Inside the Liberal Conspiracy to Save the Republic

Posted on Jan 9, 2013

Bob Jagendorf (CC-BY)

Mother Jones profiles a growing coalition of environmental, labor and civil rights groups, including Greenpeace and the NAACP, that began meeting off the record in December to try to figure out “what to do to beat back the deep-pocketed conservative movement.”

These organizations didn’t get together to celebrate President Obama’s hard-won victory. On the contrary, they reportedly committed themselves to fight the ever growing influence of wealthy individuals and corporations on politics:

At the end of the day, many of the attendees closed with a pledge of money and staff resources to build a national, coordinated campaign around three goals: getting big money out of politics, expanding the voting rolls while fighting voter ID laws, and rewriting Senate rules to curb the use of the filibuster to block legislation. The groups in attendance pledged a total of millions of dollars and dozens of organizers to form a united front on these issues—potentially, a coalition of a kind rarely seen in liberal politics, where squabbling is common and a stay-in-your-lane attitude often prevails. “It was so exciting,” says Michael Brune, the Sierra Club’s executive director. “We weren’t just wringing our hands about the Koch brothers. We were saying, ‘I’ll put in this amount of dollars and this many organizers.’”

As Andy Kroll writes for Mother Jones, progressive groups have joined forces before, but in this case there is no deadline for action (an election) and the so-called Democracy Initiative’s ranks continue to swell.

—Posted by Peter Z. Scheer. Follow him on Twitter: @peesch.

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