WASHINGTON—Spoiler alert! Corporate chieftains and big givers, all but one of them nameless, thanks to federal rules, are poised to spoil next year’s election and the effort to defeat the menace of Republican right-winger and fascist favorite Donald Trump.
The moguls are funding their pro-Trump campaign through an allegedly non-partisan non-profit, No Labels.
How non-partisan is No Labels and who are its corporate backers, shielded big givers to “non-profits?” The only one known for certain is Harlan Crow. He’s the Republican moneyman for right-wing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, lavishing millions of dollars on the High Court’s reactionary intellectual leader.
And Crow’s “a whale” for No Labels, news reports about the organization say. Crow gave it at least $100,000 in 2021, the one contribution known, and his donation attracts other heavyweight Republicans and corporate capitalists to open their wallets, too. To the tune of $72 million and counting.
The former Sen. Joe Lieberman, meanwhile, is a co-founder of the dark money No Labels group. He urged for months last year that both Manchin and Sen. Sinema of Arizona do to Joe Biden what he did to President Obama – sabotage key domestic programs.
He repeatedly urged Manchin to head up an effort to sabotage Biden’s Build Back Better program just as he had led the effort to sabotage the Obama-backed Public Option in his Obamacare program. The public option was a small but critical step in the progression toward real public-supported healthcare that set aside private insurers to get closer to the goal of universal healthcare.
The dark money and Lieberman’s role should tell you all you need to know about No Labels, which is assembling a so-called “third party” presidential drive for the 2024 election.
No Labels touts itself as the alternative to the two major political parties. It flourishes self-commissioned polls showing 69% of Democrats don’t want Joe Biden to seek re-election and 62% of Republicans don’t want Donald Trump to run, either.
“No Labels is working to ensure Americans have the choice to vote for a presidential ticket that features strong, effective, and honest leaders who will commit to working closely with both parties to find commonsense solutions to America’s biggest problems,” its website says.
And it aims to get on the ballot in all 50 states, just as Ralph Nader did with the Green Party in 2000. That’s what No Labels is using its more than $75 million raised thus far for right now. It’s already on ballots in five states, including key swing state, Arizona. Democrats there worry No Labels could hand the state to Trump. The state Democratic Party has sued to get No Labels tossed off next year’s ballot.
To combat them, MoveOn.org has assembled a 24-group coalition to try to stop No Labels in its tracks nationwide. It says No Labels’ veneer of non-partisanship is a crock.
“No Labels is a third-party dark-money group that would put Donald Trump back in the White House in 2024,” it warns. “Disguising themselves as a group of moderates trying to save America, right-wing corporate donors are funding a $70 million campaign…to create a spoiler ticket that would pull votes from Joe Biden in swing states.
“This third-party bid is not some fly-by-night operation trying to promote bipartisan progress. Cloaked in mystery, the group won’t disclose their donors and has yet to offer up a platform or agenda. What we do know: They are well funded by right-wing mega-donors aligned with Donald Trump and serious about defeating Biden to advance a MAGA agenda.”
On its website and at a July 17 televised “town hall,” from the traditional first presidential primary state, New Hampshire, No Labels pushed a suitably vague agenda. In just one example, it declares voters “want a reasonable compromise” on abortion rights. It doesn’t say what the compromise would be, and disregards polls showing two-thirds of the country affirming the constitutional right to abortion.
The town hall featured two alleged “centrists”—who aren’t. Keynoter #1: Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., the corporate-funded favorite of fossil fuel firms who single-handedly wrecked much of the progressive agenda in the 50-50 Senate in the last Congress. Keynoter #2: Former Gov. Jon Huntsman, R-Utah, a wealthy conservative corporate executive.
Manchin’s legislative victims included the Protect The Right To Organize Act, labor’s #1 goal and the most pro-worker rewrite of U.S. labor law since the original 1935 National Labor Relations Act. Manchin wrecked it by favoring filibusters, which Republicans used to kill the PRO Act, and much else. Now his one vote is endangering Biden’s nomination of worker advocate Julie Su as Labor Secretary.
The two parties “have gone too far right, too far left” he told the New Hampshire crowd.
Besides Manchin, Huntsman, and Crow, No Labels’ top names include former NAACP National Chair Ben Chavis and ex-Sen. Joe Lieberman, Ind-Conn. Lieberman, the No Labels chairman, won his last Senate term on a pro-war platform after losing the Democratic primary to progressive Ned Lamont.
MoveOn’s response: Follow the money. “Their donors want Biden defeated. That’s why MoveOn has alerted Secretaries of State and election boards in all 50 states about the deceptive efforts of No Labels.” Its coalition ‘is part of our 2024 strategy to keep MAGA Republicans out of the White House. We’re raising funds to launch a counterattack.”
Some Democrats call No Labels the political equivalent of the Trojan Horse.
“If you peel off the No Labels label, you see the Trump campaign logo underneath,” Wisconsin Democratic Chair Ben Winkler told CNN chief political correspondent Jim Acosta. Wisconsin was another swing state Biden won narrowly over Trump, four years after Clinton’s loss there.
“The best way to think about No Labels is a kind of desperate gambit–a desperate gambit funded by mega-Republican super donors and a handful of misguided, but maybe well-intentioned people, that will ultimately just pull voters away from Biden and open the path for Donald Trump,” Winkler continued.
“And that’s why they’re not really finding traction among grass-roots activists, except anyone but a small group of mega-donors on the right.”
No Labels’ presidential push has pushed some of its founders, including two congressional Democrats and Brookings Institution scholar William Galston, over the side. His reason: The menace of Trump.
“I cannot support the organization’s preparation for a possible independent presidential candidacy,” Galston said in a statement. “There is no equivalence between President Biden and a former president who threatens the survival of our constitutional order. And most important, in today’s closely divided politics, any division of the anti-Trump vote would open the door to his reelection.”
Democrats also worry about a rerun of 2000, when the Republican Supreme Court majority awarded the decisive swing state, Florida, to Republican George W. Bush, by 537 popular votes, over Democrat Al Gore. Ralph Nader of the Green Party took 97,000 votes there, virtually all from Gore.
The other analogy is 2016, when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote over Trump, aided by landslides in California, Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts. But she narrowly lost three key swing states–Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—and the electoral vote.
But the best summing up of the No Labels threat comes from a one-line tweet from Lucinda McKinley from deep-red Alabama:
“No Labels indeed has a label: ‘Republican-funded.’”
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