To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine (15 page)

In light of the Democrats’ anti-big-business pose, many people are surprised to learn how much their supposed adversaries support them. As detailed in
Obamanomics
, a book by
Washington Examiner
lobbying editor Timothy Carney, during the 2008 election cycle, the securities, health insurance, and pharmaceutical industries, and even many of the biggest oil companies, gave more money to Democrats than Republicans.

This is nothing new. As the regulatory state has grown, big business has learned to use big government to protect itself from small business rivals. Meanwhile, the secular-socialist machine gladly accepts money and support from business interests. The Left can often easily pass new regulations when they get big business on board, and these laws help both parties: the Left create the illusion they’re standing up for the little guy, and big business gets clauses put into the laws that damage their small competitors.

National Review
editor Jonah Goldberg discusses the long history of big-government corporatism in his book
Liberal Fascism
, and Amity Shlaes explores the same phenomenon in her account of the Great Depression,
The Forgotten Man
. This history is incredibly instructive, though not well-known. For example, the regulatory reforms of the meat packing industry in the early 1900s, inspired by Upton Sinclair’s muckraking book
The Jungle
, were enacted with the enthusiastic cooperation of America’s largest meat packing corporations.
That’s because they knew only the largest corporations could afford to comply with the new regulations, which drove their smaller competitors out of business. Sinclair himself wrote in 1906, “The Federal inspection of meat was, historically, established at the packers’ request. It is maintained and paid for by the people of the United States for the benefit of the packers.”

There are countless similar examples. For instance, the railroad magnates of the late 1800s encouraged the government to protect them from smaller railroad lines, price wars, and the patchwork of inconsistent state laws. Although today’s textbooks claim the government formed the Interstate Commerce Commission to stop the big railroad companies, in fact the Commission helped these companies to guarantee profits, squash competition, and ensure regulations worked in their favor. Then-Attorney General Richard Olney made this clear in an 1892 letter to Charles E. Pickering, President of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad:

This pattern continued through the twentieth century as the regulatory state expanded. The famous lawyer Clarence Darrow, in his investigative report on the National Recovery Administration, part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, noted,

We heard a more callous view of this trend during the Clinton administration’s attempt to take over healthcare. When the objection was raised that HillaryCare would drive many small insurers out of business, Hillary Clinton coldly responded, “I can’t go out and save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America.”

And that’s how much the Left really care about the little guy.

The big business-big government alliance is alive and well today, despite the anti-business rhetoric of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid regime.

Timothy Carney has described the simple rule guiding the legislative process today: “No important bill passes unless a well connected special interest benefits from it.” This, of course, reflects Saul Alinsky’s rule that organizing should be based on self-interest.

Carney has written an astounding series of columns outlining how the miasma of new regulations and bureaucracies created by the Obama administration was authored by big business interests to benefit big business at the expense of their smaller competitors.

For instance, consider the food safety bill approved by the House of Representatives in July 2009, which will probably be debated in the Senate in 2010. Industry giants like the Kellogg food company and the Grocery Manufacturers of America heavily lobbied for the bill, which is also supported by President Obama. A collection of organic food advocates and small farms oppose the bill, and with good reason: the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund says the
bill will “break the backs of small farmers.” Moreover, the Centers for Disease Control has noted that the bill, by further centralizing food production, could increase the risk of food contamination.

Consider Obama’s healthcare reform. Although proponents often pitched the bill as a way to reign in big drug companies, the lobbying group for those very companies, PhRMA, pledged to spend $150 million to
support
the bill. Why? Because the new law offers drug companies lucrative benefits:

We see the same big business-big government back scratching in the cap-and-trade bill. This is supposedly meant to punish big carbon polluters, yet many of America’s biggest corporations joined together in the United States Climate Action Partnership to lobby
for
cap and trade. These firms, including PepsiCo, Dow Chemical, GE, Shell, and the Big Three automakers, aim to game the government’s process for distributing carbon credits to gain an advantage
over their smaller competitors. Since these credits will be traded on the open market, the government would essentially be giving the corporations free money.

You may also be surprised to learn that one of the biggest advocates of The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which gave the FDA the power to regulate tobacco, was Philip Morris, far and away America’s largest cigarette manufacturer. The Philip Morris parent company, Altria, spent an average of $40,000 a day lobbying for the bill over five years. This, to say the least, casts doubt on President Obama’s declaration that the bill passed “despite decades of lobbying and advertising by the tobacco industry.” As Carney notes, the bill was opposed, as usual, by smaller manufacturers. After all, new marketing restrictions on cigarettes hurt lesser-known brands much more than famous ones.

Here’s a final example: when the IRS recently proposed new regulations requiring all tax preparers to register with the IRS, pay fees, pass certification tests, and participate in continuing education programs, the rules earned the vociferous support of H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt, and Liberty Tax, three of America’s biggest tax preparers. The reason was explained in a UBS analysis: the rules would make it more difficult for small tax preparers to enter the market. Additionally, the regulations would allow H&R Block to make money selling its own continuing education programs and certifications to other firms.

Thus, it’s no surprise, really, that a former H&R Block executive, Deputy Commissioner Mark Ernst, is an Obama administration appointee at the IRS. Furthermore, H&R Block lobbying is done by the Podesta Group, a firm founded by John Podesta, the director of the Obama presidential transition.

So the next time a left-wing politician proposes new regulations to protect you from big business, look behind the scenes to see who will really profit. It probably isn’t who you think.

 

 

 

C
onservatives, left-wingers argue, are “anti-science.” President Obama implicitly made the accusation during his 2010 State of the Union speech, when he claimed opponents of cap-and-trade energy taxes “disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change.”

This sort of demagoguery is typical of the elitist Left; they explain the unpopularity of their values by suggesting they simply know better than the majority of ignorant Americans. Of course, the Left happily ignore and reject overwhelming scientific evidence when it’s convenient for their agenda of expanding the regulatory state and enriching their allies.

For instance, trial lawyers, a key source of money for the secular-socialist machine, are incredibly “anti-science” in their willingness
to rely on junk science to gin up lawsuits. This was borne out in a 2004 study by Dr. Joseph N. Gitlin. Six outside physician consultants were asked to review 492 chest X-rays that had previously been evaluated by physician experts (called B-readers) hired by plaintiffs in asbestos lawsuits. While the B-readers found evidence of asbestos-related damage in 95 percent of the X-rays, the outside group only found it in 4.5 percent.
¹

The origins of today’s radical environmental movement provide a more disturbing example. That movement launched with a successful effort in the 1960s to effectively ban the insecticide DDT worldwide. This led to the reemergence of malaria in Africa, which has caused 1-2 million preventable deaths a year, according to the American Council on Science and Health. The crusade against DDT contradicts overwhelming evidence that the correct use of the chemical does not harm humans or the environment.

Likewise, the Luddite Left reject the use of all genetically modified crops despite their scientifically proven safety. Thus, for purely ideological reasons, these extremists oppose the cultivation of “golden rice,” a modified strain of rice with beta-carotene (vitamin A). This crop represents an enormous potential health breakthrough for more than 100 million people in the third world who suffer from vitamin A deficiency, a condition that can cause blindness and other major problems, especially in children.

Similar examples abound: due to a left-wing demonization campaign, the process of food irradiation, which could have prevented America’s 2006 e-coli outbreak, is barely used in the United States despite repeated tests verifying its safety.

But perhaps no anti-scientific argument is more dangerous today than the claim put forward by radical environmentalists, most notably Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that childhood vaccinations can cause autism. Numerous peer-reviewed studies have disproved this connection. Moreover, the
Lancet
, a prominent British journal that
published a 1998 study confirming a vaccination-autism connection, recently retracted the study, whose findings had already been repudiated by ten of its thirteen co-authors.
²

Yet some parents, worried by these rumors, have stopped vaccinating their children, endangering public health. Dr. Melinda Wharton of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told the AP that unvaccinated children contributed to measles outbreaks in 2008 in California, Illinois, Washington, Arizona, and New York. She added, “If we don’t vaccinate, these diseases will come back.”
³

When their anti-scientific arguments are causing the return of deadly diseases once thought to have been eradicated in the United States, it’s hard to see how the Left truly champion science.

Ironically, by using science as a weapon to further their political agenda, the Left are corrupting the very scientific process they claim to uphold.

This is shockingly evident in climate science. Indeed, recent revelations about the degree of groupthink, coercion, and financial corruption in this field make it seem more like a political machine than a community dedicated to pursuing scientific truth.

Reports by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been one of the major sources of information upon which international leaders have proposed action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Known as the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), the most recent report in 2007 won the IPCC, along with Al Gore, the Nobel Peace Prize. However, startling revelations have shown the report manipulated scientific research to further a political agenda.

The scandal emerged when an Internet hacker published emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at Britain’s University of
East Anglia, one of the IPCC’s main sources of data. The emails showed a remarkably hostile and unscientific attitude among CRU scientists and their allies toward anyone who questioned their alarmist data on global warming.

In one exchange, scientists plotted to keep global warming skeptics from being published in peer-reviewed literature. The existence of this orchestrated campaign undermines a common argument from global warming alarmists—that skeptics should be ignored, because their findings are usually not peer reviewed.

Emails also suggested climate scientists were motivated more by money than scientific integrity. Here’s a passage from one such email, in which a climate researcher asks how he should respond to an article by a global warming skeptic: