Reading What Isn’t There

December 12, 2009 | Filed Under Anti-Americanism, Campaign Finance, Democrats/Leftists, Elections, Government, Corruption, John Armor, Liberals, Society/Culture, State Government |

-By John Armor

As an avid follower of and writer on political and legal subjects for almost fifty years, I’ve gotten on many mailing lists from all parts of the political spectrum. This week I received the “2009 Scorecard on Campaign Reform” from an outfit named North Carolina Voters for Clean Elections. Sounds like God, flag, and Mom’s apple pie, doesn’t it?

I had never heard of this organization before. But there is a standard process I use to smoke out the bias, if any, in any new organization I hear about. My knowledge was new; the organization is, apparently, ten years old.

Step one: Who is running the organization? Neither the Director nor any of the thirteen members of the Board, are known to me.

Step two: What are they trying to accomplish? They want public funding of all elections in North Carolina, trying to build from the bottom up, from city and county elections. Okay, maybe that’s good or bad. Depends on the details, which are not clearly laid out. It looks like a plea for laws that provide every candidate with the same amount of support after they have raised a small, trigger amount of money privately.

It so happens that I’ve been involved in campaign finance issues for forty years. I’ve also run for Congress twice, and got trounced twice, in part because I did not raise anything approaching an adequate amount of money. And I knew it was an inadequate amount because I published a book on the subject two decades ago. NCVCE is starting to sound like a hard left organization who thinks that the world will be a better place if only liberals like them have ready access to the public treasuries at the local, state and national levels.

Step three: Who are the allies of this organization? Twenty-eight of the thirty-one organizations listed as Coalition Partners are on the left side of the political spectrum, beginning with AARP-NC and ending with NCPIRG. Cross check for bias: Eleven elected officials are named in articles in this report, with smiling photos. None are identified with the parties they belong to. The state level ones are all Democrats, The local ones run as non-partisan, but in local elections, the voters know who the Democrats and Republicans are.

Why do I list AARP as a hard-left organization? Aren’t Senior Citizens a generally conservative group? Why yes, they are. But the mainstream media never bother to note who runs AARP. Only four of the 23 members of the AARP Board have, or had, careers not depending on government spending. How are they nominated? By the national Board, and by regional bodies representing the state AARPs. You cannot find that out from their website.

The bottom line is that AARP is a deeply incestuous organization. Its current leaders are chosen by its former leaders. There is no way for AARP’s 40 million members to express, effectively, their opinions. That’s why an organization supposedly dedicated to seniors can wind up supporting a medical care proposal that is based on stripping 500 billion dollars from Medicare, pn which most members of AARP rely to stay alive.

It is a simple matter. Find out the backgrounds of the people who run any organization and you will know whether it will support, or betray, the purposes for which it was set up. By reading what is not written, I conclude that the real purpose of NCVCE is to elect more Democrats to public office, preferably very liberal ones.

By the same process, I conclude that the real purpose of AARP is to make as much money as possible taking rake-offs from insurance sales. It also promotes additional government involvement in medical care, because that will mean even more money pouring into the AARP bureaucracy.

Harold Lasswell was one of the giants in political science. I read many of his works in his, and my, college nearly fifty years ago. What follows are two of his most famous pronouncements. He was an elitist, who wrote that we should set aside “democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests … [since] men are often poor judges of their own interests, flitting from one alternative to the next without solid reason.”

Lasswell was also a cynic, defining politics as “who gets what, when, and how.” His two comments together mean that better and wiser people have a right and a duty to run things for the ordinary people, even if it is contrary to what the people think they want. The crisis in America today is that a majority of the House and the Senate, the White House staff from top to bottom, four-ninths of the Supreme Court, and hundreds of organizations like the two discussed here, share those unfortunate views.
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John Armor is a graduate of Yale, and Maryland Law School, and has 33 years practice at law in the US Supreme Court. Mr. Armor has authored seven books and over 750 articles. Armor happily lives on a mountaintop in the Blue Ridge. He can be reached at: John_Armor@aya.yale.edu

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