Despite propaganda relentlessly churned out by the mainstream media to justify the Obama IRS crackdown on conservative groups, the fact remains that the American Right is severely outgunned by the much better funded Left. And while highly political left-wing organizations far outpace their conservative counterparts in number and assets, they have never been subjected to the kind of rigorous scrutiny and interference that the IRS has recently inflicted on right-wing groups, making allegations of partisan abuse by the agency difficult to refute.
CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin stands as a case in point of the kind of misinformation being peddled by the Left to shield the Obama administration from the IRS scandal. Toobin writes in the New Yorker that Obama’s IRS didn’t do anything wrong. The Tea Party groups targeted by Obama’s bureaucrats got what was coming to them. Those organizations
"were seeking approval to operate under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. This would require them to be 'social welfare,' not political, operations. There are significant advantages to being a 501(c)(4). These groups don’t pay taxes; they don’t have to disclose their donors—unlike traditional political organizations, such as political-action committees. In return for the tax advantage and the secrecy, the 501(c)(4) organizations must refrain from traditional partisan political activity, like endorsing candidates. If that definition sounds murky—that is, if it’s unclear what 501(c)(4) organizations are allowed to do—that’s because it is murky. Particularly leading up to the 2012 elections, many conservative organizations, nominally 501(c)(4)s, were all but explicitly political in their work."
However, as David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin show in their meticulously researched 2012 book, The New Leviathan: How the Left-Wing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America’s Future, the greatest exploiters of the “murkiness” of “social welfare” activism are by far left-wing organizations. The collective assets of liberal-progressive grant-making foundations are in fact 10 times the size of the assets of conservative foundations.
DiscoverTheNetworks.org, a website run by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, identified 115 major progressive or left-leaning foundations. In 2010, it found the progressive foundations had total assets of $104.56 billion.
The left-leaning National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and Think Progress, a popular blog run by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, identified 82 major conservative grant-making foundations. In 2010, they found the conservative foundations had total assets of just $10.29 billion.
The progressive foundations awarded $8.81 billion in grants compared to the conservative foundations’ paltry $831.8 million in grants. As long as grant makers “don’t violate IRS rules that bar direct contributions to candidates and parties, tax-exempt foundations can operate without constraints,” Horowitz and Laksin write.
This vast network of left-wing funders and activist groups dwarfs anything the activist Right has to offer. It is “self-sufficient and self-perpetuating … an aristocracy of wealth whose dimensions exceed any previous accumulations of financial power, whose influence already represents a massive disenfranchisement of the American people and whose agendas pose a disturbing prospect for the American future,” according to the authors.
For example, Horowitz and Laksin also show that the Left thoroughly dominates two huge areas of interest-group warfare today: immigration and environmentalist activism.
In immigration, they found that there are nine major conservative groups “that support traditional immigration policies” and 117 progressive groups “that support radical departures from traditional immigration policies and notions of sovereignty.”
The conservative groups (e.g. Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA Foundation) have net assets of $15.05 million (based on annual revenues of $13.8 million), compared to the $194.67 million in net assets (based on annual revenues of $306.11 million) held by progressive groups (e.g. National Council of La Raza, Redlands Christian Migrant Association).
In other words, progressive immigration groups have 22 times the revenues that their conservative counterparts have.
In the world of environmental activism, Horowitz and Laksin report that there are 32 major conservative groups that “promote market-friendly solutions” and 552 progressive groups that “promote radical views that are anti-business.” Collectively, the conservative groups have net assets of $38.24 million, a figure that seems insignificant compared to the $9.31 billion figure representing the progressive groups’ combined net assets.
The progressive environmental groups enjoy a 37 to 1 advantage over conservative environmental groups in revenues ($3.56 billion compared to $96.17 million).
And left-wing groups almost never face the kind of heightened IRS scrutiny to which conservative groups are subjected. Republican Richard Nixon may have used the IRS against perceived enemies of all political stripes, but IRS abuse is generally a tool of Democratic administrations. President Franklin Roosevelt directed the IRS to target newspaper publishers opposed to the New Deal and John F. Kennedy “raised the political exploitation of the IRS to an art form,” according to author James Bovard.
The Obama administration leaves its friends in the nonprofit community alone no matter how odious or reprehensible their behavior. Obama’s IRS harasses only right-of-center nonprofit groups.
Toobin goes on to lament the political nature of conservative 501c4 organizations, as if this were a unique characteristic of right-wing groups that would explain selective IRS harassment of them. For instance, Toobin writes that Americans for Prosperity (which also has a 501c3 affiliate), funded in part by the Kochs, are “[i]n every meaningful sense … operating as units of the Republican Party.” Such groups were “an instrumental force in helping the Republicans hold the House of Representatives” in the 2012 election.
One can argue about the precise impact AFP had on the last congressional election, but Toobin’s undue focus on AFP and other Koch-funded groups distracts from the fact that conservative organizations are consistently, dramatically outspent by their left-wing counterparts, which are deeply embedded in the Democratic political establishment and which operate unimpeded as arms of the Democratic Party.
For example, none of what conservative C4s have done is anywhere near as partisan as what ACORN, the left-wing poster child for nonprofit abuses, perpetrated in its 40-year reign of terror against American taxpayers.
For decades ACORN, with its intricate network of hundreds of nonprofit entities, defrauded Uncle Sam by spending government grants and tax-privileged dollars on partisan campaigns and voter drives that benefited Democrats exclusively. Every election cycle Project Vote, the ACORN affiliate President Obama worked for in 1992 and that Obama White House officials remain in close contact with to the present day, spends millions of tax-exempt dollars getting Democrats, dead or alive, to the polls.
Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department never lifted a finger to investigate a nearly $1 million misappropriation from ACORN by Dale Rathke, the socialite brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke. As I detailed in my book Subversion Inc., Dale blew ACORN employees’ pension money on parties, limousines, and shopping trips to New York.
President Obama’s 501c4 goon platoon, Organizing for Action, also enjoys tax-exempt status. Formally incorporated earlier this year, the Saul Alinsky-inspired, in-your-face group grew out of Obama’s election campaign and was previously called Organizing for America when it was a project of the Democratic National Committee.
And take the egregious case of Media Matters for America, which even the New York Times describes as a “highly partisan” organization. MMfA has been mysteriously immune from IRS audits.
Underwritten by George Soros, every working day the lavishly funded Media Matters churns out political propaganda calculated to pressure journalists into unquestioningly backing the Democratic Party line. It has absurdly characterized Chris Matthews and former New York Times editor Bill Keller as sellouts to the left-wing cause.
The organization’s CEO, the emotionally unstable former journalist and self-described “hit man” David Brock, declares that MMfA’s mission is to wage “war on Fox (News)” as well as “to disrupt [News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch's] commercial interests” and to turn regulators against his media outlets. MMfA claims to combat “conservative misinformation,” but concentrates its fire on Fox because it dares to air political viewpoints that sometimes overlap with the views of Republicans. The ultimate purpose of Media Matters is to silence opposition to the Left.
C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has complained to the IRS about MMfA, which he accurately describes as a “Democratic training camp.” (Any taxpayer may file an IRS Form 13909 with the Internal Revenue Service to complain about the conduct of a tax-exempt organization.) Gray notes that the group compiled an “enemies list” and had plans to engage investigators “to look into the personal lives of Fox News anchors, hosts,” and others.
“Anyone is free to promote or criticize political views of any stripe, using one’s own money and other resources,” Gray says. But MMfA’s “partisan success was built on a much different model: it uses the taxpayers’ subsidy, through Section 501(c)(3)’s tax exemption, to try to punish private persons and companies for airing political views.”
Giving Media Matters tax-exempt status affords it an advantage not enjoyed by its victim, Fox News. That tax-exemption in effect legitimizes MMfA “by having the government affirm that the organization’s operations are truly ‘charitable’ and therefore consistent with the nation’s public policies,” according to Gray.
As for the evil conservative corporate moneymen the Left and Toobin assail, Horowitz and Laksin’s research demolishes the idea that the activist Right in America is this huge, powerful empire bankrolled by right-wing counterparts to leftist billionaire donors like George Soros, Peter B. Lewis, and Herb Sandler. In reality, deep-pocketed conservative donors are generally hard to find. For every Sheldon Adelson (casino magnate), there are a dozen left-wing billionaires and millionaires like Tim Gill (software magnate), Rob McKay (Taco Bell heir), Anne Bartley (Rockefeller heiress), Pat Stryker (medical technology heiress), Susie Tompkins Buell (Esprit co-founder), Rob Glaser (RealNetworks), Norman Lear (Hollywood producer), and Rachel Pritzker Hunter (hotel heiress).
Toobin’s deeply flawed analysis of the IRS scandal unwittingly reveals the real reason those on the Left are countenancing the clearly politically motivated repression of conservative nonprofits and why the Obama IRS engaged in these tactics in the first place. As Toobin all but admits, Democrats view Tea Party groups, that is, right-wing populist 501c4 groups, as an existential threat to the Left. These 501c4s tend to be Republican-leaning organizations and they have been successful so far in derailing, or at least slowing, parts of President Obama’s ongoing transmogrification of America. (Note: Unlike donors to 501c3 groups, which tend to be educational in nature and less explicitly political than 501c4 groups, donors to 501c4 groups are not allowed to deduct their donations from their income tax. Organizations recognized under 501c3 of the Internal Revenue Code face stricter constraints on their behavior but are not required to publicly disclose their donors.)
Toobin and his ilk don’t think any conservative nonprofits ought to enjoy tax-exempt status because they are statists who view the rule of law as an obstacle to human progress. To them, teaching Americans to respect the Constitution and the God-given rights and freedoms it protects is not a legitimate activity, or at least not sufficiently legitimate to merit a tax exemption. These groups are working against the Left, standing in the way and preventing America from becoming a leftist utopia. They’re all enemy combatants. This is why numerous high profile Democratic politicians, like Sens. Al Franken and Chuck Schumer, had no reservations openly calling for the systematic targeting of right-wing groups and the selective suppression of conservative citizen inroads into an avenue of political power long monopolized by the Left.
As Jonathan S. Tobin (not to be confused with Jeffrey Toobin) beautifully sums up the leftist position in Commentary:
“As far as a lot of liberals are concerned, the problem here isn’t the Nixonian abuse of power by the IRS but the fact that these conservatives are being allowed to raise money to resist the policies of a liberal administration.”
The targeting campaign undertaken by the IRS was never about getting the tax code right. It was about getting the ideology right.
(review appeared in 2013 at [...])
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The New Leviathan: How the Left-Wing Money-Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America's Future Kindle Edition
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At a time when the national political debate is about inequality and fairness, bestselling author David Horowitz and coauthor Jacob Laksin have written an unsettling book about the distribution of power in America. Thoroughly researched and amply documented, The New Leviathan overturns the conventional wisdom about which end of the political spectrum represents the rich and powerful, and which represents the people.
The Democratic Party presents itself to the electorate as the party of working families and the poor. In the 2000 election campaign, Democrat Al Gore ran on the slogan “The People vs. the Powerful,” while President Obama describes himself as a “grassroots organizer” and a spokesman for “fairness” and “progressive change.” Such is the world of political myth. In reality, the Democrats and the Obama progressives represent the richest and most powerful political machine in American history. Backed by a near trillion-dollar treasury in America’s oldest and largest tax-exempt foundations, progressives outspend conservatives by a factor of seven to one.
In The New Leviathan, David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin examine this growing financial power of left-wing organizations and politicians. They show how left-wing foundations underwrote the political career of Barack Obama and how massive funding advantages for progressive proposals have disenfranchised American voters and shifted the national policy debate dramatically to the left. The New Leviathan draws connections between the Obama administration and progressive organizations from labor unions to media outlets to nonprofits to political groups, and shows how on key policy fronts—national security, immigration, citizenship, environment, and health care—the sheer force of left-wing financial resources has reconfigured the nation’s political agenda.
The Democratic Party presents itself to the electorate as the party of working families and the poor. In the 2000 election campaign, Democrat Al Gore ran on the slogan “The People vs. the Powerful,” while President Obama describes himself as a “grassroots organizer” and a spokesman for “fairness” and “progressive change.” Such is the world of political myth. In reality, the Democrats and the Obama progressives represent the richest and most powerful political machine in American history. Backed by a near trillion-dollar treasury in America’s oldest and largest tax-exempt foundations, progressives outspend conservatives by a factor of seven to one.
In The New Leviathan, David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin examine this growing financial power of left-wing organizations and politicians. They show how left-wing foundations underwrote the political career of Barack Obama and how massive funding advantages for progressive proposals have disenfranchised American voters and shifted the national policy debate dramatically to the left. The New Leviathan draws connections between the Obama administration and progressive organizations from labor unions to media outlets to nonprofits to political groups, and shows how on key policy fronts—national security, immigration, citizenship, environment, and health care—the sheer force of left-wing financial resources has reconfigured the nation’s political agenda.
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- PublisherForum Books
- Publication dateJune 12, 2012
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“[A] deeply informed exposé of the powerful, very wealthy network of liberal foundations... read this and be afraid.” —Karl Rove
"A necessary, important, and troubling read.”
—Peter Schweizer, author of Throw Them All Out
"A necessary, important, and troubling read.”
—Peter Schweizer, author of Throw Them All Out
About the Author
David Horowitz is the New York Times bestselling author of, among other books, One-Party Classroom, The Professors, Radical Son, The Shadow Party, and Party of Defeat. He is president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center in Los Angeles.
Jacob Laksin is the managing editor of Front-Page Magazine and coatuhor of One-Party Classroom. His articles and reviews have also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Weekly Standard, National Review Online, RealClearWorld, and the Washington Examiner.
Jacob Laksin is the managing editor of Front-Page Magazine and coatuhor of One-Party Classroom. His articles and reviews have also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Weekly Standard, National Review Online, RealClearWorld, and the Washington Examiner.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1.
The New Leviathan
This book is about a political force of unprecedented magnitude in American life. The “New Leviathan” is a network of billion-dollar tax-exempt foundations and advocacy think tanks that work in concert with government unions and grassroots radical groups to make up the organizational core of the political left. The New Leviathan is not only a political force in the narrow sense of directly influencing electoral outcomes through the support of candidates and parties. Because its power derives from institutions whose mandates are educational and philanthropic, its influence extends into every aspect of the nation’s life. This influence is exerted through a tax-exempt universe of policy think tanks, grassroots campaign organizations, and public-interest groups, created and supported by its donations. The components of the New Leviathan operate within the framework of a “progressive” ideology that promotes an ever-expanding state, along with policies that undermine America’s sovereignty and weaken her defenses. The New Leviathan’s ever-growing power has already tipped the scales of the national political debate and, as we will show in this volume, transformed its very nature.
Conventional wisdom would dismiss the very possibility of such dominance in the political arena by a money machine of the Left. In the conventional view, it is Republicans and the political right with their corporate sponsors and big-money donors who make up the “party of the rich,” while progressives speak for the powerless and the poor. In this perspective, conservatives are agents of an economic “ruling class,” organized to defend its social privileges. In the exercise of financial power in politics, conservatives are assumed to enjoy an overweening advantage, utilizing unrivaled resources to orchestrate “vast right-wing conspiracies,” which are designed to thwart progressive efforts in behalf of equality and “social justice.”
While casting conservatives as mouthpieces for the rich, the same perspective portrays Democrats as the party of “working Americans and their families,” providing a voice for the voiceless and a shield for the disadvantaged. Accepting the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2000, Al Gore summed up this outlook in a slogan: “They’re for the powerful; we’re for the people!” 1
The political melodrama in which Democrats and progressives posture as paladins of enlightenment has a long and unpretty history. It was forged during the moderately populist and immoderately corrupt presidency of Andrew Jackson, spokesman for the “common man,” who entered the White House as a self-proposed champion of the people battling the “moneyed elite.” Both the image and the aura were transparent manipulations to seduce a willing public. Despite humble beginnings, Jackson was a man of means who basked in the privileges of an aristocratic life. The same comfortable circumstances did not discourage him from plundering the property of his political rivals, or justifying his avarice as a “sharing” of the wealth, or from exploiting the morality play he had created to expand his personal power. Nor did Jackson’s “everyman” enthusiasms keep him from owning and selling slaves throughout his life or from presiding over the forced removal of American Indian tribes from their native lands on the “Trail of Tears.”
Politics being a market in which fictions are currency, the Jacksonian myth established the enduring template of the two-party system. As a Republican newspaper in Tennessee complained, “The rank and file of the democratic party honestly believes . . . the democratic party is the poor man’s party, that the republican party is the party of boodle and corruption and that they obtain and maintain their supremacy in all the states by the undue use of money.”2
Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House a hundred years after Jackson, and despite being a born aristocrat, a “son of privilege who never depended on a pay check,” he was also able to frame his presidential tenure as “the Era of the Common Man.”3 In the 1970s, Jimmy Carter took up the folksy mantle, touting himself as a simple peanut farmer from Georgia and promising to be the “people’s president.” Yet Carter was the son of a wealthy plantation owner, inherited his own business, and spurned a lucrative job in the private sector in order to sow the seeds of a political career with a tale of humble beginnings.4 Carter’s claim to be a progressive was particularly dubious since he won his 1970 gubernatorial campaign by courting the support of southern segregationists and projecting what one biographer has called a “not-so-subtle racism” away from public view.5
In the election of 2000, Al Gore, another scion of an elite segregationist family, took up the populist theme with the campaign slogan, “The People vs. the Powerful.” As part of a White House that set records fund-raising from “special interests,” Gore’s claim was hardly credible, although a politically sympathetic media helped to make it seem so. After losing the presidency, Gore launched a new career posing himself as the people’s champion against global polluters, even winning an Academy Award and a Nobel Prize from fellow progressives for these efforts while trampling on the environment and making himself a wealthy man in the process. Today, Gore travels the world on private carbon-gorging jets and spends an estimated $30,000 a year to heat just one of his luxury mansions, which include a recently purchased $9 million villa in Montecito, California, with six bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a large pool house, and six fireplaces.6 His stake in a “green” energy company that profits from lucrative environmentally correct government contracts has positioned him to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire.”7
Populist hypocrisy was on display again and in a particularly sordid fashion during the next national election when Democratic vice-presidential candidate John Edwards cast America as a benighted home of the oppressed. According to Edwards, there were “two Americas”--on the one hand, the rich Republican America with its boot heel on the necks of the hapless and helpless; on the other, the Democrat America of the poor and voiceless (if not for noble crusaders like Edwards). Back on earth this selfless servant of the workingman had accumulated a personal net worth of $188 million, while his running mate, John Kerry, had married into two fortunes three times the size of Edwards’s own, making him the richest lawmaker in the country.8 Kerry’s opulence was not untypical of the balance between the parties: among the twelve richest lawmakers, Democrats outnumber Republicans three to one.9
The ability to see itself as a perennial underdog in a class war it regards as integral to capitalism is an abiding strength of the political left. But the image is unsupported by the facts. Far from being the party of the people, Democrats and their progressive core represent America’s social and cultural elites and constitute the richest, the most organized, and most economically powerful political force in American history. As Christopher Caldwell observed in a New York Times essay, “the Democratic Party is the party to which elites belong. It is the party of Harvard (and most of the Ivy League), of Microsoft and Apple (and most of Silicon Valley), of Hollywood and Manhattan (and most of the media) and, although there is some evidence that numbers are evening out in this election cycle, of Goldman Sachs (and most of the investment banking profession). . . . The Democrats have the support of more, and more active, billionaires [than the Republicans]. Of the twenty richest ZIP codes in America, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, 19 gave the bulk of their money to the Democrats in the last election, in most cases the vast bulk--86 percent in 10024 on the Upper West Side.” 10
Wall Street--the very symbol of capitalist excess and wealth--was a key player in Barack Obama’s successful presidential election run in 2008. Counterintuitive at first, this fact becomes immediately intelligible once one realizes that big government works for Wall Street bankers who float all the bonds that underwrite government spending programs and take their percentage on every dollar of big government debt. Award-winning business reporter Charles Gasparino observes: “. . . the assumption made by most Americans, . . . [is] that because investment bankers are rich they must favor Republicans because, by definition, Republicans favor lower taxes on the wealthy and on big business. And while, of course, no one likes high taxes, what’s more important than the tax rate is how much income you make in the first place: paying 30 percent of your money in taxes if you make a million dollars is better than paying a 20 percent tax rate on an income of only half a million.” 11
In light of these facts it is hardly surprising that the top financial backers of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign included Wall Street leaders Jamie Dimon (CEO, JPMorgan Chase), Lloyd Blankfein (CEO, Goldman Sachs), Dick Fuld (CEO, Lehman Brothers), Warren Spector (CEO, Bear Stearns), Larry Fink (CEO, BlackRock--the world’s largest money management firm), Greg Fleming (number two at Merrill Lynch), and Mark Gallogly (number two at the private equity firm Blackstone). Collectively, these Wall Street titans raised more than $100 million for the Obama campaign.12
It is a reflection on human vanity that the Left actually believes it is the people’s David to the Right’s Goliath. A recent display of this misplaced self-esteem was the now-famous PowerPoint presentation that former White House official Rob Stein screened for George Soros, Clinton political operatives, and Democratic funders as the 2004 election approached. The PowerPoint was called “The Conservative Message Machine’s Money Matrix,” and Stein’s goal was to persuade Democratic funders that they had to match the unfairly oversized conservative war chest in order to help the little people out.
Stein’s presentation began with the false premise that conservatives enjoyed an overwhelming advantage in the resources they were able to funnel into American politics. In Stein’s view, this advantage enabled conservatives not only to influence politics but to move the boundaries of the entire national debate to the right. Using charts and graphs, Stein purported to show that with just $300 million from two hundred “anchor donors” the conservative “message machine” was nonetheless able to fundamentally reshape the country’s politics.13 “This is perhaps the most potent, independent, institutionalized apparatus ever assembled in a democracy to promote one belief system,” Stein told New York Times journalist Matt Bai, who didn’t bother to check.14
In fact, Stein’s figure was a modest sum in an age when one gubernatorial campaign can cost $170 million. But his portrait of an overweening and unanswered conservative message machine proved decisive in recruiting the left-wing billionaires in the room to underwrite a network of newly minted progressive organizations. The most prominent example was the Democracy Alliance, which was established in 2005 by Soros and a coalition of eighty leftist donors, each of whom contributed $1 million toward its creation.
The immediate goal of the Democracy Alliance was to lead the resurgence of the Left in the 2006 midterm elections. Almost half the groups the alliance funded hadn’t existed only a few years before.15 In its inaugural year of operations, the Democracy Alliance distributed $50 million to assorted left-wing, tax-exempt think tanks and quasi political associations, a sum that increased to $80 million the following year. The alliance quickly became the most visible presence of the Left’s immense and unappreciated financial power in shaping the political landscape.16
Long before Stein’s presentation, the claim that the Right was massively funded compared to the Left was a standard piece of progressive folklore, supported by a bookshelf of left-wing tracts and pseudoscientific studies. In Moving a Public Policy Agenda: The Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations (1997), author Sally Covington charged that the conservative movement had relied on “a substantial and interconnected institutional apparatus” unrivaled by the Left in order to win the war of ideas and push the country rightward. Like Stein, Covington singled out a core of conservative foundations--Scaife, Bradley, Koch, and Olin--as the financial engine driving this ostensibly dramatic shift in the national ideology to the right. Yet, the Olin Foundation was so dedicated to this concerted effort that in 2005 it deliberately went out of business in accord with the wishes of its founder.17
A 1999 report by a progressive advocacy group, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, made essentially the same argument. The report claimed that conservative foundations had contributed approximately $1 billion in the ten years between 1990 and 2000 to twenty leading conservative think tanks and were thereby able to produce a “rightward shift in American politics.” 18 So powerful were these foundations, according to the report, that they could prevail despite opposition to their political agenda from the majority of the country. In short, conservative money trumped the democratic will of the people. The identical thesis with nearly identical supporting evidence was argued in No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America’s Social Agenda. Its left-wing authors, academics Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, claimed that by relying on the financial wealth of conservative funders like Bradley, Scaife, and Olin, the Right had been able to get federal policies enacted that the American people did not support.
The twin premises of all these narratives, including Stein’s PowerPoint, was that conservatives could draw on far superior and unrivaled tax-exempt resources to change the nation’s political discourse and move it to the right. Both premises were demonstrably false. As of 2009, the financial assets of the 115 major tax-exempt foundations of the Left identified by our researchers added up to $104.56 billion. Not only is this total not less than the financial assets of the 75 foundations of the Right, it was more than ten times greater.19
Of the “Big Three” conservative foundations that every one of the left-wing analyses cited (Bradley, Olin, Scaife), not one has (or had) assets exceeding a billion dollars. By way of contrast, fourteen progressive foundations do, including Gates, Ford, Robert Wood Johnson, Hewlett, Kellogg, Packard, MacArthur, Mellon, Rockefeller, Casey, Carnegie, Simons, Heinz, and the Open Society Institute.20 As already noted, the John M. Olin Foundation, which figures in each of the left-wing foundation narratives and has so alarmed the Left over the years as one of the conservative “Big Three,” actually terminated itself in 2005 and has been defunct ever since. No comparable progressive foundation has so far voluntarily put itself out of business.
1. http://academic.csuohio.edu/kneuendorf/content/cpuca/gorespch.htm.
2. Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 38.
3. Jean Edward Smith, FDR (Random House, 2008), p. x.
4. Kenneth Morris, Jimmy Carter, American Moralist (University of Georgia Press, 1997), pp. 114–15.
5. Ibid., p. 187.
6. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/17/photos-al-goree-new-8875_n_579286.html.
7. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/6491195/Al-Gore-could-become-worlds-first-carbon-billionaire.html.
8. http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/democrats-party-rich.
9. Ibid.
10. Christopher Caldwell, “The Ideological Divide,” New York Times Book Review, October 24, 2010.
11. Charles Gasparino, Bought and Paid For: The Unholy Alliance Between Barack Obama and Wall Street (Sentinel HC, 2010), pp. 30–31.
12. Ibid., p. 40.
13. Matt Bai, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics (Penguin Press, 2007), p. 26.
14. Ibid., p. 25.
15. David Callahan, Fortunes of Change: The Ruse of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America (John Wiley and Sons, 2010).
16. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/06/AR2005080600848_pf.html.
17. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/28/opinion/28miller.html.
18. http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/archive/1-billion-for-ideas-conservative-think-tanks-in-the-1990s.
19. The report identifies 82 conservative foundations, but 7 of the foundations named had zero or negative assets in 2009. For up-to-date charts of both conservative and progressive foundations, see Appendices I to III of this volume. The original NCRP report listed 79 conservative foundations but by 2009, 4 of these had zero or negative assets.
20. See Appendix II.
The New Leviathan
This book is about a political force of unprecedented magnitude in American life. The “New Leviathan” is a network of billion-dollar tax-exempt foundations and advocacy think tanks that work in concert with government unions and grassroots radical groups to make up the organizational core of the political left. The New Leviathan is not only a political force in the narrow sense of directly influencing electoral outcomes through the support of candidates and parties. Because its power derives from institutions whose mandates are educational and philanthropic, its influence extends into every aspect of the nation’s life. This influence is exerted through a tax-exempt universe of policy think tanks, grassroots campaign organizations, and public-interest groups, created and supported by its donations. The components of the New Leviathan operate within the framework of a “progressive” ideology that promotes an ever-expanding state, along with policies that undermine America’s sovereignty and weaken her defenses. The New Leviathan’s ever-growing power has already tipped the scales of the national political debate and, as we will show in this volume, transformed its very nature.
Conventional wisdom would dismiss the very possibility of such dominance in the political arena by a money machine of the Left. In the conventional view, it is Republicans and the political right with their corporate sponsors and big-money donors who make up the “party of the rich,” while progressives speak for the powerless and the poor. In this perspective, conservatives are agents of an economic “ruling class,” organized to defend its social privileges. In the exercise of financial power in politics, conservatives are assumed to enjoy an overweening advantage, utilizing unrivaled resources to orchestrate “vast right-wing conspiracies,” which are designed to thwart progressive efforts in behalf of equality and “social justice.”
While casting conservatives as mouthpieces for the rich, the same perspective portrays Democrats as the party of “working Americans and their families,” providing a voice for the voiceless and a shield for the disadvantaged. Accepting the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2000, Al Gore summed up this outlook in a slogan: “They’re for the powerful; we’re for the people!” 1
The political melodrama in which Democrats and progressives posture as paladins of enlightenment has a long and unpretty history. It was forged during the moderately populist and immoderately corrupt presidency of Andrew Jackson, spokesman for the “common man,” who entered the White House as a self-proposed champion of the people battling the “moneyed elite.” Both the image and the aura were transparent manipulations to seduce a willing public. Despite humble beginnings, Jackson was a man of means who basked in the privileges of an aristocratic life. The same comfortable circumstances did not discourage him from plundering the property of his political rivals, or justifying his avarice as a “sharing” of the wealth, or from exploiting the morality play he had created to expand his personal power. Nor did Jackson’s “everyman” enthusiasms keep him from owning and selling slaves throughout his life or from presiding over the forced removal of American Indian tribes from their native lands on the “Trail of Tears.”
Politics being a market in which fictions are currency, the Jacksonian myth established the enduring template of the two-party system. As a Republican newspaper in Tennessee complained, “The rank and file of the democratic party honestly believes . . . the democratic party is the poor man’s party, that the republican party is the party of boodle and corruption and that they obtain and maintain their supremacy in all the states by the undue use of money.”2
Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House a hundred years after Jackson, and despite being a born aristocrat, a “son of privilege who never depended on a pay check,” he was also able to frame his presidential tenure as “the Era of the Common Man.”3 In the 1970s, Jimmy Carter took up the folksy mantle, touting himself as a simple peanut farmer from Georgia and promising to be the “people’s president.” Yet Carter was the son of a wealthy plantation owner, inherited his own business, and spurned a lucrative job in the private sector in order to sow the seeds of a political career with a tale of humble beginnings.4 Carter’s claim to be a progressive was particularly dubious since he won his 1970 gubernatorial campaign by courting the support of southern segregationists and projecting what one biographer has called a “not-so-subtle racism” away from public view.5
In the election of 2000, Al Gore, another scion of an elite segregationist family, took up the populist theme with the campaign slogan, “The People vs. the Powerful.” As part of a White House that set records fund-raising from “special interests,” Gore’s claim was hardly credible, although a politically sympathetic media helped to make it seem so. After losing the presidency, Gore launched a new career posing himself as the people’s champion against global polluters, even winning an Academy Award and a Nobel Prize from fellow progressives for these efforts while trampling on the environment and making himself a wealthy man in the process. Today, Gore travels the world on private carbon-gorging jets and spends an estimated $30,000 a year to heat just one of his luxury mansions, which include a recently purchased $9 million villa in Montecito, California, with six bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a large pool house, and six fireplaces.6 His stake in a “green” energy company that profits from lucrative environmentally correct government contracts has positioned him to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire.”7
Populist hypocrisy was on display again and in a particularly sordid fashion during the next national election when Democratic vice-presidential candidate John Edwards cast America as a benighted home of the oppressed. According to Edwards, there were “two Americas”--on the one hand, the rich Republican America with its boot heel on the necks of the hapless and helpless; on the other, the Democrat America of the poor and voiceless (if not for noble crusaders like Edwards). Back on earth this selfless servant of the workingman had accumulated a personal net worth of $188 million, while his running mate, John Kerry, had married into two fortunes three times the size of Edwards’s own, making him the richest lawmaker in the country.8 Kerry’s opulence was not untypical of the balance between the parties: among the twelve richest lawmakers, Democrats outnumber Republicans three to one.9
The ability to see itself as a perennial underdog in a class war it regards as integral to capitalism is an abiding strength of the political left. But the image is unsupported by the facts. Far from being the party of the people, Democrats and their progressive core represent America’s social and cultural elites and constitute the richest, the most organized, and most economically powerful political force in American history. As Christopher Caldwell observed in a New York Times essay, “the Democratic Party is the party to which elites belong. It is the party of Harvard (and most of the Ivy League), of Microsoft and Apple (and most of Silicon Valley), of Hollywood and Manhattan (and most of the media) and, although there is some evidence that numbers are evening out in this election cycle, of Goldman Sachs (and most of the investment banking profession). . . . The Democrats have the support of more, and more active, billionaires [than the Republicans]. Of the twenty richest ZIP codes in America, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, 19 gave the bulk of their money to the Democrats in the last election, in most cases the vast bulk--86 percent in 10024 on the Upper West Side.” 10
Wall Street--the very symbol of capitalist excess and wealth--was a key player in Barack Obama’s successful presidential election run in 2008. Counterintuitive at first, this fact becomes immediately intelligible once one realizes that big government works for Wall Street bankers who float all the bonds that underwrite government spending programs and take their percentage on every dollar of big government debt. Award-winning business reporter Charles Gasparino observes: “. . . the assumption made by most Americans, . . . [is] that because investment bankers are rich they must favor Republicans because, by definition, Republicans favor lower taxes on the wealthy and on big business. And while, of course, no one likes high taxes, what’s more important than the tax rate is how much income you make in the first place: paying 30 percent of your money in taxes if you make a million dollars is better than paying a 20 percent tax rate on an income of only half a million.” 11
In light of these facts it is hardly surprising that the top financial backers of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign included Wall Street leaders Jamie Dimon (CEO, JPMorgan Chase), Lloyd Blankfein (CEO, Goldman Sachs), Dick Fuld (CEO, Lehman Brothers), Warren Spector (CEO, Bear Stearns), Larry Fink (CEO, BlackRock--the world’s largest money management firm), Greg Fleming (number two at Merrill Lynch), and Mark Gallogly (number two at the private equity firm Blackstone). Collectively, these Wall Street titans raised more than $100 million for the Obama campaign.12
It is a reflection on human vanity that the Left actually believes it is the people’s David to the Right’s Goliath. A recent display of this misplaced self-esteem was the now-famous PowerPoint presentation that former White House official Rob Stein screened for George Soros, Clinton political operatives, and Democratic funders as the 2004 election approached. The PowerPoint was called “The Conservative Message Machine’s Money Matrix,” and Stein’s goal was to persuade Democratic funders that they had to match the unfairly oversized conservative war chest in order to help the little people out.
Stein’s presentation began with the false premise that conservatives enjoyed an overwhelming advantage in the resources they were able to funnel into American politics. In Stein’s view, this advantage enabled conservatives not only to influence politics but to move the boundaries of the entire national debate to the right. Using charts and graphs, Stein purported to show that with just $300 million from two hundred “anchor donors” the conservative “message machine” was nonetheless able to fundamentally reshape the country’s politics.13 “This is perhaps the most potent, independent, institutionalized apparatus ever assembled in a democracy to promote one belief system,” Stein told New York Times journalist Matt Bai, who didn’t bother to check.14
In fact, Stein’s figure was a modest sum in an age when one gubernatorial campaign can cost $170 million. But his portrait of an overweening and unanswered conservative message machine proved decisive in recruiting the left-wing billionaires in the room to underwrite a network of newly minted progressive organizations. The most prominent example was the Democracy Alliance, which was established in 2005 by Soros and a coalition of eighty leftist donors, each of whom contributed $1 million toward its creation.
The immediate goal of the Democracy Alliance was to lead the resurgence of the Left in the 2006 midterm elections. Almost half the groups the alliance funded hadn’t existed only a few years before.15 In its inaugural year of operations, the Democracy Alliance distributed $50 million to assorted left-wing, tax-exempt think tanks and quasi political associations, a sum that increased to $80 million the following year. The alliance quickly became the most visible presence of the Left’s immense and unappreciated financial power in shaping the political landscape.16
Long before Stein’s presentation, the claim that the Right was massively funded compared to the Left was a standard piece of progressive folklore, supported by a bookshelf of left-wing tracts and pseudoscientific studies. In Moving a Public Policy Agenda: The Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations (1997), author Sally Covington charged that the conservative movement had relied on “a substantial and interconnected institutional apparatus” unrivaled by the Left in order to win the war of ideas and push the country rightward. Like Stein, Covington singled out a core of conservative foundations--Scaife, Bradley, Koch, and Olin--as the financial engine driving this ostensibly dramatic shift in the national ideology to the right. Yet, the Olin Foundation was so dedicated to this concerted effort that in 2005 it deliberately went out of business in accord with the wishes of its founder.17
A 1999 report by a progressive advocacy group, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, made essentially the same argument. The report claimed that conservative foundations had contributed approximately $1 billion in the ten years between 1990 and 2000 to twenty leading conservative think tanks and were thereby able to produce a “rightward shift in American politics.” 18 So powerful were these foundations, according to the report, that they could prevail despite opposition to their political agenda from the majority of the country. In short, conservative money trumped the democratic will of the people. The identical thesis with nearly identical supporting evidence was argued in No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America’s Social Agenda. Its left-wing authors, academics Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, claimed that by relying on the financial wealth of conservative funders like Bradley, Scaife, and Olin, the Right had been able to get federal policies enacted that the American people did not support.
The twin premises of all these narratives, including Stein’s PowerPoint, was that conservatives could draw on far superior and unrivaled tax-exempt resources to change the nation’s political discourse and move it to the right. Both premises were demonstrably false. As of 2009, the financial assets of the 115 major tax-exempt foundations of the Left identified by our researchers added up to $104.56 billion. Not only is this total not less than the financial assets of the 75 foundations of the Right, it was more than ten times greater.19
Of the “Big Three” conservative foundations that every one of the left-wing analyses cited (Bradley, Olin, Scaife), not one has (or had) assets exceeding a billion dollars. By way of contrast, fourteen progressive foundations do, including Gates, Ford, Robert Wood Johnson, Hewlett, Kellogg, Packard, MacArthur, Mellon, Rockefeller, Casey, Carnegie, Simons, Heinz, and the Open Society Institute.20 As already noted, the John M. Olin Foundation, which figures in each of the left-wing foundation narratives and has so alarmed the Left over the years as one of the conservative “Big Three,” actually terminated itself in 2005 and has been defunct ever since. No comparable progressive foundation has so far voluntarily put itself out of business.
1. http://academic.csuohio.edu/kneuendorf/content/cpuca/gorespch.htm.
2. Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 38.
3. Jean Edward Smith, FDR (Random House, 2008), p. x.
4. Kenneth Morris, Jimmy Carter, American Moralist (University of Georgia Press, 1997), pp. 114–15.
5. Ibid., p. 187.
6. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/17/photos-al-goree-new-8875_n_579286.html.
7. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/6491195/Al-Gore-could-become-worlds-first-carbon-billionaire.html.
8. http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/democrats-party-rich.
9. Ibid.
10. Christopher Caldwell, “The Ideological Divide,” New York Times Book Review, October 24, 2010.
11. Charles Gasparino, Bought and Paid For: The Unholy Alliance Between Barack Obama and Wall Street (Sentinel HC, 2010), pp. 30–31.
12. Ibid., p. 40.
13. Matt Bai, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics (Penguin Press, 2007), p. 26.
14. Ibid., p. 25.
15. David Callahan, Fortunes of Change: The Ruse of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America (John Wiley and Sons, 2010).
16. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/06/AR2005080600848_pf.html.
17. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/28/opinion/28miller.html.
18. http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/archive/1-billion-for-ideas-conservative-think-tanks-in-the-1990s.
19. The report identifies 82 conservative foundations, but 7 of the foundations named had zero or negative assets in 2009. For up-to-date charts of both conservative and progressive foundations, see Appendices I to III of this volume. The original NCRP report listed 79 conservative foundations but by 2009, 4 of these had zero or negative assets.
20. See Appendix II.
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David Horowitz grew up a “red diaper baby” in a communist community in Sunnyside, Queens. He studied literature at Columbia, taking classes from Lionel Trilling, and became a "new leftist" during the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. He did his graduate work in Chinese and English at the University of California, arriving in Berkeley in the fall of 1959. At Berkeley, he was a member of a group of radicals who in 1960 published one of the first New Left magazines, Root and Branch. In 1962 he published the first manifesto of the New Left, a book titled, Student, which described the decade’s first demonstrations.
Horowitz went to Sweden in the fall of 1962 where he began writing The Free World Colossus, his most influential leftist book. In the fall of 1963 he moved to England where he went to work for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and became a protege of the Polish Marxist biographer of Trotsky, Issac Deutscher, and Ralph Miliband, an English Marxist whose sons went on to become leaders of the British Labour Party. While in England Horowitz also wrote Shakespeare: An Existential View, which was published by Tavistock Books. Under the influence of Deutscher, he also wrote Empire and Revolution: A Radical Interpretation of Contemporary History, 1969.
In 1967, Horowitz returned to the U.S. to join the staff of Ramparts Magazine, which had become a major cultural influence on the left. In 1969 he and Peter Collier, who became his lifelong friend and collaborator, took over the editorship of the magazine. Collier and Horowitz left Ramparts in 1973 to write three best selling dynastic biographies: The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976); The Kennedys: An American Dream (1984); and The Fords: An American Epic (1987).
During these years Horowitz wrote two other books, The Fate of Midas, a collection of his Marxist essays and The First Frontier, a book about the creation of the United States. Following the murder of his friend Betty van Patter by the Black Panther Party in December 1972 and the victory of the Communists in Indo-China, which led to the slaughter of millions of Asians, Horowitz and Collier had second thoughts about their former comrades and commitments. In 1985 they published a cover story in the Washington Post called "Lefties for Reagan," announcing their new politics and organized a Second Thoughts Conference in Washington composed of former radicals. Four years later they published a book of the articles they had written about their new perspective and themovement they had left which they called Destructive Generation.
In 1997, Horowitz published a memoir, Radical Son(1996), about his journey from the left. George Gilder hailed it as “the first great autobiography of his generation,” and others compared the book to Whittaker Chambers' Witness.
In 1988, Horowitz and Collier created The Center for the Study of Popular Culture (the name was changed in 2006 to the David Horowitz Freedom Center) — to create a platform for his campaigns against the Left and its anti-American agendas. The DHFC is currently supported by over 100,000 individual contributors and publishes FrontpageMagazine.com, which features articles on “the war at home and abroad,” and receives approximately a million visitors per month. In 1992, Collier and Horowitz launched Heterodoxy, a print journal which confronted the phenomenon of "political correctness" focusing on the world of academia for the next ten years. In the same year he and film writer Lionel Chewynd created the "Wednesday Morning Club," the first sustained conservative presence in Hollywood in a generation. In 1996 Horowitz created the Restoration Weekend, which for the next two decades feature gatherings of leading conservative political, media and intellectual figures. In 2005 Horowitz created the website,DiscoverTheNetworks.org, an online encyclopedia of the political left, which has influenced the works of a generation of conservative journalists and authors.
With the support of the Center, Horowitz continued his writing about the nature and consequences of radical politics, writing more than a dozen books, including The Politics of Bad Faith (2000), Hating Whitey & Other Progressive Causes (2000), Left Illusions (2003), and The Party of Defeat (2008). His Art of Political War (2000) was described by Bush White House political strategist Karl Rove as “the perfect guide to winning on the political battlefield.” In 2004 he published Unholy Alliance, which was the first book about the tacit alliance between Islamo-fascists in the Middle East and secular radicals in the west.
Horowitz has devoted much of his attention over the past several years to the radicalization of the American university. In 2001 he conducted a national campaign on American campuses to oppose reparations for slavery 137 years after the fact as divisive and racist, since the since there were no longer any living slaves and reparations were to be paid and received on the basis of skin color). His book Uncivil Wars (2001) describes the campaign and was the first in a series of five books he would write about the state of higher education.
In 2003, he launched an academic freedom campaign to return the American university to traditional principles of open inquiry and to halt indoctrination in the classroom. To further these goals he devised an Academic Bill of Rights to ensure students access to more than one side of controversial issues and to protect their academic freedom. In 2006, Horowitz published The Professors (2006), a study of the political abuse of college classrooms. Indoctrination U., which followed in 2008, documented the controversies this book and his campaign had created. In 2009, he co-authored One Party Classroom with Jacob Laksin, a study of more than 150 college curricula designed as courses of indoctrination. In 2010, he published Reforming Our Universities, providing a detailed account of the entire campaign.
Along with these titles Horowitz wrote two philosophical meditations/memoirs on mortality, The End of Time (2005) and A Point in Time (2011), which summed up the themes of his life. A Cracking of the Heart (2009) is a poignant memoir of his daughter Sarah which explores these themes as well.
Many have commented on the lyrical style of these memoirs. The literary critic Stanley Fish, a political liberal, has described The End of Time as “Beautifully written, unflinching in its contemplation of the abyss, and yet finally hopeful in its acceptance of human finitude.”
In 2013 Horowitz began publishing a ten volume series of his collected journalistic writings and essays under the general title The Black Book of The American Left. The first volume, My Life & Times, was published in 2013; the second, Progressives, in 2014. The Black Book is filled with character and event—with profiles of radicals he knew (ranging from Huey Newton to Billy Ayers), analysis of the nature of progressivism, and running accounts of his efforts to oppose it. When completed, The Black Book will be a unique chronicle of the political wars between left and right as seen by an observer who has made a significant impact on both sides of the during his political and literary careers.
Cultural critic Camille Paglia has said of David Horowitz: “I respect the astute and rigorously unsentimental David Horowitz as one of America’s most original and courageous political analysts. . . . I think that, a century from now, cultural historians will find David Horowitz’s spiritual and political odyssey paradigmatic for our time.”
Norman Podhoretz, former editor of Commentary magazine, says of Horowitz: “David Horowitz is hated by the Left because he is not only an apostate but has been even more relentless and aggressive in attacking his former political allies than some of us who preceded him in what I once called ‘breaking ranks’ with that world. He has also taken the polemical and organizational techniques he learned in his days on the left, and figured out how to use them against the Left, whose vulnerabilities he knows in his bones.”
A full bibliography of Horowitz’s writings is available at: http://www.frontpagemag.com/bibliography
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Everyone knows that the right-wing millionaires and corporations have distorted political dialogue in the US and are intent on using their wealth to destroy democracy. Of course, what everyone "knows" is FALSE. This book is one of the best at proving that most of the money in American politics is spent to promote the causes and policies of the Left.
The Horowitz-Laksin (H-L) volume focuses on foundations and their creations. Most of the enormous wealth of these foundations is spent subsidizing Left Wing organizations. These groups, over the past few decades, have greatly changed America - diminishing the concept of citizenship, and of assimilation, and demanding instead open borders and for illegals: free public schooling, health care, welfare, translators in courts, ballots and driver's tests in various languages - in short, the decline of citizenship. And though the authors do not mention this - the Left has foisted on America affirmative action preferences and privileges for immigrants of color over white citizen, privileges granted even to illegals once they are granted amnesty. (See Hugh Davis Graham's Collision Course, for more on this).
A misconception that wealth and the Right are linked, while the Left represents the poor, this common misconception was exposed as ludicrous in 2003 when the US Supreme Court considered the question of affirmative action (AA) in cases originating at universities in Michigan. Before the court decided, it received numerous friends-of-the-court briefs; almost all favoring the continuance of AA. What is most noteworthy is that the large corporations like Proctor & Gamble, Coca Cola, General Motors, Pepsi, all favored the position of the Left, i.e., retaining AA. In addition, high-ranking military men had their attorneys submit friends-of- the-court arguments also favoring extension of race-based preferences. These briefs had their impact on the court, for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor quoted from some when she wrote the Court's majority decision upholding AA. In 2003 the military-industrial complex of America publicly aligned itself with the Left on AA. So did the leaders of academe. They wanted to keep in place the discriminatory practices that denied equal opportunity and rights to poor and middle-class whites and others.
Horowitz and others have previously exposed the Left-Wing bias of the universities and most who watch television news are familiar with its Leftist bias. Thus, lined up on the Left side are 1) the military-industrial complex, and 2) the academedia complex.
The major contribution by H-L in this work is the revelation of the vast wealth of foundations and how they have created tax-exempt organizations that work to implement Left-Wing policies. Worse, these efforts have been so successful, they have indeed changed America so that the nation now seems almost as unrecognizable to the elderly as the shock that accompanies suburbanites who traverse to the old neighborhoods in the inner city in which they were born and raised.
H-L observe that most of this foundation money did not originate with Left-wingers. Henry Ford may have been a revolutionary industrialist, but few ascribe his political views to the Left. Yet, to avoid heavy taxes, Ford established a foundation. After his death, the members of the board moved the philanthropy steadily to the Left. By the 1960s Ford Foundation grants are, in effect, creating and subsidizing anti-assimilationist (some might say anti-American) groups like the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF), La Raza, and providing funds to such ideologues who succeeded in pushing the older, more traditional League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) into the radical, anti-assimilationist camp. Whereas in the early 1960s most Latin immigrants to the US sought assimilation into America, by the late 1970s - thanks to the pernicious influence of MALDEF, La Raza, et al, - the Jimmy Carter Administration and liberal judges - changed public schooling requiring them to enroll illegals, requiring bi-lingual education (which often meant hiring poorly trained, Spanish speaking teachers who never bothered, or wanted, to teach their pupils English.
The harm these foundations have caused is delineated in chapters on open borders and the assault on assimilation, attacks on national security, mobilization to promote socialized medicine, to increase governmental regulations and power, and to expand government unions. The foundations have also underwritten attempts to increase the price of energy, to halt construction of buildings and roads to preserve rare spiders or other pests that would adapt even if the road or homes were built. The foundations try to undermine the foundations of our freedoms in the Constitution, seeking to restrict our diets, forbid us weapons, deny free speech if offends some fanatics, etc.
Not only do H-L expose the Left-wing nature of most modern, large foundations, but their indices display the overwhelming disparities in foundation funding for Left and Right. I include only one of their many statistics; total foundation grants in 2010 (the date is unfortunately unclear and may refer to that one year or many; this ambiguity is a weakness of the book) to causes of the Right, $831.8 million; and for the grants to the Left, $8.81 billion. On some specific issues like the environment, the Left Right ratio is over 100 to 1. Even if the amounts listed are for one year or for many, the discrepancy is stark - the Left received millions more in funding from foundations than the Right, and on numerous issues. With the vast wealth now dominated by the Left, the foundations have created organizations, front groups, legal specialists, promoted various studies at universities, contributed to media organizations like National Public Radio, etc. These millions have helped set the agenda for America and even the world, helping to ban DDT, seeking to panic parliaments about alleged global warming into restricting capitalist development, and even causes unmentioned in this book like abolishing the death penalty, open borders in Europe, "hate" speech laws to end free speech, etc.
Also absent from this book is the Leftist charge that when the US Supreme Court invalidated the McCain-Feingold law, that it unleashed the millions from Right-wing millionaires and corporations to corrupt the democratic process. The answer to that charge is precisely in this book. The millions from the Right are but a tenth of the surplus given to the Left by foundations to "non-partisan" groups like La Raza, the NAACP, the ACLU, NPR, etc. The Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court simply allowed the Right to have some voice against the massive media monopoly of the Left - a monopoly broken somewhat by the internet, talk radio, and Fox News.
Though it is beyond the scope of their book, H-L might have raised the issue of American foundations creating and subsidizing organization in other nations for subversive purposes. Is President/Premier Putin so wrong when he suspects Non-Governmental Organizations of subversion and demands that they register as foreign agents if their funds come from abroad? How many of these foundation-subsidized NGO's were linked to the "Arab Spring" and the rise of fanatical, terroristic Islam in much of the world? (What happened to the "google guy" in Egypt?) And, what are the possible connections between the foundations, the NGO's, and Hillary Clinton's State Department?
The foundations have enormous wealth and their boards are self-perpetuating, un-regulated cliques answerable to no one. Some of the George Soros backed foundations have been accused of helping to subvert and overthrow governments in various nations. The money that founded these foundations was usually accumulated by conservatives, but the boards they created moved Left. President Eisenhower warned of the influence of the military-industrial complex. Today, that complex stands on the Left. So too does the academedia complex. Horowitz and Laksin introduce us to the enormous dangers stemming from the massive foundations of the Left. They have written a book essential to the understanding of modern American politics.
The Horowitz-Laksin (H-L) volume focuses on foundations and their creations. Most of the enormous wealth of these foundations is spent subsidizing Left Wing organizations. These groups, over the past few decades, have greatly changed America - diminishing the concept of citizenship, and of assimilation, and demanding instead open borders and for illegals: free public schooling, health care, welfare, translators in courts, ballots and driver's tests in various languages - in short, the decline of citizenship. And though the authors do not mention this - the Left has foisted on America affirmative action preferences and privileges for immigrants of color over white citizen, privileges granted even to illegals once they are granted amnesty. (See Hugh Davis Graham's Collision Course, for more on this).
A misconception that wealth and the Right are linked, while the Left represents the poor, this common misconception was exposed as ludicrous in 2003 when the US Supreme Court considered the question of affirmative action (AA) in cases originating at universities in Michigan. Before the court decided, it received numerous friends-of-the-court briefs; almost all favoring the continuance of AA. What is most noteworthy is that the large corporations like Proctor & Gamble, Coca Cola, General Motors, Pepsi, all favored the position of the Left, i.e., retaining AA. In addition, high-ranking military men had their attorneys submit friends-of- the-court arguments also favoring extension of race-based preferences. These briefs had their impact on the court, for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor quoted from some when she wrote the Court's majority decision upholding AA. In 2003 the military-industrial complex of America publicly aligned itself with the Left on AA. So did the leaders of academe. They wanted to keep in place the discriminatory practices that denied equal opportunity and rights to poor and middle-class whites and others.
Horowitz and others have previously exposed the Left-Wing bias of the universities and most who watch television news are familiar with its Leftist bias. Thus, lined up on the Left side are 1) the military-industrial complex, and 2) the academedia complex.
The major contribution by H-L in this work is the revelation of the vast wealth of foundations and how they have created tax-exempt organizations that work to implement Left-Wing policies. Worse, these efforts have been so successful, they have indeed changed America so that the nation now seems almost as unrecognizable to the elderly as the shock that accompanies suburbanites who traverse to the old neighborhoods in the inner city in which they were born and raised.
H-L observe that most of this foundation money did not originate with Left-wingers. Henry Ford may have been a revolutionary industrialist, but few ascribe his political views to the Left. Yet, to avoid heavy taxes, Ford established a foundation. After his death, the members of the board moved the philanthropy steadily to the Left. By the 1960s Ford Foundation grants are, in effect, creating and subsidizing anti-assimilationist (some might say anti-American) groups like the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF), La Raza, and providing funds to such ideologues who succeeded in pushing the older, more traditional League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) into the radical, anti-assimilationist camp. Whereas in the early 1960s most Latin immigrants to the US sought assimilation into America, by the late 1970s - thanks to the pernicious influence of MALDEF, La Raza, et al, - the Jimmy Carter Administration and liberal judges - changed public schooling requiring them to enroll illegals, requiring bi-lingual education (which often meant hiring poorly trained, Spanish speaking teachers who never bothered, or wanted, to teach their pupils English.
The harm these foundations have caused is delineated in chapters on open borders and the assault on assimilation, attacks on national security, mobilization to promote socialized medicine, to increase governmental regulations and power, and to expand government unions. The foundations have also underwritten attempts to increase the price of energy, to halt construction of buildings and roads to preserve rare spiders or other pests that would adapt even if the road or homes were built. The foundations try to undermine the foundations of our freedoms in the Constitution, seeking to restrict our diets, forbid us weapons, deny free speech if offends some fanatics, etc.
Not only do H-L expose the Left-wing nature of most modern, large foundations, but their indices display the overwhelming disparities in foundation funding for Left and Right. I include only one of their many statistics; total foundation grants in 2010 (the date is unfortunately unclear and may refer to that one year or many; this ambiguity is a weakness of the book) to causes of the Right, $831.8 million; and for the grants to the Left, $8.81 billion. On some specific issues like the environment, the Left Right ratio is over 100 to 1. Even if the amounts listed are for one year or for many, the discrepancy is stark - the Left received millions more in funding from foundations than the Right, and on numerous issues. With the vast wealth now dominated by the Left, the foundations have created organizations, front groups, legal specialists, promoted various studies at universities, contributed to media organizations like National Public Radio, etc. These millions have helped set the agenda for America and even the world, helping to ban DDT, seeking to panic parliaments about alleged global warming into restricting capitalist development, and even causes unmentioned in this book like abolishing the death penalty, open borders in Europe, "hate" speech laws to end free speech, etc.
Also absent from this book is the Leftist charge that when the US Supreme Court invalidated the McCain-Feingold law, that it unleashed the millions from Right-wing millionaires and corporations to corrupt the democratic process. The answer to that charge is precisely in this book. The millions from the Right are but a tenth of the surplus given to the Left by foundations to "non-partisan" groups like La Raza, the NAACP, the ACLU, NPR, etc. The Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court simply allowed the Right to have some voice against the massive media monopoly of the Left - a monopoly broken somewhat by the internet, talk radio, and Fox News.
Though it is beyond the scope of their book, H-L might have raised the issue of American foundations creating and subsidizing organization in other nations for subversive purposes. Is President/Premier Putin so wrong when he suspects Non-Governmental Organizations of subversion and demands that they register as foreign agents if their funds come from abroad? How many of these foundation-subsidized NGO's were linked to the "Arab Spring" and the rise of fanatical, terroristic Islam in much of the world? (What happened to the "google guy" in Egypt?) And, what are the possible connections between the foundations, the NGO's, and Hillary Clinton's State Department?
The foundations have enormous wealth and their boards are self-perpetuating, un-regulated cliques answerable to no one. Some of the George Soros backed foundations have been accused of helping to subvert and overthrow governments in various nations. The money that founded these foundations was usually accumulated by conservatives, but the boards they created moved Left. President Eisenhower warned of the influence of the military-industrial complex. Today, that complex stands on the Left. So too does the academedia complex. Horowitz and Laksin introduce us to the enormous dangers stemming from the massive foundations of the Left. They have written a book essential to the understanding of modern American politics.
