SF Weekly: "Greening the Left"

[AtomicKitten]

Excellent article from our local mag regarding LW think tanks. They seek to work parallel with the Democratic Party to move the nation progressively to the left. I LOVE this idea. Rather than trying to eliminate * cough * certain factions of the Democratic Party that some don't like, they seek to change the paradigm and assist the Democratic Party in changing the nation. Great read.

Excerpts:

"Conservatives have developed ideas, a noise machine, with conservative think tanks and organizations that support the conservative cause. Democrats don't have that kind of support," says Lisa Seitz Gruwell, who speaks with a more world-weary tone than the others but like the rest is articulate, fit-looking, and young. She's political director of Skyline Public Works, set up by Menlo Park venture capital investor Andy Rappaport and his wife, Deborah, to distribute money made by August Capital, Andy's venture capital firm. The event is sponsored by a Rappaport-financed group called the New Progressive Coalition, meant as a sort of services, financing, and volunteer clearinghouse for leftist organizations, patterned after Craigslist.

*****

Contributor Matt Bai profiled Andy Rappaport in a story about how left-leaning tycoons wished to create a political infrastructure parallel to and separate from the Democratic Party. This new world of independent political organizations would counter a $300 million conservative message machine, which had supposedly injected once-extreme-seeming right-wing notions into the American mainstream through think tanks such as the Cato Institute, media companies such as Fox News, and social organizations such as the Christian Coalition. The article described how Democratic Party operative Rob Stein used a slide show illustrating this theory called "The Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix" to persuade top liberal financiers to cough up parts of their fortunes. By creating and funding a liberal money matrix, it was hoped, the tycoons would revitalize American liberalism.


More here:
http://www.sfweekly.com/Issues/2006-02-15/news/smith.html

[slor]

1. We need to "green" the right too n/t