THE LARGEST 527 ON EARTH
Junk Yard Blog
527 groups are nominally independent political organizations, able to raise and spend their own money but barred from cooperating or colluding in any way with the political parties. They are in practice shadow parties--they may not legally coordinate their activities, ads, messages or events with the parties, but they're free to echo party messages or even take party ideas and run further with them than the parties themselves tend to do.
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527s are or will soon be a threat to democracy, in that it takes little more than a post office box to set one up, and they can change names, ownership, locations etc as often as they like, and they're free from the rules that govern party fundraising. Say a 527 gets legitimate criticism because some enterprising blogger discovers that a Communist group from China actually owns it, for instance. That 527 can just dissolve and reconstitute under a new name, naming a new person as its chair, and it has dodged the criticism for a while, even though its assets just go straight to the new group. Rather than making our political process more transparent, campaign finance reform in the form of 527s has made it far, far less transparent.
It has also left a gigantic loophole for what has become
the world's largest and wealthiest 527, which is Viacom,
Inc.
Contrary to what most of the left thinks about giant
corporations, Viacom is a far left corporation, and its
corporate children reflect its politics.
Want proof? According to OpenSecrets.org, Viacom employees have donated a whopping 74% of their political funds to Democrats this year. Further, as Chris Regan and I have documented, Viacom uses its corporate holdings to create multimedia <font color=blue>"perfect storms"<font color=black> this year to help drive President Bush from the White House. Those holdings include Simon & Schuster, publisher of Richard Clarke's anti-Bush book along with several others including Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty; CBS, whose 60 Minutes has donated the majority of its airtime this year to whoring for Clarke, Suskind and Bob Woodward when not allowing former President Clinton to re-justify his wasted years in office; and Paramount. Viacom acquired that gem a few years back. Paramount is behind one of this summer's more odd films, The Manchurian Candidate.
Rather than describe a film I've yet to see (and probably won't see until it comes out on DVD), I'll let Frank Rich do the honors:
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I cannot recall when Hollywood last released a big-budget mainstream feature film as partisan as this one at the height of a presidential campaign. That it has slipped into action largely under the media's radar, as discreetly as the sleeper agents in its plot, is an achievement in itself. Freed from any obligations to fact, "The Manchurian Candidate" can play far dirtier than "Fahrenheit 9/11." Not being a documentary, it can also open on far more screens - some 2,800, which is more than three times what Michael Moore could command on his opening weekend (or any weekend to date).
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"The Manchurian Candidate" <font color=black>is a product of Paramount Pictures, whose chairwoman, Sherry Lansing, is a loyal Democratic contributor, according to public records. (So, for the most part, is her boss, the Viacom chairman, Sumner Redstone.) One of the film's stars, Meryl Streep, shared the stage with Whoopi Goldberg at the recent Kerry-Edwards fund-raiser. As Bill O'Reilly will be glad to hear, the cameo role of a cable-news reporter is played by Al Franken.
The screenplay has holes as large as those in the still woefully inadequate U.S. homeland security apparatus. (At the outset the film actually posits that political conventions are exciting events where even the vice presidential nomination can still be up for grabs.) Hokey, literal-minded sci-fi gimmickry usurps the wit of the 1962 original, which was faithfully adapted by the director John Frankenheimer and the screenwriter George Axelrod from the 1959 Richard Condon novel. But the new version, even at its clunkiest, could not be more uncompromising in its paranoid portrayal of a political cartel with certain familiar traits that will stop at nothing, including the exploitation and even the fomenting of terrorism, to hold on to power for its corporate backers.
...The new <font color=blue>"Candidate,"<font color=black> which takes the first Gulf War instead of the Korean War as its historical template, finds a striking new international villain to replace the extinct evil empires of Mao and Stalin: Manchurian Global, a <font color=blue>"supremely powerful, well-connected, private equity fund"<font color=black> that is in league with the Saudis and eager to scoop up the profits from privatizing the U.S. Army. Think of it as the Carlyle Group or Halliburton on steroids, just as its primary fictional political beneficiary, the well-heeled <font color=blue>"Prentiss family dynasty,"<font color=black> with its three generations of Washington influence, is at most one syllable removed from the Bushes.
Perhaps to fake out the right, the villain played by Streep has been given the look, manner and senatorial rank of Hillary Clinton. (The character's invective, typified by her accusation that civil libertarians enable suicide bombers, is vintage Fox News Channel, blond auxiliary division.) She has programmed her son to be the <font color=blue>"first privately owned and operated vice president of the United States"<font color=black> - in other words, the left's demonized image of the current vice president. This conspiracy unfolds in a sinister present-day America where surveillance cameras track library visitors, cable news channels peddle apocalypse 24/7, and the American government launches pre-emptive military strikes in countries like Guinea to prolong a war on terror <font color=blue>"with no end in sight."<font color=black> The crucial election at hand will use electronic touch screens for voting, a dark intimation of Floridian balloting mischief. It will not be an election at all, says the movie's military-man hero (Denzel Washington in Colin Powell's rimless specs), but <font color=blue>"a coup - in our own country, a regime change."<font color=black>
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So what we have is an old film remade in Michael Moore's image, complete with leftwing conspiracy fears and theories and the rest. It is, as Rich (no conservative partisan) describes, like a day added to the Democrat convention. And it's a Paramount property. And Paramount is a Viacom property. Viacom is using its corporate empire as the multimedia arm of the Democrat party, making it in effect the largest 527 on earth. Only in this case, Viacom's fund raising happens not at little cocktail soirees on the Upper West side, but in a couple thousand theaters around the country, and in Blockbuster and Hollywood video stores a few months from now. Say, around October.
Call it corporate synergy. Call it whatever you want. But it's a leftwing path around the campaign finance law that the Democrats disingenuously pushed on the nation and incredibly persuaded President Bush to sign into law.
Democrat propaganda dressed up in Meryl Streep's high heels: Coming soon to a theater near you.
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