{"id":14012,"date":"2012-11-14T14:26:10","date_gmt":"2012-11-14T21:26:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=14012"},"modified":"2012-11-14T14:26:10","modified_gmt":"2012-11-14T21:26:10","slug":"us-campaign-season-never-ends-for-professional-left-one-big-progressive-cluster-fuck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=14012","title":{"rendered":"US Campaign Season Never Ends for “Professional Left” – One Big “Progressive” Cluster-Fuck"},"content":{"rendered":"

Movement Strategy Brunches: “Campaign Season” Never Ends for the Professional Left \u201cOne Big Progressive Cluster-F\u2013k\u201d<\/strong>
\nby The INSIDER – November 14, 2012 – counter punch<\/p>\n

President Barack Obama was elected merely a week ago in a presidential campaign that ran a bill of $6 billion.
\n\u201cCampaign Season,\u201d as its called by the electioneering professionals and most journalists, has officially come to an end in the eyes of most citizens and the press, both mainstream and \u201cindependent media\u201d alike. For the \u201cProfessional Left\u201d though, \u201ccampaign season\u201d never actually ends, which explains why they refer to their form of activism as \u201ccampaigns.\u201d It\u2019s truth in advertising, at last!<\/p>\n

The newest \u201ccampaign\u201d in town is being run by\u2026.wait for it\u2026.a MoveOn.org offshoot in the form of \u201cMovement Strategy Brunches\u201d being held nationwide on Nov. 17-18.<\/p>\n

\u201cDrink Mimosas\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

On Nov. 8, writing to a confidential email list, Liz Butler, a \u201cSenior Fellow and Network Organizing Project Director\u201d of the Movement Strategy Center, declared,<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are asking you to set up a Movement Strategy Brunch \u2013 an informal, low-key way to bring together you and other local grassroots people at the local level to reflect, drink mimosas (or healthy green smoothies) and talk about the future. Sound fun? It\u2019s supposed to be! After so much hard work, it\u2019s nice to be able to kick back, drink some orange juice, and munch on a flaky croissant.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Movement Strategy Center is the Fiscal Sponsor for Van Jones\u2019 Rebuild the Dream, according to Rebuild the Dream\u2018s website. Jones\u2019 front group for the Democratic Party set up shop in June 2011 when MoveOn.org gave $348K to Rebuild the Dream in start-up capital, according to its most recent Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 990 form.<\/p>\n

Rebuild, as regular CounterPunch readers will likely recall, was responsible for the attempt to co-opt the Occupy movement not once, but twice – once in the fall of 2011 and once again in the spring of 2012.<\/p>\n

Butler oversaw the \u201c99 Spring,\u201d the front operation for both MoveOn.org and the Democratic Party. Prior to her current stint at the Movement Strategy Center in April 2012, Butler worked for 3.5 years as the Campaign Director for 1Sky, which in April 2011 merged with 350.org, currently in the throes of its \u201cDo the Math\u201d campaign.<\/p>\n

The email was co-signed by Billy Wimsatt, a Fellow at the Movement Strategy Center, as well as an employee of Rebuild the Dream, two outfits that are interchangeable and one-in-the-same. A WhoIs.net search shows Wimsatt registered the website for the \u201cMovement Strategy Brunches\u201d on Oct. 16, a few weeks ahead of the Nov. 6 election.
\n\u201cConsensual Domination\u201d<\/p>\n

Like its cousin the 99 Spring, the \u201dMovement Strategy Brunches\u201d give well-meaning grassroots activists the illusion of having full control of things at the local level. \u201cYOU organize it,\u201d shouts its website.<\/p>\n

Yet again, it\u2019s the same players managing a brand new version of what University of California-Santa Barbara Sociology Professor William I. Robison refers to as \u201cconsensual domination\u201d in his classic book, \u201cPromoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Gramscian concept of hegemony as \u2018consensual domination\u2019 exercised in civil and political society at the level of the individual nation (or national society) may be extended\/applied to the emergent global civil and political society,\u201d he wrote in the book\u2019s introduction. \u201cThe emergence of \u2018democracy promotion\u2019 as a new instrument and the orientation in US foreign policy in the 1980s represented the beginnings of a shift \u2013 still underway \u2013 in the method through which the core regions of the capitalist world system exercise their domination over peripheral and semi-peripheral regions\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

The tools of imperialism have come home to the core of the empire, as they always do. This time, like the many times before, it\u2019s in the form of \u201cconsensual domination\u201d on the part of citizens who partake in \u201cactivism\u201d that\u2019s nothing more than freshly installed astroturf for the Democratic Party disguised as \u201cdemocracy promotion.\u201d
\n\u201cThese pseudo-revolutionaires no doubt believe their own propaganda, or their \u2018memes,\u2019 as they prefer to call them. But these liberal cultists are nothing more than convenient lap dogs for the \u2018progressive\u2019 millionaires who fund them and the Democrats,\u201d said John Stauber, author of the book Toxic Sludge is Good for You and Founder of the Center for Media and Democracy. \u201dThey are well fed, they groom each other, they regurgitate the same talking points, and they consistently accomplish nothing in the real world except to push a false hope that they are leading a real Movement. In other words, it\u2019s a classic form of cooptation, which is both made possible by the severe limitations of the political process and of course serves to limit it further. It is essential to maintaining a status quo that benefits the 1%. Follow the money, this is one big progressive cluster-fuck.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Insider<\/strong> is the pseudonym of an activist who works inside the Liberal Foundation-Funded Democratic Party-Allied Belly of the Beast.<\/em><\/p>\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Movement Strategy Brunches: “Campaign Season” Never Ends for the Professional Left \u201cOne Big Progressive Cluster-F\u2013k\u201d by The INSIDER – November 14, 2012 – counter punch President Barack Obama was elected merely a week ago in a presidential campaign that ran a bill of $6 billion. \u201cCampaign Season,\u201d as its called by the electioneering professionals and more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247],"tags":[3689],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14012"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14012"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14013,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14012\/revisions\/14013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}