[Peace-discuss] Dem. Party donors funnel millions to protest groups.

Thu Oct 12 06:43:13 UTC 2017

We should get to sleep, Bob. We obviously both need the rest. It’s affected your judgement (e.g., my AWARE colleague isn’t stupid).

But in the clear light of dawn, give me some examples of “arrogance" and "dogmatic stupidity” in the WSWS piece. 

Put up or shut up. 

Regards, CGE

> On Oct 12, 2017, at 1:33 AM, Robert Naiman via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
> 
> Oh Carl. You don't think anything. Don't give yourself airs. 
> 
> 
> 
> Robert Naiman
> Policy Director
> Just Foreign Policy
> www.justforeignpolicy.org <http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/>
> naiman at justforeignpolicy.org <mailto:naiman at justforeignpolicy.org>
> (202) 448-2898 x1
> 
> Co-Sponsor Khanna-Massie to #StopSaudiFamineInYemen
> https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/force-vote-on-saudi-war?r_by=1135580 <https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/force-vote-on-saudi-war?r_by=1135580>
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 1:25 AM, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net <mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:
> The WSWS article seems to me accurate and important: I think Bob’s choler arises from his recognition that it is.
> 
> But he’s reduced to simple obloquy, which raises the question, Could Bob have been frightened by a Trotskyist (or maybe a Green party thug) when he was very young?
> 
> See <https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/19/roaming-charges-prime-time-green/ <https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/19/roaming-charges-prime-time-green/>>:
> 
> '...One of the chief purveyors of this bilge of misinformation [about Jill Stein] is a previously obscure fellow named Robert Naiman, who runs a nearly invisible group called Just Foreign Policy. Naiman was caught red-handed (so to speak) when his junk mail made its way to the inbox of John Stauber, author of Toxic Sludge is Good for You and a leading expert on the politics of propaganda and disinformation. Stauber knows a smear when he sees one...
> 
> 'In a nasty email exchange with longtime Green organizer Kevin Zeese, who is now co-director of Popular Resistance, a group which grew out of the Occupy movement, Naiman sunk even further into the slime and threatened to expose Jill Stein as “a Trotskyite cancer.”
> 
> '"On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 2:56 PM, Robert Naiman  wrote:
> Oh, is today my day to be harassed by Green Party thugs?
> I’ll make you a deal: call off your dogs and I won’t further expose Jill Stein as a Trokskyite cancer.
> Robert Naiman
> Policy Director
> Just Foreign Policy
> www.justforeignpolicy.org <http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/>"
> 
> 'Slandering Stein and the Greens for being “Trotskyites” (or “Trokskyites,” in Naiman’s quaint verbiage) is as intellectually vapid as it is vile. Everyone knows that most of Leon’s former disciples in the US have long since morphed into neocons and thus can be spotted in Georgetown cafes polishing their resumés for slots on Hillary’s foreign policy team.
> 
> '“Robert Naiman epitomizes the attitude of the paid, professional Democrat progressives attacking the Green Party and Jill Stein,” John Stauber told me. “These shills see no hypocrisy in embracing a candidate supported by Wall Street, the Koch brothers and the neoconservatives who with Hillary lied America into attacking Iraq.  So there it is, Hillary is his champion while a woman running on the most progressive platform in America is just a damned Communist.  Rather than back down when he himself was exposed, he doubled down with a smear befitting the worst of American politics. Naiman is not an aberration however; indeed, he embodies the funded progressive elite who since 2000 have become a front group for the Democrats liberal oligarchs such as George Soros and his Democracy Alliance.”’
> 
> —CGE
> 
> 
> > On Oct 12, 2017, at 12:33 AM, Robert Naiman via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net <mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:
> >
> > It's the combination of arrogance and dogmatic stupidity that pisses me off.
> >
> > Don't you have any shame at all about being so stupid?
> >
> >
> > Robert Naiman
> > Policy Director
> > Just Foreign Policy
> > www.justforeignpolicy.org <http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/>
> > naiman at justforeignpolicy.org <mailto:naiman at justforeignpolicy.org>
> > (202) 448-2898 x1 <tel:%28202%29%20448-2898%20x1>
> >
> > Co-Sponsor Khanna-Massie to #StopSaudiFamineInYemen
> > https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/force-vote-on-saudi-war?r_by=1135580 <https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/force-vote-on-saudi-war?r_by=1135580>
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 12:24 AM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net <mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:
> > I don’t know Bob, but I knew it would piss you off.
> >
> >
> >> On Oct 11, 2017, at 22:13, Robert Naiman <naiman at justforeignpolicy.org <mailto:naiman at justforeignpolicy.org>> wrote:
> >>
> >> Do you honestly think that this criminally retarded Trot nonsense is useful? Monkeys on typewriters could produce more useful analysis.
> >>
> >>
> >> Robert Naiman
> >> Policy Director
> >> Just Foreign Policy
> >> www.justforeignpolicy.org <http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/>
> >> naiman at justforeignpolicy.org <mailto:naiman at justforeignpolicy.org>
> >> (202) 448-2898 x1 <tel:%28202%29%20448-2898%20x1>
> >>
> >> Co-Sponsor Khanna-Massie to #StopSaudiFamineInYemen
> >> https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/force-vote-on-saudi-war?r_by=1135580 <https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/force-vote-on-saudi-war?r_by=1135580>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Wed, Oct 11, 2017 at 11:53 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net <mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> Democratic Party donors funnel millions to protest groups
> >> By Tom Hall
> >> WSWS.ORG <http://wsws.org/>
> >> 11 October 2017
> >> A New York Times report titled “The ‘Resistance,’ Raising Big Money, Upends Liberal Politics” details how the Democratic Party’s billionaire and millionaire donors are giving millions of dollars to so-called left-wing and progressive protest groups around the Democratic Party.
> >> “It started as a scrappy grass-roots protest movement against President Trump,” the article begins, “but now the so-called resistance is attracting six- and seven-figure checks from major liberal donors, posing an insurgent challenge to some of the left’s most venerable institutions — and the Democratic Party itself.”
> >> The article highlights the efforts of one particular group, Democracy Alliance, which the Times describes as “a club of wealthy liberals” who have donated more than $600 million since 2005 and have “helped shape the institutional left.” Since the election of Donald Trump, the group has shifted its funding priorities away from well-established organizations that supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries into a host of new “anti-Trump” groups. Their aim is to bolster the left-wing credentials of the Democratic Party, stem the growth of social opposition, and block the development of interest in socialism among tens of millions of workers and youth.
> >> “The Democracy Alliance distributed a ‘resistance map’ to its donors in July including new groups focused on converting the anti-Trump energy into electoral wins, such as Flippable, Swing Left and Sister District, as well as legal watchdog groups and others focused on mobilizing protesters, such as Women’s March and Indivisible,” the article states.
> >> Indivisible, the Times notes, was able to expand from little more than an online text document detailing how to “resist” the Trump administration into a national organization of 40 staff members, with more than 6,000 volunteer chapters across the country,” as well as two associated nonprofits which have raised $6 million dollars in donations.
> >> The Times article continues: “Yet Indivisible has also received funding from the tech entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, as well as foundations or coalitions tied to Democracy Alliance donors, including the San Francisco mortgage billionaire Herbert Sandler, the New York real estate heiress Patricia Bauman and the oil heiress Leah Hunt-Hendrix.” A representative from the group said that they would “gladly” accept funding from billionaire investor George Soros, a major financial backer of the Democratic Party.
> >> Cloaked under rhetorical attacks on the supposed “neoliberal” and “establishment” wing of the Democratic Party, a ferocious struggle is unfolding over the division of the spoils. The Center for American Progress, the Times observes, “has engendered resentment from others on the left for casting itself as a leader of the anti-Trump movement and raising money off the resistance nomenclature,” including selling t-shirts branded with the word “resist” on its website.
> >> Only the politically naive will believe that these Wall Street millionaires and billionaires will not see a “return on investment” from their donations. All of the “left-wing” groups that are receiving millions in donations seek, in one way or another, to camouflage the character of the Democratic Party as a party of the financial oligarchy and the military and promote illusions that the Democrats can be shifted through popular pressure to the left.
> >> The political goal behind these fundraising efforts is to boost the tattered credibility of the Democratic Party, widely seen as a party of Wall Street and the military, and to channel mass opposition to the Trump administration behind the Democrats in order to prevent it from escaping the control of the ruling class.
> >> Workers and young people who have been taken in by the illusion that the Democrats can be transformed from a party of Wall Street into a “people’s party” should consider the fact that the very groups promoting the perspective of pressuring the Democrats are themselves being directly backed and financed by Wall Street.
> >> “The resistance is strongest when everyone has access to our resources,” David Brock, founder of Media Matters and a prominent Clinton supporter, told the Times. “These grass-roots groups play a different, unique role, and their energy is something the progressive movement hadn’t seen in decades,” an official with the Center for American Progress added. The Times also cited Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa, who praised these groups’ work in Democratic electoral campaigns.
> >> This type of funding of supposedly left-wing protest groups did not emerge only after the 2016 presidential elections. Last October, the Ford Foundation announced that it would spend $100 million over six years on Black Lives Matter.
> >> The perspective of racial and gender identity politics that these groups espouse corresponds to the interests of a narrow layer of the affluent upper-middle class that has benefited directly over the past 30 years from the rising stock market and whose gains come at the expense of the working class of all races.
> >> The bulk of the “left-wing” upper-middle class supported the primary campaign of Bernie Sanders, who combined progressive and even “socialist” phraseology with a total silence on the reactionary role of the Democratic Party. After unceremoniously capitulating to Clinton, Sanders went on a national postelection tour with Democratic National Committee Chairman Thomas Perez to save the Democrats’ image as a party of “working people.” Sanders constantly papered over the experience of the Obama administration in order to bolster illusions in the Democrats.
> >> The result of Sanders’ efforts has been disastrous for the working class. Far from turning the Democratic Party to the left, the Democratic Party has ignored the votes of Sanders’ 13 million voters, promised to make deals with Trump on everything from tax cuts for the rich to mass deportation, and launched a nationalist campaign aimed at whipping up hostility to Russia, blaming “Russian interference” for Trump’s victory. The leadership of the Democratic Party now hopes that by mobilizing wealthy donors they can inject a popular veneer into their pro-war, pro-corporate program and block the development of a mass movement for socialist revolution.
> >>
> >> ________
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