THE NEW LEVIATHAN: HOW THE LEFT-WING
MONEY MACHINE SHAPES AMERICAN POLITICS AND
THREATENS AMERICA’S FUTURE (New York: Crown Forum, 2012).
By DAVID HOROWITZ and JACOB LAKSIN
Rev. by Hugh Murray
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.
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