Tuesday, October 11, 2011

The secret history of the people behind the "53 percent" site...

The 99 percent movement sprang up organically. Sure, the conservatives will try to pin the blame on their hallucinated "Evil Soros conspiracy," but we are nevertheless talking about genuine grass-roots stuff here.

The 53% response? Not so much. From the Washington Post:
"We are the 53 percent” was originally the brainchild of Erick Erickson, founder of RedState.org, who worked together with Josh Trevino, communications director for the right-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation, and conservative filmmaker Mike Wilson to develop the concept, according to Trevino.
Ah. So who are these guys? Balloon Juice has their number:
And so, because the message of the #OWS crowd has an organic message that resonates, one that surpasses the fraudulent tea party nonsense of the Koch brothers funded Tea Party, the money boys strike back. And who else to lead the pushback than two folks who owe their entire existence to the wingnut wurlitzer. Red State is a fully funded operation of Eagle Publishing, the owner of Human events and Regnery Publishing. The members of the money party are scared, so they’ve sent out their astroturf specialists to meet it head on.
Regnery's entire business model is a scam.
In a suit filed in United States District Court in Washington yesterday, the authors Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter state that Eagle Publishing, which owns Regnery, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.”
Regnery is not really a conservative publishing house: It's a libertarian publisher. For example, they distribute out the works of Mark Skousen, the even kookier, ultra-libertarian nephew of Cleon Skousen, the man who inspired Glenn Beck.

Josh Trevino, referenced above, identifies himself as a staunch libertarian. He has an interesting response to the libertarianism of Markos Moulitsas here.

Ericson, who co-created the 53% meme, is also part of the libertarian conspriacy. (Also see here.)

As for filmmaker Mike Wilson, creator of Michael Moore Hates America: The following comes from his Wikipedia bio...
Wilson is a libertarian and an atheist and a writer for Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood.
We must emphasize that the people behind the 53 percent meme are not just Republicans, they are strict libertarians. Drawing this distinction is important because it helps us to expose those libertarians who are still making attempts to infiltrate the OWS movement.

Cannonfire reader prowlerzee reports from the trenches:
...while there I heard one obvious plant arguing that "after this there is no excuse not to be a Libertarian." I turned and gave them a tongue-lashing, including facts, and they fell back on the standby, "prove it."
The OWS-ers had better understand that the libertarian conspiracy is funding the "53%" astroturf. You cannot let libertarians infiltrate; they are the enemy. They do not have anything to contribute: Libertarian deregulation is 100% responsible for the economic crisis, and thus libertarians can do nothing to resolve the problem.

Libertarians hate both democracy and the middle class; they envision a dystopia of Total Corporate Feudalism. Libertarianism is the true road to serfdom. I speak literally: Slavery is a worse problem today than it was before the American civil war, and the states where slavery is worst are those, like Dubai, where libertarian notions of "freedom" have sway.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Occupy Wall Street must define itself as an anti-Libertarian movement, using those words. Libertarianism caused the problem. Libertarianism is not the solution.

By the way -- you should read some of the responses on the 53% site. A lot of these messages come from poor shmoes so fueled by Rushbo ideology that they cannot bring themselves to confess that they are not in the 53% and never will be. They are like dogs, who, when kicked, say: "I musta done a bad thing, Master, so please kick me again." They are like slaves in the antebellum south who have become so brainwashed that they would rather fight for their owners than live free.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It seems to me that a lot of people have forgotten that Joint Stock Corporations are a priviledge designed to benefit society as a whole by allowing individuals to group together to form businesses wihout being jointly and severally liable. An individual who runs up debts must pay them or face bankruptcy. A shareholder however is not liable. Once joint stock corporatons start scheming against the public good, the obvious response is that it may be time to withdraw the priviledge of limited liability.

Similarly, limited liability is why corporations should not have the rights of individuals. If you create artificial entities with limited responsibilities, then surely they should have limited rights as well?

Harry

Capella said...

Here's an idea from Polly Toynbee's Guardian article October 10th:
"So try plan C, from Glasgow University's Professor Greg Philo: a one-off windfall taking 20% of the accrued wealth of the richest 10% would solve the debt problem overnight. Graduated so the top 1% pay most, taking a fifth of the £4tn they own would only push back downwards the money hoovered upwards in the last decade. They can pay it after death if they prefer. YouGov found 74% support for the idea, hardly surprising as the Insitute for Fiscal Studies on Tuesday reports that average households have lost 7% of income, with the poorest hardest hit."
Problem solved.