http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11418/pub_detail.asp
The Sneers and Smears of the Institute for Policy Studies
The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) bills itself as the nation’s oldest progressive organization. Progressive meaning collectivist.
IPS is a community of public scholars and organizers linking peace, justice, and the environment in the U.S. and globally. We work with social movements to promote true democracy and challenge concentrated wealth, corporate influence, and military power.
Actually, the oldest progressive organization is the Democratic Party, if we are to judge an organization by the policies it pursues, advocates, and advances. The Democratic Party, too, is a community of public servants and allies who link peace, social justice, and the environment. It, too, works with social movements to promote true democracy (populist mob rule) and challenges concentrated wealth (not any owned by members of the community, of course), corporate influence (not their crony capitalist friends and junket-generous lobbyists), and military power, for the Party’s ideal military policy would abolish all the services and rely on the National Guard to keep the populace honest and in line.
IPS, however, as a 501(c)3 organization that relies on public donations, can only inform and advise politicians and the public and has no legislative powers. It can’t force citizens to obey its whims and wishes or to conform to its agenda. That’s what its principals believe Congress is for.
IPS studies policies, and doesn’t like them or their authors or their supporters. It so dislikes the policies its minions study, that only the width and breadth of its scholars’ desks and all the junk on them prevent them from just penning placards with Magic Markers and stencils to make protest signs, instead of laboring over long, tongue-in-cheek anti-American screeds. IPS so dislikes the authors of these policies that it would just rather produce National Enquirer-level exposés on these individuals.
After all, to IPS, anyone who argues for self-defense, individualism and the rule of law, private property, and using nature to enhance man’s existence, is tainted by bourgeoisie ideology and is a reactionary varmint undeserving of an iota of politeness or courtesy. IPS profiles of such persons are frankly and admittedly unflattering, stereotyping caricatures, not disinterested proxy resumes or curricula vitae. IPS has never tried to disguise its invective and malice for any person, group or idea it deems an obstruction to the progress of Progressivism.
Reflecting the fresh and blossoming alliance between the Left and Islam, “Islamophobia” is the new sin IPS scholars and interns can excoriate, and anyone found guilty of expressing a fear of Islam, its depredations, and its jihad gets the same a priori derogatory treatment as have individuals such as John Bolton and David Horowitz (characterized in his profile as an “ex-lefty”—the traitor!).
IPS, in short, is a kind of “academic” auxiliary of Saul Alinsky-style community organizers and activists, a resource to turn to should a community organizer or activist be unable to coin an original slogan or who otherwise lacks the gray matter to effectively demonize his targeted, isolated, and polarized prey. Should a politician seek precooked mantras and party lines and buzz phrases with which to assault the House and Senate from the floor, and the public from the approving pulpits of The New York Times and Washington Post, IPS’s numerous papers and books are a rich trove of treasured bromides.
IPS enthusiastically endorsed Occupy Wall Street. Here it names two luminaries, the witch doctor and his cultural son and heir, a thug, as champions of OWS:
Occupy Wall Street is also garnering more attention from both local and global media, thanks to the growing outrage and support from well-known figures including MIT professor Noam Chomsky and rapper Immortal Technique.
Doubtless not a few of OWS’s behind-the-scenes planners and managers have intimate connections with IPS. The only “how-to” manuals that can instruct “revolutionaries” on methods to incite violence, “occupy” anything, disrupt commerce, trash public parks, and cry for vengeance (i.e., “social justice”) are to be found in IPS’s backlist of publications. IPS waxed poetic as OWS settled into its appropriated venues like Turks occupying Cypress, or Muslim hordes occupying European cities, and presumed to instruct us in the Howard Zinn kind of American history:
But we do know that three of the four top presidential candidates in 1912¬the “Bull Moose” Theodore Roosevelt, the Socialist Eugene Debs and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson -anchored their campaigns in the struggle against wealth’s maldistribution.
Our democracy faced “ruin,” Roosevelt warned, “if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few.” The 1912 incumbent, Republican William Howard Taft, blasted Teddy for “appealing to class hatred.” Taft ended up appealing to virtually no one. Wilson, Roosevelt and Debs together captured 75 percent of the final vote.
American politics a century ago revolved around wealth’s deeply dangerous concentration. Wealth meant to nations, activists preached, what manure meant to farms. Spread evenly, manure enriches the land. With manure concentrated in heaps, the land sours.
The young men and women these activists inspired would two decades later usher in a “New Deal” for America. Unions would “level up” average incomes. Steeply progressive taxes would “level down” incomes at America’s top. By the 1950s our plutocracy had melted away. The fortunes of our remaining rich no longer towered high enough to dominate us.
