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Then First Lady Hillary Clinton
Tuesday, January 27, 1998
Fathers (and Funders) of the Movement
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Lewis
Powell |
Irving
Kristol |
Richard
Mellon Scaife |
Brock wrote, "I had stumbled onto something big, a symbiotic relationship that would help create a highly-profitable, right-wing Big Lie machine that flourished in book publishing, on talk-radio, and on the Internet in the 90s."
"Not even Brock believed his own reporting at the time. And neither did many of the people who helped publish him. Brock alleged that [attorney Theodore] Olson pushed for the publication of [a] phony Vince Foster story because, Olson told him, the purpose was not to get at the truth but to throw mud at the Clintons and hope something stuck."
In an environment like that, who can blame Hillary for feeling picked on?
Of course, conservative propaganda doesn't focus solely on the Clintons especially now that Bill's left office. Much of it is dedicated to defending free-market, small-government ideals that tell people to just leave the billionaires alone. Professor George Lakoff explains the origins of the movement in this interview excerpt:
"In 1970, [Supreme Court Justice] Lewis Powell wrote a fateful memo to the National Chamber of Commerce saying that all of our best students are becoming anti-business because of the Vietnam War, and that we needed to do something about it. Powell's agenda included getting wealthy conservatives to set up professorships, setting up institutes on and off campus where intellectuals would write books from a conservative business perspective, and setting up think tanks. He outlined the whole thing in 1970. They set up the Heritage Foundation in 1973, and the Manhattan Institute after that. [There are many others, including the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute at Stanford, which date from the 1940s.]
And now, as the New York Times Magazine quoted Paul Weyrich, who started the Heritage Foundation, they have 1,500 conservative radio talk show hosts. They have a huge, very good operation, and they understand their own moral system. They understand what unites conservatives, and they understand how to talk about it, and they are constantly updating their research on how best to express their ideas."
And it worked. Really, really well. Eric Alterman explains: "With millions made available by billionaires like Nelson and Bunker Hunt of Texas, Richard Mellon Scaife of Pennsylvania, Joseph Coors of Colorado, and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon of Seoul, the right set about changing the terms of the debate. Unable to transform (or blow up) the Brookings Instituion, the conservatives created the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Heritage Foundation, and a host of smaller ideological shops to drown out the liberals and moderates with their own analyses. According to a 1997 report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, between 1992 and 1994 alone, just twelve conservative foundations awarded $210 million to various right-wing agenda-building institutions. The comparable figure raised for liberal groups-such as the extremely cost-effective Center for Budget and Policy Priorities-was just $18.6 million."
But liberal think tanks level the playing field, right? Wrong. Turns out rich people don't like creating institutions that suggest they shouldn't have billions while others starve. In his book, Who Rules America?, G. William Domhoff writes, "Most liberal groups have budgets of from $2 million to $6 million a year, less than one-fourth the figures for the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, which have budgets in the range of $20 to $30 million a year."
And what has the right done with all their intellectual and political influence? NOW's Bill Moyers explains:
"The corporate right and the political right declared class war on working people a quarter of a century ago and they've won. The rich are getting richer, which arguably wouldn't matter if the rising tide lifted all boats. But the inequality gap is the widest it's been since l929; the middle class is besieged and the working poor are barely keeping their heads above water. The corporate and governing elites are helping themselves to the spoils of victory -- politics, when all is said and done, comes down to who gets what and who pays for it -- while the public is distracted by the media circus and news has been neutered or politicized for partisan purposes."