Re: In defence of Krugman and against Alexander Cockburn: choice of targets

[andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen@xxxxxxxxx>]

Like I said, he attacked one of the US's most
effective civil liberties lawyers, who has put real
hurt on violent hate groups that have (pardon me for
getting personal here) killed and injured my friends
and their family, because he's not an ascetic and
doesn't expect the young ;lawyers whow ork for him to
work in crumby conditions. Why don't we go after
Michael Tigar, too -- he's made a  boatload of dough,
maindefending the likes of the Hunts, when he hasn't
been defending everyone from Bobby Seale on
-- actuallt, he has made a boatload, literally, he
owns a boat. Or Kunstler,who was also a wealthy man.
Tigar and Kunstler thought they were real radicals --
Dees doesn't -- but maybe they don't like up to Kenny
Boy's high standards.

--- Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> > Attacking left liberals has been Cockburn's forte.
> > He's run a long time smear job on Morris Dees of
> the
> > Southern Poverty Law Center, a man who has done
> more
> > to put the Klan and the Ayran Nations literally
> out of
> > business than anyone else, because Dees doesn't
> live a
> > life of ascetic poverty, unlike, uh, Cockburn . .
> . .
> > Oops, I forgot, Cockburn lives pretty well. jks
> >
>
>
> Actually, it is Ken Silverstein who has exposed
> Dees.
>
> The Church of Morris Dees
> By Ken Silverstein
> Harper's Magazine, November 2000
> How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from
> intolerance
>
> Ah, tolerance. Who could be against something so
> virtuous? And who could
> object to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the
> Montgomery, Alabama-based
> group that recently sent out this heartwarming yet
> mildly terrifying
> appeal to raise money for its "Teaching Tolerance"
> program, which
> prepares educational kits for schoolteachers?
> Cofounded in 1971 by civil
> rights lawyer cum direct-marketing millionaire
> Morris Dees, a leading
> critic of "hate groups" and a man so beatific that
> he was the subject of
> a made-for-TV movie, the SPLC spent much of its
> early years defending
> prisoners who faced the death penalty and suing to
> desegregate all-white
> institutions like Alabama's highway patrol. That was
> then. Today, the
> SPLC spends most of its time--and money--on a
> relentless fund-raising
> campaign, peddling memberships in the church of
> tolerance with all the
> zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection
> plate. "He's the Jim and
> Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement,"
> renowned anti-
> death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of Dees,
> his former associate,
> "though I don!t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye."
> The Center earned
> $44 million last year alone--$27 million from
> fund-raising and $17
> million from stocks and other investments--but spent
> only $13 million on
> civil rights program , making it one of the most
> profitable charities in
> the country.
>
> The Ku Klux Klan, the SPLC's most lucrative nemesis,
> has shrunk from 4
> million members in the 1920s to an estimated 2,000
> today, as many as 10
> percent of whom are thought to be FBI informants.
> But news of a
> declining Klan does not make for inclining donations
> to Morris Dees and
> Co., which is why the SPLC honors nearly every
> nationally covered "hate
> crime" with direct-mail alarums full of nightmarish
> invocations of
> "armed Klan paramilitary forces" and "violent
> neo-Nazi extremists," and
> why Dees does legal battle almost exclusively with
> mediagenic
> villains-like Idaho's arch-Aryan Richard
> Butler-eager to show off their
> swastikas for the news cameras. In 1987, Dees won a
> $7 million judgment
> against the United Klans of America on behalf of
> Beulah Mae Donald,
> whose son was lynched by two Klansmen. The UKA's
> total assets amounted
> to a warehouse whose sale netted Mrs. Donald
> $51,875. According to a
> groundbreaking series of newspaper stories in the
> Montgomery Advertiser,
> the SPLC, meanwhile, made $9 million from
> fund-raising solicitations
> featuring the case, including one containing a photo
> of Michael Donald's
> corpse. Horrifying as such incidents are, hate
> groups commit almost no
> violence. More than 95 percent of all "hate crimes,"
> including most of
> the incidents SPLC letters cite (bombings, church
> burnings, school
> shootings), are perpetrated by "lone wolves." Even
> Timothy McVeigh,
> subject of one of the most extensive investigations
> in the FBI's
> history-and one of the most extensive direct-mail
> campaigns in the
> SPLC's-was never credibly linked to any militia
> organization.
>
> No faith healing or infomercial would be complete
> without a moving
> testimonial. The student from whose tears this white
> schoolteacher
> learned her lesson is identified only as a child of
> color. "Which race,"
> we are assured, "does not matter." Nor apparently
> does the specific
> nature of "the racist acts directed at him," nor the
> race of his
> schoolyard tormentors. All that matters, in fact, is
> the race of the
> teacher and those expiating tears. "I wept with him,
> feeling for once,
> the depth of his hurt," she confides. "His tears
> washed away the film
> that had distorted my white perspective of the
> world." Scales fallen
> from her eyes, what action does this schoolteacher
> propose? What
> Gandhi-like disobedience will she undertake in order
> to "reach real
> peace in the world"? She doesn't say but instead
> speaks vaguely of
> acting out against "the pain." In the age of Oprah
> and Clinton,
> empathy--or the confession thereof--is an end in
> itself.
>
> Any good salesman knows that a products "value" is a
> highly mutable
> quality with little relation to actual worth, and
> Morris Dees-who made
> millions hawking, by direct mail, such humble
> commodities as birthday
> cakes, cookbooks (including Favorite Recipes of
> American Home Economics
> Teachers), tractor seat cushions, rat poison, and,
> in exchange for a
> mailing list containing 700,000 names, presidential
> candidate George
> McGovern-is nothing if not a good salesman. So good
> in fact that in 1998
> the Direct Marketing Association inducted him into
> its Hall of Fame. "I
> learned everything I know about hustling from the
> Baptist Church," Dees
> has said. "Spending Sundays on those hard benches
> listening to the
> preacher pitch salvation-why, it was like getting a
> Ph.D. in selling."
> Here, Dr. Dees (the letter's nominal author)
> masterfully transforms,
> with a mere flourish of hyperbole, an education kit
> available "at cost"
> for $30 on the SPLC website into "a $325 value."
>
> This is one of the only places in this letter where
> specific races are
> mentioned. Elsewhere, Dees and his copywriters,
> deploying an arsenal of
> passive verbs and vague abstractions, have sanitized
> the usually
> divisive issue of race of its more disturbing
> elements-such as angry
> black people-and for good reason: most SPLC donors
> are white. Thus,
> instead of concrete civil rights issues like housing
> discrimination and
> racial profiling, we get "communities seething with
> racial violence."
> Instead of racially biased federal sentencing laws,
> or the disparity
> between poor predominantly black schools and
> affluent white ones, or the
> violence against illegals along the Mexican border,
> the SPLC gives us
> "intolerance against those who are different,"
> turning bigotry into a
> color-blind, equal-opportunity sin. It's reassuring
> to know that
> "Caucasians" are no more and no less guilty of this
> sin than African
> Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and
> Hispanics. In the eyes
> of Morris Dees, we're all sinners, all victims, and
> all potential
> contributors.
>
>
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