You've no doubt been hearing about how Bank of America hired a security firm (Translation: Group O' Thugs) to push back on WikiLeaks disclosures, focusing on Glenn Greenwald and his support for the organization. Apparently Bank of America was not alone in this approach:
ThinkProgress has learned that a law firm representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the big business trade association representing ExxonMobil, AIG, and other major international corporations, is working with set of “private security” companies and lobbying firms to undermine their political opponents, including ThinkProgress, with a surreptitious sabotage campaign.
I realize this seems similiar to those pathetic attempts by that homonuclous of Andrew Brietbarts to break into a Senators office or "seduce" a CNN reporter in an effort to discredit those people like they managed to discredit ACORN. But we might want to consider what Brietbart is capable of doing by having to rely on a couple of semi-literate stooges who got lucky once and what the Chamber or Bank of America can accomplish by using the billions they have access to by hiring huge law firms and private security companies (i.e. mercenaries).
I was particularly struck though by this passage:
According to one document prepared by Team Themis, the campaign included an entrapment project. The proposal called for first creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” to give to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then to subsequently expose the document as a fake to undermine the credibility of the Chamber’s opponents.
Hmmm..creating false document, passing it off to some group as real and then exposing the document as false later on to discredit them. Could that have ever happened before?
To put some context on this, 60 minutes was ready to run with a story about the Niger nuclear story that week, and bumped it in favor of this story.
I'm sure this was all just a series of odd coincidences....
Look, I understand that Dan Rather and his producer were buffoons for running that story without doing due diligence, and that their behavior was borderline unethical if not completely so. But these sorts of games being run by private companies with unlimited resources against groups like Think Progress whose annual budget is probably smaller than what the Chamber spends on lunch for one of their meetings.
I think it also highlights how completely out of control these companies and their trade groups really are. This is a Neuromancer level of corporate chicanery and hostility.
I wonder what the outcry would be if the TeaParty express was on that list? And how long do the TeaTardians think it will be before they do appear on it if they cross these people?
