To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine (11 page)

According to a
Barron’s
magazine analysis, while the bondholders will be lucky to recover 15 cents on the dollar, the UAW can expect to recover up to 60-70 cents on the dollar—four to five times what the bondholders will receive. As the magazine noted, “Never has an American union done so well at the expense of shareholders and creditors.”

Bankruptcy was once a legal process in which an insolvent company, an impartial judge, and creditors cooperated in good faith to make the best of a bad situation. Under the secular-socialist machine, the Chrysler and GM bankruptcies became a naked opportunity for political patronage.

In the end, the losers weren’t just the secured creditors and the taxpayers who footed the bill for all these bailouts, but the rule of law itself.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of President Obama’s first year in office is the machine’s brazen willingness to use the power of the state to coerce and intimidate his opponents while rewarding his political allies.

A perfect example was the investigation launched by the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services into the insurance company Humana for having the gall to send its members a letter describing how the healthcare bill would negatively affect their benefits.

Another stunning example was reported by FOX News’ Andrew Napolitano, who had to hide the name of the people and the institution involved because of threats made by the administration. Napolitano revealed that in spring 2009, a major bank that had accepted a relatively small amount of TARP money wanted to return the money to the government. The Obama administration, however, refused to accept it and threatened “adverse” consequences
if the bank’s chairman pursued the matter. This report is particularly troubling considering the administration’s attempts shortly thereafter to convert TARP recipients’ preferred stock into common stock, which would give the government voting rights on the banks’ management or policy.

Finally, who can forget the administration’s war against FOX News? As opposition grew to their efforts to nationalize healthcare, administration officials began calling on other news organizations to shun FOX for producing, as then-White House communications director Anita Dunn put it, “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” The White House even refused to provide guests to
FOX News Sunday
for having the temerity to fact-check assertions made by administration officials. Other news organizations, rightly concluding they could be the next target, refused to ostracize FOX, and the administration eventually backed down.

This wasn’t the first time Team Obama tried to intimidate a news program. In August 2008, the Obama campaign encouraged supporters to call and email a Chicago radio station—WGN AM—to protest the appearance on the station of conservative journalist Stanley Kurtz, who had been investigating Obama’s ties to former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.

Perhaps the worst example of the machine’s intimidation tactics is President Obama’s unconstitutional use of the Environmental Protection Agency to blackmail Congress into passing his cap-and-tax energy bill.

In summer 2009, the House of Representatives narrowly passed the job-killing cap-and-trade energy tax bill. But because the bill needed sixty votes, including those of senators from coal producing states, it was obviously going nowhere in the Senate.

So at the end of 2009, the administration tried to bully the Senate into passing the bill. They cited a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that the EPA could regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. The Bush Administration had refused to do so, realizing it would create a morass of new regulations and bureaucracy. But as the UN’s annual climate change conference began in Copenhagen on December 7, Obama’s EPA chief, Lisa Jackson, announced the EPA now considers six greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, dangerous to the environment and public health, and that the EPA would begin drawing up new regulations to arbitrarily reduce them.

The announcement deliberately coincided with the climate change conference, which aims to establish an international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, the president cannot implement a treaty by himself; he needs the approval of two-thirds of the U.S. Senate. So the EPA’s announcement was actually a threat to circumvent the Senate’s constitutional prerogatives. Obama was indicating he would commit the United States to carbon-cutting goals reached at Copenhagen, and if the Senate refused to approve a carbon-cutting treaty or to pass cap and trade, Obama would simply use the EPA to regulate carbon whether the Senate likes it or not.

Senator John Kerry, a co-sponsor of the Senate cap-and-trade bill, aptly summed it up: “The message to Congress is crystal clear: get moving.”

This is a breathtakingly anti-democratic and unconstitutional arrogation of power by the president. Even Democratic senator Jim Webb warned Obama in a public letter that “only specific legislation agreed upon in the Congress, or a treaty ratified by the Senate, could actually create such a commitment on behalf of our country.”

But for a president trained to value the acquisition of power above all else, why let the Constitution obstruct that goal?

Finally, no overview of the secular-socialist machine would be complete without acknowledging its key source of funding: a clique of left-wing millionaires operating outside the Democratic Party.

A “shadow party,” as David Horowitz and Richard Poe coined it, was enabled by a rapid influx of money from a few rich liberals united in their opposition to George W. Bush and their frustration with the Democratic establishment’s ineffectiveness and lack of ideological purity.

Horowitz and Poe’s book
The Shadow Party
, along with Matt Bai’s
The Argument
, detailed the modus operandi of this new power center. By funneling money through interlocutor organizations to left-wing groups, these benefactors created an alternative structure that compliments the Democratic Party while pushing it to the Left. Conveniently, this method allows the donors to avoid compliance with campaign finance laws that regulate political parties.

This funding enriched established far-left groups like ACORN and People for the American Way. But it also helped to create new liberal “message machines” like the Center for American Progress and Media Matters for America, organizations that quickly grew to dominate the Democratic Party, scooping up its resources and volunteers.

Having aided the Democratic victories in the 2006 mid-term elections, this shadow party was also instrumental in the overwhelming fundraising and organizing success of the Obama campaign, creating a ready network of volunteers and financing to defeat Hillary Clinton and then John McCain.

A small group of far-left tycoons presides over this entire effort: George Soros, Peter Lewis, Herb and Marion Sandler, and Stephen Bing.

Soros, who declared in 2003 that defeating President Bush was “the central focus of my life,” is the key figure. Through his various
organizations, he finances an array of domestic and international left-wing causes. A major supporter of international efforts to curtail gun rights, Soros funds the International Action Network on Small Arms, which is pushing for a UN arms treaty to regulate international weapons sales. The Bush administration opposed this anti-democratic power grab, but the Obama administration has vaguely indicated openness to it.

Soros also finances marijuana legalization campaigns, contributing over $15 million through his organizations to such efforts, including ballot initiatives in several states. Furthermore, he was a big supporter of campaign finance reform. There’s some irony in that; Soros backed the McCain-Feingold Act, touted as a way to remove the corrupting influence of money from politics. Yet, since the act’s approval in 2002, Soros himself has donated tens of millions of dollars to political action committees (PACs) and other advocacy organizations that can circumvent the act’s restrictions.

Soros first united with the other big money families to flex their muscle in the 2004 presidential election, when Soros, Lewis, and the Sandlers donated more than $20 million to America Coming Together (ACT), a PAC supporting Democratic candidate John Kerry. ACT marshaled an impressive army of activists and volunteers who went door-to-door to turn out the vote for Kerry. According to Bai, it was also the first time such a small group of people had invested so much money in a single campaign.

Frustrated by Kerry’s narrow loss, the left-wing money families redoubled their efforts. Influenced by former Clinton lawyer Rob Stein, who explained to them how conservative think tanks and policy journals ostensibly help shape the Republican message, they set out to create not just a parallel voter turnout organization, but also an alternative “messaging machine” to the Democratic Party.

The funding families formed a new organization, Democracy Alliance, to channel cash to liberal organizations. Soros, Lewis, and
the Sandlers alone provide about 40 percent of the alliance’s funding.

Democracy Alliance gives tens of millions of dollars in grants to far-left organizations. But it’s impossible to know exactly who has received how much, since the alliance prohibits grant recipients from revealing its funding. This makes the alliance a major source of undisclosed and unaccountable political influence.

Despite this veil of secrecy, we know some organizations that have received Democracy Alliance funds, though not the precise amounts of the grants. According to the Capital Research Center, these include the aforementioned ACORN, as well as Media Matters for America, the Center for American Progress, the Sierra Club, Air America, and People for the American Way.

All these organizations are active supporters of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda. All are now part of the secular-socialist machine.

With David Merritt, Vice President of National Policy for the Center for Health Transformation

 

 

 

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othing captures the corruption of today’s secular-socialist machine better than the Democrats’ takeover of the healthcare system. It’s hard to imagine a more destructive course of action than the one they pursued: using fast-paced votes and procedural tricks to pass trillion-dollar bills no one had read; scheming to pass bills without actually voting on them; dismissing deep public opposition; relying on secret negotiations among a handful of staff and politicians; bullying opposition with bare-knuckled threats; and resorting to backroom deals to buy support.

This process was a tragedy, because improving healthcare for all Americans is one of our country’s most pressing priorities. The healthcare system has become an anchor on virtually every aspect of society, including personal health, the quality of care we receive, and the availability and cost of insurance.

Democrats were right to try to fix the health system, whose deficiencies threaten America’s future. We need reform so that every American has more choices of greater quality healthcare at lower cost. Everyone—policymakers, doctors, hospitals, employers, individuals—must work together to accomplish this goal.

But Obama, Pelosi, and Reid didn’t choose this path of inclusion, cooperation, and expertise. They saw the large Democratic majorities in Congress and a Democratic White House as an opportunity to expand the power of the secular-socialist machine by growing government. This was their moment to build another Great Society—a permanent expansion of the welfare state that would reduce ever more Americans into government dependence and bind them to the Democratic political machine. That’s just what they tried to do when the president signed health reform into law on March 23, 2010.

The destructive, corrupt, and thuggish path the Left followed on health reform perfectly captures the extremism of the secular-socialist machine.

The Left had to resort to this corrupt process because Americans won’t willingly approve a “reform” that massively increases government power, erodes individual freedom, and redefines citizens’ relationship to our government. Obama’s healthcare reform will do all those things: it is impossible to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars and reduce the role of government. Instead, you get new bureaucracies, more regulation, more complexity, and less control of your healthcare, just as the Left planned.

Just look at H.R. 3590. That’s the bill that Senate Democrats passed on Christmas Eve—and the one the president signed into law. In 2,409 pages, the word “shall” appears 4,231 times. That’s nearly two federal requirements, directives, or bureaucratic powers per page. The law has the word “tax” 208 times—and not once to cut taxes. The word “require” appears 198 times, usually referring to the people who are required to do something—not government. It adds 159 new federal agencies, offices, and programs to what is already the largest department in the federal government. Among the new offices is the Personal Care Attendants Workforce Advisory Panel and four duplicative offices on women’s health (see pages 1089-1109). Women’s health is obviously important, but is it necessary to have four new offices
within the same federal department?
Just to make things even more bureaucratic, there will be a new Coordinating Committee on Women’s Health to oversee the four offices. And that’s not all; here are some of the other “vital” new offices, councils, groups, and programs created by the healthcare bill: