[lbo-talk] Documented pattern of govt/elite front groups

[Louis Trager]

The collaboration between the citizens committees and the government was 
secret in the sense that at the time it was kept from the public, and 
from the officials whose decisions were at stake. It stood in direct 
contradiction to the representation of the committees -- by themselves 
and the media -- that they were independent, private, and ad hoc. Paul 
Douglas, for example, volunteered to reporters a number of time the lie 
that one of LBJ's Vietnam fronts had nothing to do with the White House, 
and the State Department and presidential press secretary were under 
orders to lie as well.

In short, these citizens committees constituted the sort of 
misrepresentation inherent in a front group, in this case perpetrated by 
a combination of some of the most influential private players and the 
state itself. Mea culpa for not making all that clear to everyone in the 
article.

Call it "confidential." Call it "private." Or go the other way and call 
it "covert" and "fraudulent."

Anyone who already knew all this information is way ahead of all the 
previous writers on the subject. No work had connected the dots among 
more than a few of the dozens of committees I mention, and none had 
elaborated the connection to the liberal consensus.

On 2014-10-02 09:17, Carrol Cox wrote:
> My problem is that I don't see what the political point is. What is the
> article saying that isn't generally known, to  anyone who wants to know 
> it.
> I guess my problems focus on the phrase, "elite, bipartisan 'citizens
> committees' that have secretly...." In what sense were those activities
> "secret"? It might be useful to distinguish between "secret" and 
> "[merely]
> confidential."
> 
> The opening paragraphs of LT's article are copied below  for reference.
> 
> Carrol
> 
> -----------
> 
> After serving as President Harry Truman's secretary of state, Dean 
> Acheson
> reminisced that 1940s organizations he had supported -- the Committee 
> to
> Defend America by Aiding the Allies and the Citizens' Committee for the
> Marshall Plan -- were "uniquely and typically American." Many groups 
> engage
> in protest, Acheson noted, but "few organize privately to support
> Government, and fewer still to support policies and measures not 
> directly
> beneficial to themselves or their group."
> 
> My research discloses that these organizations, far from being
> extraordinary, were just the most famous of dozens of elite, bipartisan
> "citizens committees" that have secretly collaborated with the
> administration of the day, whether Democratic or Republican. The
> partnerships have skirted legal restrictions on official lobbying and 
> covert
> propaganda, or violated them; a dearth of enforcement makes it hard to 
> say
> which.
> 
> This pattern confounds conventional articles of faith about a 
> pluralistic
> system founded on offsetting forces of government, business, and civil
> society, including contending Republican and Democratic parties. The
> pattern's duration contradicts beliefs that a robust and flourishing
> American democracy went sour sometime from the mid-1940s, when 
> President
> Franklin Roosevelt died and the Cold War started, to 2010, when 
> Obamacare
> and the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling on corporate speech were
> decided.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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