P
Pookie
Guest
The Shadow Party - The Second Sister
July 10, 2007
Continuing my series on the excellent book written by David Horowitz and
Richard Poe entitled "The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton,
and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party" in which I
excerpt key portions to highlight the danger America faces from the new
left.
In the first post I posted about the overview the authors gave of The Shadow
Party, the second post was about the first of Seven Sisters comprising the
Shadow Party, MoveOn.org. Now I present the second sister, the Center for
American Progress:
The Center for American Progress is widely understood to be what one
inside source called, "the official Hillary Clinton think tank" - a platform
designed to highlight Hillary's policies and to enhance her prestige as a
potential presidential candidate.
Robert Dreyfuss reported in the 1 March 2004 edition of The Nation, "the
idea for the Center began with discussions in 2002 between [Morton] Halperin
and George Soros, the billionaire investor...Halperin, who heads the office
of Soros' Open Society Institute, brought Podesta into the discussion, and
beginning in late 2002 Halperin and Podesta circulated a series of papers to
funders."
Soros and Halperin then recruited Harold Ickes - chief fundraiser and
former deputy chief of staff for the Clinton White House - to help organize
the Center. It was launched on 7 July 2003 as the American Majority
Institute, but has operated under the name Center for American Progress
since 1 September 2003.
The official purpose of the Center was to provide the left with something
it supposedly lacked - a think tank of its own. Where was the Left's
Heritage Foundation? Asked Soros and Halperin. Of course, the left had
plenty of think tanks, including the Brookings Institute, the Urban
Institute, the Economic Policy Institute, the Center on Budget and Polic,
the Institute for Policy Studies, and the Progressive Policy Institute - not
to mention the Kennedy School for Government at Harvard and numerous similar
academic institutions firmly under leftist control. But Shadow Party
Leaders seemed to be looking for something different - something that no
existing institution on the Left offered - perhaps a think tank tied
directly to their own political operations.
Regarding the alleged need for the Center, Hillary Clinton told Matt Bai
of the New York Times Magazine on 12 October 2003, "We need some new
intellectual capital. There has to be some thought given as to how we build
the 21st century policies that reflect the Democratic Party's values."
Expanding on this theme, Hillary subsequently told the Nation's Dreyfuss,
"We've had the challenge of filling a void on our side of the ledger for a
long time, while the other side created an infrastructure that has come to
dominate political discourse. The Center is a welcome effort to fill that
void."
Soros and Hillary seemed to understand the need for the new Center, even
if they did not always succeed in explaining it to others. They found fault
with every existing left-wing think tank. Even Bill Clinton's personal
favorite, the Progressive Policy Institute, was too moderate, too
middle-of-the-road for their purpose. But what was their purpose?
Hillary Clinton tries to minimize the depth of her involvement with the
Center for American Progress - as indeed she habitually does in all matters
concerning the Shadow Party. Beltway insiders are not fooled, however.
Persistent press leaks confirm that Hillary calls the shots at the Center -
not its director, John Podesta. "It's the official Hillary Clinton think
tank," an inside source confided.
Many ideological purists on the left dismiss the Center as a platform for
HIllary's presidential ambitions. No doubt, they are right. Dreyfuss notes
the abundance of Clintonites on the Center's staff, among them Clinton's
national security speechwriter Robert Boorstin, Democratic Leadership
Council staffer and former head of Clinton's National Economic Council Gene
Sperling, former senior advisor to Clinton's Office of Management and Budget
Matt Miller, and so on. Commented the Nation's Dreyfuss, "The center's
kickoff conference on national security in October, co-organized with The
American Prospect and the Century Foundation, looked like a Clinton reunion
featuring Robert Rubin, Clinton's Treasury Secretary; William Perry, his
Defense Secretary; Sandy Berger, his National Security Adviser; Richard
Holbrooke and Susan Rice, both Clinton-era Assistant Secretaries of State;
Rodney Slater, his Transportation Secretary; and Carol Browner, his EPA
administrator, who serves on the center's board of directors." Hillary
Clinton also attended the event.
"In looking at Podesta's center," Dreyfuss muses, "there's no escaping the
imprint of the Clintons. It's not completely wrong to see it as a shadow
government, a kind of Clinton White-House-in-exile - or a White House staff
in readiness for President Hillary Clinton.
Another of the Center's missions is to carry out "rapid response" to what
it calls conservative "attacks" in the media. The Center's website vows to
build its capacity for "responding effectively and rapidly to conservative
proposals and rhetoric with a thoughtful critique and clear alternatives."
To this end, the Center offers a stable of talking heads - coiffed,
credentialed and fully briefed - available for appearances on national talk
shows. Notable among the Center's line-up of talking heads are the Nation's
Eric Alterman - who claims expertise on the subjects of media and
democracy - and Morton H. Halperin, who offers to speak on national
security.
The Center for American Progress immediately helped to launch a fraternal
project, Media Matters for America, better known for its website,
MediaMatters.org. Inasmuch as Media Matters aspires to serve as a media
watchdog, monitoring the inaccuracies of "rightwing" journalists for ethical
infractions and errors, it is peculiar that writer David Brock is appointed
its President and CEO. Brock is a former conservative journalist who
defected to the left amidst and outpouring of dramatic public confessions
that he had built his career on lies, writing political hit pieces filled
with flimsy evidence. Whatever Brock lacks in credibility, he more than
makes up for in currying influence. Brock told the New York Times that he
conferred with Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Tom Daschle and former Vice
President Al Gore before launching the website.
The New York Times generously provided a 1,041-word feature article to
announce Brock's grand opening in May 2004: "Mr. Brock's project was
developed with help from the newly formed Center for American
Progress....Podesta has loaned office space in the past to Mr. Brock and
introduced him to potential donors." Brock received $2 million for the
start-up. His donors include friend-of-Hillary Susie Tompkins Buell,
co-founder of the fashion company Esprit; Leo Hindery Jr., former CEO of the
scandal-ridden Global Crossing; and San Francisco philanthropist James C.
Hormel, whom Clinton appointed ambassador to Luxembourg in the 1990's.
Media Matters quickly acquired a reputation for lock-step partisanship and
reckless disregard for the truth. Brock and his team seem to sleepwalk
through their work, rubberstamping, with mind-numbing monotony, virtually
every conservative utterance that finds its way into major media as a "lie,"
a "smear," a "slander," or a "falsehood."
One of Brock's first projects was to exert pressure on Congress and
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to ban Rush Limbaugh from American Forces
Radio and Television Service - thus depriving the troops in Iraq of one of
the few radio programs they are allowed to hear which wholeheartedly
supports them and the cause for which they fight. At the time Brock began
his campaign, only one hour of Limbaugh's three-hour show was broadcast on
only on of AFRTS's thirteen radio channels, five days per week -
constituting less than one percent of the network's total weekly
programming. Nevertheless, that was one percent too many for the Shadow
Party and its operatives.
Shortly after Media Matters began its campaign, Democrat Senator Tom
Harkin of Iowa obligingly proposed an amendment to the 2005 Defense
Authorization Act mandating "political balance" on AFRTS. The Senate
approved Harkin's amendment unanimously on 16 June. It stopped short of
banning Limbaugh outright, but the amendment effectively required AFRTS to
balance Limbaugh with more left-wing commentary. Given the fact that one of
the network's two news channels was airing National Public Radio 24 hours
per day, seven days per week, it is hard to imagine how AFRTS could have
been expected to broadcast more left-wing commentary than it already was.
Even so, Senator Harkin complained in a 17 June Senate speech, "[T]there is
no commentary on the service that would even begin to balance the extreme
right-wing views that Rush Limbaugh expresses on his program."
Taking a look at Hillary's think tanks website today we see the messages
are:
a.. Don't fall for Bush's talk about scaling down troops, Brian Katulis
warns. It's clear that Bush wants the U.S. to stay in Iraq as long as he's
president.
b.. Sgt. Geoff Millard, president of the D.C. chapter of Iraq Veterans
Against the War, talks about ending the war and how we can better serve its
veterans.
c.. Conservative talk may dominate radio, but here's a by-the-numbers look
at a recent CAP report that shows it doesn't have to be that way.
d.. Al Gore's Live Earth concert series is an opportunity to raise
awareness about global warming-and spur people to action.
And what Hillary think tank would be complete without socialized medicine.
Here is a paper put out by her think tank on caring for the elderly:
Social justice calls for treating people fairly and giving them their due,
and it demands that society's institutions reflect and promote justice. This
means, most fundamentally, that resources are equitably distributed and that
social norms, economic structures, and decision-making processes enable
people-particularly the most vulnerable-to exercise self-determination and
live under conditions of equality. Indeed, social justice may be the
paramount ethical principle for policy surrounding caregiving.
[...]Care for the elderly should be considered equal to care for the
young, women and men should have equal responsibility in family caregiving,
and migrant workers should receive the same opportunities as native
caregivers
One of my favorites:
Even though caregiving is crucial to the functioning of any society,
caregiving lacks social standing and garners little respect in the United
States. This could be due in part to our nation's commitment to
individualism and to ideals like independence and self-reliance.
You know, that evil concept of independence and self-reliance.....sigh
Gotta bring out the kleenex for the poor immigrant section also:
For those who leave their home countries in search of employment in the
United States, it is far from clear that migration enhances their life
prospects. Most would prefer not to leave, and many experience the adverse
effects described generally as dislocation.
[...]Migrant caregivers often get lower-tier jobs-and thus lower pay and
fewer benefits-than they are promised by unscrupulous recruiters
representing for-profit corporations. Depending upon the terms of their
visas, they may have to return to their countries of origin and, as a
result, often rotate in and out of jobs, losing anticipated opportunities
for advancement.
Some migrant caregivers also face discrimination and other indignities as
immigrants, yet cannot voice these or other concerns related to the
conditions of their work. And as they care for the dependent elderly in the
United States, these workers from abroad lose time with their own families,
many of whom suffer their own care gap.
Their fix?
Mending the patchwork health care system and designing more coordinated,
integrated care that is attuned to the needs of the elderly would allow them
and their caregivers to better manage care according to their own goals,
thereby promoting respect for human dignity. The principle also calls for
ensuring that all people have affordable health care coverage, including
those who are working outside the paid labor force.
The writers also mention more student loans, investments in schools and
programs, and increasing the pay (we know where the funds for that will come
from). Also, those folks caring for their parents should be compensated by
tax credits and other taxpayer funded programs:
Creating policies that acknowledge the condition of unpaid caregivers by
adequately compensating them for the important work they do is also central
to reciprocity. This could take many forms: tax credits, direct subsidies or
stipends, or perhaps credit time for Social Security-all options that merit
further exploration.
Plus we must stop the inequalities in wages between men and women:
Areas that need particular policy intervention are the gendered and
unequal distribution of caregiving labor and the persistent wage gap
between men and women.
And lastly, distribution of resources throughout the planet:
Considered in a global context, justice also calls for ensuring a fair
distribution of caregiving resources around the world so that we avoid
perpetuating inequalities in global health.
There we have it. Hillarycare in all it's glory from the Center for
American Progress. Just one of the organizations that make up the Shadow
Party.
Next up.....America Votes.
http://www.floppingaces.net/2007/07/10/the-shadow-party-the-second-si/
July 10, 2007
Continuing my series on the excellent book written by David Horowitz and
Richard Poe entitled "The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton,
and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party" in which I
excerpt key portions to highlight the danger America faces from the new
left.
In the first post I posted about the overview the authors gave of The Shadow
Party, the second post was about the first of Seven Sisters comprising the
Shadow Party, MoveOn.org. Now I present the second sister, the Center for
American Progress:
The Center for American Progress is widely understood to be what one
inside source called, "the official Hillary Clinton think tank" - a platform
designed to highlight Hillary's policies and to enhance her prestige as a
potential presidential candidate.
Robert Dreyfuss reported in the 1 March 2004 edition of The Nation, "the
idea for the Center began with discussions in 2002 between [Morton] Halperin
and George Soros, the billionaire investor...Halperin, who heads the office
of Soros' Open Society Institute, brought Podesta into the discussion, and
beginning in late 2002 Halperin and Podesta circulated a series of papers to
funders."
Soros and Halperin then recruited Harold Ickes - chief fundraiser and
former deputy chief of staff for the Clinton White House - to help organize
the Center. It was launched on 7 July 2003 as the American Majority
Institute, but has operated under the name Center for American Progress
since 1 September 2003.
The official purpose of the Center was to provide the left with something
it supposedly lacked - a think tank of its own. Where was the Left's
Heritage Foundation? Asked Soros and Halperin. Of course, the left had
plenty of think tanks, including the Brookings Institute, the Urban
Institute, the Economic Policy Institute, the Center on Budget and Polic,
the Institute for Policy Studies, and the Progressive Policy Institute - not
to mention the Kennedy School for Government at Harvard and numerous similar
academic institutions firmly under leftist control. But Shadow Party
Leaders seemed to be looking for something different - something that no
existing institution on the Left offered - perhaps a think tank tied
directly to their own political operations.
Regarding the alleged need for the Center, Hillary Clinton told Matt Bai
of the New York Times Magazine on 12 October 2003, "We need some new
intellectual capital. There has to be some thought given as to how we build
the 21st century policies that reflect the Democratic Party's values."
Expanding on this theme, Hillary subsequently told the Nation's Dreyfuss,
"We've had the challenge of filling a void on our side of the ledger for a
long time, while the other side created an infrastructure that has come to
dominate political discourse. The Center is a welcome effort to fill that
void."
Soros and Hillary seemed to understand the need for the new Center, even
if they did not always succeed in explaining it to others. They found fault
with every existing left-wing think tank. Even Bill Clinton's personal
favorite, the Progressive Policy Institute, was too moderate, too
middle-of-the-road for their purpose. But what was their purpose?
Hillary Clinton tries to minimize the depth of her involvement with the
Center for American Progress - as indeed she habitually does in all matters
concerning the Shadow Party. Beltway insiders are not fooled, however.
Persistent press leaks confirm that Hillary calls the shots at the Center -
not its director, John Podesta. "It's the official Hillary Clinton think
tank," an inside source confided.
Many ideological purists on the left dismiss the Center as a platform for
HIllary's presidential ambitions. No doubt, they are right. Dreyfuss notes
the abundance of Clintonites on the Center's staff, among them Clinton's
national security speechwriter Robert Boorstin, Democratic Leadership
Council staffer and former head of Clinton's National Economic Council Gene
Sperling, former senior advisor to Clinton's Office of Management and Budget
Matt Miller, and so on. Commented the Nation's Dreyfuss, "The center's
kickoff conference on national security in October, co-organized with The
American Prospect and the Century Foundation, looked like a Clinton reunion
featuring Robert Rubin, Clinton's Treasury Secretary; William Perry, his
Defense Secretary; Sandy Berger, his National Security Adviser; Richard
Holbrooke and Susan Rice, both Clinton-era Assistant Secretaries of State;
Rodney Slater, his Transportation Secretary; and Carol Browner, his EPA
administrator, who serves on the center's board of directors." Hillary
Clinton also attended the event.
"In looking at Podesta's center," Dreyfuss muses, "there's no escaping the
imprint of the Clintons. It's not completely wrong to see it as a shadow
government, a kind of Clinton White-House-in-exile - or a White House staff
in readiness for President Hillary Clinton.
Another of the Center's missions is to carry out "rapid response" to what
it calls conservative "attacks" in the media. The Center's website vows to
build its capacity for "responding effectively and rapidly to conservative
proposals and rhetoric with a thoughtful critique and clear alternatives."
To this end, the Center offers a stable of talking heads - coiffed,
credentialed and fully briefed - available for appearances on national talk
shows. Notable among the Center's line-up of talking heads are the Nation's
Eric Alterman - who claims expertise on the subjects of media and
democracy - and Morton H. Halperin, who offers to speak on national
security.
The Center for American Progress immediately helped to launch a fraternal
project, Media Matters for America, better known for its website,
MediaMatters.org. Inasmuch as Media Matters aspires to serve as a media
watchdog, monitoring the inaccuracies of "rightwing" journalists for ethical
infractions and errors, it is peculiar that writer David Brock is appointed
its President and CEO. Brock is a former conservative journalist who
defected to the left amidst and outpouring of dramatic public confessions
that he had built his career on lies, writing political hit pieces filled
with flimsy evidence. Whatever Brock lacks in credibility, he more than
makes up for in currying influence. Brock told the New York Times that he
conferred with Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Tom Daschle and former Vice
President Al Gore before launching the website.
The New York Times generously provided a 1,041-word feature article to
announce Brock's grand opening in May 2004: "Mr. Brock's project was
developed with help from the newly formed Center for American
Progress....Podesta has loaned office space in the past to Mr. Brock and
introduced him to potential donors." Brock received $2 million for the
start-up. His donors include friend-of-Hillary Susie Tompkins Buell,
co-founder of the fashion company Esprit; Leo Hindery Jr., former CEO of the
scandal-ridden Global Crossing; and San Francisco philanthropist James C.
Hormel, whom Clinton appointed ambassador to Luxembourg in the 1990's.
Media Matters quickly acquired a reputation for lock-step partisanship and
reckless disregard for the truth. Brock and his team seem to sleepwalk
through their work, rubberstamping, with mind-numbing monotony, virtually
every conservative utterance that finds its way into major media as a "lie,"
a "smear," a "slander," or a "falsehood."
One of Brock's first projects was to exert pressure on Congress and
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to ban Rush Limbaugh from American Forces
Radio and Television Service - thus depriving the troops in Iraq of one of
the few radio programs they are allowed to hear which wholeheartedly
supports them and the cause for which they fight. At the time Brock began
his campaign, only one hour of Limbaugh's three-hour show was broadcast on
only on of AFRTS's thirteen radio channels, five days per week -
constituting less than one percent of the network's total weekly
programming. Nevertheless, that was one percent too many for the Shadow
Party and its operatives.
Shortly after Media Matters began its campaign, Democrat Senator Tom
Harkin of Iowa obligingly proposed an amendment to the 2005 Defense
Authorization Act mandating "political balance" on AFRTS. The Senate
approved Harkin's amendment unanimously on 16 June. It stopped short of
banning Limbaugh outright, but the amendment effectively required AFRTS to
balance Limbaugh with more left-wing commentary. Given the fact that one of
the network's two news channels was airing National Public Radio 24 hours
per day, seven days per week, it is hard to imagine how AFRTS could have
been expected to broadcast more left-wing commentary than it already was.
Even so, Senator Harkin complained in a 17 June Senate speech, "[T]there is
no commentary on the service that would even begin to balance the extreme
right-wing views that Rush Limbaugh expresses on his program."
Taking a look at Hillary's think tanks website today we see the messages
are:
a.. Don't fall for Bush's talk about scaling down troops, Brian Katulis
warns. It's clear that Bush wants the U.S. to stay in Iraq as long as he's
president.
b.. Sgt. Geoff Millard, president of the D.C. chapter of Iraq Veterans
Against the War, talks about ending the war and how we can better serve its
veterans.
c.. Conservative talk may dominate radio, but here's a by-the-numbers look
at a recent CAP report that shows it doesn't have to be that way.
d.. Al Gore's Live Earth concert series is an opportunity to raise
awareness about global warming-and spur people to action.
And what Hillary think tank would be complete without socialized medicine.
Here is a paper put out by her think tank on caring for the elderly:
Social justice calls for treating people fairly and giving them their due,
and it demands that society's institutions reflect and promote justice. This
means, most fundamentally, that resources are equitably distributed and that
social norms, economic structures, and decision-making processes enable
people-particularly the most vulnerable-to exercise self-determination and
live under conditions of equality. Indeed, social justice may be the
paramount ethical principle for policy surrounding caregiving.
[...]Care for the elderly should be considered equal to care for the
young, women and men should have equal responsibility in family caregiving,
and migrant workers should receive the same opportunities as native
caregivers
One of my favorites:
Even though caregiving is crucial to the functioning of any society,
caregiving lacks social standing and garners little respect in the United
States. This could be due in part to our nation's commitment to
individualism and to ideals like independence and self-reliance.
You know, that evil concept of independence and self-reliance.....sigh
Gotta bring out the kleenex for the poor immigrant section also:
For those who leave their home countries in search of employment in the
United States, it is far from clear that migration enhances their life
prospects. Most would prefer not to leave, and many experience the adverse
effects described generally as dislocation.
[...]Migrant caregivers often get lower-tier jobs-and thus lower pay and
fewer benefits-than they are promised by unscrupulous recruiters
representing for-profit corporations. Depending upon the terms of their
visas, they may have to return to their countries of origin and, as a
result, often rotate in and out of jobs, losing anticipated opportunities
for advancement.
Some migrant caregivers also face discrimination and other indignities as
immigrants, yet cannot voice these or other concerns related to the
conditions of their work. And as they care for the dependent elderly in the
United States, these workers from abroad lose time with their own families,
many of whom suffer their own care gap.
Their fix?
Mending the patchwork health care system and designing more coordinated,
integrated care that is attuned to the needs of the elderly would allow them
and their caregivers to better manage care according to their own goals,
thereby promoting respect for human dignity. The principle also calls for
ensuring that all people have affordable health care coverage, including
those who are working outside the paid labor force.
The writers also mention more student loans, investments in schools and
programs, and increasing the pay (we know where the funds for that will come
from). Also, those folks caring for their parents should be compensated by
tax credits and other taxpayer funded programs:
Creating policies that acknowledge the condition of unpaid caregivers by
adequately compensating them for the important work they do is also central
to reciprocity. This could take many forms: tax credits, direct subsidies or
stipends, or perhaps credit time for Social Security-all options that merit
further exploration.
Plus we must stop the inequalities in wages between men and women:
Areas that need particular policy intervention are the gendered and
unequal distribution of caregiving labor and the persistent wage gap
between men and women.
And lastly, distribution of resources throughout the planet:
Considered in a global context, justice also calls for ensuring a fair
distribution of caregiving resources around the world so that we avoid
perpetuating inequalities in global health.
There we have it. Hillarycare in all it's glory from the Center for
American Progress. Just one of the organizations that make up the Shadow
Party.
Next up.....America Votes.
http://www.floppingaces.net/2007/07/10/the-shadow-party-the-second-si/