Freedom Watch: Pushing Buttons and Raising Millions
OAKLAND, California — Over the past couple of years, a number of right wing groups have been contending for the unofficial designation of the conservative version of MoveOn.org, the liberal grassroots lobbying organization. These days, Freedom’s Watch appears to have a leg up on them all.
The Washington-based non-profit organization founded last year by a group of former White House aides and a gaggle of wealthy Bush supporters is making its presence known, building a powerful organizational infrastructure, and may wind up spending as much as a quarter of a billion dollars in this year’s presidential election and congressional races.
Last summer, just before General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker were scheduled to testify before Congress on the situation in Iraq, Freedom’s Watch launched a 15-million-dollar advertising campaign to drum up public support for President George W. Bush’s surge. While the public’s perception of the occupation of Iraq didn’t dramatically change, nevertheless Freedom’s Watch impacted the discussion.
In the fall, Freedom’s Watch turned its attention to Iran: In late September, the group ran a newspaper advertisement calling Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ‘a terrorist’.
‘If Hitler’s warnings were heeded when he wrote ‘Mein Kampf,’ he could have been stopped,’ Bradley Blakeman, the president of Freedom’s Watch and a former assistant to President Bush, told the New York Times. ‘Ahmadinejad is giving all the same kind of warning signs to us, and the region — he wants the destruction of the United States and the destruction of Israel.’
In late October, the group sponsored a forum on Iran which featured several ‘experts’ on Middle East policy from the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington-based think tank that is the home of many neoconservative architects of the war in Iraq.
In December, Freedom’s Watch turned its attention to immigration, running a television ad attacking the Democratic Party’s candidate in a special congressional election in northern Ohio.
The ad was characterized by the Washington Post as ‘aggressively negative’. ‘Bankrolled largely by Sheldon G. Adelson, a Las Vegas casino executive who last year pledged an unprecedented 200 million dollars to Jewish and Israeli causes, who wrote an 80,000-dollar check to Freedom’s Watch on Dec. 7, according to Federal Election Commission documents, just four days before the election that gave Republican Robert Latta the House seat representing the district around Bowling Green,’ the Post reported.
According to the newspaper, ‘Behind a blood-red foreground, the group’s ad showed Latinos hurrying under fences and being frisked by police as a narrator accused Democratic candidate Robin Weirauch and ‘liberals in Congress’ of supporting free health care for illegal immigrants.’
‘Freedom’s Watch is the latest of several conservative groups getting into the act of pushing anti-immigrant extremism for perceived political gain,’ Devin Burghart, director of the Centre for New Community’s Building Democracy Initiative, told IPS. ‘After its pro-war ad campaigns failed to move the American people, Freedom’s Watch drifted to what may be the most divisive and volatile issue on the campaign trail this year — nativism — with its recent ads in the Ohio congressional election.’
Burghart pointed out that the fact that Freedom’s Watch ‘has jumped onto the nativism bandwagon is one more indicator that anti-immigrant politics has become the new frontline of the culture war. It’s an early warning signal of just how strongly some GOP-allies are planning on wielding nativism as a divisive weapon in the 2008 election cycle.’
‘We’re a permanent political operation here in town. We’re not going to be Johnny One Note,’ Joe Eule, the group’s executive director, told the Washington Post.
According to the newspaper, Freedom’s Watch staff of 20 ‘will be more than doubled in the coming months’; communications will be run by Ed Patru, ‘the message chief for House Republicans,’ who was recently lured ‘away from Capitol Hill’; and the group’s headquarters ‘above the posh Caucus Room restaurant [in] downtown [Washington], are being outfitted with a modern studio so the staff can send ads to TV and radio stations across the country on a moment’s notice.’
This is one group that will not experience financial difficulties: According to the Post, ‘While initial reports suggested a budget of $200 million, people who have talked to the group in recent weeks say the figure is closer to $250 million, more than double the amount spent by the largest independent liberal groups in the 2004 election cycle.’
‘There is a sense among those contributing to Freedom’s Watch that MoveOn powerfully filled a void in the left, that rallied support in the left, that raised money from the left, that mobilized the left,’ Ari Fleischer, a former Bush press secretary and a Freedom’s Watch founder, told the Post.
‘Freedom’s Watch is raking in huge donations from a few donors, a model that other federally sanctioned campaign groups cannot follow, because donation sizes are limited by law,’ John Stauber, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, told IPS.
‘And like MoveOn, Freedom’s Watch intends to augment that approach with a grass-roots fundraising model that energizes a base of supporters as it brings in money,’ he said.
Freedom’s Watch is headed by Blakeman, Mel Sembler, a millionaire former Bush ambassador to Italy, and Fleischer. Much of its financial support so far has come from Sembler and billionaire Sheldon Adelson, the sixth richest person in the world.
Freedom’s Watch’s website states that it ‘was formed to be the conservative voice fighting for mainstream conservative principles — today, tomorrow, and for generations to come. We engage in grassroots lobbying, education and information campaigns, and issue advocacy to further our goals and objectives. We create coalitions and collaborate with like-minded groups and individuals to further our common goals.’
Fleischer told the Post that the group wasn’t ‘broadening’ its agenda. ‘We said prosperity through free enterprise and domestic issues were going to be on the agenda. But something had to come first, and what came first was the ’surge’ and the president’s policies in Iraq.’
‘Freedom’s Watch is being quite transparent about its motives in running anti-immigrant ads,’ John Stauber pointed out. ‘It’s all about hot button issues that will turn out the Republican base and defeat Democrats. Obviously, they see immigration as such a weapon. Neoconservatives have shown themselves able to build strange bedfellow coalitions in the past, such as with conservative Christian fundamentalists. Ari Fleischer and his cohorts are all about winning, by any means necessary.’
Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His column ‘Conservative Watch’ documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right.
© 2008 Inter Press Service
Pro-Jewish Nazis? We live in strange times indeed. There have never been stranger bedfellows.
Wonderful names like “Freedoms watch”, and “Friends of the Community.” This country continues the destruction of civilizations around the world. We have stolen Native lands and committed genocide on millions of indigenous of Turtle Island and quoted the bible for legitimatising the slavery of millions in the econmic growth of these “United States of Amnesia.” We have a Negro on the above poster and perhaps a Latinos, poor and Natives doing the killing for us now for ‘Freedom’ and calling us your equal. We are indeed sick, sick and considering ourselves sane and religious. Shame, Shame America.
The point of the immigration “issue” is to get Americans to support the Real ID Act, the national identification card with all your information on it, including biometric info.
There has been resistance to this hallmark of totalitarian governments in the past. But whip up anti-immigrant hysteria, and watch Americans line up to be branded.
As if the corporations would ever give up the cheap labor provided by illegal immigrants!
Freedom Watch is founded by right wing Jews and appears to be just another arm of AIPAC. It’s time to end Jewish hegemony over American foreign and domestic policy. Why do American’s tolerate this nonsense. End the belief that Jews cannot be criticized. Jews can and should be criticized just as any other group when they deserve criticism.
They’ll need to keep the issues extremely framed, lest they accidentally let something out of the box they didn’t bargain on.
I am all for keeping the non-natives out.
Can we begin be sending all the European-blooded back to where they came from?
If the Jews can harken to the old scripture to claim a homeland, then we need to go back to the pre-Spanish invasion of the new world and draw the line there.
All caucasians back on the ships. Row back to whence you came.
Sarah Ruth
Sarah,
I came from St. Paul, Minnesota. My ancestors left from several parts of Europe because they were reduced by centuries of serfdom. Ship the Native Americans back to Asia while we’re at it? Leave the continent empty of people?
The only place for any of us is the ground on which we currently stand. Until we come to that realization, all hope is lost.
“Can we begin be sending all the European-blooded back to where they came from?” What?? And give them free healthcare, inexpensive university educations, and public transportation systems that work? What have they (I) done to deserve that?
“all hope is lost” ?
Lighten up, Paul.
“Native Americans” were already here when the white plague landed. They left Asia 15,000 to 33,000 years ago. How about draw the line at 10,000 years (give a nice buffer) and send everyone after that away… way away. If the Jews can go backwards in history to claim land then so can the natives here on this continent. The south states belonged to Mexico once. Why the outcry when they return to their roots?
If your ancestors can come here to get away from ‘centuries of serfdom’ then why can’t the people south of our borders escape to America. You can’t have it both ways.
vinlander is right; we get what we deserve, thus we have a country divided and full of hate mongering stooges who believe that regurgitation is education and George is an intelligent being.
Sarah Ruth
Much of its financial support so far has come from Sembler and billionaire Sheldon Adelson, the sixth richest person in the world.
Freedom’s Watch’s website states that it ‘was formed to be the conservative voice fighting for mainstream conservative principles
The “mainstream conservative principle” that Freedom’s Watch is fighting for is the principle of relentless domination of the few over the many. Take a look into Adelson’s business activity - it all caters to the capitalist high rollers, offering luxury, convenience, excitement, all on the backs of millions of struggling wage slaves. The price for freedom is very high in 21st Century America.
How sad it is that the richest people on Earth can’t even recognize that the reason they stay rich is at the expense of economically enslaved people, abroad and here at home. The rich should be giving back in the form of philanthropy, not sponsoring more hate and extremism. In fact, the rich stand to lose just as much if not more than the poor with the collapse of our current economy and political system. I guess it makes sense for them to sponsor wars in the short term, to make the money while they can and control the common people, but keeping people in the dark could backfire in a big way. Soon there will be a massive movement to right the wrongs done by these evil radicals that masquerade behind the guise of conservatism. They may have the masses under their thumb for the moment, but with more oppression comes more creativity. People who really care about freedom are dropping out of the system, and they won’t listen to this fascist dogma much longer. People are waking up to the reality that we need to change ourselves to change the world, or everything and everyone will be threatened with extinction. All the money in the world can’t buy you a functioning ecosystem, but it wouldn’t hurt if the rich got on the side of positive change instead of the side of the oppressor.
Sarah Ruth,
“White plague” is a racist and offensive term. You won’t get many progressives or populists to join causes. But that’s always been the point in the racist wedge on the both sides, eh? How many people out there are deliberately inciting racism into the mix, to prevent populism — international populism — from taking off?
The plight of Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanics, caucasians, and others will ultimately converge — regardless of how racists in their camps may try to wedge a broader populist or class movement from materializing.
‘If Hitler’s warnings were heeded when he wrote ‘Mein Kampf,’ he could have been stopped,’ Bradley Blakeman, the president of Freedom’s Watch and a former assistant to President Bush, told the New York Times.
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If Prescott Bush and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker had not supported Hitler’s rise to power - arranging financing, producing propaganda and supplying advice - it’s highly unlikely Hitler would have come to power.
Nor would the Bush family have risen to power in this country without the Nazi War Profits Prescott used to fuel his and his children’s political careers.
But that’s history.
Don’t let it upset your propaganda machine, Mr. Blakeman.
Paul,
Obviously you have never been on the receiving end. Sure looked like a ‘white plague’ to my ancestors.
This is about building walls instead of opening doors; it’s about keeping people oppressed, in servitude to those on the other side of the wall. Freedom Watch was founded by right wing Jews… they are building wall in Israel to prevent the Palestinians from knowing their own homeland. Now they want to build more wall on the southern borders to keep out illegals. Who is legal? The oppressors, of course.
The plight of the oppressed will ‘ultimately converge’? On what? Another reservation with a casino?
Sarah Ruth
I love it when the NeoCons flatly state the “Hitler could have been stopped” - with unspecified preemptive action by the western powers.
They never speak of the lost opportunity to stop fascism in Spain in 1936. They never mention that the Soviets (and the American Lincoln Brigade) actually did try to fascism in Spain at that time.
My answer to the ‘Cons is this: Beware playing “what if” with history. If we had “stopped” Hitler at Munich in 1938, WWII might have started in 1948, with a nuclear-armed Germany led by a Prussian general instead of an Austrian paperhanger.
Sarah,
Why the collective/racist punishment? I certainly don’t want to build any walls in the southern US, post-war Germany, nor Israel. You need to move beyond the rhetoric of racist group accusation.
Many of the same issues that happened to the Native Americans happened within Europe internally, just a few centuries before 1500 AD. The indigenous Europeans were forced off their own religions and customs, permanently displaced off their ancestral lands — not physically, but economically — turned into landless serfs, forced to fight wars, forced to pay tribute to kings, distant churches and distant banks, etc.
Anyone trying to “sub-prime” the struggles of oppressor vs. oppressed into a smaller box is probably either a racist at his/her core, or trying to incite one of the oldest divide-and-conquer wedges known to Empire.
Unfortunately for the Jews, the actions of a small handful of extremely powerful right-wing Jews and media moguls will eventually cause a widespread anti-semitic backlash, which will not distinguish between progressive or regressive Judaism. Just as you, apparently, do not distinguish between progressive whites — who are “native” to this land and none-other — seeing them instead as racial prototypes or archtypes in the past, rather than individuals here-and-now.
What a disgrace!!!!!!!!!!!1
Sarah & Paul,
I won’t blame all the White’s for the small pox handed to natives in these lands. But the truth is like looking at ones own vomit, we are all complicit in the greed, genocide of many peoples of color. And it appears the victim has become the worst of the oppressors. We have learned well from main stream America. Racism among Blacks in Iraq is obvious with many of our finest calling Arabs desert nigg…rs. Sad, the Jews also after being in captivity for some four hundreds years are doing the same to the Palestinians. Israel has some two hundred nuclear weapons…enough to nuke every Arab nation back to dust…Guess who collectively America supports in the guise of Bible myth?
The enemy is us and we call ourselves good Christians. Note: The most monies in donations to Israel come from Jews in Mexico. I will also state that because one is a Jew, does not mean support for Israeli policies. We are all humans suffering in a burning world with women and children suffering most…
Gilberto,
Not all of us call ourselves Christians. And there are some among us (all peoples) who refuse to pander to racism, group punishment or group accusation. It is possible to rise above it as individuals.
Europeans enslaved themselves, the mass emigration of newly freed serfs/peasants to the Americas resembles other great mass exoduses. People don’t leave their traditional homelands of milennia unless conditions are terrible, whole economies unsustainable. The Irish, for instance, were starving.
I had a number of ancestors who came from Schleswig-Holstein. I started hunting lists of emigrants (http://www.rootdigger.de/Emi.htm). Thousands of people listed on that URL left Europe illegally, just from one tiny area. Not to cause a plague on anyone — but to escape one. Large numbers of these people, maybe even a majority of the males, were going AWOL.
In some ways, the bottom 25% is more racist than the top 1-5%. Global capitalism demonstrated that extremely wealthy Americans, Jews, Europeans, Chinese, Saudis, etc. set aside some racial differences and cooperate in the lingua franca of extreme wealth. If there is a deal to their mutual benefit, they make it happen.
That same overriding bond at the bottom rungs isn’t there. Racist separatists (many are actual racists but some undoubtedly are provacateurs) keep the bottom squabbling with one another on age-old wedges: sex, creed, race, nationality even as the world shrinks and the elite at the top are cooperating in new ways.
Again you can see Racism holding hands with Theocracy. Religion is the poison of our society and freedom’s greatest threat. The Christian religion openly advocates racism, fascism, murder, extortion, and child molestation. They’re all a bunch of lunatics.
Paul,
Your ancestors may have come to this country to flee serfdom, and the Native Americans may have come from Asia. But what right did your/our ancestors have to exterminate Native Americans and commit genocide? I am not accusing you personally of any wrongdoing but why not concede the truth that what your/our ancestors did was wrong?
citizen1:
I have visited the graves of ALL of my ancestors in North America. The one that I have who came earliest came in 1857. There are Native Americans buried in the same cemetery. One of his sons attended school as one of the only whites. Most of his classmates were Native American according to his obituary. I’ve found no evidence whatsoever that any of my ancestors had antagonistic relationships with any Native Americans.
It is sheer bullshit to categorically accuse whites of genocide. Most were escaping the same homocidal tendencies that hit Native Americans.
OK, I finally get it. The Native Americans killed themselves, and gave away their country to whites voluntarily.
That meme that whites=bad is planted racism, deliberately programmed propaganda, to keep class interests divided. Oppressed peoples accusing one another instead of combining resources toward the politics of Empire.
People fled Europe because the systems were tyrannical, reduced them to propertyless peasants, cattle, conscripted soldiers, etc.
There is no f*cking sensible reason that oppressed peoples don’t combine their efforts — it is provacateurs and churls among our ranks that keep us divided.
I get it, citizen1 — working for The Man, eh?
It’s the same propaganda machine that produced the crap mentioned in other articles here on CD. For instance, the ownership class (Thatcher, Europe) tried to create an illusory middle-class — built on mortgages, debts, etc. — so that it would identify with the bourgeois, even though it would never achieve any sort of real vested equity. That was lost before the era of serfdom.
The other front in this propaganda effort is to separate the class interests of Native Americans, whites, blacks and Hispanics in particular. In the eyes of Empire, it’s important that they accuse one another — categorically — rather than combine along class lines. COINTELPRO type plants to divide movements apart from one another. It’s not credible any more.
Brother Paul,
No need to get angry, I remember visiting a gravesite in southern Arizona. A Swedish family by the name of Ericsson’s was well recieve by the Chirekawa Apaches as family members and had very good relations with natives. Circa 1850’s. We are called collectively a Christian nation and to think that many of our presidents were Masons/Christians and slaveholders. I was directly speaking of this group of Christians that have committed these atrocities in the name of God. The churches of all faiths have not come together on these issues and give us the good, compassionate stuff. When in realty there is a silent complicity with apocalyptic rhetoric to destroy the world by religiously inspired genocide, which all governments have used at one time or another. And with nuclear weapons the hands of crazies the case will be a compete end of the world as we know it…
Gilberto
How easy is it to destroy someone’s reputation with gossip, slander and lies? If the images create an emotional, viseral response, like the ones these nazi pigs are so good at creating, the easily fooled and hoodwinked just go along for the evil ride.
Don’t you know these sinister alchemists are cooking up their swift boat style ads to run against Obama or Hillary starting after the conventions.
Its going to get very nasty, ugly, and damaging. These animals have millions to spend on their attacks, and “Freedom Watch” will really mean, Attack on Truth, because these criminals have staked their claim to the right to run OUR government, for their own personal gain, and its a game they won’t allow the opposition to win.
Paul,
Your direct ancestors may not have personally murdered a native American, and may have held generally progressive (for the day) views in their dealings with them. But unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that they didn’t participate in an antagonistic relationship with natives. Being part of an uninvited, foreign, occupying cultural horde is antagonistic. Taking land and using resources previously valued by existing residents is antagonistic, even if responsibility is diffused or the occupiers had problems of their own.
Your points about race distracting from class are salient, but don’t negate the basic criticism.
The well funded Freedom’s Watch venture, once again, shows us how tax breaks for the wealthy actually function.
Tax breaks for the wealthy gives them more money which, in turn, increases both their control over the levers of political power and the loudness and distribution of their propaganda.
The only trickle down effect from such tax breaks is that these right-wing propaganda and political mobilization organizations need janitors, food handlers, and other low-paid maintenance workers.
A few slots will be open for “intellectual” workers: bombastics, spastics, opportunists, smiling and serious fanatics, faith-based logicians, the historically and factually challenged, cherry-pickers (not to be confused with actual farm-workers), fantasists, paranoid delusionals, etc.
Of course, there will be openings for a few techies. They can be dug up from anywhere since most of them work only for the money, no questions asked.
I would like to divert this discussion from its path for a bit. What I find intriquing about this is the nature of the “right wing MoveOn.org”. It is a truly astro-turf operation that has little in common with its liberal counterpart. For all its failings, moveon really IS a grassroots democratic organization. Freedom Watch on the other hand, is a well funded bunch of extremists with little community support. MoveOn involves millions in its discussions and meetups. How many does Freedom Watch mobilize? No it represents the interests of the wealthy men who pay the bills. That is all. They should be outted on this basis.
On this whole immigration issue. Freedom Watch is anti-immigration because that serves their masters’ interests. If we don’t want Mexicans coming here to find a way to support their families, we need to do what we can to encourage the Mexican government to develop policies that allow the poor of Mexico to make a living where they are. Getting out of NAFTA would be a start. NAFTA has harmed small farmers in Mexico as much as it has harmed industrial workers in this country. Supporting the Zapatistas in Chiapas would be another. They are building an alternative to free-trade corporate globalization.
No one leaves everything they know, to come to a place where they are hunted and hated because they WANT to. They come because they have to. Fair trade not free trade is the way to address the immigration issue.
The human race is collectively insane. One can not “fight” this insanity. One can only become well. This is humanity’s great challenge. This is your work; become well. Awaken from this insane dream of fear and desire. Look at the world around you right now.
Perhaps Common Dreams readers should post to the blogs on freedomswatch.org ?