In the annals of non-profit scam outfits Morris Dees' Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center is the undisputed king, with an endowment of over $100 million, as it was reported in the March 16-30 issue of CounterPunch(www.counterpunch.org). Said millions are raised by the SPLC's persistent fund-raising campaigns scaring its donors, many of them low-income, into believing the factually inane notion that the racist far right is on the verge of a political takeover of the entire country. Dees never gives up. His countenance can be counted on to appear on at least one national television news program the minute an act of racist violence has been committed and receives national media attention. In reality the SPLC is little more than a spying agency for the state and if anybody doubted this before, then I suggest they check out the SPLC's latest quarterly "Intelligence Report," an apropos name for its quarterly publication, on the Internet at www.splcenter.org.

The unauthored article "Neither Left Nor Right" was reported in the same issue of CounterPunch mentioned above. The article is basically a hack piece cheapshotting the many fine politically left groups that organized the civil disobedience that disrupted the opening ceremonies of the WTO on November 30. Said article purports the protests were infiltrated by fascists who subscribe to a politics dubbed the "European-style Third Position," where the far left and right find common ground in fighting the forces of corporate globalization. The article confidently states, not sourced, that "in at least one case, [racists] fought it out with black youth amidst the tear gas." The article only sources far right racists and their green leanings leading the uninformed reader to equate environmentalism with racism. The article also cites the internal policy debates within the Sierra Club on the topic of immigration, again giving the false impression of a non-existent alliance between the left and right.

There have been and are still plenty of people on the racist right who have fashioned themselves as ecologists. What does that have to do with organizations like Earth First!, who are named in the article but not given any space to defend their own position on the issue of racism? The one topic CounterPunch does not raise in its coverage of the SPLC article is COINTELPRO. A good question to ask is whether Dees' article was not written at the behest of the FBI or the White House itself. After all, the best bet when you take up an unpopular position like defending the WTO, as Clinton has done since its creation, is to smear the opposition with the "r" word.

I interviewed an anarchist in Fort Collins named Duncan Philp for an underground newspaper I published before moving to Seattle. Philp was unfairly smeared by the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League as a racist for his attendance of the Christian identity La Porte Church of Christ, located north of Fort Collins. Philp never became a member of said church and a photo of him marching arm in arm with two black men in a 1990 Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday event hardly fits the description of a far right racist. Philp puts forward an interesting theory on why organizations like the ADL and the SPLC spy that seems to make sense to me.

The FBI can no longer engage in the kind of spying it used to when it employed its Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, to repress political dissent, says Philp. Therefore, today, the FBI hires scam outfits like the ADL and the SPLC instead to spy on political dissidents, which includes anti-IMF, World Bank, and WTO organizations. The time is long overdue for liberals who fashion themselves as champions of civil liberties to stop giving their ill-spent money to spy outfits like the ADL and SPLC.