Ask yourself if the the rich elite, the 1%, are going
to fund that. Leave The Nation and Mother Jones on the shelf; turn
off Ed Schultz, Rachel Madow and Chris Hayes; don’t open that barrage
of email missives from Alternet, Media Matters, MoveOn, and the other
think tanks; and get your head out of the liberal blogosphere for a
couple days. Clear your mind and consider this:
The self-labeled Progressive Movement that has arisen over the past
decade is primarily one big propaganda campaign serving the political
interests of the the Democratic Party’s richest one-percent who created
it. The funders and owners of the Progressive Movement get richer and
richer off Wall Street and the corporate system. But they happen to be
Democrats, cultural and social liberals who can’t stomach Republican
policies, and so after bruising electoral defeats a decade ago they
decided to buy a movement, one just like the Republicans, a copy.
The Progressive Movement that exists today is their success story.
The Democratic elite created a mirror image of the type of astroturf
front groups and think tanks long ago invented, funded and promoted by
the Reaganites and the Koch brothers. The liberal elite own the
Progressive Movement. Organizing for Action, the “non-partisan” slush
fund to train the new leaders of the Progressive Movement is just the
latest big money ploy to consolidate their control and keep the feed
flowing into the trough.
The professional Progressive Movement that we see reflected in the
pages of The Nation magazine, in the online marketing and campaigning of
MoveOn and in the speeches of Van Jones, is primarily a political
public relations creation of America’s richest corporate elite, the
so-called 1%, who happen to bleed Blue because they have some degree of
social and environmental consciousness, and don’t bleed Red. But they
are just as committed as the right to the overall corporate status quo,
the maintenance of the American Empire, and the monopoly of the rich
over the political process that serves their economic interests.
-- John Stauber, "The Progressive Movement is a PR Front for Rich Democrats" (CounterPunch).