If you diss the secularly sanctified ACLU you can expect to get flack, flack doesn't much bother me, I use it. I think that those lists given by Sheldon Whitehouse of false fronts in service to the modern Republican-fascist-corporate oligarchy could honestly include a group that helped get them some of their most useful tools in order to do that, the ACLU which has both a long history of championing the "freedom of speech-press" items which first freed the corporate media to lie about Democrats and which directly led to Trump getting enough Electoral College votes to defeat the woman probably lied about in the whole range of media from the bottom of the sewer to the more genteel liars of the New York Times, lied about more and longer than any other Democratic nominee for president, Ted Kennedy probably the best comparison for time, though Ted did give them plenty to work with in his younger days.
The ACLU has been an amicus machine too, and in virtually every single case in which the choice was between getting money out of our politics and letting the oligarchs buy our congresses, our presidency, our courts, the ACLU has sided with the oligarchs in not a dissimlar way to the neo-facist front groups Sheldon Whitehouse exposed so beautifully the other day.
Not only that but in other "free speech" cases, such as in tobacco advertisement, liquor advertisement, ect. they have sided with corporate interests wanting to advertise dangerous addictive, health destroying and life ending products on the public airwaves, promoting the use of and abuse of them. They also had a huge hand in allowing Big Pharma to advertise on TV, something which has become a huge problem in things like the promotion of opioids which have joined tobacco and alcohol as major addiction problems destroying lives and burdening socieity and law enforcement with huge problems.
I know for a fact that when they were exposed by investigative journalists and a former employee for being on the take from the tobacco industry AS THEY WERE WRITING BRIEFS, ETC. ON THEIR BEHALF they threatened to stifle the free speech of the journalists and others who exposed them.
The American Civil Liberties Union has defended the Bill of Rights since its founding in 1920. This proud record does not necessarily mean that the ACLU welcomes an exercise of the First Amendment right of freedom of speech concerning its own affairs. I found this out when I inquired about the Union’s ties to the tobacco industry, basing some of my questions on internal documents.
The reply was astonishing. My questions embodied charges that not only lacked "any basis in fact," but were "false and misleading." So wrote Ira Glasser, the ACLU’s strong-willed Executive Director and de facto boss since 1978. For this grave allegation he offered no evidence. Nevertheless, he warned that were I to repeat the charges in an article, "we will appropriately respond at that time." If this was not an outright threat to sue for libel, it was, lawyers tell me, crafted to be read like one.
The reply was also bizarre. I cannot recall so much as an implicit threat of a libel action during the half-century that I’ve reported, extensively and often, on sensitive subjects, particularly misconduct and criminal conduct by deep-pocket corporations—including tobacco companies. Yet such an apparent threat now has come from the organization that has prided itself, for more than 75 years, on defeating efforts to weaken or circumvent the Bill of Rights.
And as the eminent investigative journalist Morton Mintz discovered, what the ACLU was issuing hush orders on was mild compaired to the scandal of it.
Glasser’s response is rooted in "Allies: The ACLU and the Tobacco Industry," a report I had released in July 1993. "Allies" drew press coverage focusing on the Union’s solicitation and acceptance of $500,000 from Philip Morris, the leading cigarette maker, in the six years 1987 through 1992. But the report raised other significant issues, starting with the ACLU’s conflict-of-interest troika: The Union was at once seeking and taking tobacco money, allying itself with the tobacco industry to oppose (with testimony, press releases and "Dear Senator" letters) legislation intended to ban or restrict tobacco advertising and promotion, and—crucially—failing to mention either activity in the endless stream of "emergency" and "urgent" fundraising letters it sends to its approximately 300, 000 members, its quarterly newsletter, Civil Liberties, and its annual reports.
I began thinking about revisiting the ACLU/tobacco alliance on the spring day in 1994 when the top guns of the tobacco industry raised their right arms at a congressional hearing and swore that they did not believe nicotine to be addictive. There followed a series of developments that convulsed the industry, including Liggett Group’s admissions that it had long known that nicotine is addictive and that cigarette smoking does cause disease; the Food and Drug Administration’s classification of nicotine as a drug and of cigarettes as drug-delivery devices, and the outpouring of internal documents demonstrating that the industry targeted children. But what Finally made me decide to follow up on "Allies" was the publication, in late 1996, of a book in which former Union employee John Fahs exposed a bundle of highly embarrassing internal documents, only to be all but ignored by the media and reviewed nowhere.
In "Allies" I had concluded that the ACLU was untainted by "financial impropriety" and that its integrity was "not the issue." Glasser used these very quotes to enhance the credibility of statements like these, made to inquiring reporters and complaining ACLU members: "There is no quid pro quo;" "none of the grants is for issues directly related to tobacco company interests;" the ACLU "seek[s] support to carry out our agenda and advance our principles; we do not accept money with any condition on it that would require us to bend our principles or carry out an agenda not our own."
The Fahs book—"Cigarette Confidential: The Unfiltered Truth About the Ultimate American Addiction"—persuaded me that I had inadvertently misled my readers. The documents demonstrate, author Fahs declared, that the ACLU undertook work "on behalf of cigarette manufacturers…in direct exchange for funding—a quid pro quo arrangement in direct conflict with the institution’s status as a government-subsidized, tax-exempt, nonprofit institution [emphasis added]." In addition, he alleged, the National Task Force on Civil Liberties in the Workplace, the ACLU unit that advocates "smokers’ rights," "owes more than 90 percent of its annual budget and 100 percent of its continued existence" to grants to the ACLU Foundation by Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (Glasser had declined, in a 1992 interview for "Allies," to disclose the amount of the contribution made by the RJR Nabisco unit).
"Philip Morris provides no general contributions to the ACLU, only earmarked money for workplace rights," task force director Lewis L. Maltby told Glasser in a September 1991 memo. But neither in the 1992 interview for "Allies" nor in subsequent damage-control efforts did Glasser so much as hint at earmarking. Rather, he deflected attention from it by emphasizing my own calculation that Philip Morris’s grants amounted to less than one-half of one percent of ACLU revenues. "Tobacco companies are not a major source of support for the ACLU," he said.
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The ACLU has been playing real liberals for suckers for pretty much its entire existence. I have compared its flagship, for show advocacy in court on behalf of this or that person who is an isolated victim of injustice with its more deadly advocacy for "free speech - free press" which has not only fueled the rise of the Republican-fascist right through the corporate media propagandizing the country but has given the fascists on the court the language with which to gut campaign fiance laws that aimed FORMERLY ON A BIPARTISAN BASIS to rescue our politics from the billionaires and milionaires domestic AND EVEN FOREIGN.
I have said the ACLU is like the little boy who stuck his finger in a hole in the dike to stop disaster as he drilled many more holes in the dike with his other hand. And that is its actual role in American politics, in American law and in American life.
I wish I could replevy the money I stupidly donated to them during the years they had me fooled, up through the 1970s, up to their part in the Skokie case in which my eyes ere opened to their con game. It was that case that forced me to realize that these pathologically irresponsible, preening pseudo-liberals thought that we should ignore the history of what the Nazis, the KKK and other ideological groups have done to destroy the rights of far more people and to, in fact, murder them. We are to always, forever let them have another chance to do what we know they can do because they did it in the past, gain power and use it to murder, to oppress, to enslave, people. Though I supposed the clean handed, well appointed members of the ACLU don't have nearly as much to worry in that regard, especially when they are useful to such people as they've been. Count me as one of those who is skeptical that they'd be useful members of the resistance once things got down and dirty. I wouldn't trust them, they'd probably give us away "on principle" don't you know. They'd figure the Nazis, the KKK, the militias "deserved a level playing field," you know, like the billionaires and millionaires get through their advocacy. Yeah, we've all got "free speech" and thanks in no small part to our ACLU our money does too. And like all "equal justice under law" all of the freedom we have with our measly little pile of "free speech" makes it just as illegal for us to sleep under bridges as it does the billionaires and millionaires with their ever so much more "free speech."
I wish the ACLU would threaten me, I'd love to see their devotion to "free speech - free press" in action. Especially if I got to get all of the relevant documents, though I'd never have the means to go through them, I might ask for some help. I'd love to know just who funds them and its relationship with the same dark money. If they're not getting that then they really are too stupid to be trusted with your tiny little donation.
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