Taxpayer Funded NPR: On International Relations



NPR Foundation President Ron Schiller




An undercover video that captured National Public Radio’s top fundraising executive disparaging Republicans, Christians, evangelicals, tea-party members, gun owners, Jews, and Americans lacking elite educational backgrounds has touched off a strong backlash across the cultural and political spectrum, fueling renewed calls for Congress to yank NPR’s $90 million in annual taxpayer funding.


Ron Schiller


Conservatives issued new demands for NPR’s defunding after the secret video emerged that showed Ron Schiller, who was NPR Foundation president and vice president for development of NPR when the video was recorded Feb. 22, making remarks that various groups found to be offensive.

The video came from conservative muckraking activist James O’Keefe’s Project VERITAS. O’Keefe is the same activist whose undercover video of ACORN spurred Congress to defund that group.

In the new video, recorded Feb. 22, Schiller is heard telling two men posing as Muslim donors with extremist ties that the grass-roots tea party movement has "hijacked" the Republican Party.

Schiller tells them that theGOP is "not just Islamaphobic, but really xenophobic. I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it's scary. They're seriously racist, racist people.”

The remarks appeared to confirm the worst fears of many conservatives that taxpayer-supported NPR harbors a deep bias against the values of fly-over country Americans.

In his meeting with the two undercover activists trained by O’Keefe, who said they were Muslims looking to distribute $5 million, Schiller traces many of the nation’s problems back to the fact that “the educated, so-called elite of this country is too small a percentage of the population.”

He also states that he perceives Zionist, or pro-Israeli, bias in American newspapers.

“I mean it’s there in those who own newspapers, obviously,” he tells his potential benefactors. “But no one owns NPR.” 

Juan Williams


Schiller, who was accompanied at the meeting by another high-level NPR fundraiser, described himself as “very proud” of NPR’s controversial firing of news commentator Juan Williams, despite the fact that NPR CEO Vivian Schiller — no relation to Ron Schiller — apologized for how the Williams matter was handled.

Also in the video, Schiller remarked: “The tea party is fanatically involved in people’s personal lives and very fundamental Christian — I wouldn’t even call it Christian. It’s this weird evangelical kind of move.”

The timing of the video’s emergence could hardly be worse for NPR. It already faces a tea-party-led push to yank its taxpayer funding, in part because of perceived left-wing bias. NPR quickly released a statement Tuesday saying it was “appalled” at Schiller’s statements.

According to NPR, Schiller announced last week that he was leaving the organization to join the Aspen Institute, a seminar and think-tank closer to his Colorado home.

That did not mollify Catholic League President Bill Donohue, who blasted Schiller’s remarks Tuesday and urged that all taxpayer funding of NPR be eliminated.

“This guy, he not only tolerates Jew-baiting, he expresses animus against Christians, he sides with the Muslim Brotherhood . . . He’s very proud that Juan Williams has been fired, yet at the end of the day, he considers liberals to be better educated and fairer than conservatives. That says it all in my mind”.
Regarding Schiller’s suggestion that evangelicals are not to be called Christians, Donohue protested: “He must have thought they were like another species. I mean, I’m Catholic, and I consider evangelicals my brothers.”

In one of the most striking passages in the videotape, Schiller appears to suggest NPR would be better off without taxpayer dollars.

“Frankly, it is very clear in the long run we’d be better off in the long run without federal funding,” Schiller says. “And the challenge right now is if we lost it all together we’d have a lot of stations go dark.”

Schiller nods in agreement during the video as one of his prospective patrons refers to the “radical, racist, Islamaphobic, tea party people.”

Schiller then replies: “Exactly.”

Donohue told Newsmax that the controversy over the Williams firing, and now Schiller's remarks, indicate a serious problem with NPR’s corporate culture.

“When patterns develop, when you see it over and over again, and it becomes part of the culture, then clearly you know there is something rotten from the top down,” he said.

Donohue added: “When you’re asking that taxpayers to pay this man’s salary, and any pretense they have of objectivity is totally blown away, that is the end of the story.”

Donohue had plenty of company Tuesday in expressing outrage over the NPR video:


Family Research Council President Tony Perkins told Newsmax that, although Schiller is free to express his opinion, NPR “facilitates the advancement of that stereotyping and that type of maligning of a large portion of the American public with taxpayer dollars.” Americans for years “have said we’re tired of their left-wing agenda that’s being promulgated and being promoted on the taxpayer dime. And that’s what it comes down to,” Perkins said.

The video provoked a sharp rebuke from tea party leaders. “Mr. Schiller himself candidly admits in the video that NPR doesn’t need federal funding, and welcomes the opportunity to slant their reporting without the oversight of the taxpayer,” said Mark Meckler, national coordinator for Tea Party Patriots. “Let’s take his advice and pass legislation that would defund the clearly biased news organization that is out of touch with Americans across the country.”

Tim Graham, media analyst for the conservative watchdog Media Research Council, told Newsmax: “This is the latest outrage that underlines how desperately this system needs to be removed from taxpayer funding. This system has so much contempt for the middle America taxpayer that pays their lavish salaries, it is time for this to be defunded. It is way past time.”

Virginia Republican and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor sent an e-mail to The Daily Caller stating: “As we continue to identify ways to cut spending and save valuable resources, this disturbing video makes clear that taxpayer dollars should no longer be appropriated to NPR.”

Socialism’s Gilded Cage

The one great truth found at the convergence of economics and politics is that government costs money. The more government you have, the more money it costs. This has both its good and its bad sides. The bad side is obvious. We need only look at the national deficit to see that. The good side is that just as the number of sheep helps limit the number of wolves, so too the amount of available money helps limit the size of government.



Of course given power, governments will vastly overspend beyond the money available to them, but that cannot go on forever. If the population of wolves increases drastically beyond that of the sheep, no matter what the wolves do, there eventually will be a dieback and a lot of dead wolves. Because as wolves sustain themselves on sheep, governments sustain themselves on money gathered from their own subjects. A government that expands beyond the ability of its subjects to sustain it will collapse sooner or later. It can go deep into debt. It can turn the entire country into a slave labor camp, as the USSR did. It can invade other countries and rob them, as Nazi Germany did. But in the end, there will be a dieback, and it will fall.


Alternatively, the need of a government for money can actually lead to reforms and more freedom. It is doubtful that America would exist today, if King George III hadn’t needed more money. Much the same can be said of Protestantism in Europe. But it doesn’t always have to come about as a violent reaction against a central authority. The colonization of the New World is a more positive example. As was the rise of a European Middle Class and the survival of the Jews in a Europe and the Ottoman Empire. All are examples of governments being forced to grant rights or decentralize their power in order to fund the exercise of that power.


The visible paradox here is that governments actually lose money by increasing their power, and in order to increase their revenues, they have to give up some level of control over the people they rule. That is why authoritarian ideologies on both the left and the right constantly warn about the dangers of money as a disruption of their moral and social order. They are well aware that freedom is financially rewarding, and that open markets undermine central authority.


The left’s obsession with capitalism emerges from the fear of an ownership society, dominated by the wishes of a socially conservative middle class. It is not the poor and oppressed that they care about, but themselves. The far right meanwhile is still stewing in the brew of inherited lamentations over the fall of kings and the diminution of inherited nobility at the hands of a capitalist meritocracy. Authoritarian ideologies on the far left and the far right, are both marked by symptomatic obsessions with Rockefellers and Rothschilds, banking institutions and billionaires. They claim to do so because they are concerned about the centralization of power. More often they simply want to be the ones to centralize power, and recognize capitalism as a dangerous tool that puts social mobility outside the control of any individual ideology or political faction.


The intersections of power politics and economics can often produce a cycle, in which governments allow freedom in order to draw in more revenues, only to have those same freedoms lead to more government control. Immigration is one obvious example. As is urbanization. Complexity and diversity can lead to more profits, but they also invite a new degree of complexity in government. Which means the rise of a larger and more controlling government.


A growing middle class and urbanization was in the long run structurally incompatible with feudal monarchies, but both led to a demand for even more centralized government to serve as a provider of services and control over dense population centers. Monarchy gave way to socialism. And socialism proved to be even better at bad budgets and spending money than Louis the Sixteenth. The lesson is that the trap of tyranny is always waiting by the side of the road. Outsmarting it requires not only moving fast enough to escape what is behind you, but studying to see what waits ahead of you in the direction in which you are headed.


A citizenry with more money only makes for a more tempting target. Robbing the middle class is much more fun than robbing peasants, because they tend to have bigger bank accounts. And they have already been trained to meet life’s needs by exchanging money for services. Which is exactly the socialist pitch. Along with the fine print that says the government is not obligated to actually provide those services, or have them available, that the cost of those services may change any time it sees fit, and that it may change the terms of the arrangement at any time, and in any way it sees fit.


Tyranny dropped its iron collar and reinvented itself as a gilded cage. A Utopian system in which a wise and kind government would see to everyone’s needs and curb individual greed and power. But when the golden paint washed off, the gilded cage turned out to be the old fashioned black iron after all. The paint only existed to sucker its new occupants long enough for them to be on the wrong side of the bars.


Governments, like con artists, configure themselves to fit the people. Even tyrannies are an expression of that. The greatest danger of tyranny is therefore not that it will be imposed against your will, but that you may actually welcome its imposition. That you may not even be able to recognize it as tyranny, until it is much too late. The fundamental shift that happens is that of the locus of control passing from the power. In democratic republics, the people control the government. In tyrannies, the government controls the people. The power shift comes down to whom both the people and the government believe is best fit to control. Who should hold the rope.


This is a question that comes down to what people actually need from their government and what they think they need from their government. The two tend to overlap, but they are never quite the same. For government, the matter is rather simple indeed. What governments need from the people is power. Money is simply another expression of power. Its popular potency lies in its symbolic decentralization of authority. By drawing the money back, governments monopolize power and diminish the available options for citizens of that country.


By purchasing services from the government through taxation, rather than from corporations, the citizenry create a much more insidious monopoly. And they are engaging in a transaction of unequals that shifts their power balance much more dramatically than any corporation could do. And so the transition from capitalism to socialism begins. Socialism however is already a dead end. Economic centralization leads to a poverty of economic options. The sheep begin to die off, and eventually the wolves have to follow. Unless the wolves reluctantly let the sheep live to breed, and create many more sheep to prey upon, and then the cycle begins again.


Governments liberalize to allow for wealth creation that they end up restricting and consuming anyway. And the social changes that encourage wealth creation also create new temptations for tyranny. The cycle repeats itself again when governments are formed into traps for a new generation, and when that new generation, having lost the wisdom of the old, flies into the gilded cage, and does not even notice when the door slams shut. Socialism’s gilded cage is a new incarnation of the recurring trap by which governments deprive the people of their power. And though a cage may be gilded, it is still a cage.

Former Justice Department Lawyer Accuses Holder of Dropping New Black Panther Case for Racial Reasons

A former Justice Department attorney who quit his job to protest the Obama administration's handling of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case is accusing Attorney General Eric Holder of dropping the charges for racially motivated reasons.

J. Christian Adams, now an attorney in Virginia and a conservative blogger for Pajamas Media, says he and the other Justice Department lawyers working on the case were ordered to dismiss it.

"I mean we were told, 'Drop the charges against the New Black Panther Party,'" Adams told Fox News, adding that political appointees Loretta King, acting head of the civil rights division, and Steve Rosenbaum, an attorney with the division since 2003, ordered the dismissal.

Asked about the Justice Department's claim that they are career attorneys, not political appointees, Adams said "obviously, that's false."
"Under the vacancy reform act, they were serving in a political capacity," he said. "This is one of the examples of Congress not being told the truth, the American people not being told the truth about this case. It's one of the other examples in this case where the truth simply is becoming another victim of the process."

Adams claimed an unnamed political appointee said if somebody wants to bring these kinds of cases, "that' not going to de done out of the civil rights division."
Adams also accused Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez of lying under oath to a federal commission about the circumstances surrounding the decision to drop the probe.

The Justice Department has defended its move to drop the case, saying it obtained an injunction against one member to keep him away from polling stations while dismissing charges against the others "based on a careful assessment of the facts and the law."

But Adams told Fox News that politics and race was at play in the dismissal.

"There is a pervasive hostility within the civil rights division at the Justice Department toward these sorts of cases," Adams told Fox News' Megan Kelly.
Adams says the dismissal is a symptom of the Obama administration's reverse racism and that the Justice Department will not pursue voting rights cases against white victims.

"In voting, that will be the case over the next few years, there's no doubt about it," he said.
In an opinion article published in the Washington Times last week, Adams said the dismissal "raises serious questions about the department's enforcement neutrality in upcoming midterm elections and the subsequent 2012 presidential election."

Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler dismissed Adams' accusations as a "good faith disagreement" with ulterior motives.

"It is not uncommon for attorneys within the department to have good faith disagreements about the appropriate course of action in a particular case, although it is regrettable when a former department attorney distorts the facts and makes baseless allegations to promote his or her agenda," she said in a written statement.

In the final days of the Bush administration, three Black Panthers -- Minister King Samir Shabazz, Malik Zulu Shabazz and Jerry Jackson -- were charged in a civil complaint with violating the Voter Rights Act in November 2008 by using coercion, threats and intimidation at a Philadelphia polling station -- with Shabazz brandishing what prosecutors called a deadly weapon.

The Obama administration won a default judgment in federal court in April 2009 when the Black Panthers didn't appear in court to fight the charges. But the administration moved to dismiss the charges in May 2009. Justice attorneys said a criminal complaint, which resulted in the injunction, proceeded successfully.

The department "is committed to comprehensive and vigorous enforcement of both the civil and criminal provisions of federal law that prohibit voter intimidation. We continue to work with voters, communities, and local law enforcement to ensure that every American can vote free from intimidation, coercion or threats," Schmaler said Wednesday.

But the Justice Department's explanation has failed to appease the United States Commission on Civil Rights, which is probing the department's decision, or Republican lawmakers who say the dismissal could lead to an escalation of voter intimidation.

The commission held a hearing in April in which Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., who has led the charge for answers from the Justice Department, was among those testifying. The Justice Department did not provide witnesses at that hearing. Instead, Perez testified before the commission in May.
"At a minimum, without sufficient proof that New Black Panther Party or Malik Zulu Shabazz directed or controlled unlawful activities at the polls, or made speeches directed to immediately inciting or producing lawless action on Election Day, any attempt to bring suit against those parties based merely upon their alleged 'approval' or 'endorsement' of Minister King Samir Shabazz and Jackson’s activities would have likely failed," he told the commission.

The commission has repeatedly sought information from the Justice Department, going as far as filing subpoenas. Schmaler said the department has provided 2,000 pages of information in response.
But Adams said in the Times article that the department ordered the attorneys "to ignore the subpoena, lawlessly placing us in an unacceptably legal limbo."

Adams also says that after the dismissal, Justice Department attorneys were instructed not to bring any more cases against racial minorities under the Voting Section.

Adams told Fox News that the New Black Panther case was the "easiest I ever had at the Justice Department.

"It doesn't get any easier than this," he said. "If this doesn't constitute voter intimidation, nothing will."

P.S,
I will take an overall look at the JUSTICE DEPARTMENT policy in my next blog. I hope to put an end to all discrimination by pointing out what it looks like.