[Peace] Morris Dees Lecture 12/9/2003

Mon Dec 8 15:00:42 CST 2003

[I think Mort's cautions about Dees and his organization are appropriate.
Here's a piece on him from 2-3 years ago.  --CGE]

	The Dees Money Machine
	by Alexander Cockburn
	from "Wild Justice," The New York Press

I've long regarded Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Center as
collectively one of the greatest frauds in American life.  The reasons: a
relentless fundraising machine devoted to terrifying its mostly low-income
contributors into unbelting ill-spared dollars year after year to an
organization that now has an endowment of more than $100 million, with
very little to show for it beyond hysterical bulletins designed to raise
money on the proposition that only the SPLC can stop Nazism and the KKK
from seizing power.

Gloria Browne, a lawyer who's worked with Dees' outfit, once told the
Montgomery Advertiser that the Southern Poverty Law Center trades in
"black pain and white guilt."  He's the Jim and Tammy Faye Baker of the
civil rights movement.

In fact, Dees began the 1960's as an attorney in Montgomery, representing
a Ku Klux Klan sympathizer, Claude Henley, who had led an attack on
Freedom Riders at the local bus station.  Dees has denied he was ever
personally supportive of the Klan or Henley, but his former partner,
Millard Farmer, has said, "We expressed openly our sympathies and support
for what happened at the bus station."  For the rest of the 1960s Dees sat
on the sidelines and got rich from marketing "Famous Recipe" cookbooks
with Farmer; he built a tennis court, pool, high-quality stables and got a
Rolls-Royce.

He founded the SPLC in 1971.  In the end Dees and Farmer fell out, with
Farmer (who later gave away most of his money and started Habitat for
Humanity) saying bitterly, "If an issue isn't bringing in money, he's off
to the woods.  He may believe [in civil rights] but he'll quit doing the
work if it doesn't make money." Farmer says of the Southern Poverty Law
Center that it's "little more than a 900 number."

Dees has always been alert to the paranoias of the hour.  The center's
entire legal staff resigned in the late 1980s, in part because Dees was
reluctant to take up legal issues of real importance to poor people.  His
obsession was the Klanwatch Project, a cash cow for the SPLC.  Literature
from the SPLC portrayed the Klan as poised to take over American and
embark on an orgy of burning and lynching.  This was at a time when the
major danger to poor people was going to be welfare reform , a collusive
project between the Gingrich Republicans and Clinton liberals, among the
latter being many fervent supporters of Dees.  Dees sits on a mountain of
cash, but his courtroom forays are not profuse.  In the early 1990s, when
the center's reserves were about half what they are today -- $52 million
in 1993 -- the center (between 1989 and 1994) filed only a dozen suits.

Recently Jim Reddin and Cletus Nelson sent CounterPunch, the newsletter I
coedit with Jeffrey St. Clair, and interesting account of Dees' latest
twist in moneygrubbing.  In its most recent Intelligence Report
newsletter, the SPLC -- in a "Special Report" -- puts forth the
preposterous theory that far from being a glorious renaissance of the
radical spirit in American political life, the protest against the World
Trade Organization, most in evidence in Seattle and in Washington, DC, at
the start of last week, have been the nexus for a far-flung crypto-facist
conspiracy comprised of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan
members and other shock troops of the far right.  The SPLC's anonymous
writer confidently states that the anarchists, socialists,
environmentalists and other left-wing dissidents who gathered in Seattle
at the start of last December were secretly infiltrated by European-style
"Third Position" fascists who mix racism with environmentalism.  "Right
alongside the progressive groups that demonstrated in Seattle -- mostly
peaceful defenders of labor, the environment, animal rights and similar
causes -- were the hard-edged soldiers of neofascism," the newsletter
excitedly warns.

No documentation is offered to substantiate this allegation.  The
newsletter doesn't name a single right-winger who has infiltrated Direct
Action, Food Not Bombs, Greenpeace or any of the other groups that
organized the Seattle protests.  Dees' pretense is that he stands for
civil rights, but of course the newsletter entirely ignores the civil
rights abuses committed by the Seattle police against the protesters, even
though the ACLU has filed a civil rights suit over the "no protest" zone"
declared by city officials.

The attack on the anti-globalization movement marks a significant shift in
the SPLC's policies, suggesting to us that Dees sees material opportunity
in attacking a popular radical cause.  As part of its scourched-earth
policy, the organization has declared war against grassroots environmental
activists.  "They pine for nations of peasant-like folk tied closely to
the land and to their neighbors," the newsletter observes disdainfully.

Some who've followed the FBI's recent disastrous predictions about Y2K
terror attacks from right-wing militias suspect that both the SPLC and the
Anti-Defamation League (which helped fuel the FBI's Y2K predictions) are
hauling water for the bureau, essentially acting as subcontractors
performing tasks of defamation that in the old COINTELPRO days would have
been performed by the bureau itself.  The worrying fact for fundraisers
like Dees is that there is a distinct shortage of terrifying specters with
which to coax the money out of the pockets of the suckers.  How long can
you raise the alarm about a fascist takeover, when the legions of the
ultra-right are a few beleaguered platoons camped around Hayden Lake, ID?

The Nation, Mother Jones, and kindred liberal publications have the same
problem.  If the fascist/Gingrichian bogey isn't out there in the
darkness, prowling round the campfire, maybe people will start concluding
that real enemy is all too unidentifiably roosting in Washington in the
two-party system.  So the new strategy of the Dees crowd, the SPLC and
ADL, is to point tremulously to such signs of realignment as the
Antiwar.com conference, "Beyond Left and Right," about which I reported a
couple of weeks ago, and raise the alarm, saying -- as the Dees
Intelligence Report does -- that the left is being duped and captured by
the far right and that realignment is a neo-fascist strategy.  And of
course they're strains in the anti-globalist, anti-free trade movement
that can buttress such a charge. It's not hard to go to a gun show and
scoop up a pamphlet attacking the New World Order along with the UN, the
big banks, and the WTO.

American, populist culture has crank patches, as do all political
cultures. In American environmentalism there's a Malthusian element that
goes back to the racist speculations of Harvard professors a century ago.  
One task for us left greens has always been to identify this element and
attack it. Going "beyond left and right" doesn't mean abandoning basic
positions on racism, Malthusianism and the like, it means trying to forge
alliances on issues such as U.S. Interventions and wars, or on the Bill of
Rights -- and keeping one's powder dry.  The attack from Dees on the
anti-WTO forces won't be the last.

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On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, John Fettig wrote:

> http://www.iuboard.uiuc.edu/Calendar/detail.asp?iEve=80&iType=945
> Event: Morris Dees - Lecture Dated: 12/9/2003 Location: Foellinger
> Auditorium Detail: Morris Dees - civil rights attorney 7pm (doors open
> at 6:00)
> 
> FREE ADMISSION
> 
> Morris Dees is a civil liberties and rights activist who sues KKK and
> aryan nation members in order to bankrupt their chapters.
> 