[Peace-discuss] [sf-core] Rise in Right-Wing Extremism

[C. G. Estabrook]

Mort--

In fact the fraudulent nature of SPLC has been a matter of public record for 
some time now. See notably Ken Silverstein, "How the Southern Poverty Law Center 
profits from intolerance," Harper's Magazine, November 2000 (note the date; 
Silverstein published a follow-up in Harper's in 2007).

As early as 1994 the Montgomery Advertiser ran a series alleging the SPLC was 
financially mismanaged and employed misleading fundraising practices. The series 
was a finalist for but did not win a 1995 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory 
Journalism. In 1996 USA Today called the SPLC "the nation's richest civil rights 
organization," with $68 million in assets at the time.

In 2008 the American Institute of Philanthropy's Charity Ratings Guide gave the 
SPLC an "F" rating for "excessive" reserves.  Hate has been very good to them.

As to "whether there is any threat from the fascist right, hate, or militarist 
groups/militias in the USA," all those Republicans and Democrats who check under 
the bed each night for tea-partiers do indeed have something to worry about - an 
aroused public, who might realize that their interests are not only different 
from but diametrically opposed to those of the American elite, for whom both 
parties toil.

Doug Henwood of the excellent Left Business Observer seems to me to have it just 
right here:

"I'm still mystified by the curiosity about - I'm deliberately not saying 
obsession with - the risks of incipient fascism in the U.S. I have two questions 
I'd love some clarification on:

"(1) How is today's threat a significant departure from more than a century of 
American political violence? To say that the Klan is some kind of incipient 
fascist movement is to drain the term of any specific meaning. But over the last 
100-150 years, we've had savage repression of labor through public and private 
means, like national guard units, cops, and Pinkertons. We had lynching. We had 
serious suppression of civil liberties during and just after World War I. The 
Panthers were essentially wiped out with death squads. I can understand why 
mainstream liberals don't want to admit that U.S. history is full of repressive 
crimes, and want to see George W. Bush or Sarah Palin as some kind of scary 
departures, but that doesn't characterize [intelligent liberals], does it?

"(2) Why should we worry more about the fascist threat than some real, imminent 
dangers like (a) a turn to fiscal and monetary tightening (Obama's deficit 
commission, which could give him cover to cut Medicare and SS; the Fed's 
signaling that it's ready to begin withdrawing its extraordinary stimulus) that 
could sink us back into recession; (b) Obama's friendliness towards offshore 
drilling and nuclear power; (c) the incapacity of the U.S. political system to 
do anything at all about climate change, even something as corp-friendly as c&t; 
(d) escalation in Afghanistan, and with it an enormous increase in civilian 
deaths; and (e) tightening the screws on Iran, possibly leading to some sort of 
utterly mad military strike. These are all initiatives either led or supported 
by a Democrat president and Congress, not some scary possibilities that some 
possible future Republican president and/or Congress could perpetrate. Doesn't 
all the worrying distract from those realities?"
	
In fact, the best thing that's happened to the clapped-out Democratic party & 
Obama administration is the tea-party movement. Screaming "Danger on the Right"; 
"Fascism on the horizon!" is they hope all that they will need to cover their 
transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, and their escalation of 
imperialist murder.

You say AC is "over the top" but then you admit the essentials of his case:

--the SPLC exaggerates the dangers of hate groups in order to make money; and

--one should distrust their antisemitism warnings & links with ADL; so

--don't send them any money.

Once again, we agree...  --CGE


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> This Cockburn report is typical over-the-top Cockburn. The only "meat" in his
> commentary is that the Dees outfit makes too much money out of its operations
> and solicitations. Hence a scam. Otherwise, he flays Dees for not making
> America better in all the ways it could be better. And he discounts or
> ignores whether there is any threat from the fascist right, hate, or
> militarist groups/militias in the USA. The Tea Party would seem to indicate a
> level of hate among many of its "constituants" that could be dangerous to the
> general welfare.
> 
> It would have been more useful if Cockburn outright refuted Dees claims with
> contradictory information. He only touches on that by saying that Dees'
> outfit does not give us the number of people involved in militias, etc.
> 
> It may be true that the SPLC exagerates the dangers of hate groups in order
> to make money and sustain and promote its existence. It may also be true that
> the SPLC does get some things right and may have a useful function to warn
> against "extremist" hate groups of the right.
> 
> Let's try to see things clearly and accurately.
> 
> --mkb
> 
> P.S. I have been solicited by the SPLC, but reject their pleas for funds. One
> should distrust their antisemitism warnings or links (?) with outfits like
> the ADL.
> 
> On Mar 6, 2010, at 5:42 PM, C. G. ESTABROOK wrote:
> 
>> [Barbara-- SPLC seems to be largely a scam.  Regards, Carl]
>> 
>> King of the Hate Business By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
>> 
>> What is the arch-salesman of hate-mongering, Mr. Morris Dees of the
>> Southern Poverty Law Center doing now? He’s saying that the election of a
>> black president proves his point. Hate is on the rise! Send money!
>> 
>> Without skipping a beat, the mailshot moguls, who year after year make
>> money selling the notion there’s been a right resurgence out there in the
>> hinterland with massed legions of haters, have used the election of a black
>> president to say that, yes, hate is on the rise and America ready to burst
>> apart at the seams, with millions of extremists primed to march down Main
>> Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of Mein Kampf tucked under one arm and
>> a Bible under the other, available for sneak photographs from minions of
>> Chip Berlet, another salesman of the Christian menace,  ripely endowed with
>> millions to battle the legions of the cross.
>> 
>> Ever since 1971 US Postal Service mailbags have bulged with Dees’
>> fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling
>> liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of hate-sodden America, in dire
>> need of legal confrontation by the SPLC. Nine years ago Ken Silverstein
>> wrote a devastating commentary on Dees and the SPLC in Harpers, dissecting
>> a typical swatch of Dees’ solicitations. At that time, as Silverstein
>> pointed out, the SPLC was “the wealthiest civil rights group in America,”
>> with $120 million in assets.
>> 
>> As of October 2008 the net assets of the SPLC were $170,240,129, The
>> merchant of hate himself, Mr. Dees, was paid an annual $273,132 as chief
>> trial counsel, and the SPLC’s president and CEO, Richard Cohen, $290,193.
>> Total revenue in 2007 was $44,727,257 and program expenses $20,804,536. In
>> other words, the Southern Poverty Law Center was raising twice as much as
>> it was spending on its proclaimed mission. Fund-raising and administrative
>> expenses accounted for $9 million, leaving $14 million to be put in the
>> center’s vast asset portfolio.
>> 
>> The 990 non profit tax record for the SPLC indicates that the assets fell
>> by about $50 million last year, meaning that like almost all non profits
>> the SPLC took a bath in the stock crash. So what was thr end result of all
>> that relentless hoarding down the year, as people of modest means, scared
>> by Dees, sent him their contributions. Were they put to good use? It
>> doesn’t seem so. They vanished in an electronic blip.
>> 
>> But where are the haters? That hardy old stand-by, the KKK, despite the
>> SPLC’s predictable howls about an uptick in its chapters, is a moth-eaten
>> and depleted troupe, at least 10 per cent of them on the government payroll
>> as informants for the FBI. As Noel Ignatiev once remarked in his book Race
>> Traitor, there isn’t a public school in any county in the USA that doesn’t
>> represent a menace to blacks a thousand times more potent than that offered
>> by the KKK, just as there aren’t many such schools that probably haven’t
>> been propositioned by Dees to buy one of the SPLC’s “tolerance” programs.
>> What school is going to go on record rejecting Dees-sponsored tolerance?
>> 
>> Dees and his hate-seekers scour the landscape for hate like the arms 
>> manufacturers inventing new threats and for the same reason: it’s their
>> staple.
>> 
>> The SPLC’s latest “Year in Hate” report claims that “in 2008 the number of
>> hate groups rose to 926, up 4 per cent from 2007, and 54 per cent since
>> 2000.” The SPLC doesn’t measure the number of members in the groups,
>> meaning they probably missed me. Change that total to 927. I’m a hate
>> group, meaning in Dees-speak, “one with beliefs or practices that attack or
>> malign an entire class of people,” starting with Dick Cheney. I love to
>> dream of him being water-boarded, subjected to loops of Schonberg played at
>> top volume, locked up naked in a meat locker. But the nation’s haters are
>> mostly like me, enjoying their (increasingly circumscribed)
>> constitutionally guaranteed right to hate, solitary, disorganized, prone to
>> sickening relapses into love, or at least the sort of amiable tolerance for
>> All Mankind experienced when looking at photos of Carla Bruni and Princess
>> Letizia of Spain kissing.
>> 
>> The effective haters are big, powerful easily identifiable entities. Why is
>> Dees fingering militia men in a potato field in Idaho when we have
>> identifiable, well-organized groups which the SPLC could take on. To cite
>> reports from the Urban League, and United for a Fair Economy, minorities
>> are more than three times as likely to hold high-cost subprime loans,
>> foisted on them by predatory lenders, meaning the big banks; “all black and
>> latino subprime borrowers could stand to lose between $164 billion and $213
>> billion for loans taken during the past eight years.”
>> 
>> Get those bankers and big mortgage touts into court, chief counsel Dees!
>> How about helping workers fired by people who hate anyone trying to
>> organize a union? What about defending immigrants rounded up in ICE raids?
>> How about attacking the roots of southern poverty, and the system that
>> sustains that poverty as expressed in the endless prisons and Death Rows
>> across the south, disproportionately crammed with blacks and Hispanics?
>> 
>> You fight theatrically, the Dees way, or you fight substantively, like
>> Stephen Bright, who makes only $11,000 as president and senior counsel of
>> the Southern Center for Human Rights. The center’s director makes less than
>> $50,000. It has net assets of a bit over $4.5 million and allocates about
>> $1.6 million a year for expenses, 77 percent of its annual revenue.
>> Bright’s outfit is basically dedicated to two things: prison litigation and
>> the death penalty. He fights the system, case by case. Not the phony
>> targets mostly tilted at by Dees but the effective, bipartisan, functional
>> system of oppression, far more deadly and determined than the SPLC’s
>> tin-pot hate groups. Tear up your check to Dees and send it to Bright,(
>> http://www.schr.org/) or to the Institute for Southern Studies
>> (http://www.southernstudies.org.html) run by Chris Kromm, which has been 
>> doing brilliant spadework on the economy, on poverty and on exploitation in
>> the south for four decades.
>> 
>> http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn05152009.html
>> 
>> Barbara kessel wrote:
>>> 
>>> Dobbs, Beck, Palin, Bachmann Share Blame For Rise in Right-Wing
>>> Extremism, Says Activist Group Southern Poverty Law Center Cites Violent
>>> Incidents; Lou Dobbs Calls SPLC Director 'Paranoid' By ANNA SCHECTER
>>> March 3, 2010 —
>>> 
>>> Anti-government sentiments in the U.S. have reached levels so high they
>>> could result in another attack like the Oklahoma City bombing, according
>>> to a report released Tuesday by an organization that tracks right-wing
>>> extremists and the authors of the report place part of the blame on Lou
>>> Dobbs, Glenn Beck, Rep. Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin.
>>> 
>>> In a statement to ABC News, Lou Dobbs hit back at the director of the
>>> group that prepared the report, calling him "paranoid."
>>> 
>>> A host of recent attacks on law enforcement, plots against President
>>> Obama, and a shooting at Washington, D.C.'s Holocaust museum are "signs
>>> of the times," said Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law
>>> Center, a non-profit group that monitors militias, white supremacists,
>>> and other extremist activity. Potok made his comments during a
>>> teleconference with reporters to promote the SPLC's latest annual report
>>> on hate-group activity.
>>> 
>>> "We've seen more threats and actual attacks in the past 18 months than
>>> we've seen at any given period over the past 15 years," claimed Potok.
>>> 
>>> Potok said he blames some public personalities and conservative
>>> politicians for inciting fear.
>>> 
>>> Potok cited talk-show host Glenn Beck for stoking fears that the Federal
>>>  Emergency Management Agency is running concentration camps, former CNN
>>> host Lou Dobbs for incurring fears about supposed Mexican plots to take
>>> over the southwestern U.S., Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., for making
>>> statements about secret political reeducation camps, and former vice
>>> presidential candidate Sarah Palin for referring to Obama "death panels"
>>> during the health care debate. Bachmann and Beck are also cited by name
>>> in the SPLC's report, but Dobbs and Palin are not.
>>> 
>>> "These people help to bring completely groundless conspiracy theories
>>> from the margins into the mainstream," said Potok.
>>> 
>>> In a phone interview, Dobbs scoffed at the report. "It's sad that Mr.
>>> Potok insists upon maintaining his paranoia, and I hope that he
>>> recovers."
>>> 
>>> "Beyond that, I have nothing to say about the man," said Dobbs.
>>> 
>>> 'Another Oklahoma City Is Very Much a Possibility'
>>> 
>>> A spokesperson for Beck declined comment. Spokespersons for Bachmann and
>>>  former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin did not respond by press time to
>>> requests for comment.
>>> 
>>> Bachmann and Beck are discussed in the report itself as possible sources
>>> of anger, while Potok cited Palin and Dobbs in separate articles
>>> accompanying the report.
>>> 
>>> The latest annual SPLC report, "Rage on the Right," claims there has been
>>> a startling rise in numbers of extremist groups, particularly in the
>>> Patriot movement and militias, the paramilitary branches of these Patriot
>>> groups. Patriot groups see the federal government as their primary enemy
>>> and adhere to extreme antigovernment doctrines, frequently believing in
>>> groundless conspiracy theories.
>>> 
>>> According to the SPLC's figures, the number of active Patriot groups grew
>>>  from 149 to 512, an increase of 363 groups (244 percent) in 2009, and
>>> the number of militia groups grew from 42 to 127, an increase of 85
>>> groups (200 percent) in 2009. The number of nativist vigilante
>>> organizations that go beyond advocating strict immigration policy and
>>> actually confront or harass suspected immigrants grew from 173 to 309, an
>>> increase 136 groups (almost 80 percent) in 2009, the report said.
>>> 
>>> The number of hate groups based on racism, anti-Semitism and anti-gay 
>>> sentiment grew from 926 to 932 in 2009. SPLC said this increase caps a
>>> decade in which the number of hate groups surged by 55 percent from 2000
>>> to 2009 (602 groups to 932).
>>> 
>>> Potok says the expansion of hate groups in 2009 would have been much
>>> greater if not for the demise of the American National Socialist Workers
>>> Party, a key neo-Nazi group whose founder, Bill White, was arrested in
>>> October 2008. The group had 35 chapters.
>>> 
>>> Taken together, these three radical strands -- antigovernment Patriot
>>> groups, nativist extremist groups and hate groups -- increased their
>>> numbers by approximately 40 percent in 2009, according to Potok.
>>> 
>>> Potok said one of the main fears is that these radical groups are 
>>> infiltrating mainstream groups like the Tea Party movement because of
>>> cross pollination of individuals who attend radical group meetings and
>>> more mainstream gatherings.
>>> 
>>> Potok said he thinks that the climate today matches that of the 'white
>>> hot' tension among anti-government groups prior to the Oklahoma City
>>> bombing that killed 150 people in 1995.
>>> 
>>> "Another Oklahoma City is very much a possibility," said Potok.
>>> 
>>> Copyright © 2010 ABC News Internet Ventures


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