By Edmund Berger
Presidential election season. It’s
that magical time every four years when the airwaves become clogged with
torrents of campaign ads, soundbites, and over the top rhetoric spewing forth
from both sides of the aisles, the time when the sense of patriotism is most
compelled to act out the tradition of civic duty. It’s the ultimate expression
of the “American Experience,” and fittingly, it is the time when all
conversation, all debate, and the majority of dissent gets put on the shelf as
our eyes turn towards Washington. It’s that magical time every four years when
those outside voices are pulled through the Beltway’s doors and begin to cheer
for their home team, regardless of whatever criticism they had spoken outside
of the electoral cycle.
A good case in point is The Nation magazine, the intellectually
sophisticated organ of the progressive and populist Left. The longest-running
weekly publication in America, The Nation
is currently presided over by Katrina vanden Heuvel, the daughter of a wealthy
heiress and a prominent diplomat and corporate lawyer. She’s a self-described “progressive,”
and has the stripes to prove it: for one, she’s an adviser of the World Policy
Institute, a Rockefeller Brothers Fund-subsidized World Federalist-style
think-tank that was, for quite a few years, housed at the forward-thinking New
School for Social Research in New York City. For another, she’s also affiliated
with the Institute for Policy Studies, an organization that has long been
charged by the Right as being a “Marxist front organization” operating in America.
This charge persists despite the fact that their work has long been financed by
the aforementioned Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, the
Ford Foundation, and the AFL-CIO labor federation, all of which have utilized
their leftist veneer to disrupt more radical, particularly Marxist-oriented,
social movements. Moderate philanthropies also subsidize The Nation, such as the MacArthur Foundation – moneyed heavyweights
that further assist the “non-mainstream media” by providing cash to Mother Jones. MacArthur, alongside most
of the foundations mention above, also fund the Council on Foreign Relations –
an organization described by Laurence Shoup as the “citadel of the American
Establishment” and “the most influential of all private policy planning groups.”
(1) Curiously, here again we can find the progressive Katrina vanden Heuvel, achieving
a front-row seat to the process through which policy is made in America.
Despite her impressive pedigree
in the moderate establishment of the Professional Left, vanden Heuvel has
broken from the typical party line several times over the actions of President
Obama. For example, in December of 2010 she published an article in the Washington Post with the title of “Obama:
On the way to a failed presidency?” (2) “Ronald Reagan famously quipped that
the Democratic Party left him before he left the party,” she begins, before
adding “Like many progressive supporters of Barack Obama, I'm beginning to have
the same feeling about this president.” She continues to assault Obama’s
continuation of the war in Afghanistan, his free trade agreement with South
Korea, and his embrace of the attitudes and socio-economic philosophies of the “Beltway
elites.” She returned to the Post to
further critique Obama in June of 2012, condemning the administration’s “kill
list” of terrorists marked for death by drone strikes. (3) Similarly, one of
the chief editors of The Nation,
Christopher Hayes, has spent time amongst the establishment as a fellow at the
MacArthur Foundation-funded New American Foundation (a “Third Way”/centrist
Democratic Party-oriented organization with a membership that boasts figures
like the pro-globalization pundit Fareed Zakaria, Francis Fukuyama of The End of History fame, Jonathan Soros,
and Google CEO Eric Schmidt) before attacking America’s divisive economic
system in the recently published Twilight
of the Elites.
Both Hayes’ Twilight of the Elites and vanden Heuvel’s Washington Post piece were published on June 12th, and
seemed to confirm the growing trend of left-wing disenfranchisement at the
Democrat Party (excluding of course MoveOn, who recently came out and endorsed
Obama). But just a matter of days later, on June 27th, The Nation sent out a short email blast
with the simple of title of “Remember?” Within it is a reminder that on June 28th
the Supreme Court will vote on whether or not the so-called “Obamacare” is
constitutional. “No matter how they come down, we’ve got to show that we’re
behind the President on this,” the email reads. “If you agree that access to
health care should always be a right—not a privilege—sign this petition to
stand with President Obama.”
There are multiple problems that
rise to the surface with this email. First, Obamacare should not be confused
with a universal healthcare system – the true culmination of the
healthcare-as-a-right ethos – because it is a mandate-based structure that
relies on the continued existence of the private healthcare industry, as
opposed to outright nationalization. Essentially, it’s a form of forced
consumerism masquerading as progressive reform. This is exactly why in 2009
some 4,525 lobbyists, representing 1,750 healthcare and pharmaceutical companies
(as well as the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce),
descended on Capitol Hill to influence the legislation. (4) In its current
form, it’s a massive hidden subsidy to all of these industries. Furthermore, to
drag up a tired talking point, Obamacare’s initial inspiration came from the
current (alleged) opposition, Mitt Romney – and Obama even met with three of
Romney’s advisors in drafting the legislation.
But the issue isn’t truly Obamacare.
The email, at a glance, is a simple petition for a progressive-seeming cause.
But what is does is project an image vital for Obama’s reelection campaign: for
so long we’ve seen the real face of Obama, the face of a “1%er,” a warhawk, a
corporate sellout. By bringing Obamacare back up from the corridors, offices
and legislative channels of Washington, these truths are replaced with the
image of Obama the Fighter, standing up for the everyman and defending the
underclasses against the unscrupulous plutocrats in the Republican Party. This
is further confirmed when one notes that the email is not directly a product of
The Nation, but instead a sponsored
ad from Mike Ryan, the policy director at the Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee (DCCC). The DCCC, in turn, is the critical body for helping
Democratic politicians get elected; it plays an absolutely vital piece of the
Democrat Party’s inner machinery.
Ryan was most likely brought
into his important position by the DCCC’s current chair, Steve Israel (D-NY)
for whom Ryan served as a legislative director. Prior to this Ryan gained
experience as a senior legislative assistant to Robert “Bud” Cramer (D-AL), a
conservative-leaning Democrat that voted for the invasion of Iraq, as well as
the later re-authorization of the Patriot Act. His rightist leanings are
further amplified by his position in the Blue Dog Coalition, the formal
grouping of “moderate” Democrats in Congress – a position he holds right
alongside Steve Israel. Typical “Third Way” advocates much akin to their “RINO”
equivalents on the other side of the aisle, Blue Dog Democrats have attacked
typical liberal ideals such as welfare, and have continually acted in favor of
free trade, business interests, and more often than not, pro-war efforts. Thus,
it’s probably unsurprising to note that Obama once told the Congressional
conservative democrats “I’m a Blue Dog at heart.”
It’s a worrying state of affairs
for what we conceive as independent media. Publications such as The Nation hold themselves up as both
muckrackers and vocal outlets for the progressive Left, the “ultra-opposition”
inside the liberal sphere. How are people supposed to trust the information and
the insights within the magazine or on its website if it is so willing to allow
itself to become an unofficial apparatus of one of two (largely indivisible)
political parties? One may write it off as simply another ad in the midst of
campaign season, but that’s the thing about ads. They make seem rather
innocent, but they take information and imagery that may or may not have a
neutral character, and turn it into a tool, a means for an end that will surely
benefit the person pushing the ad than the person buying into what they’re
selling. As such, and particularly in the case of electoral campaigning, the ad
is a form of propaganda, and its appearance in relation to The Nation - and coupled with its funders and the institutional
affiliations of many of its figureheads (5) – casts doubt on the publication’s
validity as a whole.
Of course, as noted above, people
like vanden Heuvel frequently operate within the policy-making establishment,
with her presence on the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) coming directly to
mind. While this particular organization had been the breeding ground for
membership in Bush Jr.’s administration, its expertise has been featured
prominently in the age of Obama. Laurence Shoup, writing for Z Magazine, identifies a slew of CFR
players that have surrounded the president: Secretary of the Treasury and
former Federal Reserve chief Timothy Geithner; National Economic Council
director Lawrence Summers (who had been the Treasury Secretary of CFR member
Bill Clinton, husband of Obama’s Secretary of State); the late Richard
Holbrooke, Obama’s “Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan”;
General Stanley McChrystal, former military commander; General David Petraeus,
current CIA director; Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense; and a vast
array of advisers and other non-elected appointments. (6) Of course, vanden
Heuvel has shown her willingness to oppose aspects of the wars that many of
these CFR members unabashedly support. But the fact remains that the CFR, a
diverse and often fragmented group as opposed to a unified opinion bloc, is one
of the most powerful playgrounds of an elite whose age that Chris Hayes claims
we’re in the dusk of. It is an organization that has opposed the ideals of
democracy that The Nation professes
to support: “Representative democracy… cannot be worked successfully, no matter
what the basis of election, unless there is an independent, expert organization
for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make the
decisions… Public opinions must be organized for the press if they are to be
sound…” wrote Walter
Lippman, one of the CFR’s early board members. (7) With the organization’s
commitment to secrecy and its connections to the press, it’s hard to see how
these views reflect any differently today.
To further bolster her
credentials in the arena of electoral politics, vanden Heuvel is also a member
of the American Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation, which aims to network
progressive activists with Congressional representatives. Co-founded by Lorelei
Kelly (who comes from the earlier discussed New American Foundation), the
foundation draws much of its membership from the Institute for Policy Studies,
with the presence of not only vanden Heuvel, but also the institute’s current director,
John Cavanagh, and its early leader Robert Borosage. Its membership also
includes Bill Fletcher, a former high ranking official at the AFL-CIO and the
co-chair of United for Peace & Justice. Most importantly, these individuals
are joined by Joan Blades and Wes Boyd – the two founders of MoveOn, Obama’s
astroturing mechanism of choice when it comes to rallying grassroots activism
in his bids for the White House.
We tend to think of the elites
who dominate us as those who dwell in corporate boardrooms or sit in the Oval
Office or on Capitol Hill. But its election season, and the Beltway begins to
extend itself far beyond the Washington D.C. city limits, across the Great
Plains and Rocky Mountains and far beyond. When power is to be gained and
networks are the key, activism becomes advertising and people become extensions
of the political machine. It’s important in this time, perhaps more than any
other, to uncover these networks and ask ourselves what it is exactly that we’re
fighting for.
1. Laurence
H. Shoup “Bush, Kerry, and the Council on Foreign Relations” Z Magazine October, 2004.
