the activities of a network of right-wing think tanks in Latin America. It’s known as the Atlas Network. The name is an obvious tip of the hat to the right-wing libertarian Ayn Rand’s novel, “Atlas Shrugged.”
The Atlas Network’s aim is to implement neoliberal, so-called free market economic policies throughout Latin America. But it’s also aimed at undermining populist progressive movements.
The Atlas network has played a key role in what many call a coup against Brazil’s former president, Dilma Rousseff. The network is deeply immersed in the ongoing crisis in Venezuela. It’s played a pivotal role in the chaos in Argentina. The Atlas network has received funding from the infamous Koch brothers in the United States and it has also sponsored training sessions with the right-wing provocateur, pretend journalist, James O’Keefe.
In many ways, the Atlas network appears to be a sort of modern day analogue to what the U.S. has long done in Latin America with the Central Intelligence Agency and powerful multinational corporations.
Lee Fang talking:
this is the kind of the very first big look at an organization that played a pivotal role in ideological formation and developing political infrastructure all across the world. The Atlas Network is a relatively small foundation and think tank in Washington D.C. that is basically designed to take the very successful political strategies that have helped shape the modern conservative right in the U.K. and in the U.S. and to duplicate those political infrastructure strategies in country and after country all across the world.
It’s very familiar to anyone who kind of follows the Republican Party or the post-Reagan conservative movement to see that, you know, there’s an array of foundations and think tanks and media organizations that kind of work in tandem to advance a similar policy agenda — a very kind of libertarian, economic, hard right idea of, you know, tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, privatization, and kind of attacks on organized labor.
But what the Atlas Network does — they take this model and they train young libertarians and business leaders in country after country on how to duplicate this model in their home country. They fly them in the U.S., they provide training seminars, they teach them fundraising, they teach them political management strategies and they provide seed financing to get these kind of think tanks that are based on the American model or the U.K. model set up, whether it’s in in Poland or Brazil.
Our piece focuses on the development of these political strategies in Latin America and how they’re really reshaping the political landscape across the continent.
The National Endowment for Democracy, which was created in the early 80s, under the Reagan administration, to be an arm of American soft power, to basically take money from the State Department and USAID and to finance American friendly nonprofits and NGO groups that would train politicians, that would help shape the media, help shape kind of the political dynamics in the developing world to be more friendly to U.S. foreign policy goals. And this was borne out in the midst of the Cold War, but it’s, you know, continued since then.
In Argentina, the Atlas Network has worked with a whole network of think tanks that train political leaders. They’re very consciously duplicating the model of the Heritage Foundation or the Manhattan Institute, these very famous American conservative think tanks. And, in fact, not only do they draw upon local billionaires and wealthy kind of industrial conglomerates for money, they also receive financing from the National Endowment for Democracy, this arm of U.S. foreign policy. So, you know, for these think tanks that are part of the Atlas Network that have been pivotal in shaping the political climate in these countries, there is a connection to U.S. foreign policy because they’re receiving taxpayer money.
But, also, that they play a similar role that we’ve seen attempted as the U.S. has tried to kind of mettle in the local politics for much of the post-World War II era.
Alejandro Chafuen, goes by Alex Chafuen, is Argentine American. He grew up kind of in the Argentine elite in the very turbulent 60s and 70s. You had a lot of attempts and successful military coups during that era with the hard right in Argentina cracking down violently on leftists and suspected leftists. And this was the kind of atmosphere that Chafuen grew up in.
He gravitated to libertarian, economic ideas. He was a teenage devotee of Ayn Rand. He went and studied at Grove City College, a very Christian-right College in Pennsylvania, and came back to Argentina very excited about these emerging libertarian ideas that he gleaned from the West. He was brought in was very young to work at the Atlas Network, and after the founder of the Atlas Network, Anthony Fisher, passed away, Chafuen took the reins and he’s really focused the energy of the Atlas Network into developing an American-style network of libertarian think tanks and countries all across South and Central America, with this special focus in places like Chile, Argentina, Brazil.
And what Chafuen has done in places like Brazil, he’s helped set up a network of over 13 different Atlas-backed think tanks. Some of them focused on training young people to embrace libertarian ideas. Students For Liberty, the libertarian youth group, was very new to Brazil only a few years ago, but now has the largest chapter in the world in Brazil. They set up organizations to basically take Catholic theology and Christian theology and apply them to libertarianism, to make the religious case for these policies.
They have kind of Heritage Foundation style think tanks now in Brazil that sponsor a blogger known as the Breitbart of Brazil, someone who kind of uses very conspiracy laden ideas to kind of ridicule anyone on the left or anyone associated with the Workers’ Party, the PT party.
And, you know, when I talked to Chafuen in Argentina at the Atlas Network Latin America Forum earlier this year, he explained it very clearly that some of these ideas that he’s developing are at the margins of society, that they aren’t popular. You know, mass privatization, cracking down on labor unions, cutting taxes for the rich, it’s not something that comes intrinsically to a lot of these countries he’s operating in. They are popular ideas.
But if you’re developing a stable of young political leaders, if you’re developing a foothold at universities, and developing policy papers and concrete plans for when you take power — that when an opportunity arises and in Brazil that’s a combination of two major factors, you know, decreasing commodity prices, basically sinking the Brazilian economy which once was red hot, and a mix of political and corruption scandals that have plagued all of the major political parties — this has given a ripe opportunity for the Atlas Network backed think tanks to seize the crisis and push their narrow set of ideas. And that’s exactly what they’ve done.
The libertarian youth groups organize some of the largest protests in the world against Dilma. Hundreds of thousands, in some cases millions of people taking to the street, to protest Dilma. Folks connected to the network basically making the legal case to push the impeachment effort. Folks working with the major media outlets to try to channel outrage solely on the Workers Party. You know that they’ve got a crew creating YouTube videos, they have columnists at the major newspapers, they have pundits on television, they channel this outrage at political corruption and center it only on the Workers’ Party, saying it’s only their fault.
So this has been an incredibly successful strategy and I think Chafuen has acknowledged it. That, you know, you can develop this political infrastructure and so it’s ready to strike when there is a legitimate crisis, that you can seize upon it and then implement your ideas.
Fernando Schüler, who’s a Columbia University-trained academic, someone who’s very prominent in these libertarian circles in Brazil, he’s prominent in the Atlas Network, he’s helped build this political infrastructure. When I interviewed him earlier this year, he really made the point that he’d like to focus on the institutional hurdles for, you know, his agenda and the biggest institutional hurdle that he identified were labor unions.
Yeah, you know, this is kind of a fascinating dynamic of the story. I covered the Republican wave in 2010, which was followed by an orchestrated effort to attack the power of organized labor in the United States, with this new wave of Republican governors and Republican legislators, particularly in the Midwest, particularly in states like Wisconsin, they took this new political power and the very first thing they did was weaken their ideological and political opponents. They went after organized labor. They essentially weakened collective bargaining for public sector unions. They implemented right to work laws from, you know, Michigan, Wisconsin, they attempted in Ohio, and Indiana. And the Atlas Network has carefully studied the way that the strategy advanced and what they say is that a network of newly empowered think tanks in the Midwest and in Wisconsin had developed the strategy and pushed it. And when unions and activists had protested they were there for kind of a rapid-response strategy of ridiculing teachers’ unions, of outmaneuvering them in the media.
And the same kind of individuals at the think tanks like the MacIver Institute in Wisconsin have given training seminars to the Latin American leaders that are operating in places like Brazil and Argentina. You know, there are folks like James O’Keefe, a very kind of well-known provocateur who uses these undercover videos to undermine labor unions and other kind of institutions on the left.
He’s also given talks to Atlas Network to teach them in his ways. So the Atlas Network think tanks not only want to implement big, libertarian policies — you know, in Brazil they’re talking about privatizing prisons, privatizing education. You know, these ideas that became popular in the United States in the early 90s, they’re now taking root in Brazil. But they’re not only doing that. They’re also thinking very concretely about how to change the structural dynamics in their country and the very focal point for that is weakening organized labor. They see that as the biggest kind of institutional hurdle. That’s the model that’s been showcased in the U.S., but that’s something that we can duplicate in places like Brazil.
Towards the end of the political campaign last year, I was talking to some of the editors and some other reporters and, you know, if you look at the Obama Administration, one of the best predictors of public policy on the kind of issue-based level was just personnel. Personnel is policy, if you looked at the Department of Justice and who came in in Obama’s first term, a lot of the bank-friendly folks, I mean that was a great predictor of Obama not prosecuting the banks responsible for the financial crisis.
But, you know, we made the very conscious decision that whether it’s Hillary Clinton or Trump, we would have a laser-like focus on the personnel. These folks play such an outsized role, whether it’s on climate change, or taxes, or an environmental policy and health care policy.
So we’ve carefully taken apart who was appointed to the transition. We’ve conducted Freedom of Information Act requests to get lists of the political appointments at every single agency. You know, when a new administration comes in they have something like 4,000 political appointments. Below the cabinet level there’s very little focus on who these people are and what their agenda is — who they’re meeting with. And you know they have just such broad powers on any given issue.
So we’ve done almost weekly stories on who the Trump Administration is appointing at the EPA, you know we’ve done a number of stories just showing that the folks handling chemical safety issues, they’re former chemical lobbyists. The people kind of working on congressional outreach, they previously worked at trade group that represents some of the highest polluting power plants in the country. We’re just taking a look and cataloguing these conflicts of interest, because I think it’s important for the public interest for people to know who these people are and to provide some accountability to let the administration know that we’re monitoring what they’re doing and we’re keeping track of who they appoint.
who is benefiting most from the seven months or eight months of Donald Trump’s presidency,
The biggest winner, so far, has been the fossil fuel lobby. There’s the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. There was these appointments, folks like Scott Pruitt at the EPA, you know this former attorney general who has been basically a handmaiden into the oil and gas and coal industry, to a lower level folks who were all oil and gas or coal lobbyists throughout the Department of Interior and the EPA and the Department of Energy. So Trump’s been very friendly there. These are basically decisions that are in his hands, you know. He’s been known to bypass the filibuster, do it all through administrative action.
But, you know, they’re not the only winners. You know we did a story recently looking at basically all the top political appointments at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Our attorneys who formerly worked for Goldman Sachs who were to provide some legal services for Goldman Sachs and other major banks. It’s very likely that we see the rules and kind of restrictions on big banks like capital requirements or the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. We’re likely to see some of the changes coming up, they haven’t happened yet, but just given the personnel is policy, the tealeaves, looks like Trump is moving that direction. But in terms of one industry winner, its fossil fuels.
There’s complete disarray in the Republican Party in terms of the policy, that they don’t know what to repeal and replace Obamacare with because Obamacare is based on the 2006 Massachusetts law signed by Mitt Romney, which is based on the Heritage Foundation plan that’s very friendly to the private sector. You know, that basically maintains a for-profit system of health care.
But the Democrats are completely unclear on how to move the ball forward. One very popular idea is single payer, basically having the government act as your insurance company, the government taking care of all of your premiums and deductibles and you basically taking that card to a provider of your choice. This is really taking on a lot of steam recently within the Democratic base, but it’s not clear where this is going. You know, for-profit health care interests still have a tremendous level of power within the Democratic elite, within the Democratic Party. Health insurance and hospital and medical device and pharmaceutical lobbyists are the biggest fundraisers for the Democratic Party. They have board seats at the largest Democratic Party apparatus organizations, you know, the big think tanks and foundations.
You reference a story we did recently, Dick Gephardt, the former Democratic House Leader, now kind of like, he’s been a super delegate and a DNC member, I mean he is also on the board of a health insurance company, Centene. We obtained audio from the recent Centene Annual Investor event, and he’s at a ritzy kind of hotel and one of the health insurance executives at this event had asked Gephardt to come and basically give his point of view on where the Democrats stand on health care, and they said, “Is there any threat of single payer happening because that’s basically an existential threat to our industry, it would replace us?” Dick Gephardt just laughed this off and said:
Centene pays Dick Gephardt a lot, and just like a lot of these for-profit health care insurers, all of which have the potential to lose profits, if not be completely replaced by a single payer-type system, have a lot of skin in the game. So they’ve used their apparatus to influence the debate.
And I think for anyone interested in this question of where the Democrats stand on single payer, you have to look at a, I believe it’s a 2006 or 2007 document that was leaked by a whistle blower at a health insurance company. After the movie Sicko, from Michael Moore, came out kind of criticizing the American health care system and calling for a single payer, you know, single provider-type plan the health insurance industry, through its main trade group, AHIP, America’s Health Insurance Plans, tapped a P.R. firm and said, “You know, how do we prevent America from moving toward single payer?”
This is, you know, back in 2007, or so. And they said, “Well here’s what you do. You know you can use Republicans to go after, after the ideas, you know, call it communism, call it socialism, demonize it but you also have to work equally aggressively within the Democratic Party. What you need to do is you need to work with a centrist, third way-style, think tanks, get people on TV saying that this would divide the party, this is too dangerous, this would alienate moderates and suburban voters. You need to tap former Democrat politicians, get them to write op-eds and disparage the idea. You need to shift the public debate. And then you need to offer for-profit health care as a proactive player to basically co-opt the debate.”
That’s an old document now, 10 years old, but that’s essentially what we’re seeing on, at least publicly what’s going on. Even though there’s a demand from the grassroots and from some of the left-wing labor unions to move toward single payer, there’s a very hasty effort to smother any momentum before it kind of breaks out and takes on a role of its own.
Kirsten Gillibrand has roots as a centrist Democrat who promoted, like the N.R.A. and these type of institutions that are now anathema to the Democratic Party. But she’s moved steadily to the left. She said nice things about single payer, kind of tipping her hat to this new movement. She’s also voted against almost all of Trump’s nominees. I think positioning herself as an opponent of the Trump Administration.
But you know folks like Gillibrand, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, these are folks that I think the center of power within the party are taking a hard look at. But, you know, also folks like Senator Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota, Governor Hickenlooper in Colorado. But the party is very hesitant to embrace any kind of Bernie Sanders or Keith Ellison-style candidate. They’ve kind of deployed their proxies to smear any attempt to position these type of politicians for 2020.
But, you know, it is kind of absurd that we’re here in 2017, already having this debate, when there’s so much else at stake and there’s so many other big elections this year next that will come before all of this.
you’ve already seen the Trump freak-out over Robert Mueller and that investigation. If Democrats control either chamber of Congress after the midterms and have their own subpoena power, you know, that’s going to be kind of endless political battles.
But the question is: Will Democrats use that to just narrowly focused on Russia or do they subpoena all these sprawling conflicts of interest, when it’s clear that private industry, oil and gas industry, are in the driver’s seat. If Democrats take back power in Congress will they start investigating that side of Trump corruption as well.
— source theintercept.com 2017-10-03