Yesterday Patriot Project wrote about the many front groups that appear during campaign season,
How is it that so many front groups are able to appear just in time to spread their lies and poison into campaign seasons? It is almost as if there is a template that is used, with a factory that cranks them out, all the parts assembled, needing only a misleading name -- and a target.
The front group Free Enterprise Fund is now running ads attacking MoveOn.org with absurdly false charges - but who's counting? For example, one ad accuses MoveOn of “stopping welfare reform” even though the welfare reform battle occurred years before MoveOn’s formation. (And welfare reform was not stopped.) The group has also set up an attack website StopMoveOn.org, that accuses “Radical Billionaire George Soros” and MoveOn of wanting to “take control of our national agenda.”
The StopMoveOn website is clearly designed to fire up “the base,” using cult-like language accusing Soros and MoveOn of being “collectivist.” The accusations continue, saying MoveOn and Soros plan to implement "global governance" and the "subjugation of the US powers." Here is a list from the website:
"$1.3 Trillion Tax Increases: Repeal the tax cuts that have stimulated our economy.
Blocking Energy Independence: If you think gas prices are high now, wait until MoveOn.org takes over. They oppose most new domestic drilling. With turmoil in the Mid East, producing less oil means there is less to be purchased, driving prices higher and higher and higher. (Think gas shortages of the 1970's.)
Socialized Health Care: Remember Hillary-Care? Its back but now she is a Senator and its one of MoveOn's top priorities. They want you to get the same excellent service at the hospital that you get at the DMV. And, they want you to pay for it.
Massive Government Spending Increases: You may have heard some Democrats talk about the budget deficit. But the truth is that the Democrat proposed alternative budget for 2007 would have increased spending by $90 BILLION! And that was without radical MoveOn.org's prodding. Just imagine what MoveOn.org will really spend if they get their puppets in power.
Stopping Welfare Reform: Entitlement spending is set to explode to almost 60% of all government spending in the near future unless reforms are passed. George Soros opposed the successful welfare reform of the 90's saying it "appalled" him. With that kind of pressure from the top of the food chain coupled with the Democrats' propensity to pour more and more money into broken systems, don't expect future reforms. But then again, they'll just raise taxes to try to pay for it.
Global Governance: This is a favorite of George Soros and the "can't we all just get along" crowd. Soros has advocated for increased global governance and subjugation of the US powers in the name of cooperation. Such "cooperation" will lead to the US signing on to such economically crippling efforts as the Kyoto Protocol.
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The Free Enterprise Fund is closely associated with the Club For Growth, a group that attacks moderate Republicans as "RINOs" - Republicans In Name Only. FEF's Chairman, Mallory Factor, was the subject of a July, 2005 New York Magazine story appropriately titled, The ATM For Bush's America. The story provides some insight into how the money drives the Republican policy process - they don't really care at all about MoveOn, except as a useful bogeyman to hold up to scare "the base",
Five years ago, Factor was a political nobody, a New York right-winger with zero clout. Today, he’s a leader of a tiny but powerful army of New York conservatives whose checkbooks sustain the national Republican majority.
[. . .] The core of Factor’s operation is a regular conservative gathering known as the Monday Meeting, which he runs with James Higgins, an investment manager. Factor is the money guy; Higgins is more oriented toward policy. Together, “they have created the Wall Street–Washington nexus,” says Steve Moore, a longtime activist on the right. “Now all these congressmen and senators want to go up to New York City because Mallory has become the gatekeeper to the large conservative fund-raising community.”
[. . .] Over the course of numerous conversations in the following weeks, Factor told me that Republicans in both the House and Senate were about to get behind an exotic Social Security plan championed at the Monday Meeting. The plan would fund private accounts with the Social Security surplus, necessitating either deep spending cuts or massive deficit spending, since the surplus is currently used to fund other government programs.
[. . .] In June, Senators Jim DeMint, Lindsey Graham, and Rick Santorum introduced the plan. All three have appeared at the Monday Meeting, and DeMint and Graham are particularly close to Factor. In fact, Graham told me he got the idea from the Monday Meeting. At the same time, the Wall Street Journal editorialized in favor of the plan, and the Free Enterprise Fund, which Factor is now in charge of, generated extra buzz in the press.
All the power centers represented at the meeting worked in perfect unison. Getting the legislation introduced was undoubtedly the group’s greatest postelection victory. There is but one minor glitch—the bill doesn’t have a chance in hell of passing. So the whole process ends up looking like an ideological exercise.
Factor prefers to see it as laying the groundwork for future breakthroughs.
[. . .] The majority of New York conservatives, especially in the donor community, have always been social libertarians, and not much has changed on that front. Conservative Christian groups still support their own activities by shaking money out of lots of angry $50 donors in red states, not by reaching into the pockets of Wall Street. What has changed is that the economic agenda of Manhattan conservatives has become far more radical—so radical that many of them are willing to cede plenty of ground on social issues if they can get the other stuff they want.
In some ways this group is almost phoning it in. Will this kind of extreme, cult-like language truly "bring out the base?" (Do you think they talk like that to each other in their penthouses?) Will this group of Wall Street investment millionaires and billionaires really be able to drive blue-collar workers to the polls demanding that their Social Security be cut or entirely eliminated, so that Mallory Factor and the rest can buy themselves an even bigger jet?
The Patriot Project is working to expose the front groups, their funding, their connections and their tactics.