Showdown: Confronting Bias, Lies, and the Special Interests That Divide America
401
Showdown: Confronting Bias, Lies, and the Special Interests That Divide America
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Overview
The Ten Things You Can't Say in America struck a chord with eager readers across the country, exposing truths others have been too afraid to address. In his new book, Elder is out to slay entrenched and enmeshed special interest groups, government agencies with the capacity to meddle in Americans' lives and businesses, lawmakers who continue a pattern of outrageous overtaxation, and those who would hamstring this country with good intentions.
Showdown demonstrates how the nation would be better, stronger and safer with less gvernment intervention and how individuals would not only cope but thrive without the so-called safety net. Showdown is a call to arms for a truly free society. Elder discusses:
- What a Republican-led government means for progress
- Where a responsible government would put its citizens' tax dollars
- Why racial and sex discrimination are non-issues in the 21st century.
Larry Elders straight talk and common-sense solutions spare no one and will inspire his passionate and growing audience.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466842403 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 401 |
| Sales rank: | 762,934 |
| File size: | 669 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Confronting Bias, Lies, and the SHOWDOWN
Special Interests That Divide AmericaBy Larry Elder
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS
Copyright © 2002 Larry ElderAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0312301790
LIBERAL FASCISM
Stealing Freedom With Compassion
Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State; and it is for the individual in so far as he coincides with the State.... Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual. -BENITO MUSSOLINI, FASCISM: FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. -C. S. LEWIS
Every day, well-meaning liberals sacrifice America's freedom under the guise of benevolent protection. The United States faces real danger in following this perilous path-where liberalism quietly, softly, and sneakily becomes fascism.
The Founding Fathers envisioned a country where the individual restrained the government. But today, feel-good policies, well-intentioned politicians, and "caring" special interest groups conspireto rob us of our personal and financial freedoms.
West Hollywood, California, requires bar and tavern owners to display fishbowls full of condoms and provide safe-sex literature to patrons! Combating AIDS and other communicable diseases somehow falls outside of the responsibility of individuals. Instead, tavern and bar owners must ensure that their beer- and booze-guzzling patrons engage in responsible "safe sex."
Meanwhile, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) has inked a new deal with Hollywood studios. Citing legal concerns, SAG no longer uses the term "affirmative action" in its contracts with studios. Instead of requiring studios to use "best efforts" at diversification, the new contract language says studios "shall" engage in diversity. "Shall?" How ironic that Hollywood, a community full of allegedly freedom-loving liberals, sees no contradiction in mandating presumably "racially insensitive" employers to hire based on race or ethnicity.
In Santa Monica, California-sometimes called the People's Republic of Santa Monica-the city recently passed a "living wage ordinance," mandating a minimum wage of $10.50 an hour! When businesses protested and predicted layoffs, the Santa Monica City Council simply shrugged and said, "Too bad."
Now, get ready for "visitability." Visitability? The term means the ability of "disabled" friends, neighbors, and solicitors to visit your house. The Santa Monica City Council authorized a study to determine whether to mandate handicapped accessibility in private homes. If this law goes through, homeowners face a requirement to install at least one handicap-accessible ground-level entrance, thirty-six-inch-wide hallways, and at least one bathroom with a thirty-two-inch-wide doorway. This would apply to all new Santa Monica homes as well as those undergoing extensive renovation.
"This is a movement toward something that is inclusive," said Santa Monica resident Alan Toy, also a member of the Santa Monica Rent Control Board. Mary Anne Jones, the executive director of the Westside Center for Independent Living, said the ordinance is necessary "because we can't go see our friends." And Santa Monica Mayor Michael Feinstein said, "There's no question that there's value in universal access."
And then there's the new Santa Monica "rehiring law." After September 11, many businesses faced layoffs and the belt-tightening induced by any economic downturn. In hyper-liberal Santa Monica, restaurateurs laid off over three hundred workers. What does any self-respecting collectivist city council do? It passes legislation requiring-repeat, requiring-employers to first rehire those laid off. Not only that, employers must rehire them in the same order in which they laid workers off. In other words, a restaurateur, who first laid off Harry, the most expendable employee, must first rehire Harry, the most expendable employee! In a classic example of liberal fascism, Santa Monica Mayor Michael Feinstein said, "Businesses always operate within a social context defined by any municipal and state law. In this case, we have to look at September 11. It created an extraordinary situation in this country." Within a "social context"? Feinstein also suggested rent control for commercial properties, making Santa Monica the only city in the country to cap prices on commercial real estate.
Tearful articles about people struggling to survive on minimum wages spark demands to force employers to artificially boost wages. In a recent Wall Street Journal cover story, for example, the newspaper followed Pat Williams, a nurse's aide attempting to piece together a life based on $5.55 an hour. Not until deep in the article do we learn about Ms. Williams's three grown children (there is nothing in the Wall Street Journal article that suggests her grown children financially assisted her), that she never married the father(s) of her children, that she dropped out of high school in the tenth grade, that she cares for her seven-year-old grandson, that she once left for a higher-paying job but returned to the nursing home that paid her the minimum wage because she preferred that atmosphere. So Ms. Williams-a card-carrying victicrat-becomes the poster child for laws forcing employers to pay artificially higher prices for wages.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
For the first 150 years of our nation's history, the Supreme Court interpreted the Constitution the way the Founding Fathers wrote, explained, and intended it-as a restraint on government. What happened?
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
While FDR rallied American spirits and brilliantly prosecuted World War II, he also deserves the damning title of principal architect of the modern welfare state. Angered by Supreme Court decisions striking down major parts of his New Deal legislation, FDR fought back, proposing a law to add more justices to the Supreme Court. He threatened to pack the court with justices who deemed the Constitution a "living, breathing document," versus the "strict constructionist" outlook held by the anti-New Deal justices, who had determined that an activist, benevolent government was unconstitutional.
Even FDR's legal advisor, Felix Frankfurter (whom FDR later appointed to the Supreme Court), advised FDR against his court-packing scheme. In the well-received biography Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous With Destiny, author Frank Freidel discusses the profound shift in constitutional interpretation that occurred during the dramatic years of the Roosevelt administration. "Frankfurter," wrote Freidel, "had hastened to Washington and had advised ... [FDR] to bide his time before clashing with the Supreme Court: let more adverse decisions accumulate and then propose a constitutional amendment. Roosevelt ignored the advice and set forth upon his own course of action."
The Constitution, despite the '30s circumstances of a depression and 25 percent unemployment, did not permit the kind of income redistribution New Deal legislation required, no matter how popular or desirable. If you want to pull this off, advised Frankfurter, change the Constitution. "From Roosevelt's standpoint," wrote Freidel, "the emotion was not pique but outrage. His target was not the Constitution but rather the outmoded Supreme Court interpretation of it."
Following his second inauguration, Roosevelt remarked to one of his speechwriters, "When the Chief Justice read me the oath and came to the words `support the Constitution of the United States' I felt like saying: `Yes, but it's the Constitution as I understand it, flexible enough to meet any new problem of democracy-not the kind of Constitution your court has raised up as a barrier to progress and democracy.'"
FDR's court-packing scheme angered liberals, moderates, and conservatives alike. Many members of Roosevelt's own party, while supporting the New Deal, hated his naked attempt to alter the court's historic structure. "One of the unhappier aspects of the proposal was its deviousness," said Freidel. "No sophisticated person took Roosevelt seriously when he insisted afterward that what he wanted was to speed the business of the court through providing additional aid to superannuated justices. That smacked of the trickery of demagogues."
But the court-packing scheme worked. Shortly after Congressional hearings on the court-packing bill began, the court blinked. Justice Owen J. Roberts, who previously ruled against New Deal legislation, switched sides. Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes reportedly congratulated him on "saving the court." Eventually, through replacement appointments, Roosevelt built a New Deal-friendly "Roosevelt Court." And thus began a staggering invasion of federal authority that would have stunned the Founding Fathers. "From this standpoint," wrote Freidel, "the court fight had brought the great end Roosevelt sought. The end was far more acceptable because he had not attained even a compromise; the legitimation of the New Deal reforms came from a court with the traditional nine justices, and it came fundamentally before even the first Roosevelt appointee took his seat. A momentous turning point had come in constitutional law [emphasis added]."
Never mind that state-sponsored welfare violates Economics 101 while diminishing the initiative of both the giver and the givee. No, the crime of the modern welfare state is more basic. The Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution to limit government, expecting citizens to assume responsibility for the rest of their lives. As James Madison put it, "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
Today's liberals, as with the well-intentioned Roosevelt, bulldoze over the constraints placed by the limited-government-supporting Founding Fathers. The it-takes-a-village crowd simply pours it down our throats like castor oil while telling us that it's good for us. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution outlines the duties and responsibilities of the federal government, leaving all other powers to the states and to the people. It's a good read.
CONSERVATIVE-BASHING FOR FUN AND PROFIT
"Wake Up Democrats! Take Back the Country," became the rallying cry for the June 24, 2001, conference sponsored by the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. Its attendees included a who's-who list of extremist, emotional, angry, "compassionate" liberals. The theme? Post-George W. Bush, Americans need to regain their moral center and kick out those evil Republicans, who seek to reenact slavery and chain women to hot stoves.
At the conference, actor Warren Beatty trumpeted the need for campaign finance reform, calling it "the transcendent issue of American democracy in our time." He also urged those on the left to put aside factionalism in order to write a simple "one-page Democratic Contract With America" that would be "short enough to accommodate the attention span of the channel surfer."
Former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, author of the over-the-top The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President, bashed the U.S. Supreme Court conservative majority's legal reasoning in Bush v. Gore, charging that they "belong behind bars" since they committed "one of the biggest and most serious crimes in American history when they stopped the recount in Florida."
House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Missouri) attacked the Bush tax cut as "a horrible mistake for the future of the country" and accused Republicans of "blowing the fiscal responsibility which ... [the Democrats and President Clinton] stood for."
Reverend Jesse Jackson condemned the very concept of federalism, calling the nation's greatest problem "a separate and unequal system" of "50 separate and unequal states and 3,067 separate and unequal counties [that] must be rooted out root and branch.... The enemy here is the Tenth Amendment, the unenumerated rights" which permits inequalities to exist.
Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America's Future, called Bush a latter-day William McKinley and accused the president of creating an alliance of robber barons against the people, given Bush's policies of "tax cuts for the wealthy," "arsenic in the water," and "salmonella in the food."
Representative Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), typically blunt, said, "If George W. Bush does not wake us up, we are literally dead!"
Former Green Party California senatorial candidate Medea Benjamin, in a panel on the California power crisis, described President George W. Bush as "marinated in oil." S. David Freeman, adviser to California Governor Gray Davis (Democrat), said "Deregulation is a bad idea [and] the common good requires governmental action." Representative Dennis Kucinich (Democrat) of Ohio proposed a constitutional amendment to bar anyone from operating an electric power system for profit.
Representative Henry Waxman (Democrat) of West Los Angeles flatly announced, "We belong to a community where we want to take care of everyone.... We must guarantee everyone access to health care, universal coverage." Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich urged the Democrats to retake power by promising health care, child care, education, and "no more tax cuts."
A "mole," attorney and journalist Edgar B. Anderson, attended the affair. In ten hours of speeches, Anderson said he never once heard the word "taxpayer." He saw a room of "toe-tag" liberals. These are people who live cradle-to-grave, apparently believing in the existence of something called "the government" as a source of funds separate and apart from the taxpayers, who, in fact, provide the money for these feel-good programs. Taxpayer? Who's that? Personal responsibility? What's that?
NONLIBERALS = BAD PEOPLE
Twenty years ago, former pro-life California state legislator John Schmitz blasted feminist attorney and radio talk show host Gloria Allred. The senator held hearings on a proposed anti-abortion measure.
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Excerpted from Confronting Bias, Lies, and the SHOWDOWN by Larry Elder Copyright © 2002 by Larry Elder
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.