To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine (8 page)

The way the Left govern in Sacramento, Albany, in many local governments, and especially in Washington is clearly indicative of a machine. When a $787 billion stimulus package can pass in days with no elected official having read the bill, it is evidence of a machine. When a 300-page amendment can be attached at 3:00 am to a bill passed at 4:00 that afternoon with no hearings and no amendments (the maneuver that bought enough votes to pass the Waxman-Markey energy tax), it is evidence of a machine. When 4,500 pages of healthcare bills affecting one-sixth of the economy are negotiated in secret, bypassing the normal open bill resolution process, it is evidence of a machine. When New York City mayor Bloomberg reports, as he did on
Meet the Press
, that no senators or congressmen he had talked with knew what was in the health bill they had voted for, it is clearly evidence of a machine.

Today, the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Left are indisputably secular, they are socialist, and they operate as a machine. Therefore, “secularsocialist machine” is the most accurate way—in fact, the
only
accurate way—of describing the movement that now controls our government.

Once the Left’s values and goals are clear, their secular-socialist agenda will be crushed in free and fair elections. To avoid this repudiation, they have to build a political machine that is too powerful
to be defeated by popular anger. That is the Chicago model of “unrepresentative government.”

Union funding for politicians who will eliminate the right to a secret ballot when voting to form a union is a classic example of machine politics. This effort stems from the difficulty unions have had winning secret ballot elections in recent years. One solution would be to improve the union model so it could win secret ballot elections. But union leaders instinctively adopted a coercive strategy: eliminating secret ballots and relying on public commitments, which makes it easier to apply social pressure to coerce workers into joining unions.

Similarly, every test of voluntary payments to unions for political activism has resulted in a catastrophic drop in donations—as much as 96 percent in some cases. The unions’ answer: make the payments mandatory so people have to fork over the money to be in the union, and they have to be in the union to keep their job.

Similar kinds of social and economic coercion are found in other fields. In Hollywood, if you are openly on the Right you probably won’t get a job. And in many universities, conservatives will never get tenure.

This coercive brand of machine politics is the key to the Left’s attempts to gain power and remake the American people. The secular-socialist machine does not seek to serve the American people; it wants to force us into accepting the values and obeying the institutions of secular, big-government bureaucracies and their unionized employees.

Transplanting secular-socialist values into people through government action requires a malleable view of human nature and a government-centric concept of citizens’ rights.

To socialists, people are inherently bad and capitalism is always exploitive. Only strong government can take money from the rich, give it to the poor, and reeducate the ignorant or misinformed through government-sponsored programs. (Read the education philosophies of Bill Ayers or John Dewey to understand the Left’s mania for incorporating public education into the secular-socialist machine.)

This socialist worldview is the exact opposite of our Founding Fathers’ outlook. As we’ve seen, the Founders believed our rights come from God, that our behavior should be shaped by a culture infused with religious values, and that government shoud be a carefully limited servant of the people.

A religious worldview inherently limits the purview of government. Even the concept of sin limits government by suggesting that external constraints of right and wrong should guide us no matter what the state says.

In short, our core religious values hinder the secular socialists from realizing a government-dominated, politician-defined world of limited citizenship and unlimited bureaucracy. Thus, the culture of secularism has to replace the culture of religion if socialism is to survive.

For secular socialists, the government’s overarching goal is to condition people to accept alien behaviors and values. In practice, this outlook inherently produces creeping dictatorial bureaucracy and, ultimately, totalitarianism. George Orwell, despite being an avowed socialist, warned of this tendency in his essay “Why I Write”:

For those who ridiculed warnings that “death panels” would accompany a government-run health system, Orwell should stand as a stark reminder that the expansion of government power may be a small step on the long march to tyranny and domination by bureaucrats and politicians.

In
The Road to Serfdom
, Friedrich Hayek, an influential critic of centralized government and a major influence on President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, similarly warned that “[government] planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals.” He added, “The more the state ‘plans’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”

Hayek clearly explains why the utopian fantasies of the secular-socialist machine are a direct threat to our freedom. Defeating this machine, and thwarting its furious attempts to impose alien values on us, is not a partisan matter between Democrats and Republicans; it’s an effort to save America.

 

 

 

H
ow does the secular-socialist machine gain power? That’s easy: they lie to us.

But at some point in 2009, the American people realized they were not getting the truth from President Barack Obama, House speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate majority leader Harry Reid.

Perhaps it became clear in December during Congress’s first round of voting on healthcare “reform.” After an embarrassing and shocking parade of political payoffs to achieve the necessary votes, House and Senate leaders met with White House officials to draft a final bill.

President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Leader Reid bypassed the normal conference committee for the bill, opting instead to hash out the details behind closed doors. There, they struck a corrupt deal with their union boss donors that would exempt union members
from paying taxes on certain healthcare plans while non-union Americans would still get taxed.

Not only did this flagrant venality mock the very idea of equal protection under the law, but the process that created it was the polar opposite of the way President Obama and Speaker Pelosi had promised to govern.

When Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in November 2006, Speaker Pelosi pledged, “This leadership team will create the most honest, most open, and most ethical Congress in history.”

They promised to give members of Congress—and the American people—twenty-four hours to review bills before voting on them, to conduct rigorous internal ethics investigations, and to reform the earmark process to stop taxpayer-financed political payoffs.

Similarly, candidate Obama passionately vowed to make Washington more bipartisan, more transparent, and more accountable to the American people. Condemning backdoor negotiations, he called for “bringing all parties together and broadcasting [healthcare] negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are.”

He made this pledge at least eight times during the campaign, and the pledges were compiled in an online video. In one clip, he explains that he is personally responsible for making this happen, insisting, “One of my jobs as President will be to guide this process.”

C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb asked congressional leaders to live up to those pledges so the American people could see how their representatives decide the vital issue of healthcare. But President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid refused. And no wonder; TV cameras would have exposed exactly the sort of corrupt bargaining on behalf of major political donors that candidate Obama had pledged to “shame”—his word—congressional leaders from making.

Thanks to that video, President Obama’s C-SPAN flip-flop may have been the most vivid example of the Democratic leadership’s unwillingness to uphold campaign promises, much less the ideals of this country. That instance of hypocrisy, however, is just the tip of the iceberg.

Any honest assessment of the campaign promises made by the current Democratic Congress reveals a stunning gap between words and deeds. Despite the Democrats’ much-heralded promises of transparency, accountability, and higher ethical standards, the current Congress has featured unprecedented corruption and secrecy.

During Obama’s presidency, we have seen Democrats ram massive, complex legislation through the House and Senate and sign it into law so fast that members—as well as the American people—had no time to read it.

We’ve also seen Nancy Pelosi protect Democratic congressmen under criminal investigation. One such congressman, Charles Rangel from New York, who has taken a “leave of absence” from his position as head of the committee that writes our tax laws, is under an ethics committee investigation for alleged tax dodging, filing deficient financial disclosure forms, and other charges. Although the committee “admonished” him—its weakest reprimand—for taking corporate-sponsored trips to the Caribbean, Pelosi declined to join many of her Democratic colleagues in calling for Rangel to step down as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. In fact, in an interview with ABC News’
This Week
, Pelosi conceded that the admonishment of Rangel was “not good,” but stressed that Rangel’s actions were “not something that jeopardized our country in any
way.” Is this the new ethical standard we were promised—that corruption is acceptable as long as it doesn’t “jeopardize” the country?

In fact, under the Democrats, we’ve seen the very apparatuses used to police ethics in Congress made more and more feckless. For example, even though they created the Independent Office of Congressional Ethics, the Democrats failed to give it subpoena power and have ignored its findings.

Meanwhile, under Democratic control, the ethics committee seems surprisingly eager to clear members of Congress of wrongdoing. The committee cleared two members of Congress who, according to the panel, tacitly tied requests for campaign donations to earmarks that would have benefited the donors. Five others—four congressmen and one delegate—who took the same Caribbean trips as Congressman Rangel were cleared after claiming they did not realize the trips were sponsored by corporations, even though they repeatedly took pictures in front of corporate logos. The ethics committee has even issued guidelines for congressmen on how to get around new rules that prohibit lobbyists from throwing parties in their honor: make sure the parties are honoring more than one member of Congress.

Most significant, in order to get President Obama’s initiatives approved in Congress, the Democratic leadership used the American people’s money to buy the votes of key senators and congressmen and to pay back their own political allies, behavior that the Founding Fathers rightly called corruption and for which they rebelled against Britain.

Look, for example, at the shameless bribes used to get wavering Democratic senators to vote for the healthcare bill. These bribes were so outrageous—even by Washington standards—they each earned a nickname:

Additionally, Democratic senators from Nebraska, Vermont, Massachusetts, Michigan, Connecticut, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Hawaii secured bonuses in the Medicare payments for hospitals in their states worth more than $2 billion.

Although the so-called “reconciliation bill” stripped out some of these abuses, they were only removed due to widespread public outrage—the politicians, who make deals like this all the time, were slow to realize the American people were paying close attention.

When asked about this extraordinary abuse of taxpayer dollars, Senate majority leader Harry Reid suggested senators who didn’t get a payoff were not doing their job. “I don’t know if there is a senator
that doesn’t have something in this bill that is important to them,” he said. “And if they don’t have something in it important to them, then it doesn’t speak well of them.”