I suppose that most people are aware of tompaine.com, a lavishly funded website that takes out weekly ads on the NY Times op-ed pages promoting one of their feature articles. Today there is an ad calling Times readers to an item about Indian immigrants being kept in near-slavery conditions in Oklahoma. (http://www.tompaine.com/op_ads/opad.cfm/ID/5763)
On the other hand, I have noticed articles that tompaine.com that seem somewhat off-kilter. For example, you can find a proposal from a Cato Institute staffer for joining forces between libertarians and progressives. It concludes with the following sentences: "Which brings me full circle. Libertarians and progressives should talk to each other more readily. Leave the Ds and Rs to schmooze each other. For my schmoozing buck, I'd rather talk to someone who's got a compelling ideology." You can also find a rather dopey salute to the ineffably repulsive Clintonista George Stephanopolous: "Stephanopoulos is a logical choice to host "This Week." He has greater inside knowledge of politics than any of the current Sunday morning talk show moderators. He’s good on TV. He wrote a much better book about the Clinton White House than people gave him credit for. And he might even get more Americans to watch a show about current affairs. That’s something even the press should like." This led me to do a little digging on tompaine.com on guidestar.org (a website that keeps data on nonprofits that they are required to make available to the public) and other websites. It turns out that tompaine.com is a project of the Florence Fund, which is itself an offshoot of the Florence and John Schumann Foundation. Bill Moyers is the president of the Schumann Foundation, while his son John is president of the Florence Fund and runs tompaine.com on a salary exceeding $76,000 per year. Among the other beneficiaries of Schumann Foundation largesse is Robert Kuttner's American Prospect magazine. Last December senior editor Ana Marie Cox was fired after only six weeks. According to the Washington Post: >>"It was the latest in a series of staff purges and defections at the nonprofit magazine, which has received, in addition to other grants, about $10 million from the Florence and John Schumann Foundation, headed by public television icon Bill Moyers. Prospect president and founding editor Robert Kuttner flew here from his Boston headquarters to defenestrate Cox." We hear that Kuttner referred to notes on a legal pad as he told the editor that she was "not being civil" and had improperly changed the copy of senior writers -- i.e., Kuttner -- "without due process." We hear that Kuttner was also angry that last week, during an editorial lunch he did not attend, Cox had jokingly called him "Crazy Bob."<< After Cox was fired, contributing writers Thomas Frank (of Baffler fame) and Ken Silverstein (ex-coeditor of Counterpunch) withdrew their articles from an upcoming issue in protest. Although it is not mentioned anywhere on the tompaine.com website, Robert Kuttner and Charles Peters sit on the editorial board of the Florence Fund. In other words, "Crazy Bob" is one of the main operatives at a website that is making a calculated effort to appear leftish. Charles Peters shares Kuttner's Democratic Leadership Council politics. He founded the Washington Monthly in 1969 in order to promote "neoliberalism", a term that he seemed to have coined all on his own--a dubious distinction to say the least. Using seed money from Warren Buffett, he made the magazine into a megaphone for the rightwing of the Democratic Party. While most people are aware of the "leveling" effect of the Internet that allows nearly anybody to get a hearing as long as they are technically proficient enough (or know how to recruit such a person) to set up a website, there is another aspect that deserves more consideration. Namely, the ability of big capitalists and their foundations to adopt the coloration of "alternative" websites. For example, we learned that despite superficial appearances, the British website www.opendemocracy.net is a platform for libertarians of the Spiked Online variety. Clearly there is useful information on tompaine.com, but I would urge the reader to exercise a little caution considering the background and funding. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
