How To Win The Media War Against Grassroots Activists

How To Win The Media War Against Grass­roots Activists

- by Steve Horn, July 29, 2013. Source: Mint­Press News

Rafael Pagan — who died in 1993 — was not invit­ed to be a part of his for­mer associate’s new firm, Mon­goven, Bis­coe & Duchin. His tac­tic of con­quer­ing and divid­ing activist move­ments and iso­lat­ing the “fanat­ic activist lead­ers” lived on, though, through his for­mer busi­ness part­ner, Jack Mongoven.

Mon­goven teamed up with Alvin Bis­coe and Ronald Duchin to cre­ate MBD in 1988. While “Bis­coe appears to have been a large­ly silent part­ner at MBD,” accord­ing to the Cen­ter for Media and Democ­ra­cy, Mon­goven and Duchin played pub­lic-fac­ing star­ring roles for the firm. 

Duchin, like Pagan, had a mil­i­tary back­ground. A grad­u­ate of the U.S. Army War Col­lege and “one of the orig­i­nal mem­bers of [Army] DELTA” — part of the broad­er Joint Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Com­mand that killed Osama Bin Laden — Duchin had jobs as a spe­cial assis­tant to the sec­re­tary of defense and as spokesman for Vet­er­ans for For­eign Wars pri­or to com­ing to Pagan.

Duchin served as head of the Pentagon’s news divi­sion dur­ing “Oper­a­tion Eagle Claw,” Pres­i­dent Jim­my Carter’s failed 1980 mis­sion to use spe­cial forces to cap­ture the hostages held in Iran.

Referred to by The Atlantic as the “Desert One Deba­cle” in a sto­ry Duchin served as a key con­fi­den­tial source for — as revealed in an email in the “Glob­al Intel­li­gence Files” announc­ing Duchin’s 2010 death — “Eagle Claw” end­ed with eight U.S. troops dying, four wound­ed, one heli­copter destroyed, and Pres­i­dent Carter’s rep­u­ta­tion in the tank. The failed and lethal mis­sion served as the impe­tus for the cre­ation of the U.S. Spe­cial Operations.

Large­ly avoid­ing the lime­light while work­ing as Pagan’s vice pres­i­dent for Issue man­age­ment and strat­e­gy — the brains of the oper­a­tion — Duchin became a noto­ri­ous fig­ure among ded­i­cat­ed crit­i­cal observers of the pub­lic rela­tions indus­try while co-head­ing MBD. Dur­ing MBD’s 15 years of exis­tence, its clients includ­ed Big Tobac­co, the chem­i­cal indus­try, Big Agri­cul­ture and prob­a­bly many oth­er indus­tries nev­er iden­ti­fied due to MBD’s secre­tive nature.

MBD worked on behalf of Big Tobac­co to fend off any and all reg­u­la­to­ry efforts aimed in its direc­tion. Philip Mor­ris paid Jack Mon­goven $85,000 for his intel­li­gence-gath­er­ing prowess in 1993.

“Get Gov­ern­ment Off Our Back,” an RJ Reynolds front group cre­at­ed in 1994 by MBD for the price of $14,000 per month, serves as a case in point of the type of work MBD was hired to do by Big Tobacco.

“The firm has devel­oped ini­tia­tives for RJ Reynolds that advo­cate pro-tobac­co goals through out­side orga­ni­za­tions; among oth­er projects, the firm orga­nized vet­er­ans orga­ni­za­tions to oppose the work­place smok­ing reg­u­la­tion pro­posed by OSHA,” explains a 2007 study appear­ing in the Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Pub­lic Health. “[It] was cre­at­ed to com­bat increas­ing num­bers of pro­posed fed­er­al and state reg­u­la­tions on the use and sale of tobac­co products.”

Par­al­lel­ing the Koch Fam­i­ly Foun­da­tions-fund­ed Amer­i­cans for Pros­per­i­ty groups of today, “Get Gov­ern­ment Off Our Back” held ral­lies nation­wide in March 1995 as part of “Reg­u­la­to­ry Revolt Month.”

“Get Gov­ern­ment Off Our Back” dove­tailed per­fect­ly with the Repub­li­can Party’s 1994 “Con­tract with Amer­i­ca” that froze new fed­er­al reg­u­la­tions. The text of the “Con­tract” matched “Get Gov­ern­ment Off Our Back” “near­ly ver­ba­tim,” accord­ing to the Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Pub­lic Health study.

‘Rad­i­cals, Ide­al­ists, Real­ists, Opportunists’

While its client work was note­wor­thy, the for­mu­la Duchin cre­at­ed to divide and con­quer activist move­ments — a regur­gi­ta­tion of what he learned while work­ing under the men­tor­ship of Rafael Pagan — has stood the test of time. It is still employed to this day by Stratfor.

Duchin replaced Pagan’s “fanat­ic activist lead­ers” with “rad­i­cals” and cre­at­ed a three-step for­mu­la to divide and con­quer activists by break­ing them up into four sub­types, as described in a 1991 speech deliv­ered to the Nation­al Cattleman’s Asso­ci­a­tion titled, “Take an Activist Apart and What Do You Have? And How Do You Deal with Him/Her?”

The sub­types: “rad­i­cals, ide­al­ists, real­ists and opportunists.”

Rad­i­cal activists “want to change the sys­tem; have under­ly­ing socio/political motives’ and see multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions as ‘inher­ent­ly evil,’” explained Duchin. “These orga­ni­za­tions do not trust the … fed­er­al, state and local gov­ern­ments to pro­tect them and to safe­guard the envi­ron­ment. They believe, rather, that indi­vid­u­als and local groups should have direct pow­er over indus­try … I would cat­e­go­rize their prin­ci­pal aims … as social jus­tice and polit­i­cal empowerment.”

The “ide­al­ist” is eas­i­er to deal with, accord­ing to Duchin’s analysis.

“Idealists…want a per­fect world…Because of their intrin­sic altru­ism, how­ev­er, … [they] have a vul­ner­a­ble point,” he told the audi­ence. “If they can be shown that their posi­tion is in oppo­si­tion to an indus­try … and can­not be eth­i­cal­ly jus­ti­fied, they [will] change their position.”

The two eas­i­est sub­types to join the cor­po­rate side of the fight are the “real­ists” and the “oppor­tunists.” By def­i­n­i­tion, an “oppor­tunist” takes the oppor­tu­ni­ty to side with the pow­er­ful for career gain, Duchin explained, and has skin in the game for “vis­i­bil­i­ty, pow­er [and] followers.”

The real­ist, by con­trast, is more com­plex but the most impor­tant piece of the puz­zle, says Duchin.

“[Real­ists are able to] live with trade-offs; will­ing to work with­in the sys­tem; not inter­est­ed in rad­i­cal change; prag­mat­ic. The real­ists should always receive the high­est pri­or­i­ty in any strat­e­gy deal­ing with a pub­lic pol­i­cy issue.”

Duchin out­lined a cor­re­spond­ing three-step strat­e­gy to “deal with” these four activist sub­types. First, iso­late the rad­i­cals. Sec­ond, “cul­ti­vate” the ide­al­ists and “edu­cate” them into becom­ing real­ists. And final­ly, co-opt the real­ists into agree­ing with industry.

“If your indus­try can suc­cess­ful­ly bring about these rela­tion­ships, the cred­i­bil­i­ty of the rad­i­cals will be lost and oppor­tunists can be count­ed on to share in the final pol­i­cy solu­tion,” Duchin out­lined in clos­ing his speech. 

Bring­ing the ‘Duchin For­mu­la’ to Stratfor

Alvin Bis­coe passed away in 1998 and Jack Mon­goven passed away in 2000. Just a few years lat­er, MBD — now only Ronald Duchin and Jack’s son, Bartholomew or “Bart” — merged with Strat­for in 2003.

A book by John Stauber and Shel­don Ramp­ton — “Trust Us, We’re Experts!” — explains that MBD pro­mo­tion­al lit­er­a­ture boast­ed that the firm kept “exten­sive files [on] forces for change [which] can often include activist and pub­lic inter­est groups, church­es, unions and/or academia.”

“A typ­i­cal dossier includes an organization’s his­tor­i­cal back­ground, bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion on key per­son­nel, fund­ing sources, orga­ni­za­tion­al struc­ture and affil­i­a­tions, and a ‘char­ac­ter­i­za­tion’ of the orga­ni­za­tion aimed at iden­ti­fy­ing poten­tial ways to co-opt or mar­gin­al­ize the organization’s impact on pub­lic pol­i­cy debates,” the authors pro­ceed­ed to explain.

MBD’s “exten­sive files” on “forces for change” soon would morph into Stratfor’s “Glob­al Intel­li­gence Files” after the merger.

What’s clear in sift­ing through the “Glob­al Intel­li­gence Files” doc­u­ments, which were obtained by Wik­iLeaks as a result of Jere­my Hammond’s Decem­ber 2011 hack of Strat­for, is that it was a mar­riage made in heav­en for MBD and Stratfor.

The “Duchin for­mu­la” has become a Strat­for main­stay, car­ried on by Bart Mon­goven. Duchin passed away in 2010.

In a Decem­ber 2010 Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion to the oil com­pa­ny Sun­cor on how best to “deal with” anti-Alber­ta tar sands activists, Bart Mon­goven explains how to do so explic­it­ly uti­liz­ing the “rad­i­cals, ide­al­ists, real­ists and oppor­tunists” frame­work. In that pre­sen­ta­tion, he places the var­i­ous envi­ron­men­tal groups fight­ing against the tar sands in each cat­e­go­ry and con­cludes the pre­sen­ta­tion by explain­ing how Sun­cor can win the war against them.

Bart Mon­goven described the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute as his “biggest client” in a Jan­u­ary 2010 email exchange, lend­ing expla­na­tion to his inter­est in envi­ron­men­tal and ener­gy issues.

Mon­goven also appears to have real­ized some­thing was off about Chesa­peake Energy’s finan­cial sup­port for the Sier­ra Club, judg­ing by Novem­ber 2009 email exchanges. It took “ide­al­ists” in the envi­ron­men­tal move­ment a full 2 ½ years to real­ize the same thing, after Time mag­a­zine wrote a major inves­ti­ga­tion reveal­ing the fidu­cia­ry rela­tion­ship between one of the biggest shale gas “frack­ing” com­pa­nies in the U.S. and one of the country’s biggest envi­ron­men­tal groups.

“The clear­est evi­dence of a finan­cial rela­tion­ship is the note in the Sier­ra Club 2008 annu­al report that Amer­i­can Clean Skies Foun­da­tion was a finan­cial sup­port­er that year,” wrote Mon­goven in an email to the Nation­al Man­u­fac­tur­ing Association’s vice pres­i­dent of com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Luke Popovich. “Accord­ing to McClen­don, Amer­i­can Clean Skies Foun­da­tion was cre­at­ed by Chesa­peake and oth­ers in 2007.”

Bart Mon­goven also used the “realist/idealist” par­a­digm to dis­cuss cli­mate change legislation’s chances for pas­sage in a 2007 arti­cle on Stratfor’s website.

“Real­ists who sup­port a strong fed­er­al regime are drawn to the idea that with most in indus­try call­ing for action on cli­mate change, there is no time like the present,” Mon­goven wrote. “Ide­al­ists, on the oth­er hand, argue that with momen­tum on their side, there is lit­tle that indus­try could do in the face of a Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­dent and Con­gress, and there­fore time is on the envi­ron­men­tal­ists’ side. The ide­al­ists argue that they have not gone this far only to pass a half-mea­sure, par­tic­u­lar­ly one that does not con­tain a hard car­bon cap.”

And how best to deal with “rad­i­cals” like Julian Assange, founder and exec­u­tive direc­tor of Wik­iLeaks, and whistle­blow­er Bradley Man­ning, who gave Wik­iLeaks the U.S. State Depart­ment diplo­mat­ic cables, the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and the “Col­lat­er­al Mur­der” video? Bart Mon­goven has a sim­ple solu­tion to “iso­late” them, as sug­gest­ed by Duchin’s formula.

“I’m in favor of using what­ev­er trumped up charge is avail­able to get [Assange] and his servers off the streets. And I’d feed that shit head sol­dier [Bradley Man­ning] to the first pack of wild dogs I could find,” Mon­goven wrote in one email exchange revealed by the “Glob­al Intel­li­gence Files.” “Or per­haps just do to him what­ev­er the Ira­ni­ans are doing to our sources there.”

Indeed, the use of “trumped up charges” is often a way the U.S. gov­ern­ment deals with rad­i­cal activists, as demon­strat­ed clear­ly dur­ing the days of the FBI’s Counter-Intel­li­gence Pro­gram dur­ing the 1960s, as well as in mod­ern-day Occu­py move­ment-relat­ed cas­es in Cleve­land and Chicago.

‘Infor­ma­tion economy’s equiv­a­lent of guns’

Just days after the Sept. 11, 2011, attacks on the World Trade Cen­ter and Pen­ta­gon, The Austin Chron­i­cle pub­lished an arti­cle on Strat­for that posed the rhetor­i­cal ques­tion as its title, “Is Knowl­edge Power?”

The answer, sim­ply put: yes.

“What Strat­for pro­duces is the infor­ma­tion economy’s equiv­a­lent of guns: knowl­edge about the world that can change the world, quick­ly and irrev­o­ca­bly,” wrote Michael Erard for The Chron­i­cle. “So if Strat­for suc­ceeds, it’s because more indi­vid­u­als and cor­po­ra­tions want access to infor­ma­tion that helps them dis­sect an unsta­ble world — and are will­ing to pay steady bucks for it.”

When it comes down to it, Stauber con­curs with the “guns” metaphor and Duchin’s “war” metaphors.

“Cor­po­ra­tions wage war upon activists to ensure that cor­po­rate activ­i­ties, pow­er, prof­its and con­trol are not dimin­ished or sig­nif­i­cant­ly reformed,” said Stauber. “The bur­den is on the activists to make fun­da­men­tal social change in a polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment where the cor­po­rate inter­ests dom­i­nate both polit­i­cal­ly and through the cor­po­rate media.”

Stauber also believes activists have a steep learn­ing curve and are cur­rent­ly being left in the dust by Pagan, MBD, Strat­for and others.

“The Pagan/MBD/Stratfor oper­a­tives are much more sophis­ti­cat­ed about social change than the activists they oppose, they have lim­it­less resources at their dis­pos­al, and their goal is rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple: make sure that ulti­mate­ly the activists fail to win fun­da­men­tal reforms,” he said. “Duchin and Mon­goven were ruth­less, and I think they were often amused by the naivete, ego­tism, antics and fail­ures of activists they rou­tine­ly fooled and defeat­ed. Ulti­mate­ly, this is war, and the best war­riors will win.”

One thing’s for cer­tain: Duchin’s lega­cy lives on through his “for­mu­la.”

“The 4‑step for­mu­la is bril­liant and has cer­tain­ly proven itself effec­tive in pre­vent­ing the demo­c­ra­t­ic reforms we need,” Stauber remarked, bring­ing us back to where we start­ed in 1982 with Rafael Pagan’s remarks about iso­lat­ing the “fanat­ic activist leaders.”