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PAUL SCHNEE: DAVID HOROWITZ DISCUSSES THE NEW LEVIATHAN

Posted By Ruth King on June 28th, 2012

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/28/david-horowitz-discusses-the-new-leviathan-at-the-wednesday-morning-club/

To order “The New Leviathan: How the Left-Wing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America’s Future,” the new book by David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin, click here.

Attendees of the Freedom Center’s June 22nd meeting of the Wednesday Morning Club were treated to an invaluable lecture by Center President David Horowitz on his new book, “The New Leviathan,” coauthored by Jacob Laksin. The book, which exposes the unrivaled financial heft of the Left, comes at a most opportune time, as the nation enters full election mode and contends with the might of these overflowing leftist political coffers.

The book’s subtitle, “How the Left-Wing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America’s Future,” gives us a strong hint about its content. As Horowitz explained, the new Leviathan is a conglomeration of thousands of 501(c)3 organizations, think-tanks, government unions, and radical groups with a combined treasury in the many billions of dollars. They are, he said, a kind of shadow political universe that indulges in trench warfare. These organizations make mischief in order to carry on the debate between election cycles whilst doing their utmost to pursue their ultra-left agenda. They have innocuous and worthy-sounding names that disguise their real purpose of advancing “progressive” goals.

As a former radical and left-wing activist, Horowitz knows which tune the devil is whistling since he once whistled it himself before he experienced an epiphany and transitioned to the right. Horowitz provided mountains of detailed and specific information about how the left wing is funded and he exposed as false the conventional wisdom that most of the money in politics comes from conservative organizations.

Horowitz described how most of the great American foundations no longer represent the original intentions of their founders. For example, in his letter of resignation from the board of the Ford Foundation, Henry Ford II stated that the foundation’s money was being spent attacking the very principles of free enterprise, principles that were responsible for the enormous financial success that allowed the Ford Foundation to be established in the first place. The same story can be told at the Carnegie, John D. MacArthur, Pew, Packard and Rockefeller Foundations — their founders would be positively apoplectic with fury if they knew how their money was being spent.

Horowitz went on to explain that there are 553 anti-free market, left-wing organizations with about $9.5 billion in assets at their disposal as opposed to 32 free-market organizations with approximately $38 million in their coffers. When it comes to immigration, the picture is just as alarming. There are, he said, 117 open-border, illegal immigrant organizations, most of which regard assimilation as a racist idea. Conservatives are outmatched both in numbers and fire-power. One knows, at last, how Custer must have felt.

Later in his talk, Horowitz went on to describe the social apocalypse that has been induced by the policies promoted by the tax-exempt organizations that are accountable to nobody and have been elected by no one. Affirmative action, for example, rewards the undeserving, results in inappropriate job placements and stigmatizes its presumed beneficiaries. Government has been steadily blighting the poor and blacks, Horowitz claimed. The sub-prime mortgage crisis was an example of how leftists, obsessed with imposing affirmative action standards on lending practices, were actually responsible for the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. They bullied lenders into granting loans to blacks, Hispanics and poor whites and thereby granted by fiat what was normally obtained through thrift: ownership of a home.

Thus, courtesy of Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) America was introduced to the concept of so-called “affordable housing” which meant that even people on welfare, with no credit, no job, no assets, and no collateral, could buy a home under “desk top” underwriting rules mandated by the Democrats in Congress. A political ploy to get votes turned into a national and international disaster after Wall Street took all of that FHA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac worthless paper and made them CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) which were then easily sold to greedy investors because they paid high interest rates. The riskier the loan, the higher the interest rate. When the economy went into a recession it was only a matter of time before the mortgagors defaulted.

The awful consequence was massive foreclosures, especially in certain markets where “flipping” speculative properties became a rampant economic pastime for both professionals and amateurs alike. Horowitz noted that 54% of the net worth of the homes owned by the sub-prime mortgagors was wiped out. To hear the “progressives” tell it, this was all due to the evil men on Wall Street. The Democrats mounted their high horse, an animal they always keep closely tethered, and rode it down Wall Street taking shots at bankers, insurance companies and lenders of all sorts. However, if they had pointed their guns in the right direction, they would have blasted themselves out of the saddle all the way back into the Potomac River.

Horowitz also made the point that the socialist model in which one can constantly increase the size of government, reducing the tax base and producing more people who depend on the government, has collapsed and that the idea of a centrally planned economy has long been discredited as an economic theory. Both, however, are still alive and well in the liberal psyche.

One of the ways the new Leviathan increases its chances for permanent control is through the high salaries and magnificent benefits paid to government employees. These are used to fund government unions which then funnel a portion of that money back to the Democrats who vote for the pay-packages of government workers. The unions function as a conduit from the taxpayers straight to Democrats running for election. Witness your tax-dollars at work.

This new Leviathan, said Horowitz, has spread its tentacles over every aspect of our national life. It is a huge contraption that drives public policy, garnering more funds as people are duped by the illusion that it promotes the “general welfare.” Enormous consequences have resulted: Socially divisive multiculturalism is promoted in the classroom, which is a form of classic Marxism with race and gender thrown in; elsewhere, the union AFL-CIO has long since been taken over by socialists; the Annenberg Foundation has given $900 million to left-wing organizations and causes; at a time when creating jobs should have been the president’s highest and most urgent priority, he spent all of his time pushing through ObamaCare which is the door to the socialist future; and so on.

The future that the Left is creating is one that rests on the myth that the Democrats and their comrades of the new Leviathan are the party of the down-trodden, the disenfranchised and the dispossessed, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Of the 20 richest zip codes in the country 19 of them gave most of their money to Democrats in the last election. Fourteen liberal foundations have assets in excess of $1 billion. Not one conservative foundation has such an amount. Progressive foundations have a combined total of just over $100 billion, ten times the amount in the hands of conservative foundations.

Horowitz shows how the members of the new Leviathan and the Democrats form the party of the elites. Of the twelve richest congressmen and senators the Democrats outnumber the Republicans three to one. The Democrats are the party of Vogue Magazine, of the Ivy League, of Manhattan, of the media, of Hollywood, of trial lawyers and they are gaining more and more support from billionaires who favor global governance with a national anthem nobody sings and a flag nobody salutes. All of them are united in an attempt to define America on a secular scale that is the exact opposite of the intentions of the Founding Fathers.

At the end of his talk, Horowitz had demolished the posture of the Left as a force for good and a champion of the common man. His numbers expose the fraudulent nature of the Left’s claim that their policies lead to one long felicitous march towards progress and freedom. One is left aghast at the notion that, like Alice in Wonderland, we have passed into the region where black is white and white is black.

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