having to disclose the donors that fund its work by its 501(c)(4) tax status, which labels it a ‘social welfare’ organization.”
“The same goes for its affiliated 501(c)(3) foundation,” continues OpenSecrets.
But apparently this legal loophole does not exist for the tax forms of many other right-wing groups and foundations. OpenSecrets investigated these forms and discovered a number of AFP’s funders, past and present.
“OpenSecrets Blog found, for example, that AFP received $25,000 from the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry trade group, which vigorously opposes legislation that attempts to slow climate change,” states the watchdog.
“API also gave money to two other conservative groups that ran ads in 2010,” continues OpenSecrets. These groups are “the 60 Plus Association, which received $25,000 from API, and Americans for Tax Reform, which received $50,000, OpenSecrets Blog found.”
“Both of those groups sponsored numerous ads opposing Democratic candidates, often tying them to climate legislation or the new health care law,” declared the watchdog.
“Much larger sums of money came to the AFP entities from [more ideological] rightward-leaning foundations,” states OpenSecrets.
“In 2010 the John William Pope Foundation gave AFP $1.6 million, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation $520,000, and the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation sent $150,000,” OpenSecrets continued.
“The Lambe Foundation’s directors include several members of the Koch family,” points out the political watchdog.
As for the Pope Foundation, it “is the creation of James Arthur Pope, a conservative multi-millionaire who heads a company that owns several chains of discount stores” declares OpenSecrets.
“Pope sits on the board of AFP,” continues the watchdog. “He and his extensive political activities in his home state of North Carolina and nationally were the subject of a New Yorker profile last year.”
“Pope is also on the board of the Bradley Foundation,” states OpenSecrets. That Milwaukee-based foundation “has disbursed hundreds of millions of dollars over the last decade to conservative think tanks, publications and other groups.”
“Bradley money has helped generate interest in such issues as welfare overhaul and school vouchers and supports an anti-union outfit called the Center for Union Facts,” declares the political watchdog.
Of course no one would expect to hear the truth about, say, Jewish people from a group of rabid anti-Semites. Likewise, no one should expect to hear the truth about unions or climate change from a group of wealthy people whose obvious biases – and equally obvious propaganda – poison any rational discussion on such subjects.
And where there is no possibility of rational discussion, there can be no democracy. But perhaps that is the whole point.
